Talking Tuesday: Moral Complexity

I've started researching a character for a story I'd like to write at some point  (I'm unsure right now whether the character will be a man or a woman).  In any case, I know this character will be a morally complex one.  One who inhabits a place of moral ambiguity, yet has clear ideas of right and wrong.  Someone who has done terrible things, probably continues to do some terrible things, and yet searches for redemption, to find goodness in the world, to be the good.  I don't have a clear picture yet of the story arc, or even a lot of details, but I've got a stack of books ready for background research.

Image via decohubs.com

Yesterday, Rod Dreher posted an excellent summary of Tish Harrison Warren's great essay on the legacy of Southern culture, and how Southerners have to cope with the moral complexities of their history all the time.  It is perhaps healthy that they do so, for many of the rest of us to do not have to confront the good and bad of our ancestors (or ourselves, for that matter) so viscerally.  

Dreher writes:

"The sins of another time and place are not necessarily the sins of our own, but we make a grave mistake to imagine that this means we do not sin. Our descendants will look back on things that we believe and do without thinking twice about it and marvel that we could have been so blind and wicked. And they, in turn, will suffer the same fate. To study the past with an open mind and an open heart is to be chastened about one’s own fallibility.

It’s the same all over, don’t you think? It is perhaps clearer for Southerners, because the evil of slavery and all that followed it was so stark, and still exists within living memory. I tell my children how things were here in our own town not that long ago, and they find it hard to believe. How could white people have believed those things? How could they have done those things? Well, I say, they did. And I try to convey to them in a way that they understand that they too might have believed and done those things had they grown up back then. This is the lesson of the Gospel account of Christ’s passion: every single one of us would probably have stood in that crowd yelling, “Crucify him!”

Every single one.

Yet it would be so easy if we could write off all our ancestors as simply evil. It saves us from having to do hard thinking about moral complexity, and about how goodness and evil can exist within the same person." [emphasis mine]

~Rod Dreher, "Human Fallibility a Historical Constant", American Conservative blog, October 5, 2015