scruples / saints

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Two
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Scruples
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Since the early eighties more students in my Literature and Ethics class, a freshman seminar, say they would press a button that would kill a nondescript peasant in another land, for which they would receive one million dollars and the guarantee of never being caught. They respond anoymously and must give a reason. Four out of twenty-five would in 1982. Eleven out of twenty-five in 1995. Reasons: Because it would set me up for life. Or, It's just a one-time thing. And once, Because it's a doggie-dog world. Afterward, I point out that the question is designed only to see if they are murderers. By semester's end, I'm pretty sure I know who they are, these murderers, and it all switches to me -- that age-old imperative, to discover what's right and to do it. I've given a murderer an A because of incontrovertible intelligence. Yet I've graded down at least a few because their logic, however sound, was without heart and I didn't like their faces. And I can't say how many times I've given up on some of the decent ones -- their correct, inherited, annoying positions unchanged by drama or dialectic. In the early seventies, no one I knew would press the button. I love that it wasn't high-mindedness back then, merely the obvious, and that so many wished to do good. Experience took years to show us what we could not sustain.
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Saints
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Those who earn their names know what suffering is ... and elect it anyway. They love without ambivalence one shining thing, yet some -- the even more saintly -- are tortured by the manifold richness of the discernible world. I've known one secular saint. I watched him fast so an idea would swell. I didn't want to be him, though once or twice, by design, I've felt that strange sumptuousness born from doing without. For him it must have been an imagined feast, like a wafer on the tongue. For me: just another something for the body to have known before it dies and becomes dust. Saints, like revolutionaries, walk headlong into the cool, dry wind, are always serving a hidden flame, are terrifying because of what they do not need. The saint asks, What will you die for? The revolutionary adds, For what would you kill? Either way, sacrifice is an ugly business, as ugly as history itself. Choose between these terrible things, history often says. We are only commentators until, for us, it comes to that choice.
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(Stephen Dunn)
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