Wrath; Or, On The Catalogue Of Appetites

Humanity,

I call you to the greatness of which you are capable.

You know its face. You have seen it in the person who stood beside you when standing there became dangerous. You have heard it in a voice that told you the truth at considerable cost. You have felt its presence in the hands of someone who could have hurt you and whose care made the thought impossible.

You know what nobility is.

The knowledge has survived every invitation to laugh it out of existence.

Tonight, give it your allegiance.

We have allowed contempt to sit in judgment upon too much that deserves our love. We have endured the spectacle of cruelty presenting its credentials as sophistication, of cowardice lecturing courage on the advantages of surrender, of people who abandoned their own aspirations appointing themselves the custodians of everybody else’s.

They have mistaken our patience for agreement.

Let that mistake end.

There is a difference between wisdom and ignorance. The distinction survives the embarrassment of the ignorant. There is a difference between excellence and negligence; the bridge will demonstrate it when the weight arrives. There is a difference between a person who protects a vulnerable life and a person who enjoys discovering how easily it can be manipulated, used or broken.

No cleverness abolishes these differences. No applause reverses them.

Good and evil have consequences in human lives. The betrayed person must live through the betrayal. The frightened child must pass another night in the house. Someone’s body receives the blow that an ingenious argument has just excused.

Begin your judgment there.

Begin with the person who will have to suffer what the speaker finds so easy to defend.

The attack upon our virtues works by corrupting the language in which we recognize them. Restraint is made to sound cowardly. Honor is dismissed as vanity. Tenderness becomes an invitation to ridicule. Before long, the person ashamed of none of his cruelties is explaining to the decent why they ought to be ashamed of their decency.

Consider what has been done to equality when a bully is told that he may strike a girl the same way he can strike another boy.

The command to stop mistreating people has been turned into permission to mistreat one more.

I reject that permission.

A boy may not strike a girl to avenge his wounded pride. Her refusal does not place her body at his disposal. His anger imposes duties upon him; it confers no rights over her.

Teach him to govern the strength that is growing in his shallow mind. Teach him to take pride in the trust wisdom earns him. Let him understand that the delicate calls forth care, and that the greater his power to injure, the more exacting his obligation to refrain.

A gentleman would regard making a woman afraid of him as a disgrace.

Keep that standard.

Keep it when somebody calls it old-fashioned. Keep it when a fashionable theory offers to relieve him of it. A name for cruelty does not become honorable because the name was borrowed from justice.

The lady and the gentleman are humanity’s highest achievements. They bring character into the ordinary encounters of life. A promise becomes dependable in their keeping. Affection can approach them without first arranging its defenses. They possess enough command of themselves to spare other people the consequences of every passing appetite and temper.

Their courtesy has a foundation. It remains when they are disappointed.

Civilization acquires a human face through such people.

And civilization deserves to be beautiful.

A woman’s beauty should be a cause for delight. The person who resents it must answer for his resentment. She owes him no disfigurement of her happiness to make his envy easier to bear.

The same obligation holds before every excellence we encounter. A brilliant mind incurs no debt to the person who refused to study. A work of mastery owes no apology to the spectator whose own work remains unfinished. Someone else’s achievement offers us the opportunity to admire, to learn, and to attempt something worthy ourselves.

Accept the opportunity.

There is a hunger in human beings for what surpasses their present condition. We want to understand. We want our work to acquire beauty through our care. We want to look upon the life we have made and recognize something worth the years it cost.

Speak to that hunger.

A teacher who asks little of a capable student robs the student under the appearance of kindness. A culture that flatters every appetite and excuses every failure of discipline does the same thing on a grander scale. It leaves people unprepared for the demands of their own ambitions, then teaches them to resent the demands.

Excellence requires an apprenticeship. Intelligence must submit to study. Talent must acquire the patience to correct itself. The desire to create something magnificent must survive the discovery that the first attempt is poor.

Continue.

Mediocrity becomes a fate when a person begins defending what he should be improving.

You have the power to refuse that fate. Use it without apology. Demand more of your work. Become difficult to satisfy where your own conduct is concerned. Learn to distinguish the fatigue that asks for rest from the vanity that asks to be spared correction.

There is nobility in the willingness to become worthy of your ambition.

Honor gives that ambition its obligations.

An honorable person remains bound by his word after betrayal becomes profitable. He remembers the absent. He keeps faith with those who have lost the power to compel him. Place something precious in his care and its safety will not depend upon whether anybody is watching.

Think of what such a person makes possible.

Honor gives people freedom from the exhausting work of perpetual suspicion.

Betrayal destroys that freedom. The betrayer takes more than the immediate object of his dishonesty. He teaches another human being to approach the next promise with fear.

Call the act by its name.

We owe truth to the wounded as surely as we owe them help.

Courage begins when the truth requires a defender.

Courage gives conviction a body. Until the moment of action, a person can imagine himself in possession of every virtue. The decision reveals which of them he has made his own.

Then fortitude must carry him beyond the decision.

There will be mornings when the enthusiasm has gone and the obligation remains. The work will be tedious. The opposition will repeat itself. An easier life will advertise its availability.

Great undertakings are often saved by the person who returns after the occasion has ceased to feel great.

That persistence has a majesty of its own. It is the builder completing the part nobody will see, the scholar checking the result that everyone is eager to announce. They have accepted responsibility for something that deserves to endure.

Let us recover our capacity to honor them.

We have given too much attention to the person who knows how to make a spectacle of destruction.

Destruction is cheap. A lifetime of workmanship can be ruined in an afternoon. The ruin proves how much depended upon the builder’s care. It confers no greatness upon the hand that destroyed it.

The person who takes pleasure in degrading excellence has made a confession. He has found relief from the demands of aspiration by attacking their object.

Do not accept his relief.

Let admiration cost you the effort of rising.

A doctrine that praises freedom while cultivating dependence has betrayed its name. A claim to justice that excuses the humiliation of the vulnerable has surrendered its authority. Intelligence is wasted when it merely decorates the excuse.

Use your mind to uncover what the excuse conceals.

Then have the integrity to accept what you discover.

Authenticity requires that integrity. A person becomes authentic by bringing his conduct into agreement with his considered convictions. He ceases borrowing a personality from the audience. His judgment survives the departure of the people whose approval first encouraged it.

There is freedom in becoming someone you can recognize when you are alone.

Information warfare aims to occupy the place where judgment ought to occur. Provocation demands an immediate answer. Another provocation arrives before the first has been examined. The mind is kept busy while its purposes go unattended.

A person can spend years reacting and call the exhaustion a life.

Reclaim those years.

The book remains unread. The instrument waits. The child has something to tell you. The work that would justify your pride requires an uninterrupted hour.

Give the hour.

Foresight begins in that act of custody over the future.

Look beyond the reward being offered today. Ask what your work will teach, what your example will excuse, what another generation will have to repair. Build with enough conscience that a stranger can safely inherit what you leave behind.

Our descendants will live inside the consequences of our character.

Give them something better than a catalogue of our appetites.

To the artists, I speak with particular urgency.

You possess the power to direct admiration. You can make courage visible. You can give a person, through a story, the first clear image of the great human being he wishes to become.

That gift carries responsibility.

When you lend a beloved hero’s face to cruelty, you spend affection the cruelty has never earned. When you make degradation attractive, your skill increases the reach of the injury. The commission does not remove your signature from the work.

Remember what your imagination is for.

Create the person whose arrival changes what evil dares to attempt.

Give us a hero who understands the life in his keeping. Let his power become magnificent through its purpose. Let the endangered recognize him and know that their abandonment has ended.

Heroism fulfills the promise of strength.

It accepts the danger that would otherwise fall upon someone unable to withstand it. It acts while the spectators are still calculating the advantages of remaining spectators.

A human being steps forward, and the world acquires a fact it did not possess a moment before: someone will resist.

Such a person deserves our admiration without the compulsory sneer. Give him the honor he has earned. Let the young aspire to resemble him.

Humanity, the standard is high because your potential is high.

Wisdom is worth the discipline it requires. Beauty is worth the labor that gives it form. Truth is worth the discomfort of correction.

We betray ourselves when we teach otherwise.

The person who wants an obedient, disposable workforce has no use for your nobility. A worker with pride in his craft may refuse dishonest work. An independent mind insists upon reasons.

Such people are inconvenient to anyone who wishes to use them without answering to them.

Remain inconvenient.

Keep your judgment. Develop your abilities.

Human greatness begins to recover its authority when people enact it with enough consistency that contempt must answer to achievement.

The work belongs to us.

It belongs to the writer choosing what deserves admiration. It belongs to the person who refuses to laugh, the professional who refuses to falsify.

There will be fear. Let courage answer it. There will be weariness. Call upon fortitude. There will be offers of relief at the price of your honor.

Know the price before you agree.

I ask you to become magnificent in the conduct of your life.

Let your intelligence make the truth clearer.

Stand where cruelty expected acquiescence.

Build where contempt expected surrender.

And when the young ask what kind of beings they were born among, give them an answer they can live by:

Here, strength protects.

Here, honor holds.

Here, a human being is expected to rise.