Civilized
“The
mark of a civilized man is his willingness to examine his most cherished
beliefs.”
Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When
the craziness of today gets to the shrieking point in my ears, I turn to the wisdom-seekers.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of those. I have no idea what his Supreme Court
legacy is, but from his quotes he appears to have been someone grounded in clear
vision and understanding of both human nature and the Constitution of the
United States. When I hear people touting their “right to not wear a mask” in a
global pandemic, I think of Holmes. He said: “Pretty much all law consists
in forbidding men to do something they want to do.” There is no provision
in civil law that gives anyone the right to endanger other people, and that
goes for mask-wearing in a pandemic as much as for shooting guns in our public
spaces. Our rights end when they threaten harm to another person.
Here’s an example from my life: When I was in school, and even when my
children were in school, no child was admitted to any grade without an
up-to-date vaccination record—including college admission. Because without that
safeguard, that child and other children were at risk for diseases that kill or
cripple. I remember polio, and tuberculosis, and mumps, and I remember what
rubella does to unborn babies. Whatever happened to that rule?
No one except Batman
loves wearing a mask in the heat of summer—and he’s a comic book character. We
do it simply because it’s the right thing to do, and we are willing give up our
so called “right” to do whatever we please in order to serve the greater good. Holmes
said, “Liberty is often a heavy burden on a [person]. It involves the
necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor [people] have always
dreaded.”
Until
we begin to care that many of our choices negatively impact others and
choose differently, we will not have a civilized society. To consider ourselves
civilized, we must sacrifice some of our individual freedoms in service to the
greater good even though we have never been good at doing that. I am reading
Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe. In it, he tells the story of our early
days on the north American continent. One part of that story has to do with the
tribal people who lived here already. When a European settler was captured by a
tribe and taken to live among them, that settler rarely wanted to come back to “civilization.”
The same was not so for natives captured by the settlers and brought to live
among them. When they escaped or were set free, they went home to their tribe.
That says a lot about bonding and belonging in our culture.
We can
do better than this, people. The time has come to examine some of our most
cherished beliefs. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "We have been cocksure of many things that were not so." We all love this land, and this way of life, and we must be
willing to sacrifice as well as demand our “rights” in support of it. We must
search our hearts and find the good again.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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