William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

On denying the good

It’s long since been observed that there are good bagels, good sex, and good deeds, and that what “good” comes to in each case depends on the noun it modifies. A good talking to will be judged by different criteria from a good campsite. The good, in short, is the good of the kind. This is true enough, and well observed, and I won’t be understood to be contradicting it when I say that, for all its variations, the good, across all kinds, makes a claim on us. One would be forgiven for thinking, reading the day’s op-eds, that moral life might consists solely in judgments of the bad. There is scarcely a good person left in the history books about whom some clever critic has not found out something damning. The surprising thing, however, if we attend to our own composition, is not that the persons of history were and died, like us, as humans, but that we should take this to qualify their goodness. We are afraid, I think, of calling a human good for fear they’ll turn out to be the devil. But this should, I think, show that we misconceive goodness, for if there exists a good person they must be human and being human must be imperfect. We act as though our standards were so high none could meet them, but this doesn’t show what we wish, that we have high standards, only that we are bad judges, and have lost the sense of a good word. I said the good makes a claim on us – what is this claim? Generalizing – which, we forget, has its place – the good makes a claim on our attention and asks no more than that we recognize it as such. Good paintings, good jokes, good ideas, where they are such, make themselves known to us,

crying what I do is me: for that I came.

This is not to say we must announce every good grape, for we are bound by a feeling for situations to say only those things that are called for – and not every delight is remarkable at every hour. This sense of situations, that is, of relevance, is precisely, I add by the way, what a so-called social medium aims to deaden, as though it were at all times relevant to report on your breakfast. No, we needn’t announce it to recognize the good. A problem arises, however, when we are asked to recognize some bad connected with it. A good cheese makes a claim on our attention, as should the indignities of dairy farming: must the one be denied to acknowledge the other? Here I assert my maxim: we must never deny the good. This does not mean: eat the cheese. It does mean: we stand to gain nothing but a corrupt consciousness by denying that a good of its kind is good. This is the moral nuance one wishes to cultivate, for oneself and one’s company. To be able to hear with due horror accusations against Kings and not deny what’s good in a good person. I have heard it said of a painting that it couldn’t be good owing to actions of the painter, as though goodness of one kind followed only by entailment from goodness of another. I would be more forgiving of this pseudo-judgment if it didn’t so often eventuate in an excuse for not looking, and so in one more mode of self-imposed ignorance about the world we share. Complain! But if you do not look at the world you complain about you must pardon us for returning to it. But don’t mistake me for an apologist for bad people; I bid you see the good, not blind yourself to the bad. There come, in fact, times – and none can tell you when one is – when goods must be forsaken. Good jokes, even good deeds, are not sufficient reason to keep the company of a bad man, and you may – I’m none to tell you no – decide that a good painting ought to be sacrificed for a greater good. Only let this be indeed a good and let your judgment rest on a true account of the reality it judges, for it is only a sacrifice if some good goes with it, and as much as we ought never deny the good, perhaps the greatest gift this maxim, followed, brings is the ability really to sacrifice, for we are rich in proportion to the goods we can afford to let alone.