Denial
is so often the preface to the justification.
Christopher
Hitchens (Hitch-22)
The
Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett, adducing one of the constants
of human behaviour, writes: “A man cannot live without
justifying his life to himself, he cannot even take a single
step.”
We
assume, in deference to the self-evident, he makes no mention
of the unpremeditated, spontaneous response to adversity, as
well as the imperatives that issue from the self-preservation
reflex, and actions that arise consequent to the passions: jumping
into frozen water to save a child from drowning, smashing a
tennis racket on the ground after missing an easy return.
In
instances where the good is served, referring, for example,
to persons who are compulsively generous, one can make the case
that the spontaneous act and its first effect constitute a single
gesture and are therefore their own justification. But what
about the man who beats on his wife after discovering she is
having an affair with her boss? In the cuckold’s conflicted
mind, prefiguring yet another chapter in the voluminous In
Retrospect annals, the combination of jealously, outrage
and betrayal justify the assault which, depending on a country’s
laws and their gender inflected weight distribution, might result
in a pardon or nominal token slap on the fist. However, had
the perpetrator properly reflected on his wife’s infidelity
-- in consideration of not only the law that proscribes assault
and battery, but also the message his behaviour imparts to his
teenage son and daughter -- in all likelihood he would not have
been able to justify the physical attack on the mother of his
children. So we have to distinguish between spontaneous unpremeditated
acts which we justify (or can't) in retrospect from all those
actions and deeds we have to deliberate over before undertaking.
Most
of us in the course of a lifetime discover that good deeds are
their own justification, that very little thought is required
prior to their execution. We don’t have to do battle with
the devil in deciding to give a percentage of our salary to
the homeless. But we still have to justify the good deed to
ourselves, however nominally. We want to know that we are doing
right, and just as importantly for some, we want to know that
others are witting to us doing right.
More
problematic and unsettling is the decision not to be charitable,
which requires a more elaborate and convoluted justification.
The individual who has the means to be charitable and decides
against it will twist or rearrange the circumstances of his
life in order to budget what would otherwise be available monies
for charity for life's essentials (a conveniently vague category)
or unforeseen health emergencies or the purchase of a new home
to accommodate future visits from his extended family.
Even
hideous acts of evil (think Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy) require
justification where the perpetrator, through sleight-of-mind,
performs a con job on himself without recognizing that it is
a con. A serial killer of young women will have convinced himself
that all women are evil and responsible for man’s historic
unhappiness. The pedophile will claim that he is at the mercy
of a defective gene sequence, or that he himself was abused
as a child and is caught in a vicious circle over which he has
no control.
So
if we agree that there is a primordial species-specific urge
that compels all human beings to justify their actions, and
that includes acts (evil) for which there is no justification,
we must ask what motivation underlies the reflex? And what does
it teach us about our essential selves?
What
separates man from all other forms of life are his faculties
of judgment, being able to choose when choice is an option.
Choice implies that, whatever we do in life as we project ourselves
into the future, it could have been otherwise, that we could
have chosen “the road not taken.” We also know that
choice implies difference, disparity, divergence, dissimilarity.
Where objects and options are identical there is no choice.
At the extremes, choice can be either insignificant (choosing
between an orange over grapefruit for one’s daily ration
of Vitamin C), or significant (choosing fruit instead of mix
of bleached flour, butter and sugar for dessert). In the fruit
versus butter scrap, science teaches us that one choice is categorically
more salutary, more favourable to a positive health outcome,
the result of which will redound positively to the well-being
of the individual and his family as well as the greater community,
assuming that the healthy, over the course of a lifetime, are
significantly less of a drain on finite resources set aside
for healthcare, than the unhealthy.
As
to the individual who over the course of a lifetime has been
consuming a liter of ice cream on a nightly basis instead of
fresh fruit, in the name of the justification principle he will
have convinced himself that he was born with the craving, or
that his love of ice-cream confers a happiness that no fruit
can equal, or that the corner store, whose survival is threatened
by a nearby mega-supermarket, won’t survive without his
patronage. Man, from his humble beginnings to the present, has
shown himself to be extraordinarily inventive when it comes
to convincing himself that he is doing right when in fact he
is doing what he wants to do, a misconstruing against which
our long standing codes of correct conduct have very little
purchase.
Self-justification
derives from an imperative that operates through all human beings.
Choice precludes right and wrong, a better versus a worse choice.
Taking liberties with Jean-Paul Sartre (man is condemned to
be free.), we are condemned to choose. And for this reason,
no matter what the choice, since there is always a choice, we
have to justify it to ourselves, referring to all the decisions
we make throughout out lives.
To
read or not to read this convoluted essay to its end is a choice,
just as one could have chosen another essay on the same subject,
or an altogether different subject. But whatever the choice,
and however subconsciously, we will have had to justify that
choice to ourselves.
Just
as I now choose to end this essay with the justification that
I have nothing further to say on a subject that has, in all
likelihood, been more effectively and eloquently disclosed by
others.
And
finally, the writer begs the reader to refrain from rendering
too harsh a judgment as it concerns his playing the false humility
card.
