Gould Ode to Human decency Globe and Mail 20 Sept 2001
An Ode to Human Decency
Stephen Jay Gould
Bless the good people of Halifax, writes pre-eminent American scientist STEPHEN JAY GOULD, one of 9,000 travellers forced to land in Nova Scotia during the terrorist strikes
NEW YORK—Images of division and enmity marked my first contact, albeit indirect, with Nova Scotia—the common experience of so many American schoolchildren, grappling with the unpopular assignment of Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, centred on the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755.
My first actual encounter with Maritime Canada, as a teenager on a family motor trip in the mid-1950s, sparked nothing but pleasure and fascination, as I figured out the illusion of Moncton’s Magnetic Hill, marvelled at the tidal phenomena of the Bay of Fundy (especially the reversing rapids of Saint John and the tidal bore of Moncton), found peace of spirit at Peggy’s Cove and learned some history in the old streets of Halifax.
I have been back, always with eagerness and fulfilment, a few times since, for reasons both recreational and professional: a second family trip, one generation later, and now as a father with two sons aged 3 and in utero; a lecture at Dalhousie; some geological field work.
My latest visit among you, however, was entirely involuntary and maximally stressful. I live in lower Manhattan, just a mile from the burial ground of the Twin Towers. As they fell victim to evil and insanity on Tuesday, Sept. 11, during the morning after my 60th birthday, my wife and I, en route from Milan to New York, flew over the Titanic’s resting place and then followed the route of her recovered dead to Halifax. We sat on the tarmac for eight hours and eventually proceeded to the cots of Dartmouth’s sports complex, then upgraded to the adjacent Holiday Inn. On Friday, at 3 o’clock in the morning, Alitalia brought us back to the airport, only to inform us that their plane would return to Milan.
We rented one of the last two cars available and drove, with an intense mixture of grief and relief, back home.
The general argument of this piece, amid the most horrific specifics of any event in our lifetime, does not express the views of a naively optimistic Pollyanna, but rather, and precisely to the contrary, attempts to record one of the deepest tragedies of our existence.
Intrinsic human goodness and decency prevail effectively all the time, and the moral compass of nearly every person, despite some occasional jiggling prompted by ordinary human foibles, points in the right direction. The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)
In an important, little appreciated and utterly tragic principle regulating the structure of nearly all complex systems, building up must be accomplished step by tiny step, whereas destruction need occupy but an instant. In previous essays on the nature of change, I have called this phenomenon the Great Asymmetry (with uppercase letters to emphasize the sad generality). Ten thousand acts of kindness done by thousands of people, and slowly building trust and harmony over many years, can be undone by one destructive act of a skilled and committed psychopath. Thus, even if the effects of kindness and evil balance out in the course of history, the Great Asymmetry guarantees that the numbers of kind and evil people could hardly differ more, for thousands of good souls overwhelm each perpetrator of darkness.
I stress this greatly underappreciated point because our error in equating a balance of effects with equality in numbers could lead us to despair about human possibilities, especially at this moment of mourning and questioning; whereas, in reality, the decent multitudes, performing their 10,000 acts of kindness, vastly outnumber the very few depraved people in our midst. And thus, we have every reason to maintain our faith in human kindness and our hopes for the triumph of human potential, if only we can learn to harness this wellspring of unstinting goodness in nearly all of us.
For this reason, a documentation of the innumerable small acts of kindness, the good deeds that almost always pass beneath our notice for lack of “news value,” becomes an imperative duty, a responsibility that might almost be called holy, when we must reaffirm the, prevalence of human decency against our pre-eminent biases for hyping the cataclysmic and ignoring the quotidian. Ordinary kindness trumps paroxysmal evil by at least a million events to one, and we will not grasp this inspiring ratio unless we record the Everest of decency built grain by grain into a mighty fortress taller than any breakable building of mere concrete and steel.
Our media have stressed—as well they should—the spectacular acts of goodness and courage done by professionals pledged to face such dangers, and by ordinary people who can summon superhuman strength in moments of crisis: the brave firefighters who rushed in to get others out; the passengers of United Flight 93 who apparently drew the grimly correct inference when they learned the fate of the Twin Towers, and died fighting rather than afraid, perhaps saving thousands of lives by accepting their own death in an unpopulated field. But each of these spectacular acts rests upon an immense substrate of tiny kindnesses that cannot be motivated by thoughts of fame or fortune (for no one expects their documentation), and can only represent the almost automatic shining of simple human goodness. But this time, we must document the substrate, if only to reaffirm the inspiring predominance of kindness at a crucial moment in this vale of tears.
Halifax sat on the invisible periphery of a New York epicentre, with 45 planes, mostly chock full of poor strangers from strange lands, arrayed in two lines on the tarmac, and holding 9,000 passengers to house, feed and, especially, to comfort.
May it then be recorded; may it be inscribed forever in the Book of Life: Bless the good people of Halifax who did not sleep, who took strangers into their homes, who opened their hearts and shelters, who rushed in enough food and clothing to supply an army, who offered tours of their beautiful city and, above all, who listened with a simple empathy that brought this tough and fully grown man to tears, over and over again. I heard not a single harsh word, saw not the slightest gesture of frustration, and felt nothing but pure and honest welcome.
I know that you good people of Halifax have, by long tradition and practice, shown heroism and self-sacrifice at moments of disaster—occasional situations that all people of seafaring ancestry must face. I know that you received and buried the drowned victims of the Titanic in 1912, lost one in 10 of your own people in the Halifax Explosion of 1917, and gathered in the wreckages and remains of the recent Swissair disaster.
But, in a sense that may seem paradoxical, you outdid yourselves this time because you responded immediately, unanimously, unstintingly and with all conceivable goodness, when no real danger, but merely fear and substantial inconvenience, dogged your refugees for a few days. Our lives did not depend upon you, but you gave us everything nonetheless. We, 9,000 strong, are forever in your debt, and all humanity glows in the light of your unselfish goodness.
And so my wife and I drove back home, past the Magnetic Hill of Moncton (now a theme park in this different age), past the reversing rapids of Saint John, visible from the highway, through the border crossing at Calais (yes, I know, as in Alice, not as in ballet) and down to a cloud of dust and smoke enveloping a mountain of rubble, once a building and now a tomb. But you have given me hope that the ties of our common humanity will bind even these wounds.
And so Canada, although you are not my home or native land, we will always share this bond of your Unstinting hospitality to people who descended upon you as frightened strangers, and received nothing but solace and solidarity in your embrace of goodness. So Canada, because we beat as one heart, from Evangeline in Louisiana to the intrepid Mr. Sukanen of Moose Jaw, I will stand on guard for thee.
Stephen Jay Gould is a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard University and an internationally renowned author, whose books include Questioning the Millennium and The Book of Life: An illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth. He lives in New York.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Web Club Notes: Stephen Jay Gould from yesterday’s Globe
I am passing Jim’s report from Ground Zero on to others not on the original distribution list. Well worth looking at. Thank you, Jim. Something else that I think worth distributing to these lists is Stephen Jay Gould’s Ode to Human Decency appended below. I would have loved to give the whole world a URL for this “Special to the Globe and Mail.” Unfortunately, it was just about the only thing in the print edition of yesterday’s Globe not available online. I am sure that this has something to do with Gould’s refusal to sign over rights in perpetuity to the Thomson databases. This is something that I can understand and appreciate, even though I have been advised by unbiased umpires that I lost the Napster-web-free speech debate that raged in the web club lists last summer to the acolytes of Courtney Love.
Sometimes in life you do get what you pay for. In this case to read Gould’s Ode you would have to have purchased the paper edition of the Globe yesterday. For some bizarre reason the Globe decided to run the piece in the Entertainment section of the paper. It may have been because yesterday the rest of the paper was so chock full of really edifying stuff. The whole world got to read John Ibbitson on the love affair between George the Elder and George the Younger; apparently everyone has forgotten the fist-fight before W went on the wagon. It also included Ibbitson’s assertion that Goerge the Elder was “one of the most superbly prepared politicians ever to ascend to the White House.” Move over John Quincy Adams, whose own preparation included being ambassador to and learning the languages of many of the courts of Europe at a time when the United States was waging a 20-year, unilateral war against the “Barbary pirates” (ie, most of the Islamic kingdoms of the southern shores of the Mediterranean). Jim M. has already brought this piece of worthless drivel to your attention. History, it seems, is the first fatality when the attentions of university and think tank are focused on any subject these days.
Gould’s ode is the also first time in the wake of WTC that I have seen or heard anyone mention the Halifax Explosion of 1917, an event that instantly killed 1600 people, maimed another 9000, and destroyed or damaged the homes of 25,000 (nearly half the city’s population). It took years to learn what had actually caused the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima. The relief and rebuilding efforts in the wake of the explosion lasted for many years, formally wound down in 1976. Perhaps this experience is a better guide than punditry as to when life in New York will return to normal. It will take a little more than the return of David Letterman to the airwaves.
I trust that, in making this OCRed item available to these lists, Stephen Jay Gould will understand that I doing so not to violate his copyright, but rather to add to the available documentation of “small acts of goodness,” particularly when the Bozo in Chief forgot to say thank you to the people of Halifax or Gander or Toronto or Montreal for anything yesterday evening. Smaller, tit-for-tat Canadian minds might wonder the next time an emergency request comes in to divert hundreds of commercial airliners to Canadian fields if this might not present a unique opportunity to settle the softwood lumber dispute once and for all.
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