In an environment of nastiness, expect little, but do good. Regardless of your charitable efforts, you will always be open to attacks large or small by those who will be driven by motiveless malignity like Herman Melville’s character Claggart or Shakespeare’s Iago. “Motiveless malignity” is Thomas Carlyle’s term for such a character. Iago, if you recall, is the guy who gets Othello to kill his wife Desdemona. In Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Billy is a young and capable man whom Claggart dislikes for some undefined reasons.
The consequences of the stories are bad for the good. Desdemona and Billy Budd die. And today, we see our share of Claggarts and Iagos online and in the media. They seem obsessed with destruction, and we can’t always figure out why. They have junior high school bully mentality, a motiveless malignity. And there is nothing the innocent can really do to prevent the onset of their malicious actions.
You might argue that there is no such thing as motiveless malignity, that there’s always a cause. Maybe you are correct, but tell that to millions—if not billions—who have suffered because of motives they could not fathom. As the deaths of many well-meaning people from Christ to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrate, good, as we know from history, doesn’t stop Claggarts and Iagos. Every generation has them, and many good people suffer indignities because of them. In today’s language, they are known as “haters,” and they have access to instantaneous worldwide messaging.
Those with motiveless malignity will continue to work their varying degrees of destructive energy for the bad of those they want to hurt or destroy. And when this generation passes, the next generation of Claggarts and Iagos will follow. Of course, all malignity hurts, but no amount of self pity will change the attacker. So what choices do any of us have with regard to those who would do us harm regardless of our attempts to do good? The only counter that lasts is to continue to do good for others.
Recipients of our acts of goodness might be only a small fraction of humans, but if you believe our species is capable of and deserving of dignity, then you will have done your part to foster it. We seem to know that dignity best that is tested dignity.
Those out to harm you or someone else will most likely not consider the full consequences of their actions. In that regard they are pitiful. They have devoted their lives in either the short or long run to destruction for unknowable deep-seated reasons. What will we put on their tombstones—surely each, like 100 billion humans before them, will have one—that characterizes their accomplishments? Should we write, “Here lies the modern Iago” or “Beneath lies the Claggart of his (or her) times”?
Your tombstone will say, “Dignity survives because of _____ [your name here].”
The consequences of the stories are bad for the good. Desdemona and Billy Budd die. And today, we see our share of Claggarts and Iagos online and in the media. They seem obsessed with destruction, and we can’t always figure out why. They have junior high school bully mentality, a motiveless malignity. And there is nothing the innocent can really do to prevent the onset of their malicious actions.
You might argue that there is no such thing as motiveless malignity, that there’s always a cause. Maybe you are correct, but tell that to millions—if not billions—who have suffered because of motives they could not fathom. As the deaths of many well-meaning people from Christ to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrate, good, as we know from history, doesn’t stop Claggarts and Iagos. Every generation has them, and many good people suffer indignities because of them. In today’s language, they are known as “haters,” and they have access to instantaneous worldwide messaging.
Those with motiveless malignity will continue to work their varying degrees of destructive energy for the bad of those they want to hurt or destroy. And when this generation passes, the next generation of Claggarts and Iagos will follow. Of course, all malignity hurts, but no amount of self pity will change the attacker. So what choices do any of us have with regard to those who would do us harm regardless of our attempts to do good? The only counter that lasts is to continue to do good for others.
Recipients of our acts of goodness might be only a small fraction of humans, but if you believe our species is capable of and deserving of dignity, then you will have done your part to foster it. We seem to know that dignity best that is tested dignity.
Those out to harm you or someone else will most likely not consider the full consequences of their actions. In that regard they are pitiful. They have devoted their lives in either the short or long run to destruction for unknowable deep-seated reasons. What will we put on their tombstones—surely each, like 100 billion humans before them, will have one—that characterizes their accomplishments? Should we write, “Here lies the modern Iago” or “Beneath lies the Claggart of his (or her) times”?
Your tombstone will say, “Dignity survives because of _____ [your name here].”
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