I found a post today that points at various people in history that “broke the rules and made for perfect role models”. That got me to thinking:
What makes someone a truly moral person? Standing up to The Man? Sticking with your moral guns in the face of public condemnation? Having a personal moral code that matches your public moral code?
If you accept all three, let’s review some of the choices made in the post:
Muhammed Ali (aka Cassius Clay)
WIN. He chose not only to resist the Vietnam draft, but did not flee or hide. He stood up tall and took his lumps–lost his livelihood and title, and went to jail to boot.
The Dalai Lama
FAIL. The descendent of the traditional leaders of Tibet spends others’ money freely in his global quest to free Tibet from Chinese control. What he doesn’t say loudly is that he wants to go back to the old ways in Tibet, which was the poorest country on earth per capita, while the lama class lived in splendor in palaces in the capital Lhasa. Nice gig, and he wants it back.
Mohandas Gandhi
FAIL. He led his country to freedom from British imperialism and practically invented the concept of civil disobedience–certainly a moral alternative to being killed when fighting overwhelmingly powerful adversaries. However, he later abused his privilege, his wife, and numerous young girls to quench his sexual appetite.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
WIN. He ran the Manhattan Project (managing a lot of independent scientists and engineers who resisted being managed), saw the horrific moral implications of what the Project had done, and made his views public. This got him fired, his secret clearances revoked, and forced him to make a living as a cattle rancher. (He later established the San Francisco Exploratorium.) He stuck by his moral guns.
Edward R. Murrow
WIN. Journalist and anchor for CBS News in the ’40s and ’50s, he was famous for his signature signoff line that he used during his broadcasts from London during the Blitz: “Good night, and good luck”. He went after Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, despite what that fight cost him professionally and personally. He was known around the world for someone who told the truth, however unpopular it might be.
Oskar Schindler
WIN. Schindler was a German industrialist who was first motivated by money to use slave Jewish labor in his factories. But when he came to the moral realization of what Nazi Germany was doing to the Jews, he began to shelter them, even to his own political detriment and personal cost. Today there are descendants of those he saved from the gas chambers who declare that they are “a Schindler Jew”.
