Good or Not-Good?

There is a fair amount of self-congratulatory, smug and righteous back slapping going on around our corner of the blogosphere these last couple of weeks. It isn't everyone, thank goodness, but there are folks that seem to feel that it is needful just now to tell each and all how good and right they are, and then share the accolades from blog to blog.


It has me thinking, when I'm not muttering about how pissed off the whole game makes me, about what exactly it is that makes us "good" or "bad," and how a person can be certain which category they fall into? I think I'm a pretty good person -- not nearly perfect, but pretty decent most of the time. But, I imagine, based on the sorts of things that the "we're just awfully good" crowd are pointing to, I'd be way out on the "not so good" end of the scale. Part of me wants to growl the question: "and just who in bloody hell do you think you are deciding who is and is not good," but part of me is intrigued with the question.


So... simple stuff first: humans, throughout history and across cultures have a pretty straightforward view of what is and isn't good. In nearly every human society, good people avoid harming others; they respect the property of other people; they contribute, according to their capacities, to the general well-being of the community. Those general social precepts form the basis historically for the creation of systems of law. As complicated as we can make it, the fact is that social laws and rules are based on our shared understandings of what is important for us each to protect -- the things we most value. So it is, that "civilized" people tend to agree, with very little discussion, that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, damaging children is wrong, abusing animals is wrong, lying is wrong, ... There is really not much incremental difference between us on most of that. We may argue passionately about the ethical edges; hence the endless and usually fruitless debates about abortion, the death penalty, justifications for war, and end of life decisions -- but the reasonable ones among us mostly don't square off and determine that the other side is "bad" simply because they disagree with our views.



None of that is IT when we are working at convincing ourselves that we are "good" and someone else is "bad." Nope. It's sex. Even in our circle; even with our shared interest in spanking and assorted kinks, there are cliques and clubs and in-groups and out-groups. There are some pretty convoluted measures of "good" and "bad," but I suspect that a very great deal of that judgement is firmly anchored in Puritanical notions of "proper" displays of sexual attraction and interest between men and women. However carefully we choose our words; however we work to attend to the politically correct views of our community; however we congratulate ourselves on our open mindedness, when the less than truly open minded are in the company of their peers, it seems there is a tendency to revert to very norm-driven conventions. So it is that we find our back slappers declaring that monogamy and long-running marriage are marks of "goodness" while relating outside of those institutions points to something "less than." Old cultural habits die hard. Never a single moment's thought that there is more of luck and skill to forming a long-lasting loving relationship; that it is not so much virtue as a sort of win in the great lottery of love and life. What amazing personal arrogance and hubris!



Whatever. I judge no one's relationship but my own, and that is very good indeed. I am exceptionally lucky. It wasn't always my luck to be partnered with a qualified and well-matched love, but the stars brought me to the right moment and the right people, and I am in exactly the right place -- not socially sanctioned but way better than my youthful and ill-advised "good" marriage that was so entirely horrible and dismal. I suspect that the smugness that is pouring forth at the moment is perhaps unconscious and not intended to come across the way it does to my ears. It is simply the way our society tends to look at this part of adult relating. Shrug. I believe that in time, we will stop valuing love based on who the partners are -- the longevity, the conventionality, the gender, or the numbers -- and come to see that love is a very great gift that ought to be celebrated wherever and whenever we manage to conjure it up.



swan