Respectability always matters
On nonviolence, child-rearing, and the problem with trying to applaud Gandhi without rejecting bad actors in the present
It has long been easy to pay lip service to the notion of non-violent resistance to injustice; nobody gets into trouble for praising figures like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet it seems easy to overlook that the moral force of nonviolence depends upon an upstream condition: A sense of honor.
■ The honor of the resisters isn't what matters, but the honor of the audience -- the public at large. Gandhi and King both depended upon the expectation that the public would respond with revulsion to the sight of their protesters being punished, physically and brutally, for behaving blamelessly.
■ They assumed that even people who might have subscribed to a sense of racial superiority of their own would have subscribed even more to seeing themselves as being more decent than the brutality put on display by the authorities -- ostensibly in their name. For its political ends, the entire concept depends upon a common sense of respectability.
■ Respectability starts small. It doesn't emerge out of the ether in adulthood; it has to be inculcated in children in little ways (share, play fair, treat others how you want to be treated) and then reinforced all throughout a person's lifetime. Something is fundamentally broken among those who reject the importance of respectability.
■ Every member of the public who recognizes what good came from the nonviolent resistance movements needs to recognize that an essential way to honor its past victories is to reject disreputable behavior by those who wish to be leaders in the present.
