by Rushworth M. Kidder

I still don’t know Michelle’s last name. Somewhere in Green Bay that late Wisconsin afternoon, as she was listening to the car radio, she pulled over to the roadside and called the station. Then, in a voice edging into tears and freighted with meaning, she provided one of those glistening, rare, and reassuring moments in the nation’s ethical life.

That afternoon, Ben Merens and I had been talking about the ethical issues behind the current financial crisis. Ben hosts a highly regarded daily talk show, “At Issue,” on Wisconsin Public Radio, and he had invited me on to talk about my new book, The Ethics Recession. Our callers already had raised questions ranging from the morality of derivatives and credit default swaps to the outlawing of religious teaching in schools. They’d wanted to know what could be done about the corrupting nature of financial short-termism. They had wondered how to make it easier for people to recognize unethical behavior — and harder for them to lack shame and guilt.

Then Ben took Michelle’s call.

“Y’know, I had this whole conversation I was going to have,” she said, starting out bravely enough on what sounded like a slightly crackly cell phone. “But I have been so touched by the things that you’re saying, I’m — I’m sitting here in my car in tears. Because I have felt like I’m the only one who feels like this, and everybody else in the entire world is so morally bankrupt!”

In the instant’s pause before her next sentence, it dawned on me that what was breaking up was not her cell-phone signal. It was the deep emotion in her voice. But she struggled onward.

“And, y’know,” she continued until she could go no further, “it’s like I have hope now — and I just want to thank you…!”

I assured her she was not alone, that there were plenty of others in the world who also longed for this kind of integrity. Ben waited patiently for me to finish, and then he gave her the answer she really needed.

“Michelle,” he said, in a voice as sincere as hers had been troubled, “I am touched by callers all the time. But it’s been a while since someone touched me as deeply as you just did. And if we are giving you hope, please know that your call gave that right back — to me, to Rush, and to a lot of people listening to this program!”

He was right. But why? Why does it matter so much that a woman calls up in tears? Yes, this was talk radio in America, a phenomenon that sometimes attracts anonymous emotional venting. But Ben isn’t the kind of high-decibel ranter who whips his audience into an emotional froth every afternoon. He manages a thoughtful, intelligent conversation about current events and hard news. Nor are his public-radio listeners given to outbursts of illogic, rage, or despair. I could think of nothing in the preceding minutes that had cranked our discourse to a fevered pitch. We hadn’t been rooting around among dark scandals or ain’t-it-awful outrages. We’d simply been talking about ethics, character, and responsibility.

What moved Michelle, then, was not so much what we were saying as the fact that something was being said at all. I suspect that, if Ben could track her down and quiz her, she wouldn’t be able to point to this or that exact sentence as the place where the dam of her composure came unstuck. I also suspect that if Ben’s talk show had been like so many others — where callers secretly hope that if they seethe with enough indignation, someone will throw a chair at someone else — she would have turned away in dry-eyed disgust. Nor were her tears prompted by sentimentality, tragedy, patriotism, or the rest of the kit bag of tricks well known to speechwriters and actors. They were tears of relief. She found she wasn’t a lonely thinker plagued by weird thoughts no one else shared. She was part of a widening conversation among rational people caring deeply about values and integrity. That gave her hope. And as Ben so elegantly noted, she gave it right back to us and to the other listeners.

So thanks again, Michelle. I think you’re out there by the hundreds of thousands, yearning to know that the ethical life is more than a myth. You’re reminding us that we have an obligation to care for one another, especially during the moral midnight of an ethics recession. And you’re telling us that we build hope and nurture engagement simply by keeping the ethics discourse alive and timely — and that our very willingness to get into the conversation can sometimes be more meaningful than the things we say.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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