by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week, in a blizzard of public outrage over corporate greed, vandals smashed windows at the Edinburgh home of Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland.

Then on Saturday night, in a blizzard of public enthusiasm over energy conservation, the Scottish Parliament building and Edinburgh Castle happily went dark during Earth Hour, a global demonstration calling for action on climate change.

Last week, angry workers facing layoffs at a 3M plant in Pithiviers, France, held plant manager Luc Rousselet hostage for several days, demanding better severance packages in an incident of what’s becoming known as “bossknapping.”

Then on Saturday night, as the lights shut down at the Eiffel Tower, householders across France gladly joined in, turning off inessential lights for an hour in an event designed to bring together a billion people in 80 countries and 25 time zones.

Last week Iowa senator Charles Grassley had to backpedal on his comment that AIG executives responsible for the ailing insurance firm’s financial mess should either “resign or commit suicide” — a retraction coming only days after AIG executives reported receiving death threats connected to large bonus payments.

Then on Saturday night, Americans dowsed TVs, dined by candlelight, and delighted as monuments from the Empire State Building to the Golden Gate Bridge temporarily vanished from nighttime skylines.

What’s going on? Who are we?

Are we a people fixed on revenge? When we find arrogance and greed in our midst, do we resort to vigilante violence to set things right — spurred on, at times, by ill-considered words from our top political leaders and media personalities?

Or are we a people wedded to reform? When a cause — like saving energy — unites us, do we readily band together in global networks to urge those same leaders to develop policies for a better world?

Looking at the cultural context of the twenty-first century, you can understand why there’s such a crisis of identity. On one hand, we’re marinated in a polarizing political discourse. For the sake of sound bites and tweets, we reduce complexity to black-and-white starkness. Result: Frustration is heightened, anger is encouraged, and we’re drawn into speaking and acting on these oversimplifications with all the belligerence of a schoolyard bully.

On the other hand, we’re surrounded by thoughtful, many-layered arguments about oil reserves, alternative energy sources, global warming, and rising energy costs. Result: We roll up our sleeves, do the hard intellectual work of comprehending such issues, knit together common frameworks for action, and join hands to promote them peaceably and respectfully around the world.

Some would say, of course, that these are two sides of the same coin. They argue that wrath is an essential precursor to reform, that local revenge and global hand-holding are simply different paths to the same goal, and that to save the world for good you must first save it from bad. For them the perception of humanity as morally bipolar — by turns brutish and generous, craven and thoughtful, hateful and loving, noxiously misanthropic and radiantly communitarian — is less a cause for alarm than a statement of fact.

In earlier centuries, that was an interesting theory. But changing the world demands that we change our theories of the world. And one of the theories most in need of change is that such dualism is okay. Given the moral stakes of our collective future, we can no longer tolerate this kind of two-sided approach to public affairs. Why? Because the technology of today’s media — from global satellite radio to instant messaging, from Google to Facebook, from BBC online to blogs and chat rooms — has brought us into a whole new moral universe. We can now gin up populist outrage immediately, globally, and deeply. We can use it for enormous good — to change energy policy, for example. Or we use it for enormous bad — to foment personal violence and the like.

Does that mean outrage is bad? Not at all: There are plenty of things that require us to rise in rebellion, look selfishness and tyranny squarely in the eye, and muster the moral courage to deliver a ringing condemnation. But that doesn’t give us permission to fight arrogance with disrespect or greed with violence. The fact that some corporate bonuses are unjust doesn’t give us license to vandalize. The fact that some executives made bad decisions doesn’t mean they should die.

Last week left us with a danger, a promise, and a way forward. We now know how easy it is to stir up populist outrage — and the danger of doing so. But we also know something promising about our better angels and our capacity for respectful, united action. Going forward, we need leaders committed to doing the former only in the service of the latter. Moral outrage? Yes. Violence? No. Respect? Always.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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