A confession addressed to an exhausted nation nearing two hundred and fifty.

Permit me, my compatriots, to pour you another bourbon before you object. We have the look tonight of a great and weary nation that still believes the world suffers from too little kindness: that if we only cared a great deal more, and policed a great deal less, and apologized at sufficient length for the sins of our grandfathers, we might at last be redeemed. A beautiful faith. We held it once, when we were young enough to mean it. Look at us now, slumped at the threshold of our two hundred and fiftieth year, too tired to lift the glass.

Observe ourselves. Have you ever watched a people work so hard at goodness and arrive so reliably exhausted? We convene our councils and committees, we fund our charities for the relief of strangers we would not cross a wet street to meet, we draft our solemn condemnations of the past, and then we go home and treat the waiter at the diner precisely as our grandfathers did, only with worse tips and a clearer conscience. We carry in our pocket a lit window onto every catastrophe on earth, and we have learned to grieve each one for the length of a breath and then to scroll, which is the most modern prayer there is. I have come to a conclusion I offer you freely, since free advice is the only kind I can still afford to be honest about. Our disease is not cruelty. It is conscience. We have far too much of it, and almost all of it counterfeit.

Consider what the conscience is for. Mine, I assure you, has never once stopped me from doing a thing I wished to do. It has only, afterward, helped me explain why a better man would have done the same. That is its only function. Not to restrain the appetite but to launder it. And a civilization of such consciences is simply a great machine for committing its preferred sins while feeling, throughout, like the injured party.

So I propose we economize. Let us keep the appetites, which are honest, and discard the conscience, which is not. Let us stop pretending we have outgrown the policeman, the master, and the closed border, and begin instead to praise them. Openly, gratefully, the way one ought to praise any old friend who does one’s dirty work and asks only never to be named.

And here I must record my debt, for I did not arrive at this candor alone. We are fortunate, my compatriots, fortunate beyond any generation before us, to live under a president who has relieved us of the last and most tiresome of our pretenses. The pretense of caring. Consider all that he has done for us. He says the cruel thing in daylight, plainly, before the cameras, and nothing happens to him; and each time nothing happens, a little more of our shame falls away. He apologizes for nothing, and so teaches a whole nation that nothing need ever be apologized for. He names the stranger a danger and the shut purse a kindness, and he does it smiling, without the faintest tremor of the old hypocrite’s guilt. He has not invented a single one of our appetites. He has merely given us leave to feed them in the daylight, and to call the feeding love of country. For this we are, in our weary way, grateful to him, as a tired man is grateful to whoever first says aloud what the whole room has been thinking and dared not. So raise the glass to him. He has made our conscience optional, and an optional conscience is the one luxury a great and tired nation truly craves.

We flinch, all of us, at once, the great slow flinch of a continent. Good. Drink. We are past the hour of pretending. I shall begin with the policeman, of whom I am inordinately fond, and to whom… but I am ahead of myself.

On the Policeman, Refined

We were always fond of the policeman, and with reason; but the old-fashioned sort, who polices everyone without distinction, has come to seem almost tactless. The ordinary officer cannot tell the difference; he polices us, you understand, you and me, the people who pay the taxes and the salaries and the pension. There is something democratic and therefore distasteful in it. No. What the discerning conscience requires is a policeman who polices only them.

And oh, what a gift it is, my compatriots, that little word: them. Say it, at dinner, in the suburbs. Feel how it works. A them has no first name, no mother, no particular way of holding a cup. We had a neighbor once, before we learned better; he had a limp and an opinion about tomatoes and a daughter who drew on the pavement in chalk. Insufferable. All that detail. It clings to a man, it follows him, it asks things of you. But call him an illegal, an alien, an element, a flow to be stemmed. Observe the miracle: the limp falls away, the daughter falls away, the chalk drawings dissolve, and what remains is a clean abstract noun you may do anything to. We have not even touched him yet and already he has no face.

For the van is the small part. Anyone can buy a van. The art is in the renaming, and it is performed by people exactly like us, at dinner, in pleasant rooms, saying we must be realistic and they are not like us and there are simply too many. Note the arithmetic in that last one, too many, for it is the most useful phrase ever devised. It converts a crowd of souls into a quantity, and a quantity into a problem, and a problem may be solved without anyone ever having done a thing to a person. We adore it. We keep it by the door like an umbrella.

Then, the renaming complete, we need only not object. We leave the objecting undone, the way one leaves a door unlocked for a thief one is too civilized to hire. The van arrives for the abstract noun, driven by serious men with badges and masks. And we remain innocent, because one cannot be cruel to a category. Besides, we were at lunch.

Some will say, “but surely you feel something.” Of course we feel something. We feel grateful. We did not hunt anyone through a parking lot – we were merely kept safe from them, by serious men, at considerable public expense, while we expressed, and this is essential, concerns. We are always full of concerns. It is comforting to know that the mere wringing of hands is a better choice than the dirtying of them.

And here is the part we love best. The man in the van is judged by no one, because the thing in the van is no longer a man. He acts in our name but never under our signature. When the photographs surface (there are always photographs: the children in the corridors, the cots in long rows under the strip lights), we shall all of us be appalled, sincerely, and we shall agree it is a tragedy, a systemic tragedy, which is the kind that has no author. We will condemn it at dinner. Our outrage will be so genuine that it passes, even to ourselves, for innocence, and you will forget we were the ones who taught the room to say them.

And we have spoken so far only of the ones we send away. There are also the ones we keep. For not everyone we wish gone is a foreigner we may deport. Some are citizens, inconveniently, and a citizen must be removed by subtler means. So we cage them. We have caged more of our own people than any nation now alive, more than the very tyrannies we are so fond of lecturing, and we have done it without once feeling like jailers. The renaming holds here too, for it never fails: a man, a woman, even a child becomes an inmate, an offender, a felon, a number stenciled on a jumpsuit, and once they are a number you may keep them for life and call it justice. We build the cages in distant cities no one we dine with has ever driven through, so that the vanishing makes no sound in the pleasant rooms. We do not see the cage. We see only the street, which is safer now, and we are grateful, and we have a name ready for our gratitude. We call it law and order, the most respectable phrase we have yet devised for never having to look.

That, you see, is what I mean by economizing on conscience. We keep the safety and the indignation. We are the master and the penitent. We unname the man, and we mourn him once he is gone, and we never once unlock the door ourselves.

On the Folly of Tending Strangers

Now we arrive at the tenderest of our economies, and we must lower our voices, for here even cynics grow sentimental. We come now to our late withdrawal from that great hospital of nations, the one the world built together and we helped pay for, that fusses over fevers in countries whose names we mispronounce, that counts the dead in places we shall never visit and sends its grave little bulletins about a cough three borders away.

We left it, my compatriots. Our current president slammed the purse and turned the key in our name, and we have rarely felt so unburdened.

Consider the reasoning, which is impeccable once we stop being ashamed of it. Charity toward strangers is the most counterfeit of all our consciences, being the only virtue one may practice at a great distance, at no cost, and to applause. We do not love our neighbor (we, who let our own sick wait in the cold and step over our own poor asleep in our own doorways), and yet we wept real tears over a plague in a region we could not find on a map. Why? Because the distant child is safe to love. He makes no demands at our door. He will never ask to be paid.

And note how kindly the distance does our renaming for us. We did not even have to invent the ugly word this time; the map supplied it. The fevered child is already an abroad, a case, a figure in a column, a statistic, a clip that plays itself for fifteen seconds between a recipe and an advertisement, and we have trained the thumb to move on before the heart can catch up. You will recall what I said of the column and the figure, how a quantity may be abandoned where a person could not. Here the arithmetic runs the other way, but it runs just as sweetly: not our concern, not our border, not our problem to absorb. Three small subtractions, and a hospital full of the dying is removed from the ledger of things we are obliged to feel.

So we have done the honest thing at last. We have admitted that our compassion was always a kind of tourism, and we can finally stay home. Let the fevered regions tend their own fevers. We shall keep our money and we shall keep our reputation too, by explaining that we left in order to be responsible, that the hospital was wasteful, that it was captured by foreigners, that true generosity begins with fiscal responsibility. We have a dozen such phrases. They cost nothing and they pay handsomely. Concern, after all, is merely the modern alias for alibi; prudence is the name for the bill we decline to pay.

And we did not stop at the one hospital. There was a whole apparatus of such charity: granaries and clinics and seed and clean water shipped to nations that struggle, the kind of giving so vast and so quiet that no one of us could quite picture who received it. So we ended the better part of it, and felt, all of us, a clean satisfaction. Observe why it was so easy: a struggling nation is the most abstract noun we have yet manufactured. It has no face, not one, but a hundred million, which amounts arithmetically to none. You cannot weep for a hundred million – the eye refuses. The figure is too large to enter the heart and so it waits politely outside it. We did not cut off any person. We adjusted a line item. And somewhere a granary closed, and no single child could be photographed starving on our particular account, the math had already divided our guilt by a hundred million and left each of us holding a remainder too small to feel.

And when the cough we declined to count arrives at last at our own border (for it always arrives, the borders being what they are), we shall be appalled, and we shall say so at dinner. But you begin to know that tune by heart.

On the Great Convenience of the Unborn

But here, my compatriots, is the purest economy of them all, for it is the one in which the conscience has nothing whatever to grip. Not a face, not even a living body, not so much as a name on a manifest. We come now to our happy withdrawal from that solemn accord among nations, the one in which we all promised to burn a little less, to suffer the small inconveniences of a cleaner fire, for the sake of a world we shall not live to inhabit. Your president tore up the promise, and we tore it up gratefully after him, and we have gone back to the good thick smoke. And we have never felt so weightless, so perfectly absolved.

Consider the matchless beauty of the victim here. The migrant at least exists – one must take the trouble to unname him. The struggling nation at least breathes, somewhere, today. But the one who will inherit the drowned coast and the failed harvest: he is not yet born. He cannot vote. He cannot reproach us. He cannot be photographed in a corridor, for there is no corridor and no he, only a probability, a curve on a chart that bends somewhere past our own funerals. We shall be comfortably dead before the bill so much as arrives. Tell me, what master in all of history has been offered a servant like this: one who suffers entirely in the future, on another’s watch, and can never once turn and look him in the eye? It is the appetite with the face removed not by language this time, but by time itself. We have only to wait, and the conscience starves for lack of a person to accuse.

And the cleaner fire. Ah, here we are most honest of all. They came to us with their alternatives, their wind and their sun, their quieter engines, and we refused them, and we told the room it was because such things were unproven, unserious, a fashion, a foreign racket, a threat to honest men in honest pickup trucks. Fine phrases, every one, and we keep them by the door, with the umbrella. But here, in this dim and forgiving light, we may admit the truth beneath them – we refused because changing is effort, and effort is the single thing the conscience asks that the appetite will not grant. It is so much easier to keep the old smoke. The old smoke asks nothing of us but the lives of people who do not yet exist, and those are the cheapest lives there are.

So we shall warm ourselves, and dress our comfort in the robes of realism, as cowardice has always preferred to be styled. And when the curve at last bends down upon some child we will never meet, we shall be ash, and innocent, and unanswerable. A tragedy, yes, and you know by now what kind – the kind with no author, least of all those who took such care to be dead before it began.

On Masters, and Why We Should Stop Pretending

Here I must be careful, for I am about to say aloud the thing every economy so far has only whispered, and you will want, you will long, to believe I do not mean it. Let me spare you the comfort. I mean it exactly as much as you do.

We abolished the masters, did we not? We are very proud of it. We hold ceremonies and Fourth of July parades. And yet observe. The work the master once compelled is still done, every hour, by someone at perfect liberty to stop, provided only that he is willing to starve. The fields are still bent over. The kitchens still steam. The iPhone in our palms, warm from its journey through a thousand unbilled hands, was assembled by someone who will never afford one. We did not abolish the master, my compatriots. We performed a far cleverer trick. We distributed him. We made the mastery so diffuse, passed it through so many banks and borders and polite intermediaries, that no single hand holds the whip and therefore no single hand need feel the shame of holding it.

This is progress, and we should salute it, because it is mastery with the one intolerable ingredient removed. The face again, always the face. You see now that it has been the same trick all evening, performed in costume after costume. With the van, we unname the man so we may remove him. With the hospital and the shuttered granary, we unname him so we may abandon him. With the old smoke, we let time unname him for us, before he is even born. And here, with the master, we unname ourselves! We dissolve the one accountable face into a thousand blameless ones, a supply chain, a market, a consumer base, until the whip is held by everyone and therefore by no one. The math that made the migrant too many and the unborn too far off now makes the master too diffuse. And we have lately found the most diffuse master of all – the machine we have taught to choose for us, so that when the cruel thing is done we may swear, in good conscience, that the system decided it, that the model advised it, that no one chose at all. Always the same sum, my compatriots. We have only moved where we place the minus sign.

The old master at least had to look. Ours is the better arrangement. We enjoy the bent field and the steaming kitchen and the assembled phone, and we are assured, by everyone, including ourselves, by the whole machinery of American Dream rhetoric, that we are no one’s master at all. We are merely consumers, which is what we call a master who has been assured he is a victim, by everyone from the scrolling cathedrals of Amazon to the smallest digital storefront; a lie so comfortable we have forgotten it was ever a lie.

And should you press, should you rouse yourselves from the bar at last and say, but do you not want it otherwise, then here is the honest answer we have been circling all evening, the one beneath all the others. No. We do not. We will not. We like being served. We like the lettuce on the plate and the van at the curb and the hospital locked against the cough. Most of all we like the feeling of being good while we like these things. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design. The conscience was never built to stop us. It was built to keep us company while we did not stop.

There. I have said it, and you have heard it, and now (this is the small, perfect cruelty of the thing) you cannot unhear it, and you are implicated in the hearing.

Benediction

So let me bless you, my compatriots, before the glasses are dry and you stumble home, exhausted as ever, into the honest night. They are filling the sky tonight with drones in the shape of your flag, two hundred and fifty of them, and you will not look up.

Go in peace. Keep your appetites – they at least have never lied to you. Discard the conscience, or rather (for one cannot truly discard so useful an organ) promote it, from a jailer to a companion, from the thing that forbids to the thing that consoles. Praise the van and the locked hospital and the old thick smoke and the distributed master. Praise them out loud! Our founding fathers would recognize the honest appetite beneath all that constitutional language. You will find the words come easily. They always have – you have merely been ashamed to be heard saying them, and shame, I have shown you tonight, is only the last and most expensive of the counterfeits.

You think I have been describing the men in the vans, the officials who lock the hospitals, the ones burning the world to stay warm, your president and the comfortable architects of all this honest cruelty. How relieved you looked, an hour ago, believing that. But I told you at the start what kind of confession this is. I said we all evening, my compatriots. One warm, forgiving, inclusive we, and you sank into it gratefully, the way a tired man sinks into a chair, never once asking whom it gathered in. It gathered you. And do not take me for the one honest man in the corner: every economy I confessed is mine, practiced with appetite, and I confessed it only to make you own yours. He did not make you; he merely read you aloud. You elected the mirror.

We did not order the lettuce. We merely ate it. We did not lock the hospital. We merely felt safer. We did not light the old smoke. We merely declined to be inconvenienced, on behalf of someone not yet born to object. We did not distribute the master. We merely enjoyed our share. And tomorrow, when the photographs surface, we will be appalled (sincerely, I do not doubt it for an instant), and we will say so beautifully, to everyone we follow and everyone who follows us, with the right words and a candle laid over our face, and we will mean every one of them. And by morning the feed will have refreshed, and so, gratefully, will we.

It is a tragedy, of course. A systemic tragedy.

The kind, as we have agreed all evening, that has no author.

Drink up, my compatriots. It is our round, and our two hundred and fiftieth year.

Many happy returns.