The price of honor

There is a conversation going around the Internet about “allies” versus “accomplices.” If you haven’t encountered it, the idea is this: many people refer to themselves as “allies” of a group, such as straight allies of the LGBT community, or white allies of the black community, or male allies of women. (Or “male allies of feminism,” a slightly different idea) Many people have also noticed that these so-called allies often turn out to be real jerks when push comes to shove, making a big marketing brouhaha over their “allyship” but being perfectly willing to throw said group over the side when it suits their needs. The “allies-versus-accomplices” discussion has been about wanting people to take on a deeper relationship: to take on not only the issues, but to share in the risks of actively fighting for some cause.

I’m not going to go in to the depths of this discussion, because it’s a fairly technical issue within a specific community.¹ But the ideas behind it are profoundly relevant to the quote above.

The term “ally” is actually an extremely accurate one. In a war, your allies are not on your side; they are people with their own side, with whom you share common interests, and with whom you therefore collaborate to achieve those goals. This isn’t a failure of the alliance; it’s what an alliance is, a joining of aims between multiple independent parties. (To take World War II as the most famous example, just because the US, the UK, and the USSR were all fighting the Nazis didn’t mean they were also best friends)

The analogue of the alternative, the one being referred to as being an “accomplice,” would be an individual who looks out the window and sees that there is a war, and that one side is right and the other is wrong, and goes to enlist with one side. That is, a decision that the success of that side and one’s own success cannot be separated; you can have no victory so long as the side you have chosen does not have one.

You may expect that I’m about to argue that accomplices are better than allies. That’s not where I’m going.

There is nothing wrong with alliance, in any of these contexts: it is perfectly reasonable to decide that your aims (say, the aims of establishing a world that you want to live in) coincide with someone else’s aims (say, those of eliminating pervasive discrimination against them) and thus that you wish to work together.

But alliance with those in need does not satisfy our moral obligation to be decent people.

The difference comes precisely at the time when the quote above fails: when the cost of decency is not zero. In an alliance, one should weigh the costs against the benefits to one’s purposes, and decide whether or not to proceed on that basis. But if you have “chosen a side” in a struggle, you know that defeat will cost you everything; you already know that you need to proceed.

What’s important here is that one can not be an accomplice of everyone; if nothing else, it would be practically impossible to be so entwined with the success of every other single person that your success cannot happen without theirs. Nobody has the capacity to solve all the problems of the world. Nor, for obvious reasons, should one be an ally of everyone; not just because of limited resources, but for the simple reason that some people are just jerks, and you wouldn’t want to be allied with them.

But we have to make certain choices.

Sometimes, your choice is forced. You will tend to choose the side of a group that you’re in, although occasionally people will choose the opposing side — feeling that their side is doomed, and hoping for survival as a servant of the enemy. (The horrible misuse² of the term “Uncle Tom” is a reference to one type of person who does this)

Sometimes, you choose to take a side because you know that if they come for your neighbors one day, they will come for you the next. Those who have been the victims of the mob one time too many will often know that there is no real choice for them at all.

And sometimes, you choose to take a side simply because the needs of morality demand it. Because you know that the price of not choosing that side is having to live for the rest of your life with the knowledge that you didn’t.

In the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, there is a hall dedicated to the “Righteous Among Nations.” These are people who were not Jews, or Roma, or any other group targeted by the Nazis, but who nonetheless risked their lives — and often paid with them — to save the lives of others. What is righteous about them is not who they saved, but that ultimately, it did not matter who they saved: only that they were in need.

To stand in this room is to tremble before the heroism displayed, and to know that for each person whose name is known, there are a thousand whose names we do not know. Could there be any greater honor than to stand among them?

We are faced with such choices in our lives. Sometimes the consequences are greater, sometimes they are less: do we stand up for our friends and our neighbors, even when to do so will not only make us unpopular, it will make us a target, even an enemy, of people we care about? When it may harm our careers, put our livelihoods in jeopardy? When as political winds change, our support for others may leave us marked as “terrorist sympathizers” or worse?

We should not always choose to do this; not every fight is worth fighting, and not every hill is worth dying on. But there are some times when we must take a stand, and there are some moral lines which we must never allow to be crossed.

I often use Niemöller’s rule (“First they came for the Socialists…”) as a rule of thumb, because I know through harsh experience that there is no thing that affects any one group which will not, ultimately, be pointed at me as well.³ I ask myself: if this affected me directly, how far would I be willing to fight over it, and on which side? This is often a good first cut as to what side you should take, and with how much vigor. If my children were at daily risk of death? I would know no bounds. If I were to be made mildly upset a few times a week? I would probably know a lot of bounds.

This cannot be the final rule, because of the problem of limited resources; none of us can solve every single problem in the world, and we must triage. If we were to try to solve everything, we would end up solving nothing.We pick the things which strike our hearts the hardest, which come closest to us, about which we feel the most certainty, the things which we feel we could do the most useful things about. There are any number of methods by which we go from “this is a thing that matters” to “this is a place where I will take a stand.”

And certainly, as our power grows, as our capacity to affect things increases, and as our available resources become larger, having more capacity (in everything from wealth to security to “spoons”) to do something, so does our moral obligation to put it to good use. Which is to say: There is nothing wrong with having wealth, or privilege, or power; all that matters is how you use it.

So finally, to return to the quote that started this discussion: sometimes, the price of being a decent human being is nothing, and sometimes, the price is everything. To be a “decent human being” is to pay the obligations which are put upon us by morality. It does not mean to fight every fight, but it means to not turn away when we have the ability to help, and when we know that we would fight much harder for a thing if we ourselves were at stake.

Some days, the price of honor is nothing; some days, the price of honor is your life.