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You Don’t Need ‘Moral Authority’
You need to be good, but you shouldn’t give up your curiosity and interrogation.
I want to tell you about a book that’s part of my identity, insofar as it felt important to me years ago and I still think of it now and then. It’s Nikki Stern’s 2010 book Because I Say So: Moral Authority’s Dangerous Appeal, which I read the year after it came out. I read it again just now.
It started with a terrorist attack
Stern lost her husband in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. When she did, she abruptly gained an identity as a “9/11 widow,” and media interviewers wished to imbue her with a supposed “moral authority.” They wrote, she recalls, character-driven stories of the “‘how do you feel’ or ‘how are you doing’” variety, as well as narrative-driven stories about 9/11 family members fighting institutions for benefits. Nonetheless, she refused to believe that 9/11 families had “acquired any sort of grief-related moral wisdom.”
Maybe “tragedy builds character,” she muses, but “it certainly doesn’t confer expertise” nor “moral advantage.” Grieving people may speak passionately because they are “deeply wounded,” but their grief probably hasn’t changed their core self.
