On Self Respect, Morality, and Personal Reconciliation
The meaning of self respect and morality as I understand it now.
October 31, 2024
Dear Mel.
There’s something that’s been on my mind lately that I’m sure I never shared with you because it was so shocking at the time, but now that I’ve put some distance in the rear view between my trip to inter Mom’s ashes and the here and now, I realize that I need to talk about it.
About twenty years ago my parents hosted one of our irregular family dinners. There were seven of us crowded around the dining table I knew so well, the one my mother polished it with a homemade concoction of linseed oil and turpentine, and no school projects ever touched. My brother and his wife, together with his adult son were on one side; my parents sat at either end; and my ex and I were on the other side, in our usual places. Mom had made chicken paprikas, a kind of bribe to entice us I’m sure.
Anyway, Dad brought up the topic of their final arrangements, to which my mother responded in a peculiar way.
“Throw my body into a ditch,” Mom said. “I don’t care what you do.”
Silence. I hardly breathed hearing her say this. No one knew what to say. So Mom went on.
“What does it matter, anyway? It’s not like I’d know the difference.”
After an awkward beat, Dad changed the subject and went on about something that happened at the Hungarian Club where he was treasurer. We all pretended that we were okay. It was almost a shrug, but I wasn’t shrugging inside.
Here’s the thing — it shook me so hard that the memory has stuck with me for two decades. I’ve finally sorted out why after re-reading Joan Didion’s essays about self-respect and morality.
Ever since I discovered Joan Didion when I was your age I have found myself rereading her work at different stages of my life. Two essays in particular still hold up. The first, written in 1961 for Vogue, when she was just 27 years-old, titled “Self-Respect: Its Source Its Power” continues to stun me with its insight. When I was 27 I was incapable of articulating the true meaning of self-respect, but she nailed it.
The second essay, “On Morality,” first published in The American Scholar in 1965 and later collected in the volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem along with “On Self Respect,” is closely related, at least it seems so to me.
To be without self-respect is to be an “unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined.” There’s that figurine at Grandma’s, a remnant from the country she left behind in 1939, shattered when I was five or six years old. Later, what a shit I was for sleeping with a friend’s boyfriend. Oh, the look on a another friend’s face! How could I have said what I did in that tone? And on it goes, the movie of errors, bad judgement, selfishness, not to mention the hustle for praise and fitting in. The things is, on the face of it, none of these things results in a lack of self-respect by default. It’s how we handle them that indicates its absence.
“To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises broken…[We] eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
Self respect has nothing to do with the face of things, our outward behavior or virtues, nor the esteem of others. This is why those whose behavior suggests to us that they could not possibly respect themselves sleep quite well.
Consider my favorite TV gangster, Tony Soprano. Tony most certainly lacked virtue, yet he respected himself. He had a code. Family came first. Trouble was he had two families, his blood relations and his business. Often the two overlapped and came into conflict. This may have had something to do with his depression, for which he sought relief from a psychiatrist. No one in his business family could know about his treatment, neither the talk therapy nor the Prozac prescription. They’d kill him if they did. Tony respected himself enough to get treatment anyway. He understood it would make him a better leader.
Instead of virtue, self-respect “concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.” People who respect themselves have the courage of their mistakes. If they commit adultery, they do not beg for absolution from the wronged party in an effort relieve their own conscience. People with self-respect “exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, … the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” (Italics mine.)
Those with self-respect are willing to invest something of themselves, take calculated risks, they know the odds and play anyway. When they fail they get back up again.
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked, within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.”
It turns out my mother didn’t respect herself. She failed to recognize her own intrinsic worth. Throw my body in a ditch. I don’t care. This failure also reflected a weak morality.
In “On Morality” Didion tells the story of a car accident out in the Mojave desert in which the driver is killed and the passenger, a woman, is found alive. A nurse and her husband come across the accident. The nurse drives the female 185 miles to the nearest hospital while her husband stays with the body.
“You can’t just leave a body on the highway,” she tells Didion later. “It’s immoral.”
What she meant was had her husband not stayed to scare away the coyotes the body would have been mutilated before a coroner or funeral director could retrieve it.
Civilized people retrieve their dead. This is a code so fundamental that perhaps it doesn’t need mentioning, but it does. In Didion’s estimation, and I agree, this is an indisputably moral act. And, it’s the only one that is beyond dispute. My mother lacked the moral code that says our remains have spiritual and social value, that they do not belong in a ditch ripe for animal mutilation. Yet, she thought there was a kind of rational correctness to her position. The moral code was lost on her. She was no Tony Soprano.
And therein lies the problem. My haunting. The reason I have trouble letting go of the memory of that dinner twenty years ago. Didion and I agree that caring for our dead is perhaps the only act that universally deserves to be describe as moral. And my mother didn’t get it. She did not respect herself. She didn’t understand her own value to her tribe in life or in death.
Here’s the kicker: neither does my brother. He is just like the mother he blames for all of his personal problems, both personal and material. He didn’t care about laying her to rest. It would have been okay with him if someone came along and tossed her ashes into a garbage bin.
All of my life I have looked up to my older brother, wishing we were closer, agonizing over the difference in our life circumstances, trying to get his attention, even an acknowledgement of filial love. Now I realize what a fool I’ve been. He can’t do it. He hasn’t taken the journey toward self-respect that I have. That is why he ditched me the day we were supposed to inter Mom’s ashes together. He does not give a whit about me, either, and what it meant to me to do this one final thing together for our mother. No doubt he thought he was following his conscience, the same warped logic of our mother’s: It’s not like she’d know the difference.
How many lunatics have said, “I did what I thought was right” or “I followed my conscience.” How many killers? Politicians? Dictators? Peacemakers? How many times have we said it? How often was what we thought right or moral to us?
It seems to me that I have no right to inflict my conscience on you, however reasonable or unreasonable, nor do you have the right inflict your conscience on me. We don’t always know what is morally right from wrong beyond the fundamental loyalty to the social code that says to us we must respect the dead. The word is overused in any other context, worse it becomes an excuse to follow through on madness. We have preachers running for office who shout about a time for killing for pity’s sake. Someone will vote for that person, quite a few someones.
“Because it is when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and this is when we are in bad trouble.”
abortion
climate
reparations
deportations
sovereignty
The label of “moral” has been applied to each of these and we have no agreement whatever on how to address them as a society. Whose “morality” should prevail? Is the imposition of a proposed solution itself moral?
Careless people who carelessly apply what ought to be a private morality publicly in exchange for power fail utterly to respect anybody, including themselves, for their hypocrisy inevitably reveals their true selves as something other than the moral beacon they presented to the rest of us. I looked up to my brother all of life, willfully ignoring the signs that he was unworthy.
Often a private shame drives a public moral position. I’m thinking here of priests who diddle little boys; of politicians loudly opposed to gay rights who turn out to be more than a little gay curious; of those opposed to government handouts who are the first in line to receive such handouts; of women and men who themselves have procured abortions and now push pro-life policies like Texas’s bounty law. Such people have not made peace with themselves.
The reason I could not have written an essay about self-respect at the age of 27 as Didion did is because I did not yet respect myself. Like my mother, I was too concerned with the surface of things, appearances. I was a people pleaser and didn’t know how to say no in a way that gave no offense because of the inner conflict I felt all the time.
There is something deeply broken within my brother. Yet, he presents himself as harmless, not responsible for his own carelessness or as the kids like to say, adulting. This is the reason I cannot speak to him. I can no longer hide behind the illusions of a younger sister who keeps hoping that one day he’ll accept himself as the architect of his life so that he can care about others, including his own mother’s remains, rather than blaming his current adult condition on her.
My mother lacked self-respect. Throw my body into a ditch. This could be why my brother never loved her, in fact hated her enough to use her in the last years of her life to enhance his own standard of living by allowing her to live with him and using what little income she had to get a better apartment for himself and his wife. If he had to put up with her presence for a while, well, that was a trade he was willing to make. Maybe that’s something he can’t live with now that she’s gone, a contributing factor to his behavior.
A friend of mine from my days as a corporate cog used the term self-respect when we met for lunch in my old neighborhood in Toronto after I’d left my job and had made my way head first into the whirlwind of an existential crisis. She was a wise one. I’m not sure how many years older than me she was, at least ten. She recognized that I was hustling to fit into an organization where I didn’t belong. My inner character didn’t have a lot patience for the surface of things and that place was all about surfaces. She however, managed just fine. She understood the borderlands between her inner life, her real work, and her job. At that point I hadn’t yet sorted all of that out. But when I began the journey, she recognized the emergence of true self-respect in me.
That I’m even asking these questions and tracking my own way through the forest of life proves that my evolution has diverged from my brother’s on a parallel track in which the lines can no longer intersect.
Thank you for your friendship. I know you’d never leave me to the coyotes, nor would I leave you on the desert floor.
Fond regards,
Martina
References & Credit
Links to full text of Joan Didion’s essays:
https://home.ubalt.edu/ntygfit/ai_01_pursuing_fame/ai_01_tell/jd_morality_.htm
https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion
Didion Portrait:
https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002w3wq
Photo attribution: Writer Joan Didion, full length portrait, 1970 Photographer: Kathleen Ballard, August 2, 1970. The Los Angeles Times. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.