UPDATE: 11:45, 3/30/45: Rock briefly addressed the Smith attack during his concert in Boston tonight, but said nothing substantive about it. “Soooo, how was your weekend?”, he began. After the crowd responded with a standing ovation, Rock continued: “Let me be all misty and shit.I don’t have a bunch of shit to say about that, so if you came here for that…I had written a whole show before this weekend. I’m still processing what happened, so at some point I’ll talk about that shit. It’ll be serious. It’ll be funny, but right now I’m going to tell some jokes.”
And he did.
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Incredibly, Chris Rock has managed to stay off the Ethics Train Wreck that he unfairly was the catalyst for. Bravo, Chris. This alone makes him a worthy Ethics Hero. Consider:
- He wisely and coolly resisted the impulse to defend himself physically when Will Smith ambushed him. It doesn’t matter that he’s a much smaller man and Smith had played Muhammad Ali. A couple months ago, Rock mused ruefully about his being bullied as a child, and regretted still letting people “walk all over him.” In the heat of the moment, he could have struck back at Smith, and might have even gained some support by doing so—and it would have wrecked the Oscars more than Smith, the fumbling, cowardly producers and the disgraceful audience in the auditorium wrecked it as it was.
- He refused to file charges. He was well within his rights to do so, but withholding that indignity was a kindness to Smith and the Academy, neither of whom deserved it.
- He has said nothing about the incident at all in public. Good. Literally nothing he said could do anything but make matters worse. Criticizing Smith would allow the media to promote a “feud,” obliterating the real issues. Accepting Smith’s bogus apology would be another example of letting bullies walk all over him: I’d criticize Rock for that, because it would validate Smith’s hypocrisy and attempt at an easy escape from accountability. Rocks brother says Smith has yet to contact Chris personally.
- Chris Rock also wins the first Ethics Alarms “If” award, named for my father’s favorite poem. So far, he has embodied the first verse to the finest detail:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
Ethics Alarms 
Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day inspired by the discussion of “Black Lives Matter” (and Black Lives Matter without quotes, which thrives on the confusion) requires no introduction. Here it is, a comment on “Ethics Quote Of The Week: American Thinker…(With A Flashback And Regrets)”:
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“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet!”
“Deus vult!”
“Workers of the World, Unite!”
“The World Must Be Made Safe for Democracy!”
“Peace, Bread and Land!”
“Asia for the Asians!”
“Make Love, not War!”
“Give Peace a Chance!”
“Black Lives Matter!”
On their faces, all these slogans sound benign and inspirational. Maybe even the intent behind them was good, or at least the true believers thought so. Muhammad was looking to move the Arab world, forward, not back, when he introduced his own brand of monotheism, and I don’t doubt he thought he was creating a framework for a good and honest life when he wrote it all down and proclaimed this the complete record, with nothing more to come. However, there is no doubt he was also using it to cement his own power, and the evil that was later done in his name and that of his early slogan is history.
When Pope Urban shouted “Deus vult!” (God wills it!) on that hill outside Clermont, there is no doubt he thought that he was doing the right thing by rallying the attending nobles and knights to form and army and take back the Holy Land from the Muslims, who had stolen it away from the Byzantines and were not respecting the rights of Christians there. History also tells us what happened after that, and none of it is humanity at its best.
When Karl Marx wrote “Workers of the World, unite!” he probably meant it, but it was clear he hadn’t really thought it through. He himself was no working-class hero, just an expatriated writer and philosopher who avoided bankruptcy more than once because his well-to-do fellow traveler Friedrich Engels bailed him out. In 1848 he published the Communist Manifesto, fuel to the fire of the already smoldering problems that became the Revolutions of 1848, which you can look up. We all know what came later as a result of his crazy and unrealistic ideas.
“The World must be Made Safe for Democracy!” So shouted Woodrow Wilson to Congress as he led this country into a war that he had campaigned months before to keep it out of. I don’t doubt he really meant to do this world some good as a missionary for his rigid, hypocritical morality. I also don’t doubt that America’s contribution to WWI was a net positive for many people in Europe who would have suffered longer or more without it. However, it was also the first of a series of dominoes that led this world into a lot bigger problems later on, and arguably made the world less self for democracy in the long run.
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