In college I knew a guy named Bill.
Bill saw himself as a values-driven person. Certain virtues mattered a lot to him and he put a lot of effort into living up to his own high standards. He was morally serious, emotionally sensitive, altruistic, literary and pensive. He was anti-racist, anti-sexist, and generally anti-bigot. He was an uncompromising idealist. Everyone knew this about him.
The problem with Bill, though, was that it wasn’t enough for him to live up to his own standards. He wanted to experience his virtues and himself as virtuous; and for that he needed moral foils. People who were morally frivolous, amoral or even vicious made his own morality stand out in relief. It gave his virtues something to do — something to resist or oppose or silently endure and resent. The slight shittiness of slightly shitty people helped Bill experience who he really wanted to be.
Whether he was aware of it or not, he seemed to enlist whoever happened to be around him in his personal moral dramas. In his presence, I could always feel some scene he was acting out, and the role I was cast to perform. And it was rarely a flattering character. I felt pushed and pulled and twisted and pressured into a character only tangentially connected to myself, and I often felt torn between going along with Bill’s game which required some degree of self-betrayal or swimming upstream against the social current Bill was establishing and creating unpleasant and exhausting tension.
I now recognize that Bill was a man from the future.
His ideals perfectly match those of many educated young people today. They match the ideals of many educated old people who prize youth and try to stay youthful by imitating the young. But back then it was much less common, and acceptance was not nearly as automatic as now. Back then it took some vision and courage, and willingness to be scorned by cool people. I believe Bill deserves some credit for being far ahead of trend.
Today, whenever I’m enlisted as a moral foil, which is every day — when I feel myself being someone else’s capitalist, or white guy, or old man, or dirty Zionist, or milquetoast liberal, or suspected closeted conservative, or whatever they’re after — I think about Bill and his virtuousness.