The Good/Bad divide

“Good girls write in their journals, bad girls don’t have the time,” my father recently wrote to me in a letter. This got me thinking. I have too much time on my hands. Move over Mother Teresa…

More thinking: December highlights our society’s fixation with good/bad polarities. Whether it’s Santa checking his list—twice, no less!—or New Year’s guilt-ridden resolutions, we (certainly the American We) tend to slip into opposing camps. “Be good,” mommy tells little Johnny, because being bad is bad, meaning asocial and undesired.

I prefer the way the French look at it. Rather than tell children to behave themselves by “being good,” they counsel them to “be wise.” Because good/bad depends on societal and individual taste, being wise means coming to an intelligent conclusion based on personal experience.

The Dutch, schooled in the Calvinist belief that all men are born deprived, however, don’t mince words—we’re all bad and there's nothing anyone can do about it.