Trails of Thought, II: Law and Lenience
A series of occasional bite-sized musings on the history of the American West.
In the still-evolving picture of the average Westerner's mindset and values I've slowly formed over the years, I've noticed that if the West had one peculiar moral flaw or idiosyncrasy, it was...not precisely lawlessness, as in deliberately flouting all law or restraint, but a tendency to draw an arbitrary distinction between "good vs. bad" and "lawful vs. unlawful" which sometimes led to a curious lenience toward certain types of law-breaking. Often you might find a Westerner characterizing somebody as friendly, brave, kind, a good sort of fellow, but oh dear, he has that inconvenient habit of stealing horses or shooting at people! Westerners seemed inclined to overlook or minimize a little law-breaking—so long as it didn't involve cruelty or taking advantage of a weaker or helpless person—if the lawbreaker fit their definition of "a good man" in possessing some of their most highly valued personal qualities: e.g. physical courage, straightforwardness, determination, loyalty to friends, etc. I remember being struck by this attitude when reading Charles Siringo's A Cowboy Detective, in which Siringo so often casually noted becoming fast friends with men he was assigned to track down and help convict (usually for robbery of some type) or quite unselfconsciously described one of them as a splendid chap or words to that effect.
I suppose the positive flip side of this failing might be giving short shrift to the man who was technically lawful, but personally corrupt; the supposedly upstanding citizen who is only one outwardly, but is essentially cruel and cowardly or takes advantage of others by legal means. I sense that the type of average Westerner I've described would have very little patience with such a one. Well, that's good. But I can't help thinking (broadening scope a little here) that the hypocrite type of antagonist has been overdone in fiction generally, or rather consistently mishandled—his wrongdoing persistently blamed on religion or respectability itself, instead of a recognition that his real perfidy lies in wearing the externals of those things as a false veneer.
Getting back on track...this Western moral paradox of "good" versus "lawful" is the one thing I've found most puzzling whenever I encounter it. But as I think it out, I begin to see dimly where it might come from. Independence of character, and especially independence of thought, has always been a distinctive element of American and particularly American Western values; and as John Truby points out in The Anatomy of Story, a good way for a writer to create a character flaw is to envision how a strength carried too far can become a weakness, or a positive trait have a negative flip side. Perhaps the Westerner's independence of character—extremely valuable in its place—sometimes tended toward a belief in his own ability to decide right and wrong based on situation rather than standard.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, whose fiction displays the moral paradox as much as any of his contemporaries and perhaps more so, took this discussion head-on in a telling campfire conversation from his short story "An Executive Mind":
"And who's to be the judge of whether it's a good law or not? You?" "Me. Me, every time. Someone must. If I let some other man make up my mind I've got to use my judgment—picking the man I follow. By organizing myself into a Permanent Committee of One to do my own thinking I take my one chance of mistakes instead of two." "So you believe in doing evil that good may come, do you? "Well," said Jeff judicially, "it seems to be at least as good a proposition as doing good that evil may come of it...there isn't one thing we call wrong, when other men do it, that hasn't been lawful, some time or other. When to break a law is to do a wrong, it's evil. When it's doing right to break a law, it's not evil. Got that? It's not wrong to keep a just law—and if it's wrong to break an unjust law I want a new dictionary with pictures of it in the back."
That's both the strength and the weakness right there. Enough strength and independence of mind to seek for the difference between justice and injustice, but too much independence in believing fallible human nature is capable of deciding what's right without an objective standard. (So many earnest stories muddle onto the rocks here, having characters agonizing over whether they're doing right or wrong, but leaving them adrift without an objective standard to measure their conduct by!) To judge a fallible human law you need the infallible measuring-stick of God's law—by the campfire, as well as on the city street.
image: "Tall in the Saddle" by W.H.D. Koerner
Previously: A Good Man