Taking Sides: A Memoir in Stories

by Philip Green

From the I am a political philosopher by trade, but looking back, I find in my past a series of takings of positions that grew only retrospectively into something that might charitably be called a coherent political philosophy. Those positions, taken singly or collectively, do seem to grow from a common origin that I will call the logic of a sensibility, and I suggest that in reality this is a common experience. In thinking about this memoir, for example, I seem to have found the earliest trace of that sensibility in the recollected experience of witnessing, as an eight-year-old, the death by shotgun of a rabbit, at the hands of a family friend with whom we were, I thought, out for a walk that turned into, quite casually but unexpectedly, a hunt. Some years ago I came across a collection of essays by young philanthropists trying to define the experience that changed them from sons and daughters of privilege into persons who couldn’t wait to find someone to whom they could give away their—as they saw it—undeserved wealth. I remember only one of them, by a young woman who as a girl was being driven through Louisville on her way to somewhere else, and was shocked by the conditions in the black neighborhoods they somehow were traversing; she asked her mother, “why do these people live like this?,” and her mother replied, “because they are poor.” “Why are they poor?,” she asked, and her mother tried vainly to explain. Just like that, her old life she discovered her limit of the acceptable.

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Published January 1, 2015