the thought counts for nothing
2003-11-26 : 9:54 a.m.

Contrary to what most of us believe, it�s really not the thought that counts.

But let me back up a bit.

I think I did something very wrong yesterday. I did it out of the best of intentions, which of course means nothing once the dust settles.

Several weeks ago, a coworker came to me and disclosed some very serious personal problems. He is an outreach worker on one of our most important grant-funded programs, a program with which I work very closely. And he told me that he thinks he�s a sex addict. That he�s been blowing big wads of cash on young hustlers, and that he can�t stop. He�s engaging in sexual behavior that places him at risk, and enables the very kinds of risk behaviors that we work against in the community. He told me that he wanted to seek therapy, and I encouraged him to do that. I told him that �sex problems� are rarely really about sex; that�s what makes them such perfect illustrations of the general principle that our symptoms are always more fun than our problems. Their very glamour saves us from looking at what we cannot bear. I told him that he was placing himself and the agency in real danger, and that this needed to be addressed.

And I let it lie.

However, as days turned into weeks, that conversation nagged at me. My discomfort grew. Over the weekend, I ran a routine analysis of that outreach team�s numbers, and discovered that the median age of his contacts is far lower than that of the other team members� contacts. Over half of his contacts are under 35, and fully one quarter are under 25. And I had been hearing things about this worker from various people�things that further increased my discomfort.

The age distribution numbers clinched it, though. The thought of news stories about a CDC-funded outreach worker being arrested for solicitation is horrific enough, but the thought of that worker being arrested wearing our agency�s tee-shirt makes my teeth ache. I was already worried about this person, but I am a manager, and as such I have to be concerned for the well-being of the organization as well. And the scenarios in which this person�s behavior could harm the agency were fast multiplying in my head.

So yesterday, after our Management Meeting, I spoke privately with this worker�s manager and our Executive director. I told them about the conversation I�d had with this worker, and shared my long-standing concerns about patterns that I had seen in the data on his contacts. I told them that he had talked about seeking therapy, but that I didn�t know if he�s actually followed through on that. I also said that, on the whole, this person is an exemplary outreach worker who fights HIV in places that most of us wouldn�t even be willing to visit.

The Executive Director said that she needed to have a talk with him, in order to document and/or establish a plan for remediation with therapy in order to be sure that he gets the help he needs, and to protect the agency�s programs from his behavior if he refuses to get avail himself of that help. She suggested that I tell him that I had talked to her about this. Which will not be pleasant, Dear Reader. Not pleasant at all.

That afternoon, I talked to another member of that outreach team about this situation. I trust her, and value her opinion.

And that was when I realized that I�d made a horrible, horrible mistake.

She told me that she and other supervisor on that team had already done an intervention on this worker regarding this behavior. They had required him to enter therapy and seek out Sex Addicts Anonymous. They were documenting his follow-through on both of these. They hadn�t taken it to management because they feel like this worker�s manager because they had gone to him before, and he had seemed incompetent to deal with this situation. The feel that the Executive Director has a subtle agenda to staff that outreach team entirely with African Americans (the worker in question is Hispanic), and they didn�t want to give her an excuse to replace him.

Which is precisely what I had done.

The manager in question told me that he only wants to help this worker, and he assures me that the E.D.�s intentions are the same. Still, I share my friend�s suspicions enough that I wouldn�t have talked to the manager and the E.D. if I had known about my friend�s intervention with this worker. Truth be told, though, I don�t really trust either of them all that much.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I don�t understand how anyone who lives with other human beings can deny the notion of Original Sin, because it�s precisely situations like this that reveal the fundamental moral failure of human beings. It�s not that we don�t mean well; the great insight of the doctrine of Original Sin is precisely that despite our best intentions, we will eventually (maybe usually) fail to do the right thing.

Freud knew this. St. Paul knew it far earlier: �the good that I would do, I do not; indeed, I do the very thing I hate.� I figure that any act is formed of at least three elements: our moral intentions to produce a certain outcome, our (always incomplete) knowledge of what needs to be done to insure that outcome, and the will (or, in some instances, courage) to do those things. And it seems to me that at least one of these elements will always be malformed, or at least incomplete.

The most obvious sort of sin is when the intent, the motives are malformed. Sometimes (though rarely), people act out of an actual conscious intent to do harm. We don�t have a hard time with those cases. We call those people �bad�, and we do our best to limit their power to affect the lives of others. And we would just love to imagine that those are the sinners, the bad people. We would love to imagine that the line between good and evil can be drawn between people, rather than right though every human heart.

The problem is, of course, that we do not know ourselves. This is what Freud taught us: the desiring individual is the last person to fully understand her motives. I usually imagine that I know my own motives, though sometimes they are a mystery to me. The great Freudian insight is that in either case, I may be�and probably am�wrong. We cannot amend our own intentions, because we never fully know them.

The second kind of moral failure we easily recognize is that which occurs when we have good intentions and sufficient knowledge (we want to do the right thing, and we have a clear idea of what the �right thing� would be), but our will is weak or lacking, and so we do nothing. �Cowardice� is one of the things we call this sort of moral failure. �Complacency� is another. We have a little more sympathy with this sort of evil, though, because even the best of us has lost our nerve at least once. We�re all against child abuse, to take an easy example, but when was the last time you made a father stop hitting his small child when you saw the terrible scene unfold in the dairy aisle at the grocery store?

The last common sort of sin occurs when our intentions are good, and our will is strong, but our knowledge is malformed or incomplete. We think we know what�s right to do�and we turn out to be disastrously wrong. This is the one we all deny. We deny it every time we tell ourselves �it�s the thought that counts.� Because in our heart of hearts, we all know full well that it�s the outcome that really matters when we think about the moral quality of an act. In fact, we almost always mean well.

To trot out a threadbare example, one could argue that Hitler really believed that the racial purification of Europe was a compelling moral mandate. In this scenario, his intentions were pure and his will was certainly not lacking. It was his knowledge�what actions were necessary to achieve a moral outcome�that was murderously flawed. He had a really bad idea about the meaning of history and the meaning of Europe, and from that tiny seed grew a garden of horrors that covered a continent.

Or take another case from the Second World War: Neville Chamberlain may truly have believed that �peace in our time� was possible: that Hitler could be appeased and his expansionist impulse contained. Every fact at his disposal may well have pointed to this conclusion. His intent was outstanding: to preserve England in peace and security. His will was sufficient to act on this intent. His downfall was the incompleteness of his knowledge. A better understanding of the situation would perhaps have lead him to Churchill�s conclusion that the time for negotiation was long passed, and the moral statesman could only choose the lesser evil of a war to overthrow Nazi Germany.

One need not resort to Hitler to understand the point, though. Whether your knowledge was incomplete, or your idea was just plain bad�haven�t you been wrong before? Wrong about the right thing to do?

I was wrong about the right thing to do. My intentions were the best, or so I�d like to think. But my knowledge was incomplete. I didn�t know about the intervention that had been done with this worker. I didn�t know about the E.D.�s possible ulterior motives. I just didn�t know. If I had asked, I would have known, but one rarely knows that one doesn�t know. I thought I saw the big picture.

I still don�t know how this particular situation will shake out. I can only pray that the damage will be minimal. What I will never forget, however, is that the moral high ground I like to posture on is nothing more than a sand-heap of my good intentions. Any plan founded on my good intentions is a house built on sinking sand.

And I pray that I will never forget that a righteous life is build not on my own prissy ethical self-image, but on humility, listening, prayer, and an openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That may sound like dragging out the theological �big guns� for relatively small problems, but without the whispering breath of the One who is nearer to me than I am to myself, the smallest action can unfold in disastrous consequences. God alone is righteous, and all my high-toned moral posturing can earn me nothing but trouble and sorrow.

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