I’m not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.
And what, exactly is Sanford’s humanity? He cheated on his wife and got caught, then went on the lam to Argentina? What part of that is the human part? Cheating or ducking out?
Sanford acted with extreme selfishness, and that is the action we label ‘human’? If a person is uncharacteristically generous, do we remark on the behavior as an example of ‘humanity’?
Is behavior at the margins of the spectrum that which we call ‘humanity’ as a way of excusing it? Are we supposed to say, “There but for the grace of God go I?”
I can’t. I might say that if I saw someone on whom has fallen an unforseen and unavoidable calamity, but I don’t say that for people who engage in pointless and self-centered actions and are found out.