Many years ago, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a piece for Forverts, complaining about the replacement of moral black and white with shades of grey.* Just as grey is a blend of black and white, so modern judgment is ambivalent, often self-contradictory, quite often consisting of opposing terms of praise and blame linked by the conjunction “but.” He is a thief but kind to his mother. Singer regrets this development, preferring the clarity of unqualified judgments. He laments the relegation of the terms tsadik (righteous) and roshe (wicked) to “the archive, where old words lie and rot, dead and forgotten.”

Singer’s impatience slips into something bordering on cantankerous, almost personal, grievance, a tone that I remember well from Richard Nixon’s constant attempts to excuse his egregious behavior.

First people praise someone to the skies, and then they sling mud at them. Very often this is done together by the same writer using the same pen.

Words no longer count for anything.

Powerful people claiming that they can’t get a fair hearing usually strike this discrediting false note.

Writing in Yiddish, and addressing his thoughts to a socially conservative readership with little experience of and less patience with the complex psychological revelations of Freudian analysis, Singer represented an aspect of North American life that was passing from this world as its membership aged. But there is also another foundation of his complaint that all of us must accommodate or reject: the erosion of personal privacy.

Singer was old enough to have grown up in a world where private life was far more effectively screened from common view than it would become in his later days. A polite convention of discretion masked the “warts and all” assessments to which journalists today are so addicted that, in cases where the whole truth would make for unpalatable reading and cannot even be hinted at, they will exaggerate a few minor faults for the sake of verisimilitude. In the old days, Singer suggests, men were judged for their public behavior, which alone was visible or of decent interest.

The invisible side of life usually involved persons of the opposite sex. Singer’s examples of righteous behavior are what we might call civic, actions beneficial to his fellows, rather than personal, concerning the family. It is more than conceivable that in Singer’s system, a tzadik might well be a trusted servant of the community and an unloving husband (or worse). Not a problem, because “When you called someone a tzadik, you could not add a ‘but’.” In practice, this led to the erasure of misconduct with women. And women, not so incidentally, were not candidates for tsadik awards; they had no proper voice or role in the conduct of public affairs.

That has changed.

Public service has always been felt to be a calling with a strong moral dimension, which is why we are so uncomfortable with the success of Machiavellian schemes, and cannot help disapproving of cynical statesmen like Bismarck. There would probably be no call for the word “righteous” if this were not so. Our problem today is with the man of righteous public service whose private conduct is not so admirable but, on the contrary, “all too human.” Or rather, perhaps, our problem is that we insist upon evaluating the whole man, even though it often seems contrary to public interest to do so.

Consider the very interesting case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was both lame and “unfaithful.” Both of these aspects of his life were well known to insiders, albeit a much smaller circle of insiders in the case of Lucy Rutherfurd. In retrospect, it is difficult not to be grateful that neither his disability nor his infidelity — particularly the former — was held against him to the extent of preventing his election to the presidency. Knowledgeable insiders kept mum, and one can’t help believing that those voters who must have suspected that there was something wrong with Roosevelt’s walking seem to have behaved as if they didn’t want to know more. What they wanted to believe was that he was as healthy and capable in every way as he was in the White House. It ought to be remembered that many wealthy voters who were both bitterly opposed to Roosevelt’s policies and sufficiently close to the ruling élite to know about his affliction did not use this information to campaign against him.

What if, instead of the long affair with Rutherfurd, Roosevelt had been given to intimate picnics with  pre-teen girls? In that case, I’m pretty sure, Democrat Party support for his political career would have been negligible. There appears to be a sliding scale on our tolerance for wayward behavior.

The appeal of hailing men of accomplishment with clarions and trophies is immense, and Singer’s essays reminds us of its sometimes simplistic (or simplifying) satisfactions. Meanwhile, we must consider the likelihood that, in a world that grants indisputable human rights to women as well as to men, a righteous man is hard to find.

*An excerpt, translated by David Stromberg, appears in the Readings section of the May 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine.