Off the Bookshelf: "Lives We Carry With Us" by Robert Coles

I have always admired Dr. Robert Coles.  His work first became well-known in the 1960's when he profiled a young woman named Ruby Bridges, a young African-American girl who was part of the first wave of school desegregation, and whose psychological strength in the face of hatred and terror became a classic case study in childhood resilience.  As a longtime professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, the central focus of Coles' work is moral reasoning, especially in children.  Indeed, I read his Moral Life of Children and The Moral Intelligence of Children when I was in graduate school, and this led me to pick up his most recent work, Lives We Carry With Us: Profiles of Moral Courage (New Press, 2010, 210 pp.)

In Lives, Coles profiles a series of individuals whose "moral voices" he has internalized, either through his personal contact with them, his experience with their writing, and/or his admiration of their lives' work.  Each "life" is a separate chapter, and he illustrates a cast of characters as diverse as Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, and Dorothy Day, to artists like James Agee, Bruce Springsteen, and Flannery O'Connor, to moral giants like Dietrich Bonhoffer and Simone Weil.  His final chapter highlights his most enduring character: the six-year-old Ruby Bridges.  About this little girl who endured "murderously heckling mobs," he writes:
 
A well-developed conscience does not translate, necessarily into a morally courageous life.  Nor do  well-developed powers of philosophical thinking and moral analysis necessarily translate into an everyday willingness to face down the various evils of this world.  I was once helped in this effort at clarification by a  black woman (Ruby Bridges' mother) whom I suppose I'd have to call illiterate.  She pointed out that "there's a lot of people who talk about doing good, and a lot of people who argue about what's good and what's not good."  Then she added that "there are a lot of people who always worry about whether they're doing right or wrong."  Finally, there are some other folks: "They just put their lives on the line for what's right, and they may not be the ones who talk a lot or argue a lot or worry a lot; they just do a lot."