Put Something Back
A Crisis Dispatch
On September 2, 2010, at 11:08 PM, Steve Jobs picked up his iPad and wrote himself an email. He sent it from his own address to his own address. The signature line read Sent from my iPad, the device his company had launched five months before. He was eleven months from his death. He almost certainly knew, or suspected, that he did not have much time left. And he wrote himself a list.
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing.
I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
The Steve Jobs Archive has placed this email at the center of a memorial site called Put Something Back. The framing line above the email is Steve’s driving motivation. The framing line below is Steve had been turning to a set of core ideas for decades. The site reads as a quiet act of documentation. Here is who he understood himself to be, when he was alone with himself at night.
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The email is one of the most extraordinary documents I know. Not because of who wrote it. Because of what it does.
Jobs is one of the paradigmatic creators of our era in the popular telling — the founder, the visionary, the man who made things. The Apple mythology, which he himself helped construct, lives inside the great man frame. The genius. The maker. The one who reached down into the future and pulled the present forward by force of will.
And he sat with his iPad in his hands one night and wrote a list of everything he had received. Not made. Not invented. Not earned by his own hand. Received.
The food he did not grow. The seeds he did not breed. The clothes he did not stitch. The language he did not invent. The mathematics he did not discover. The freedoms and laws he did not conceive. The music that moved him, written by people he had never met. The medicine that kept him alive longer than his body would have managed alone. The transistor. The microprocessor. Object-oriented programming. Most of the technology I work with, written by the man who made the iPhone.
This is precision, not humility. The iPhone is not the transistor. The transistor was Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, in 1947, working at Bell Labs on problems he had nothing to do with. Object-oriented programming was Alan Kay and Dahl and Nygaard, working in the 1960s and 70s on conceptual frames he inherited rather than originated. Apple synthesized. Apple selected. Apple insisted on standards. Apple had taste. None of which is the same thing as inventing what Apple used. Jobs knew this. He wanted to make sure he would never forget.
The closing sentence is the gravity of the document. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
The living and dead is doing the work. He is not just naming his contemporary dependencies. He is naming the accumulated deposit. Everyone who ever bred a seed. Everyone who ever refined a language. Everyone who ever discovered a mathematical relation. Everyone who ever wrote a law, composed a melody, developed a medical technique, sketched a circuit diagram. The deposit is the species, living and dead, holding him up with his iPad in his hands at 11:08 PM in Cupertino in 2010.
He did not pray. He did not write a religious document. He emailed a list to himself. But what he was doing is the most ancient form of human address: I acknowledge what holds me up. That is the Te Deum. That is the Pokrov. That is what every prayer of thanksgiving has ever attempted to say. He found the secular version. He sent it to himself so he would not forget.
I have been thinking about this email all day, because some of the response to it from people I respect has been dismissive. Steve Jobs was not a saint. Of course he was not. He could be cruel. He cheated his early co-founder out of a bonus. He denied the paternity of his daughter for years. He treated employees harshly, sometimes humiliatingly. He held grudges. He could be petty in ways that would have been ordinary in a less powerful man and were grotesque in him because of his power. He delayed cancer treatment that might have saved his life because of what looks, from the outside, like magical thinking. The mistakes were real. The blindspots were real. The people he hurt were real, and some of them carried the wounds for decades.
And he sat with his iPad in his hands at 11:08 PM eleven months before he died and wrote himself a list of everyone he depended on. Living and dead.
The dismissive move says: because of who he was, the document doesn’t count. The puritanical move says: because he was not always good, his goodness now is suspect. The cynical move says: this is hagiography in service of corporate myth-making.
I want to refuse all three.
The dismissive move is wrong because the document does count. A man at the height of his power, terminally ill, sat down at night and wrote himself a list of his dependencies. He did not have to. No one was watching. The document was meant for himself. It is the cleanest possible evidence of what he understood himself to actually be, when he was alone with the question. He understood himself to be a recipient. He understood himself to be held up by the species, living and dead. He understood himself to be totally dependent. Not partially. Totally.
That is not the self-understanding of a man congratulating himself for his greatness. That is the self-understanding of a man who has been studying his own dependence for decades and wants to make sure he remembers it as he approaches his end.
The puritanical move is wrong because it treats moral life as a static accounting, when moral life is actually a record of what we become. The version of Steve Jobs who wrote that email at fifty-five was not the version of Steve Jobs who denied his daughter’s paternity at twenty-three. He had walked some distance between those two men. The walk had been imperfect. The walk had been, in places, ugly. But the walk was real, and the document of his arrival is what it is regardless of how he started. I love and admire my species, living and dead is a sentence written by someone who has done the work of becoming a person who can write that sentence honestly. He could not have written it at twenty-three. He could write it at fifty-five. The difference is the work. The puritan refuses to recognize the work.
The cynical move is wrong because the document is private. It was never published in his lifetime. It was sent to himself. It was found and made public after his death by people who thought it captured something true about him. The Steve Jobs Archive’s memorial around it is a small act of bearing witness. Here is what he wrote to himself when he was alone. Here is what he wanted to remember. We thought you should see it.
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The reason this email matters, beyond its specific occasion, is that it names the substrate of every actual life. Everything you have, you got from someone else. The food. The language. The mathematics. The freedoms. The music. The medicine. The technology. Every single thing that makes your life possible was deposited into the present moment by people you will never meet. The species, living and dead, holds you up. Right now. As you read this.
You did not make the alphabet you are reading these words in. You did not develop the screen you are reading them on. You did not invent the protocols by which the bytes traveled from my keyboard to your eye. You did not discover the principles of optics that allow your retina to focus the photons or the principles of neuroscience that explain why the photons become words. You did not write the language. You did not establish the political conditions under which a writer like me can publish words critical of power without being arrested. You did not breed the cotton in the shirt you are wearing. You did not refine the steel in the structure of the building you are sitting in. You did not produce any of this.
You are receiving it. Right now. From a species, living and dead, that holds you up.
And the appropriate response is the one Jobs found at his desk at 11:08 PM. Love and admire. Not for your contemporaries’ approval. Not for the corporate brand. Not for the great man’s legacy. For the species itself. The whole long arc of it. The seed-breeders and the law-writers and the music-makers and the surgeons and the nurses and the engineers and the parents and the teachers and the strangers who built what you are using to live. Love and admire them. Be totally dependent on them. Acknowledge it. Put something back.
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I have been watching, this week, an American political moment unfold around a man named Graham Platner. He is a former Marine, an oyster farmer, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate from Maine. He is also a man who, in his early twenties, on a drunken night in Split, Croatia, walked into a tattoo parlor with his fellow Marines and chose a skull and crossbones from the wall because Marines like skulls and crossbones. He had it inked on his chest. He moved on with his life.
Twenty years later, that tattoo was identified, by people who study such things, as resembling a Totenkopf — the death’s head insignia of the SS. Platner says he did not know. The chronology supports him; it is, frankly, what an undisciplined drunk twentysomething Marine on liberty would do without knowing. He has covered the tattoo. He has apologized. He has owned the mistake. He has also apologized for old Reddit posts written, by his own account, during a difficult period of post-traumatic stress after his deployments — posts that were ugly about police, about rural Americans, about sexual assault. He has not defended them. He has said they represent me not knowing what I am talking about. He has said: if it wasn’t for that entire journey, I would not be who I am today, and I’m incredibly proud of who I am today.
This is the structure of moral growth in real time. A person did something wrong. The wrong has been identified. The person has acknowledged the wrong. The person has apologized. The person has changed. The person has named, in public, that the journey out of the wrong is constitutive of who they have become. They are now running for federal office on a platform that includes substantive criticism of private equity, of corporate consolidation, of the political capture of working people’s lives. The candidacy is consequential.
And there is a chorus saying: disqualifying. There is a Massachusetts congressman, Jake Auchincloss, calling the tattoo and Platner’s account of it personally disqualifying. There are operatives in both parties using the past as a club. There is the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which would never under any circumstances care about a Nazi-adjacent tattoo if the man wearing it had an R after his name, suddenly and ostentatiously caring. There is an apparatus that has discovered, in Platner’s youthful idiocy, the perfect implement for foreclosing the danger he represents to private power.
The puritan move is the implement. He should never have been wrong in the first place. The cynic’s move is the deployment. We will use his having been wrong to ensure he never gets the chance to be right.
These are not separate operations. They are one operation. The puritan supplies the moral cover. The cynic supplies the political objective. Together they ensure that no one who has ever been wrong about anything important can ever participate fully in public life — which is, conveniently, almost everyone, but selectively applied so that it is in practice only the people whose political effectiveness threatens existing power.
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The puritan move is structurally a defense of inheritance over conversion.
If only people who have always held the correct views are morally qualified to participate in public life, then the only people who qualify are people who happened to be inducted into the correct views early — by family, by class, by the accident of which subculture they landed in. The convert — the person who held the wrong view and saw through it — is permanently disqualified by their having held the wrong view at all. The test of righteousness becomes the luck of one’s birth into the right tribe.
This is not moral seriousness. This is positional sorting dressed in moral seriousness. It rewards inheritance and punishes conversion. It treats the moral life as a static photograph rather than as a journey. It makes growth itself impossible, because growth requires having grown from somewhere, and the puritan refuses to acknowledge that there was anywhere legitimate to grow from.
The whole architecture of moral and religious tradition that created our civilization is the architecture of conversion. Metanoia — the change of mind. Paul was killing Christians and then he wasn’t. Augustine was a Manichaean and then he wasn’t. The Confessions exist because Augustine thought it was important to record what he had been before, in order to make legible the work of becoming what he became. The puritan would say: you should never have stolen the pears in the first place, which is true and trivial, and which, taken seriously, would mean we could never have the Confessions, never have the convert, never have the testimony that the wrong view is escapable from the inside.
The convert is the proof of concept. The convert is the evidence that the wrong view can be left behind. The convert is therefore precisely the person the wrong view’s current adherents most need to encounter, because the convert is the empirical demonstration that getting out is possible. To attack the convert is to remove the proof of concept from public view. To say you should never have been wrong is to ensure no one ever publicly testifies to having gotten out of being wrong.
This is what the apparatus actually wants. Not moral standards. The foreclosure of testimony.
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We should be clear about what the puritan is actually doing, because the structural argument is incomplete without naming the motive.
The puritan is taking social power they have not earned.
This is the part that has to be said plainly. The demand that someone prostrate themselves in shame for their past failings, the dismissal of their visible moral growth as insufficient, the insistence that the past is the only legitimate ground on which to evaluate them — this is not, whatever it tells itself it is, a moral practice. It is a power transaction. The puritan is converting other people’s failures, real or imagined, into authority for themselves.
The authority is the thing they are after. They have not earned it through any of the means by which authority is normally earned — by building anything, contributing anything, creating anything, growing anything, risking anything in their own person. They have not done the work that produces authority. They have not converted from any wrong view, because they have not held one publicly enough to convert from. They have not built the platform from which the convert speaks. They have not made the contribution that gives the contributor the standing to be heard. They have, in many cases, simply been correctly opinioned throughout their lives, in the lucky way that comes of having been raised inside the right subcultures or having credentialed themselves into the right institutions. Their virtue is an accident of placement.
And they want, badly, to convert this accident into authority. The mechanism they have found is the public judgment of others. By appointing themselves the arbiters of who has done sufficient penance for past wrongs, they extract a kind of social position they could not extract any other way. They become the ones who decide who is acceptable. They become the ones whose approval matters. They become the gatekeepers of legitimacy without ever having had to legitimate themselves.
This is, in a phrase, moral cosplay as power-grab. The performance of rigor as a substitute for the work of actually doing anything. The simulation of seriousness as a substitute for ever having been on the line for anything. They have not built. They have not led. They have not converted. They have not testified. They have not put anything back. But they have, very loudly, judged the people who have, and through that judgment they have positioned themselves as the ones to whom those people must answer.
This is the operation. It is ugly and it is small. It deserves to be named for what it is.
The convert does not need the puritan’s permission to participate in public life. The builder does not need the puritan’s certification of their growth. The person who has done the work owes the puritan nothing — not because the work has made them invulnerable to criticism, but because the puritan is not, in fact, the one to whom the criticism is owed. The criticism is owed, if it is owed at all, to the people actually wronged, to the actual moral community whose standards have been violated, and to the long record of human moral seriousness that includes the witness of every convert who ever testified. None of these constituencies are the puritan. The puritan has appointed themselves to speak for them, but the appointment is self-issued and the credentials are forged.
The convert can address the actual wronged parties directly. The convert can answer to the actual moral community on its actual terms. The convert can stand in the lineage of testimony and add to it. None of this requires the puritan’s mediation. The puritan is a third party who has inserted themselves into the transaction in order to extract authority from it. They can be removed.
This is, by the way, exactly the structure of indulgence-selling that the Reformation rose against. The medieval Church had appointed itself the broker of forgiveness, the third party between the sinner and God, the institution to whom payment was owed in order for the moral transaction to be completed. Luther’s whole point was that this brokerage was not part of the actual moral structure of the universe. It was a power arrangement that had inserted itself into the moral structure and was extracting rent. The sinner could address God directly. The mediator was unnecessary, and worse than unnecessary — the mediator was taking authority that did not belong to them, dressing up rent-extraction as religious service, and making themselves indispensable to a transaction that did not, in fact, require them.
The puritan is the secular indulgence-seller. They have inserted themselves between the convert and the moral community, between the grower and the standard they grew toward, between the person who did the work and the public to whom the work was offered. They are extracting authority from the gap they themselves manufactured. The Reformation move is the right move. You do not need them. The transaction was never theirs to broker.
This is what we owe nothing to the puritan actually means. We owe the species, living and dead. We owe the moral community whose standards we have violated when we have violated them. We owe the people we have hurt. We owe the long record of correction and the witnesses who carried it forward. We do not owe the people who have appointed themselves the brokers of these debts. They are not creditors. They are rent-seekers in moral drag.
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Thomas Jefferson, writing to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, ten years before his death, with the contradiction of his own life unresolved:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Jefferson knew. He owned people. He had children with a woman he owned. He could not, in his own person, escape the institution he had inherited and benefited from and rationalized. He wrote against slavery in his earlier life and he never freed his slaves in his lifetime. The contradiction was the substance of him. He could not get out of it. He died inside it.
And he wrote, in 1816, that the institutions of the barbarous ancestors must not bind their descendants. He wrote it knowing he himself was the barbarous ancestor he was naming. He invited his posterity’s judgment. He authorized us — us, the descendants — to leave him behind. The coat that fitted the boy will not fit the man. The regimen of the barbarous ancestor must be passed through and grown past. This is the man who could not free the people he owned, telling his descendants that they must.
This is the convert speaking from inside the conversion he himself could not complete. It is the most honest possible moral position. Not the figure who has finished the work — Jefferson had not finished it, could not finish it, knew he could not finish it — but the figure who names the work as the obligation of those who come after him, and who insists that being unable to complete it in his own person does not authorize his descendants to abandon it. He hands it forward. He authorizes the leaving-behind. He builds, into the document of his own civilization, the requirement that he himself be surpassed.
The modern puritan reads this and says: he should not have owned slaves. Which is true and trivial. The harder and truer thing is what Jefferson said himself: institutions must advance. The coat will not fit. The boy’s frame will not hold the adult. The barbarous ancestor must be passed through, by descendants who will themselves be barbarous ancestors to their own descendants, and who must — like Jefferson — write the documents that authorize their own being-left-behind.
This is the moral structure of an actually-living tradition. The tradition is the long handing-forward of the work, by people who could not finish it and who knew they could not finish it, to people who must continue it and who will themselves not finish it. The work is generational. The work is unfinished by design. The work is the whole point. The puritan wants a static photograph and the tradition is a relay.
Jefferson is the witness against the puritan from inside the puritan’s strongest case. The man the puritan reaches for first as the example of why we cannot honor the founders is the same man who wrote the most explicit invitation in the American canon to grow past him. He is what the puritan claims to be: someone who has identified the wrong. And he is doing what the puritan refuses to do — naming the wrong as the work of generations, claiming his own implication in it, and authorizing his descendants to continue the work past him.
He is, in the precise and ancient sense, putting something back. He could not free his slaves. He freed his grandchildren to despise him for not freeing his slaves, and to act on the conviction he could not act on himself. That is the deposit. That is what he put back. The puritan, by contrast, refuses the gift. The puritan says: because Jefferson could not get out, nothing he said from inside counts. Which would mean — and the puritan does mean this, whether they know it or not — that the conversion he authorized cannot proceed under his authority, that his descendants are on their own, that the moral inheritance must be refused along with the moral failure.
This is the operation in its most consequential form. The unfairness to Jefferson is the smallest part of it. The larger part is the severing of the rope by which the present moment was hauled out of the past. The convert who could not complete his own conversion is the figure who holds the rope for everyone coming behind. Cut the rope and the climb gets harder, not easier, for everyone still climbing.
We owe Jefferson. Not for the slavery. For the sentence about the coat. For the document that authorizes us to leave him behind. For the moral seriousness of a man who could not save himself and refused to use his inability to bind his descendants to his failure. We owe him the same thing he asked us for: we must grow past him. We must become what he could not be. And we must write, in our own turn, the documents that authorize our descendants to grow past us, into a moral seriousness we cannot yet imagine and will not live to see.
The puritan cannot do this. The puritan has not located themselves inside the long handing-forward. The puritan stands outside it, judging, refusing to be implicated in the work because being implicated means admitting that they themselves will be the barbarous ancestor of someone, that their own moral certainties will look from the future like Jefferson’s looked from his — partial, compromised, embedded in conditions they could not see past. The puritan refuses this position because the position is humiliating to anyone who has built their identity on present-moment correctness. The convert accepts the position. The convert is the position. The convert is the person who has located themselves inside the long handing-forward and is doing their portion of the work.
Jefferson, owning slaves, writing the sentence about the coat, is more morally serious than the modern puritan who has never had to do anything difficult and has never had to admit anything embarrassing and has never had to grow from anywhere. The contradiction Jefferson lived inside is the substance of moral seriousness. The puritan’s seamless rectitude is the absence of it.
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The Steve Jobs email and the Graham Platner candidacy are not the same kind of thing, but they are subject to the same operation. In both cases, a person did something good — wrote a true sentence, ran for office on a populist economic platform — and the response from a particular kind of voice is to reach back into the person’s past and find evidence that they were once worse than they are now. The function of the reaching-back is not to evaluate moral progress. The function is to refuse to recognize moral progress as a category at all.
He was not always good. No one was ever always good. He hurt people. Everyone has hurt people. He believed wrong things. Everyone has believed wrong things. The interesting question is never was this person ever wrong. The interesting question is what did this person become, and how did they become it, and what are they doing now.
By the standard of was this person ever wrong, no human being qualifies for public participation. The only candidates are people who have done so little that they have never had occasion to be wrong in public, which is to say, people whose lives have not been consequential enough to leave a record. The standard selects against consequence. It selects for the kind of polished biographical thinness that is produced only by people who have been groomed for public life from a young age inside subcultures that taught them never to deviate from the approved opinions. It selects, in other words, for the inheritor over the convert. For the dynastic over the self-made. For the person whose moral views are an inheritance rather than an achievement.
This is why the apparatus loves the puritan move. The apparatus is, almost by definition, populated by inheritors. The convert is dangerous because the convert can speak to the people still inside the wrong view in a register the inheritor cannot reach. The oyster farmer who got a stupid drunk tattoo at twenty-two and now wants to break up the private equity firms eating his town is exactly the kind of person whose testimony the apparatus has the most reason to fear. He can talk to the people the inheritor cannot. He has been one of them. He knows what their lives are like. He is therefore the candidate the apparatus must, at all costs, neutralize before he reaches the people who need to hear him.
Platner’s tattoo is a gift to power. Power did not cause the tattoo. Platner caused the tattoo, in his own youthful stupidity. But power has been waiting for a tattoo of this kind, on a person of this kind, for years. Now it has one. And the puritan voices — including some inside the Democratic coalition — are doing power’s work for it, because the puritan voices cannot tell the difference between taking moral seriousness and enforcing positional sorting. They believe, sincerely, that they are doing the first. They are, materially, doing the second.
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What Steve Jobs wrote himself at 11:08 PM on September 2, 2010 is a document that names the only ground on which the puritan move can be refused.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
If you take this seriously, you cannot hold any human being to a standard that requires them to have never been wrong. Because the species, living and dead, is full of people who were wrong and who learned. The species is a record of corrections. The seeds were not always perfect. The mathematics was not always understood. The medicine was wrong about more than it was right about for most of human history. The freedoms and laws were extended over centuries by people who had previously been content with their absence. The music we love was written by people who said and did things in their lives that would not pass any modern moral test, including some that would not pass any reasonable moral test.
To love and admire the species, living and dead, is to love and admire the long record of correction itself. It is to recognize that the present moment’s moral seriousness was won by the labor of people who had to grow into it from places that were less morally serious. It is to recognize that you yourself are, right now, holding views that your descendants will look back on as morally inadequate, and that the right response to this is not to pretend you are not, but to keep doing the work of correction so that your descendants have less to correct.
The puritan move pretends that this is not the structure of moral life. The puritan move pretends that the present moment’s correct views were always available, and that therefore everyone who held wrong views was simply morally defective rather than situated in a particular time and place where the correct views had not yet become available or had not yet become available to them. This is historically false and it is also psychologically punitive. It is the move of people who have never had to correct anything significant about themselves, projecting their accidental rectitude as a moral achievement and demanding that everyone else have managed the same accident.
The convert, the man who got the tattoo and learned what it was, the man who wrote the Reddit posts in PTSD darkness and wrote his way out of them, the technologist who hurt people in his twenties and wrote himself a list of his dependencies in his fifties — these are the figures who carry the actual moral weight of a society. Not because they were always good. Because they did the work. Because they are the proof that the work is possible.
We should be holding them up. We should be saying: look, the work can be done. Look, here are people who did it. Look, you can do it too.
We should be putting something back.
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The Steve Jobs Archive’s memorial site is called Put Something Back. The phrase comes from Jobs’s own account of why he worked at all: that he had received so much from the species, living and dead, that he felt obliged to put something back into it before he was done. The work was not the point. The work was the return. He understood himself to owe the deposit, and he understood his life as the long attempt to return some portion of what he had received.
This is a Christian frame in everything but vocabulary. Freely you have received; freely give. This is a Jewish frame, which Christianity inherited. The world stands on three things: on Torah, on worship, and on acts of loving-kindness. This is a Buddhist frame, which the dharma names directly. Indebted to all sentient beings. This is the frame that every wisdom tradition with any depth has converged on. You were given more than you can ever return. The proper response is to spend your life trying to return some of it anyway.
It is, structurally, the frame of every tradition that takes seriously the fact that human beings are not self-creating. Which is all of them. The traditions that pretend otherwise are not traditions. They are routing structures wearing tradition’s clothes.
The American tradition is supposed to be one of these. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The truths are held, not invented. They are self-evident, meaning visible to anyone who will look. They are endowed, meaning given. The Creator is the deposit. The unalienable rights are the deposit’s structure. The whole American constitutional sentence is an assertion that human beings receive the structure of their dignity from a source they did not author.
This is the substrate. This is the species, living and dead. This is what Jobs sat at his desk at 11:08 PM and named in his own vocabulary. This is what every honest tradition has named in its own.
To refuse this frame in favor of the puritan move — you should have been better earlier — is to refuse the substrate itself. It is to insist that moral standing is positional rather than received and acted on. It is to make the moral life a closed system rather than an open one. It is to foreclose conversion, growth, repair, return. It is to assert that the only people who matter are the ones who never had to learn anything, which is a lie about both human nature and the history of every moral tradition we have.
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I want to say something to the people who are dismissive of the Jobs email, and to the people who are calling Platner disqualified.
You are not being morally serious. You are being positionally certain. There is a difference. Moral seriousness asks what is this person doing now, and what have they become. Positional certainty asks did this person ever fail to be where I am. These produce wildly different judgments and wildly different politics. The first is a politics of growth, repair, return. The second is a politics of inheritance, exclusion, and the foreclosure of testimony.
The first is the American constitutional sentence taken seriously. The second is the routing structure that has been trying to substitute itself for the constitutional sentence for as long as the constitutional sentence has existed.
You are doing the routing structure’s work. You may not know you are doing it. You may believe you are doing the opposite. But the structural function of refusing to recognize moral growth is to make growth itself impossible — and to ensure that the people who have grown, who have done the actual work of becoming better than they were, are kept out of the public space where their testimony might persuade others to do the same.
The convert is power’s enemy. The puritan is power’s tool, however unwillingly.
I understand why this is hard to hear. The puritan move feels like moral seriousness from the inside. It feels like holding the line. It feels like not letting bad people off the hook. I am not telling you that everyone who has ever done anything wrong should be welcomed back into public life on their own terms. I am telling you that you have to be able to tell the difference between someone who has done the work of changing and someone who is performing change in order to escape consequences. The Jobs email and the Platner statement are both, by every available indication, the first kind. To treat them as the second is to misread the data, and to misread it in a direction that always, conveniently, serves the existing distribution of power.
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I will close with what Jobs himself said, in 1995, to the Smithsonian, which the Put Something Back memorial site preserves alongside the email:
The only way to do something deeply is to be willing to be a beginner. And the only way to be a beginner is to have been wrong about something, and to know it, and to start again.
Be a beginner.
Love and admire your species, living and dead.
Receive what has been deposited into you, and put something back.
Refuse the puritan move and the routing structure that hides inside it.
Honor the convert. Honor the work. Honor the long record of correction that is the only thing standing between us and the worst versions of ourselves.
The species, living and dead, holds us up.
We owe.
We owe.
We owe.
Thank you for this.
Bravo, sir!