Meetings

Meetings

Larry David’s “My Dinner with Adolf” brings up an important point. Bill Maher met Donald Trump for dinner at the White House: was he wrong to do so? The meeting was justified by invoking the principle that it is a good idea to meet with people with whom you disagree. Surely, we should be able to talk to people with different opinions from our own—isn’t that a moral truism? The truism makes it sound as if people opposed to such a meeting are moral fools, narrow sectarians. And that is how Mr. Maher defended his meeting with Mr. Trump. But Larry David’s satire brings out the fact that it isn’t just a matter of meeting people we disagree with; it all depends on what those people are guilty of. It isn’t merely that Larry and Adolf have different views; Hitler was an evil man responsible for the worst atrocity in history. You don’t have a cozy dinner with a man like that. The question, then, is whether Trump is an evil man responsible for evil acts. That is the question Maher avoided in his justification for meeting with Trump. You don’t need to take a stand on that question in order to see its relevance—which Maher signally failed to do. Opponents of the meeting will point to the harm Trump has done to countless people, his lawless deportations, his vengeful cruelty. It isn’t disagreement of views; it’s actual behavior with serious consequences. Dinner with disagreement is fine, but not dinner with evil. The hard question is when disagreement tips into serious wrongdoing, about which people may have different opinions. On balance I think Maher was wrong to have that dinner and wrong to defend it in the way he did. He was wrong intellectually and morally. It is certainly disingenuous at best to argue that it was merely a case of dinner with someone you disagree with—as if Hitler is just someone with different opinions from yours. This has a particular meaning for me because I have been confronted with a similar situation in the past: I have refused to shake hands with, acknowledge, or even say hello to certain people because of my strong disapproval of the people in question (I won’t say who and why). This was no doubt perceived as rude and hostile—and I would agree that it was. But I am glad that I did it—it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing I could do in the situation in which I found myself. It sent the right message. Sometimes we should not meet with, or treat civilly, certain individuals, because of their actions. This is what is called having a backbone, instead of being nice. They say you sometimes have to be cruel to be kind, but you also have to be unkind to the cruel.