Synchronous with Germany's current national effort at decency - "for once", our chancellor must have thought, after so much bad press about G€rman motivations during recent calamities - there was a guy recently on US radio, NPR, who said it was time for modern man to refocus on decency.

Decency seems to me to be one of those highly malleable unscientific concepts, like trust. Or sanity. Or even intelligence.

Probably decency is a subset of sanity. I have always found the latter concept disturbing. Who decides what is sane? Isn't that always just a function of what the majority of surrounding society deems normal? E.g. it doesn't seem sane to drive heavy metal cars faster than 5 km/h, since the metal, plus the incredible momentum built up by faster-moving one-ton-or-more wheeled apparati, causes most of the traffic deaths in a given society. (To the order of several "9/11"s every year in most developed countries!) But it is seen to be - even by me, I admit, partly.

Decency seems to me a little more definable, and it even sounds more like its true core, normalcy. Even by its name, it indicates a subjective standard which may soon change.

I suppose, in Germany, decency is what Prussians meant about 150 years ago with the concept of the Prussian "Ehrenmann" - the good German, who is guided by her/his own conscience. This of course didn't stop the last Prussian emperor from helping to start the 1st World War, and laying the ground work for the anti-semitism that followed (and was then "blown up" into the Holocaust a quarter of a century later).

Today, a German's decency to my mind ought to be decidedly humanitarian & plutocratic. Let people be! Suppress egoism in daily and more general spheres.

Our asylum laws (German: "Asylrecht") are a countermeasure remnant of the crazed bloodlust our governing/tyrannical representatives displayed just 7 decades ago. They allow people who are fleeing from desparate situations to find a place to stay, and live. Here in the erstwhile land of thinkers and poets. Before Nazi boots stamped that reputation into the dark dirt of Northern Europe & later the world.

Let's see how long we manage to announce - and physically support - this current form of decency. Here.

P.S.: There's a very decent proposal made by a SPIEGEL op. ed. about 3 weeks ago. Here's hoping you have the vocabulary, the time and the extra cash to have a look at it! :-)