Lately I’ve been drawing lines in the sand.

This is not like me. Being a dialogue guy, I tend to hear news reports and imagine the complexity of an issue, the not-unreasonableness of all sides, the way in which my view could be wrong.

But suddenly, when yet another sexual assault charge goes south, I think, “This has got to stop.” When NPR reports the Department of Defense’s research into robots that can wage war, all I can think is “No, no, NO.” Damn the subtleties of the individual case. It’s time to take a stand.

Part of this, I think, is the concussion. Last month, I went headfirst into the snow while cross-country skiing and sustained what, in the grand scheme of things, is probably a mild concussion. Whatever mild means. As is typical of concussions, symptoms seem to come and go at random, you go two steps forward and one step back, it can take weeks to make progress.

I know what this sounds like. It sounds like the concussion made me unable to handle nuance—clear evidence that drawing lines in the sand is the domain of stupid people.

But obviously that’s wrong. Some of our brilliant thinkers have written about the power of convictions and not giving ground. (Shameless plug: I wrote about two of these thought leaders recently, both theologians, and how their thinking about “convicted civility” doesn’t go quite far enough.)

And the more I write, the more appreciation I have for the value of convictions. They represent, in many cases, a lifetime of wrestling with ideas. They form an important part of what we bring to the world. At the same time, I’m all too aware of the destructive power of holding one’s convictions with an iron grip, impervious to other ideas or even hard data.

Maybe what I’m saying is this:

Maybe my line in the sand is not conviction so much as it is impulse: not impulse as in impulse buying, but impulse as an involuntary reflex of the soul. Such an impulse would come from an unutterably deep place within us—a place common to all of us. We respond from this place when we think of children abused by sexual predators, or Syrian civilians caught in a barbaric crossfire, or frail people with no support system and nowhere to go.

The impulse says: Something is wrong here, and must be made right.

This impulse does not remove the importance of hearing all sides, of considering the nuances of each individual case. But it is a cry for universal values among us: a cry for justice, a cry for compassion, a cry for community.

In fact, sometimes the impulse shapes the dialogue. Example: Many state pension funds are losing the ability to fulfill their obligations to retired employees. On one level, this issue comes down to math: if you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money, and retirees will have to find another way. But I hear the impulse saying: dammit, Government, you made a promise to these people, and promises must be kept. Suddenly we have two powerful, countervailing forces—one a function of cold hard realities, the other a function of moral imperative—and thus a place to start a robust dialogue.

This is new to me, and yet a very, very old idea in general. (Look at how zealous the God of the Bible is about making things right.) What do you think? How does all this fit together?