Morality
Although I am an atheist, I am very fond of religions and respect belief in them completely (for reasons I’ve discussed previously). Much, though not all, religious tradition is codified morality of a very fine sort, the sort imbued with an otherworldly detachment from ends. While the practitioners of religious morality -being human- have often been deviously barbaric, the ideas themselves and their interwoven mythical justifications can be both beautiful and transformative.
Ordinary morality, concerned with praxis and outcomes, is problematized by subjectivity as well as human nature; as Nietzsche noted, “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” From the start, any individual or collective assessments of reality and their according moral deliberations are debatable, endlessly so. This does not mean that nothing is good or that nothing is evil, but it does multiply the gradations of gray between those poles. And since “error is the central feature of human existence,” the most important moral decisions about when we may kill, when we should die, how many civilians we may incinerate incidentally and for what ends, are in my view fundamentally indecent to make. We are too likely to be wrong to take life. As J.U. Neuf put it in 1950, “The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.”
When I say pure morality is unconcerned with ends, I mean it is concerned only with means, with the conduct of the individual. The state of the world is never within your control; only your behavior is. A pure moral system -which arbitrates your relationship with the world- cannot depend at all on variables beyond your control or it is worthless, contingent, ungoverning. Thus pure morality has little to say about justice or peace or other political concepts involving the group; rather, justice and peace emerge from aggregated individual morality.
(This is why efforts to “legislate morality” are deeply problematic. As social morality is an emergent phenomenon, it is not within our capacity to lead the horse with the cart by enforcing ends; we must be and inspire moral individuals, a process nearly impossible except on the interpersonal scale).
Long ago, I asked my father what was extraordinary about Jesus’ willingness to be crucified. After all, I asked: if I proposed to him that he might die painfully but would in doing so give eternal and blissful life to every human being who wanted it, wouldn’t he say yes? Given the context of the Gospels, wouldn’t he be elated to save sinful humanity? I ask this of parents: wouldn’t you die to give your child infinite life without suffering? Wouldn’t we all love to have this: a chance to sacrifice for the good of all humanity, a chance to redeem the world? And to know while doing so that an afterlife awaited you?
If we posit that there was a heroic and incontestably valuable end, we reduce the power of his self-sacrifice, though not completely. (My father proposed that Christians assume Jesus was so fully human that he didn’t know or couldn’t believe in those aspects of his mission, particularly while on the cross; if that is the case, I regret proposing my analysis).
In World War II, Gandhi advised Jews threatened by Nazism that they “…should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife… They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… Collective suicide would have been heroism.” We shudder at his morality, but that is purity: the “hatred of the world” Kierkegaard spoke of, the refusal to engage in any defense of self, family, or friend at the expense of another life. Gandhi will not defend Indians; Jesus will not save the crucified thieves. (This is why the Buddha felt that children were chains: they bind you in love to the world your status in it; you cannot, for example, martyr yourself resisting the SS if you have a family who will suffer for your deed).
This morality is difficult if one hopes to improve the world-which I why I would never engage in political action- and I admit that in any material sense it is indefensible. Civilization is the result of ever-improving efforts at implementing broader moral systems (efforts with fits and starts, to be sure), which is another reason why moral teachers and prophets are typically renunciatory: they have no business in society.
The world cannot and perhaps should not be composed of such people: pure in moral austerity, willing to die, willing to let kin die, willing to let the world do whatever it may without ever resisting, mindful of the fact that to fight for is always to fight against and disinclined therefore to fight at all. In extremity, morality becomes unacceptable to us; Gandhi’s ahimsa seems loathsome when we think of Hitler. And indeed, what would we say now to Jesus, who would not kill Bin Laden, or even assassinate Hitler himself?
This morality seems inhuman, practically, but it is in this morality that I am most interested, in how it problematizes the affairs of state, the laws we enact, the deeds we condone, and most of all in how in emulating the exemplars of this morality we achieve the very ends we’ve turned away from in doing so: justice and peace.
Hence Gandhi’s wonderful quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Do not seek it; do not legislate it; do not fight for it. Be it.
