Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The True Meaning of Success

A bright intelligent professional of my acquaintance regrets not being a success. I suspect that to this person, success involves a sizable suburban house with a white picket fence, one or two European cars, a photogenic family, foreign travel and career recognition.
I plead guilty to hankering after some recognition for the work I do. I labor obscurely on an economic weekly dealing primarily with unemployment and poverty.
My dream was to be managing editor of The New York Times. I couldn't even get an op-ed piece published by the Gray Lady. Then again, last I heard the Nobel committee had bypassed me for the Peace Prize yet again.
But let's be clear. My dream of being the NYT managing editor wasn't because in that lofty position I would be able to afford Armani suits costing way more than I spend for food in a month.
Rather, I thought I would be able to steer the finest journalism in the world to even greater heights, performing a public service, unmasking wrongdoing, pointing out tragedies that are going unaddressed, holding the feet of government, business and so-called charities to the fire. Admittedly, Jill Abramson did that very nicely without me.
Similarly, I am proud of my progeny not for the money they make, but for the essentially principled lives they lead. They are successful in this.
This, I submit is the true meaning of success: living a life with a purpose that in some way, no matter how little noticed, attempts to serve the betterment of humanity.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Why "innocent"? The Malaysia Air passengers had no foibles like anyone else?

It riles me no end to read and hear the drumbeat of "innocent" passengers killed in the Malaysia Air plane over the Ukraine. Without any disrespect intended to the dead (although, why not, since we don't particular honor the living?), I am sure that these people all had their moral failures; including the children.

This happens with annoying regularity. Yet what makes people killed randomly innocent?

Gazans and Israelis do not cheat on taxes or their mates? Boston Marathon bombing victims had never cheated in school or failed to come to a full stop at a stop sign? And don't get me started on the scummy bond traders who died in 9/11!

The same applies to children who, any truthful parent or teacher will testify, are selfishly wilfull.

All right, you might say that these people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were innocent with respect to the conflicts that caused their deaths. But were they?

Conflicts in the Middle East and the Chechnya did not occur in isolation to everything else. Certainly, also, the largest economy in the world, the United States, is in some respect dependent on almost every corner of the planet.

For example, when something grievous has happened in the Middle East, we have to think of our oil interests. Surely some oil company has profited and its employees have purchased something that has spurred economic activity that in some way has splashed upon us directly or indirectly.

As Dick Gregory once told a Canadian who claimed to be uninvolved in Vietnam, "Did you pay sales tax on those socks you're wearing?" When the young man admitted he had, Gregory went on to show in a complicated train of events I have long forgotten how those taxes freed resources for war.

We are all much more interconnected today than we were in the 1970s, when Gregory's remark was made. No one is entirely unconnected to what happens in Gaza, the Ukraine and elsewhere. We all in some way continue to thrive in the global human system that makes these events happen.

There are no innocents. Indeed, long ago one Augustine of Hippo proposed the theory of "original sin" (or original concupiscence) as an explanation of the reality that, even at birth, we are all culpable. The rich baby effectively exploits the poor baby born the same second, taking a greater share of resources than, strictly speaking, are his or her due.

None of us is an island. We are all in some way responsible for everything and have the duty to stop the bad and increase the good. To the extent we fail at either, we are guilty of moral failure.

There were no innocents on the Malaysia Air flight as there will not be in the next tragedy that occurs.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Hard to forgive: those who will not apologize, even for the other September 11

It was a week or two after the event many people are fixated on today, that I witnessed an Irish priest, a visitor at what was then my parish, state from the pulpit that forgiveness was fine and dandy (my words), but that what had happened demanded retribution (his word).

No turning the other cheek for that allegedly Christian clergyman.

I understand this because, to tell the truth, I find it very difficult to forgive. The problem is that the people who injure me, mostly with haughtiness and a refusal to listen, don't do me the favor of abjectly recognizing they are at fault.

Surely, Osama bin Laden died with the certainty that he was right and that the United States had aggrieved the Muslim world in a way that deserved what happened and more.

Similarly, I doubt that any of the ITT executives who provided covert funds, the Nixon White House operatives and the CIA men have lost much sleep over aiding and abetting the destruction of democracy on another September 11, the one in Chile in 1973 that ended with an elected president dead and thousands of Chilean citizens from all walks of life kidnapped, tortured and killed.

The initial toll (people killed at the stadium in Santiago in the immediate aftermath of the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende) was similar in Chile to that on Manhattan island 28 years later: 3,000 people killed.

Gen. Augusto Cesar Pinochet had laid out in the military journal Estrategia in 1965 his plans for a "national security state" to struggle in defense of what the military regimes of South America came to call "Christian, Western civilization." He died without ever apologizing for his crimes.

Nor for the US$250 million paid to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company by the Pinochet regime to offset the loss of two-thirds of its copper production under Allende. Anaconda, ruled a major polluter by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s, was bought by the Atlantic Richfield Company in 1997, which was in turn purchased by BP, the former British Petroleum, and the source of the recent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

What a tangled web some weave ...

Still, today's gospel speaks of forgiving "seventy times seven," biblical talk for many, many times. I can sympathize with the silly Irish priest when I think of Sept. 11, 1973.

As for the one ten years ago, I wish that instead of talk of retribution there had been more room for understanding those who witnessed the pillage in their countries by U.S. and other Western interests with which most of us  feel no commonality whatsoever -- and how misdirected, grief-stricken rage was the real pilot of the four crashed planes.

Then they might have come to forgive us for unwittingly enjoying the living standard sustained by our society's plunder. And we could forgive them back.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Is it possible to be good and be right?

Today I came face to face with a paradox that has bedeviled me for years. There are two kinds of desirable or admirable people and it seems nearly impossible to be the best of both at the same time.

Good people are attentive to the needs of others, kind to their neighbors, hard workers, honest taxpayers, the whole bit. These people can rarely explain why one should be good. Often they don't understand what "good" means, if they even believe that their behavior is merely "normal." (Not!).

Principled people hold opinions and beliefs that they can cogently justify and explain. They distinguish between mere concurrence or sequence of situations and a causal relationship between one and the other. Most of the time, however, they are too clever by half and no one can really can get along with them, especially if they happen to be right.

The good and the principled are as oil and water. The good could stop do-gooding for a moment to enunciate why goodness is best. The principled could relax and do some good, instead of always insisting on knowing why something should be done. Neither does alter course for very long, if ever.

It's rare to find someone who embodies the best of both. If you do, let me know.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Real Natural Law

What we know about life, liberty and property from nature today is quite different from what most natural law advocates think.

Life is a complex set of chemical reactions scientists can explain better than I can. The place of our species at the top of all sentient, self-propelling animals is questionable, particularly as we are about to destroy the planet's ability to sustain life. Judging by behavior of all species, life is pretty cheap and that of an individual animal, human or otherwise, is not particularly valuable.

Natural law is the law of the jungle.

Liberty is, in natural terms, nonexistent. The combination of our genes, environment and nurture determine our behavior and the terms of our life.

Property is, similarly, an entirely unnatural concept. At most, we can say that possession is a temporary characteristic of any thing around any animal, plant or mineral, to the extent that power can be exerted to control it.

Thus, here is natural law as it really is:

1. Fight tooth and nail to survive, because if you don't some other
human or animal or plant or even mineral will take it.

2. You are inexorably and ultimately subject to fate, even though your senses will fool you otherwise.

3. Hang on to whatever people, animals, plants and minerals you
control, knowing that you must relinquish them when you lose control.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

My pal Friedrich Nietzche

Reluctantly, I come to the conclusion that the exploration of ethics, politicas or philosophy is pointless since we are incapable of free moral acts, are only goaded by what we are taught and are kept in line only by coercion.

The existence of freedom is much exaggerated. From the moment of our conception, our potential to decide and act is severely constrained by inherited biochemical traits.

Once we are born, we enter society in a social and economic context that is entirely not of our own choosing and very rarely changed in any substantive way by a free act, thought or deed. By the time we go to school, the course of our life is not known, but it is more or less set. The arena left to moral choice is absurdly minute, if it is exists at all.

Conscience, in the personal and moral sense understood in Western societies, is little more than a set of biochemical reactions in the brain to the challenges of the interaction of ingrained habit, social custom and individual tendencies. Shame and pride, in normal doses, are socially ingrained. There is nothing magical or "supernatural" about this.

In this context, the only purpose of institutions such as the churches or government) is to attempt to enforce socially mandated behavior; those that have failed to do this have either disappeared (the Shakers) or gone woefully astray (Stalinist Russia).

Monday, August 16, 2010

All Unhappy People

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Leo Tolstoy memorably in the opening sentence of Anna Karenina. He may have been wrong. It's the unhappy who are, in general, quite common and ordinary, the happy rare and uncommon.

In "My Life in Therapy" by Diana Merkin, the author discloses a tidbit about Freud that I had never heard before and struck me with the simplicity of a classic truth:
Therapy, as Freud himself made clear, is never about finding a cure for what ails you. Its aim, despite the lyrical moniker it is known by (“the talking cure” was not actually Freud’s phrase but rather that of Dr. Josef Breuer’s patient Bertha Pappenheim, whom Freud wrote about as Anna O.), was always more modest. Freud described it as an effort to convert “hysterical misery” into “common unhappiness,” which suggests a rather minimalist framework against which to judge progress.
Common unhappiness. I haven't spent nearly a tenth of the fortune or time the author devoted to psychiatrists, but I am just as convinced that therapists are a colossal waste of time, not to mention money. It may not be their fault.

Maybe the problem is that there is a common unhappiness that, like the common cold, cannot be cured.

Most of us are in some respects garden variety neurotics. We have the hangnails of mental illness. Our parents were not perfect—nor did we understand them perfectly as children. Our spouses fail us—just about as much as we fail them. We are afraid of the dark, of being alone, of being poor—and of living alone and poor in a dark room, most of all. We suffer the wouldacouldashouldas of life.

Our mental hangnails are, to be sure, elaborately shaped, worthy of an exhibit at one of the more bizarre of modern art galleries. But they are still hangnails.

Most of our families are not “dysfunctional.”

Most of us are all fed, clothed, housed, schooled, eventually employed for some of our lives. Sure some are fed and clothed better, schooled in name schools and end up with corner offices overlooking a famous avenue. But the rest of us muddle through just fine.

Families exist mainly to help us muddle through, regardless of the members emotional quirks.

So, perhaps, Tolstoy bears rewriting. All people are alike in their common unhappiness; a few are happy, for a while. All happy families don't stay that way; all unhappy families, welcome to the club.

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Take the Responsibility and the Blame

I was very tempted to go to hear Diane Ravitch speak at an event here in Washington, so I could ask her what we, as a society, get now that she has seen the light. Public figures love to "take full responsibility" for misdeeds (when they get caught doing them), but accept none of the blame. Punishment? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education in the Bush (pére) Administration, was by her own admission a "conservative advocate of charters, merit pay and accountability." Now she claims to be a "skeptical independent," having hit upon the novel notion of checking the data.

A bit too late, she has discovered that the policies she shoved down everyone's throat haven't suceeded at anything good. In the interim, from the 1980s to today, millions of children were subjected to aggressive teach-to-the-test instruction and a corresponding number of teachers were forced to become automatons in the service of some wonk's slash and burn approach.

I myself discarded the briefly held idea of becoming a teacher once I was confronted with one public school system's "competency-based curriculum." This was essentially one of those unreadable educratic policy tomes in which everything is a three-word something (pencil = paper-oriented wordprocessor) and single syllable, Anglo-Saxon words are never used if a longer, Latinate one can be had.

So, yes, Ms. Ravitch, you and your fellow edufascists-in-arms chased me away, even though I could have made learning something so enjoyable students might pursue it on their own, outside school.

Worse, still, the kids didn't get any smarter under the No Child Left Behind regime your propaganda inspired. Even you admit it now. What was the ditty? Ah, yes: those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, teach education.

In Ravitch's case, she's out to make money confessing her error in a new book. Borrow it from a library, if you must; just don't give her a dime she doesn't deserve.

How is it that all sorts of people can not only start wars, dumb-down schools, steal from the poor and give to the rich, steal from the rich and keep it, and -- only if caught! -- appear in public with crocodile tears about how terrible and wrong they were. They can even non-apologize "if" someone suffered as a result.

Then they get to rake in the real publicity and dough.

What ever happened to scarlet letters, stocks, public humiliation and taunting, drawing and quartering? Weren't these the preferred social catharses the uberconservatives loved? Or were those only for Galileo, English Jesuits and the victims of the unruly teenage girls of Salem?

I'd like to see some real, unremunerated effort to compensate society. Barring that, a good whipping would do.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

It's Time for Me

I've been hearing this phrase with ever greater urgency from fellow Boomers for a decade or so. When Chani, in a recent blogpost, argued that she tore up the memo that "told me I was supposed to have low self-regard and take crap from people," I felt some response larger than a comment was needed.

Chani complained about a woman who was talking endlessly about herself (another creeping Boomer affliction, but also seen at all ages). The woman was admittedly spitting out negativity best left unspoken: TMI. She had also committed the cardinal sin of showing no interest in Chani's life.

Sound familiar? Yes, folks, men and women are the worst people around. No one really cares about you; everyone, including you, is really concerned with self-gratification and survival.

We are all about "me." (Actually, younger people seem to be more about "duty," but that's another post.)

Chani's complaint that she has lived "consumed with the needs and wants of others," which in my experience is not that uncommon a refrain among women, misses the mark. Living for the needs of others is not self-effacing, it is self-aggrandizing and self-affirming.

The put-upon nurturer is in reality saying, "I am the only thing standing between these people and utter chaos." One of the big gains of motherhood and similar traditional roles that I have observed is that women who may have been self-questioning gain enormous confidence as "executives" in the lives of others.

No one does anything except for gain of some kind. The nurturer gets something from nurturing, or else he or she wouldn't do it. Maybe it is approval, a sense of importance, feeling that one is "good."

A change that sounds more appropriate to me than to tear up the memo, is to realize that doing what one is told is no longer appealing. The "oughts" of the past no longer make sense to us; there's nothing in them for us any more.

That's because all our time, from birth to death, has always been really "for me" and "about me." Let's not fool ourselves.

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Interests vs. Ethical Values

The same people who will cheer a single-payer or public option health reform, will fall silent when the suggestion wanders toward abolishing the gambling system known as stock exchanges (even if individual stockholders get a refund), and will likely voice outrage at the proposition that the inheritance laws that are the pillar of our financial caste system has no real philosophical basis.

Similarly, it is easy to find the veritable legion of "family values" advocates who are multiple divorcees, middle-aged prudes who committed "youthful indiscretions," or reformed drug users who want to lock up teenage experimenters and throw away the key.

Greed? Hypocrisy? Fear? Individualism? Not really.

At the heart of all this is a vast confusion between one's own interests and a moral philosophy that emerges out of disinterested reasoning. It's the difference between nominal Christians' churchgoing for fear of hell and Emmanuel Kant's notion that what is good is worth doing for its own sake.

When people cite a "principle" that obviously feathers their own nest, rather than an ethical imperative, they are giving voice to an interest, not an ethical value.

Interests are all about what is convenient and consistent with one's way of life. Ethical values are what is good, whether or not we like it.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Delusions and Consequences

Is it your fault if a relative you drove to a hospital doesn't like your choice of venue or somehow gets sicker, even though you didn't choose the equivalent of a refugee camp clinic in Chad over a peer of the Mayo Clinic? You had two apples, a red delicious and a granny smith and with the best intentions you chose one over the other.

Is it your moral, philosophical or psychological fault if the person you gave the apple to gets an indigestion or just plain doesn't like the taste? There are people -- often enough they are women taught to apologize for their mere existence -- who would beat themselves up, who would engage for hours in exploration of the chain events that any small and largely apparent choice brings on.

You decided to major in English literature and not accounting, so you failed as a novelist and live in a garret in East St. Louis, but your accounting-major classmates have already retired to mansions in Provence. You turned left rather than right at a certain intersection and a truck laden with hundreds of pounds of bananas backed into your car three blocks later.

Remember, we're not talking legal here. Lawyers could argue that a matricidal maniac should not be punished harshly because he is an orphan, but that's not the kind of issue on which I want to dwell.

Responsibility, to my mind, turns on whether we actually have choices. I would argue that most of us have extremely few meaningful choices and it's a delusion of grandeur -- or Calvinism, depending on your mileage -- to think otherwise.

If I were given the choice of being 15 again to relive it all, given what I know now, I would like to think I would make choices that would make me either rich as Donald Trump or famous as Albert Schweitzer or, at a minimum, irresistibly handsome to women ranging from Heidi Klum to Janet Reno. But it's just not so.

Let's take Heidi Kulm and Janet Reno. Attractiveness to the opposite sex is based on a wide range of biological factors that pair certain groups of men and women with each other and the results ... are happenstance. An actress once told George Bernard Shaw that if they had a child it would be beautiful and brilliant, only to hear from Shaw that the reverse would be true if the child inherited her brains and his beauty.

Social norms have tended to accentuate some aspects over another. Indeed, in its pursuit of study, the Jewish tradition has historically pushed its most intelligent people to marry. A rabbi's son was once the dream husband. Conversely, the rule of priestly celibacy in Catholicism assured that, at least during the long medieval night, the era's most educated and talented men of western Europe either did not reproduce or spawned children born into social disadvantage.

I belabor birth, because one's birthplace and parentage remain the most meaningful and decisive factors in lifetime social and economic outcomes -- democracy and everyting else notwithstanding. Unlike many Americans, I did not get to choose mine, which is why I am not particularly proud of being American -- or of occupying a given quintile in U.S. income distribution or hailing anciently from a particular corner of the world.

It's simply not true that being superior makes you white or being smart makes you rich or being chosen by Uncle Sam makes you number one. Even if it were, what did you have to do with any of those?

So what makes you think that you had a real choice in the hospital for your relative? You didn't have a choice between the Chad and Mayo clinics. At worst you had a choice between equally mediocre hospitals operating in the midst of a collapsing system.

We all do our best -- and, yes, we can choose not to -- and consequences spring whether we like them or not. I'm not even sure that doing one's best makes a difference, except to ourselves.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Why Does Wrongdoing Persist?

Bernard Madoff is probably the most egregious example, but let's not kid ourselves, wrongdoing large and small is pervasive. This fact rubs against the grain of my notion that the basis of all ethics is survival: are we all that self-destructive?

Now, granted, I never said that human beings were ethical. I merely suggested that if, out of curiosity, we wished to consider what we ought to do, human survival was as universal a principle available for discerning right from wrong.

On that basis I developed a decalogue, as if it made any difference, only to find myself waking up in this new era of deception and plunder to the reality that no one -- or very few -- takes ethics seriously. Unless they run the risk of getting caught and punished.

Frankly, I can't say that, when rubber hits the road, I'm any better. Boiling down l'éthique cecilieuse to its boy-scout-manual essentials, am I confident, sincere, joyful, respectful, nurturing, trustworthy, truthful, giving, loving, content? Not by a long shot.

Bless me, father, for I have been wracked with self-doubt, layered in pretenses, miserable, callous, lustful after what belongs to others, deceitful, grasping, selfishly licentious and chained to my artificial needs. This is why I will not survive.

Indeed, this is what dooms all humanity to a life that is, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Moral Hazards of a Coarser Time

Roughly three years ago, I stumbled upon an economist who, in the measured tones of a Harvard academic, proposed before an audience what some described as the "Voltairean" idea that economic growth brings "moral positives." Today, with only my own observation to guide me, I would argue that the reverse is equally true.

In the 12 months ended last December the gross domestic product declined a staggering 6.2 percent and now everywhere you go there is the language of the hustle. The phone company, the banks, the major corporations, they're all chiseling, double-dealing and outright lying at every turn, as if they were bookies, drug dealers and pimps.

What does it all remind me of? That used-car dealership portrayed toward the beginning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In other words, what's come down to us from the 1930s: the unrelenting flim-flammery oozing from every pore of a society in decay.

What happened then, besides poverty? Lynching. The rise of the Mafia. Father Coughlan, the antisemitic radio priest from Detroit. In Europe there were black shirts and brown shirts and blue shirts marching all about; and millions of bullets expended on the back of someone's head.

That is why we must risk everything to pull ourselves out of this economic disaster. We humans are a selfish, materialist species that becomes meaner when times are leaner.

Monday, February 09, 2009

Neither Rude nor Wrong

Pit good manners against a thought-out moral standard and I'll always choose the latter.

In the play A Man for All Seasons, which chronicles Sir Thomas More's refusal to accept the putative children of Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the throne, the question is put this way:
DUKE OF NORFOLK: But damn it, Thomas, look at those names.... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?

THOMAS MORE: And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?
Something like this arose when, in the context of a conversation about the upbringing of boys as opposed to that of girls, I mentioned a teenage boy who, on principle, had declined girls' invitations to bed. My interlocutors, two middle class American women, cringed at my allegedly "inappropriate" talk of sex, without ever quite citing a principle.

Indeed, what principles? Both are of tepid, Episcopalian upbringing, a worldview in which purity is wearing white gloves. Yet both had the effrontery of agreeing with each other as they shared the laughter of female camaraderie -- Norfolk's fellowship -- that I had been "inappropriate."

In the name of what morals was I at fault for telling of a boy who acted on a matter of conviction that did not meet with the approval of peers? One need not agree with the boy's views to admire his moral courage.

I could not get a response philosophically sharper than the edges of a jellyfish. Impropriety seemed to consist only of whatever feels edgy. Propriety seemed to amount to a mannerly anomie of studied indifference.

Manners be damned.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Consequences

"What is a sin in your decalogue?" asks a regular reader of this blog, "Something that makes me unhappy?"

In outlining the ethics of survival I have never mentioned "sin," a religious term for deeds, words or even thoughts that violate a moral code. My purpose was to concentrate on what one ought to do, rather than on what one ought not to do, assuming in that Kantian, categorical imperative way that good is worth doing for its own self.

It is true, however, that most historical moral codes have been linked to what I'd call the Santa-Claus threat: he's checking his list to see who's been naughty or nice. Heaven, Nirvana, 70 Virgins, toys or whatever for the nice; hell, samsara, coal in stockings or whatever for the naughty.

That never did much for me.

Even when I was a believer, doing good for the reward seemed cheap. In Catholic morality there was always the distinction between imperfect contrition (being sorry you sinned because you deserved punishment) and perfect contrition (sorrow for sin out of regret for having offended one's loving and dear God). I always thought the reverse would hold as well: you could be good, literally for goodness' sake.

In the grand philosophical edifice of the ethics of survival, a distinctly godless set of propositions, there's an additional issue. The whole raison d'être of these ethics is the universal esteem in which survival is held, coupled with the logic that since ethics are about human behavior an essential requisite of any ethical system would have to be that there be humans alive to behave.

In this light, there are only wrongdoings, not "sin," and the punishment comes in the form of inexorable consequences. Violating these ethics is wrong because it imperils one's survival.

Of course, this is where the survival system diverges from religious systems of ethical compulsion: there is no no possible "pardon" nor "remission of sins." You live or you die.

You pollute, you cause conflict, you bomb, you start wars, you steal from the poor and you get the present mess humanity finds itself in. Will we survive? Individually, as John Maynard Keynes quipped, "we're all dead in the long term."

How about collectively? The jury is out on that one, but at the outset of 2009 I am not uproariously optimistic.

Reality "pardons" to the extent that we are, mercifully, quite resilient and, in cosmic terms, insignificant. Smoking cigarettes is not an automatic ticket to the oncology ward and despite our depredations the planet continues to sustain us.

The law of the jungle is never as absolute and fierce as we think. Jungle species have ample resources to survive.

Sure, these ethics assume that we are, at best, intelligent animals with material needs. Our first concern is our own survival. We are a bit wild, still.

We have the capacity to destroy ourselves and our kin. We ought to avoid that.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Last Commandment

Let's have a drum roll for the last of my godless commandments, albeit not the last of my ethical ruminations, and introduce it with a story about its origins.

As with the Psalms in the Bible, the numbering of the Ten Commandments is not uniform.

Catholics merge the first three biblical injunctions -- I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not make for yourself an idol -- into one first commandment. Anglicans consider the first injunction to be a preface, leaving the other two separate. Talmudic Judaism and Orthodox Christianity opt for two commandments, the first being the first injunction and the second containing the other two.

This is followed by seven parallel but differently numbered commandments. For example, Thou shalt not kill is the 5th commandment to Catholics, but the 6th to everyone else.

Then at the end, the Catholics catch up by drawing a distinction regarding the prohibition concerning coveting. The Douay-Rheims English translation, produced in France by exiled English Catholics during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, renders the commands as follows:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife: nor his house, nor his field, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his. (Deut. 5:21)
Obviously, the Catholics saw the colon as an important distinction, but others do not.

Catholic seminarians used to joke that to Protestants, evidently, wife and "ass" was pretty much the same thing. Ba-da-bing!

When I was constructing my norms founded in the notion of survival, I sought to focus on what might mitigate against my (one's) survival. Hence I promulgated the dictum that
Thou shalt rein in desires that give rise to hate, theft, disrespect of others, despoiling of the earth that sustains thee, and the diminishment of life.
The notion of coveting -- in dictionary definition, to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others -- has been the source of much mischief. Wrongfully? Inordinately? What is wrong? Is there an order, who defines it and what sets the order off kilter as to be "inordinate"?

No one argues much about the rights of others, any more than anyone credibly argues about "thou shalt not kill" (other than to say it doesn't apply to war, execution, abortion and few sundry other things).

The rights of others are pretty obvious; when we want to trample on them, we generally just ignore them and leave the sheriffs and deputies to argue about them.

Survival being so essential to the notion of ethics, I wanted to cover much broader, uncontested territory. I thought that any unbridled desire that could give rise to disrespect of another human being or the natural environment that sustains us, would be detrimental.

These would include envy, greed, prejudice. In action, I specified razing a forest merely to make more money, wishing an accident on someone who has a better car than ours, deriving one's own self-respect from a dim view of entire classes of people.

Let's face it: envy, greed and prejudice are toxic. They corrode inside us.

Often a home, a way of living, a job, looks, possesions or social standing that have served us perfectly well, become puny and embarrassing, simply because we see a mirage. We suddenly see in an imaginary lake the image of someone else richer or more beautiful, wealth beyond our normal imagining, a difference in appearance that we can make into something of to make ourselves look better.

Then we begin the mindless chase that disregards even our own well-being. Most of the time, if we manage to grasp the object of our desire for an instant, its gleam vanishes and we then seek it again and again, in hopes of retaining the glitter.

John D. Rockefeller was once asked how much money would be enough. His reply was, "A little more."

This rule of life is about enough being enough. We can survive perfectly well with a lot less wealth, fewer possessions and a lower level of esteem than we think. We need not worry on this account.

Friday, December 19, 2008

It's a Madoff, Madoff, Madoff, Madoff World

Agence France Presse quotes Dominque Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, saying the following of the latest financial scandal, "The surprise is not that there are some thieves in the system, the question is where were the police?"

I beg to differ.

Financier Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion global pyramid investment scheme involved such gigantic servings of greed, stupidity and fraud so as to make one wonder about the moral fiber of humanity.

As in the 1963 Stanley Kramer all-star film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World about a wild goose chase for buried loot, nobody comes out unsullied in the Madoff affair:
  • not Madoff;
  • not the middlemen who solicited investments;
  • not the wealthy who put all their eggs in one rotten basket;
  • not the law enforcers who had the problem pointed to them and ignored it nonetheless;
  • not the policymakers who advocated total freedom for the "invisible hand" of the market; and certainly
  • not the whole lot of us who, in some measure, find ourselves able, from time to time, to tap our capacity for mendacity, greed, disregard for others, stupidity, laziness and cupidity.
This is an equal opportunity moral paradigm in which the issue is not who went wrong but why aren't we all in some sort of jail or at least sitting on a small chair facing a corner?

Sometime in my early childhood, at about the age of five, my obsession was to find the answer to the question, "Are people good or bad?"

My mother said people were essentially good, although in my recollection one could have said her motto was "trust but verify." She was always reserved about information that could give rise to envy, greed or pity; in some important ways, no one really knew her.

My father and many other relatives said the opposite, but their behavior was as careless as Madoff's customer list. They lived as if no one would ever fleece them; indeed, no one did, whereas my mother lived through some rank injustices.

Is that the way of the world?

Why should I care? Why does the fleecing of rich retirees in an exclusive country club evoke even the slightest sympathy in a world in which thousands of auto workers will be idled without pay for two weeks or more, and in which more than a 1,000 people have died of hunger in the last hour?

Perhaps because they are part and parcel of the same human condition.

For the first time in history, we have the means and resources for everyone, we just don't have enough of a will to share, to be fair, to be compassionate -- collectively or individually -- to eradicate extreme poverty, or extreme wealth.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Thou Shalt Partake of Sex

What if, instead of mortification of the flesh, abstinence, avoidance, belts and locks and scarlet letters, our religions and reigning ethics had an imperative principle to seek to slake fleshly desires, to engage in carnal pleasure, to seek out every lickerishness, to open the doors of every bedroom and heap praise on the randy hearted?

You'll say that's why they invented the Internet and its seemingly endless parade of porn.

But, no, I mean an imperative: something like "remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day," yet for sex. Certainly our bodies drive us to extremely silly and oft-reckless behavior in response to the stimuli that cause sexual arousal.

To provide an example of a philosophical version of the drive was my intent in penning the ninth of my godless commandments four years ago:
Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof.
Today these words feel as unsatisfactory as they day I wrote them, especially since the underlying notion behind this set of ethics I have proposed, is the universally agreed notion that prizes human survival.

From the point of view of survival, sex is principally reproductive. We spawn ... for what? It's not the oft-cited notion that our children are there to have someone to care for us in old age -- ha!

To my mind, the biological point of reproduction is to replace each individual within a species after death, and to provide sufficient replacements to withstand environmental pressures against the species continued existence. If we spawn in large enough numbers, the worst catastrophe won't wipe us all out.

Not for nothing individuals in some species die after reproductively successful sex. The praying mantis female bites off the male’s head immediately after, sometimes during, sexual intercourse. Perhaps it was in a related sense that the dualistic, sex-conflicted English Victorians called orgasm "the little death."

Certainly, also, reproduction was what Pope Paul VI was thinking about in 1968 when he issued the immensely imprudent encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming Catholic docrtine's opposition to artifical means of contraception.

Still, then and now critics in and outside scientific circles have noted that even animals don't engage in sex merely to reproduce. Sex also serves to cement social bonds.

Regular sex with a caring partner, or three, is also recognized among humans as a significant factor in one's happiness, one's degree of patience and tolerance toward others. Doesn't the world seem rosy when one walks out into the street from the arms of a good lover?

Remember, then, to partake, now and then, prudently, with willing and able partners of an appropriate age and suitable health.

Remember, also, that sex has consequences, from irretrievable affection to parenthood to death. Clicking sex into operation, as with software, carries with an implied end-user license agreement. Read his or hers carefully because, even if you don't, the other person's EULA kicks in immediately -- as does yours.

All this notwithstanding, dare to give yourself to another in one of life's most pleasant endeavors.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Truth Telling

Our text this morning is "Thou shalt honor thine own reputation by being a teller of truth as best thou seest it." This is from, you guessed it, my godless decalogue. Let's parse it.

Reputation, etymologically involves a rethinking. Perhaps it is a matter of sitting thinking about another, much as a 14-year-old girl who moons by her phone willing it to be rung by the boy she is (re- putare, Latin) thinking about, again, for the 33rd time this afternoon.

"I hear he ..." she has heard.

We can't create our own reputation, but we can regard it well, or disregard it. Maybe, if it is worthy, we can honor it.

As to truth, is it so if it is merely what we can best see? Might it be something well beyond the horizon, which we cannot see?

The God-ists say so, I suppose, but that is not what I have in mind. Rather, I am thinking of what you think is true, even if it isn't.

Such things aren't true by virtue of thinking they are. But they aren't quite lies, unless one knows them to be or experiences them as false. Then you dishonor yourself.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Greenness Is Next to Godliness

It always struck me as very odd that U.S. churches, charged in part with good stewardship of their acre, do everything they can, through their parking lots, to encourage the use of cars on Sunday. That is why, for my sixth ethical imperative, you will recall, I expanded the biblical encomium about adultery -- which was really about maintaining a pure lineage for the purposes of inheritance -- to apply to preserving the environment, our common inheritance.

In these days of high gasoline prices, of course, everyone is "green." Yet you still see those parking lots overflowing with SUVs. I have never heard a word ever preached against these gargantuan monuments to selfishness, lest they go elsewhere and affect the pastor's bottom line.

The Bible, of course, is the very opposite of environment friendly. One more reason to question it. In Genesis, God tells the first humans "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth." (Gen. 1:28)

This view influenced the Puritans and their spiritual descendants in the United States. Cities, railroads, highways, smokestacks, mines, vineyards, dams and canals were strung out from East to West like ornaments on a Christmas tree, pretty much without regard to what these human works did to plants and animals of North America, nor to the air, the water or the soil.

The U.S. Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s was part nature, part human carelessness. Bad weather came on the heels of the Depression's outbreak. It happened upon poorly tended, overworked soil with cultivated few of the modern agricultural precautions.

Today, as we face the environmental apocalypse of climate change, a commandment calling for "green" behavior seems oddly missing in the Mosaic original. So here goes my own godless ethical norm: "Thou shalt respect the surroundings that sustain thee and thy fellows."