Nov. 26, 2009
By Chris Jepson
This Thanksgiving I'd like to explore whether an individual is ever absolved of the responsibility to think for him or herself. How do we reach a moral or ethical decision? How exactly do we determine what is appropriate or inappropriate, right or wrong, good and bad? On whose authority should we act?
Shakespeare observed, "Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." There is a part of me that completely agrees with this perspective? Yet, child molestation is not made acceptable by thinking it is permissible. Rape. Intentionally polluting our environment, most wars, stealing an election, violence against the harmless, no amount of thinking will make such acts ethically acceptable. To me.
Obviously killing falls under the "thinking makes it so" category. We kill during war but we call it self-defense or "Manifest Destiny" or "Remember the Alamo" or "My Country Right or Wrong." We kill to protect ourselves, even our property. We execute killers. We kill time. We kill ideas. We kill creativity. Spontaneity. We even kill ourselves. So there is a great degree of "relativity" on how we apply the Do Not Kill admonition.
Is there a moral code for how we "should" act that is in any way separate or distinct from human beings? The Ten Commandments are a human construct, an understandable attempt at creating order out of a world of chaos. I've countless examples of religious doctrine passing for divine wisdom. Why we have to attribute humane behavior to a supernatural spirit has always made me chuckle. Can we not attempt on our own to be "better" without insisting that some nebulous otherworldly spirit is responsible, is pulling our strings? God is watching. And the boogeyman is in the closet. What's the difference?
I've said for years that a gift one generation can give to another is to let go of shopworn ideas, of questionable values and odious behaviors that while once acceptable and normal are no longer so.
I have a family example that illustrates this perfectly. My grandfather was a martinet. He instilled fear (love, too) in his sons. He punished with a belt and taught his sons that such violence was acceptable, normal and permissible. He was so fearsome that his brother sent his children over to be disciplined by Gramps. My father started out his family and, as the twig is bent so grows the tree, he thought that hard, physical, emotionally confrontational parenting was how you did it and my brother bore the brunt of just that for the first four years of his life. My brother says today, "Thank gawd for sister Susan, she saved my life! Dad had something else to focus on after she was born."
Decades later my father welled-up with tears describing how he treated his first child. He changed his behavior. My father let go of how he was raised, of his parenting examples and literally became a much kinder and gentler man (parent) as a result of some personal epiphany he had in the mid-1940s. I was never aggressively touched, not once, by my father. Father let go of the baggage of an earlier generation and we (children) all led better lives as a result. What a gift. Thank you, Father.
My point in this example is that we all make decisions all our lives based on how we were raised, what we learned from our parents, what their values were and how we saw them applied.
Literature, fiction is a fabulous tool of moral persuasion. It's a gift. By reading a book (play, poem, novel, etc.) we can literally submerge ourselves in another's life and experience what they experience. Think Charles Dickens, Nabokov, Whitman, Orwell, Voltaire or Julia Alvarez. Fiction offers us the ability to live a variety of "morals," to try them on for size, to see their applicability from the "safety" of our overstuffed den chair. Literature has arguably been the most illuminating of life-changing tools. No wonder book burning, book banning, censorship is such a familiar and persistent phenomena.
Reading on your own, thinking for yourself is probably the most revolutionary act we can all freely participate in. At least in America, in the West.
We come to conclusions about "moral" issues based on what we observed as children, what we have learned by living as adults, what we have gleaned from our efforts at self-education (reading and such) and from what our "trusted" authorities tell us is so. An illustration of a trusted authority follows.
On June 18, 1452, Pope Nicholas V "authorized Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers to perpetual slavery." Slavery was sanctioned in the papal bull Dum Diversas.
This act, according to some historians, started (the imprimatur of) the slave trade of West Africa.
On January 5, 1455, Pope Nicholas V again wrote to the same Alfonso. "It followed up the Dum Diversas extending to the Catholic nation of Europe's Dominion over discovered lands during 'The Age of Discovery.'" "It sanctified the seizure of non Christian lands and it encouraged the enslavement of native and non-Christian peoples in Africa and, later, to the New World."
History is another avenue available when determining one's moral barometer.
Why would you automatically believe what your church is telling you about the morality of reproductive choice or homosexual rights when that very same institution has been on the wrong side of the dime so many times in history? Why? Why?
From slavery to how the Earth moves through the heavens, Pope after Pope after Pope claimed moral authority and people died, people suffered.
Faith is good, I practice it myself. But faith does not absolve you from not thinking through why and how you live (lead) your life. There are many ways to determine answers as to how one lives morally.
What we learned at momma's knee, what we learned in "kindergarten," life's experiences, life's possibilities through fiction, and our trusted moral authorities are all factors in making us the moral person we are.
Because the Pope (or any religious authority) issues a dictum prescribing your moral choices does not prevent you as a sentient human from legitimately asking, "Why are you right now in your condemnation of homosexuals, for example, when your moral authority has so often wrongly censored so much of humanity, condemning so much of humanity to suffering, humiliation and death? And the morality of that is?"
Answer that and then judge, condemn others. This time of Thanksgiving.
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