Morality’s hardly a new idea. Folks have been pondering how to be since the advent of the first-person pronoun. My age cohort dismissed morality as invasive, irksome, fuddy-duddy, replacing our parents’ didactic certitude with a groove-to-your-own-tune tolerance. Who was authorized to judge, much less dictate, conduct!
Tolerance works wonders if folks are good. The flowerchildren of the Woodstock generation were presumed virtuous. If folks are evil, tolerance encourages misconduct. Trump, too, belongs to the Woodstock generation.
My dad being a didactic moralist, I became the opposite. Humans contradict their parents in the ordinary course. Other creatures apparently accept parental patterns without demurral. The old ways work fine – if it aint broke, don’t fix it.
For most of my life I figured folks were good deep down, at least meant to be, so enough with the life lessons. Problem is, morality, that is, figuring how best to be, takes work – thought, discipline – and we were a lazy lot. Instincts are insidious tutors. Do your own thing and you end up raping strangers in dressing rooms, then lying about it, then corrupting others to protect your lies, and so forth – a slave to your appetites and a danger to society. When anything goes, things go wrong – maybe not in blissful Samoa, but in bustling America.
America’s current crisis is moral. We’re not happy with things as they are and don’t know what better way to be. Our grievances are grievous, we rage, but in support of what? We’ve got goods galore but we don’t feel good. We’re staging a tantrum, so many of us, like frantic tots. Politicians echo and amplify our distress. We’re so mad we kick the cat, whose name is Civilization.
How to soothe ourselves? How to, first, subdue our sobs, then point us toward productivity and peace? How to locate the best way to be?
That’s where morality comes in. Morality, done right, is inquisitive, not prescriptive. It addresses our soul’s sickness analytically, as physicians do our body’s. It begins with basic questions: What makes me glad? What does it mean to be good? What attributes do we admire? It explores previous solutions to being and tries them on for size. It soon realizes that paradise is impossible, because humans can always imagine a preferable outcome. The forbidden fruit doesn’t tempt puppy Henry; he steers clear. We humans, sadly, are not that smart.
I got to thinking about morality because a) it’s interesting and b) it’s urgent. How best to be – as persons and a people – has seldom been less obvious. We need to use our heads – and hearts – and reason quietly together.
What is the goal of being, we must ask – the role of faith, the importance of truth? How should we be toward our loved ones, neighbors, strangers? Does beauty matter – or kindness – or grace? What does it mean to be free, to win? What mite might we contribute to the common weal? What value life – of persons, creatures, the planet?
Each question branches into others, then others, few of them simple. That is the price of thinking. The more we think, the more there is to think about. Thought carries us farther from certainty, when we’d wished the opposite.
How do we remain civil, yet not feeble, during this time of strife? How to coincide with a neighbor I cannot convince? Why not the ostrich option, sticking our heads in the sand, or the sybarites’ indifference, screw ‘em all, let’s party? Having misplaced my user’s manual to existence, I must improvise my own. Complexity recruits me. I have my work. I am glad.