Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Morality Does Not Scale

The Bush-era torture memos that Obama released last month make for some horrific, gut-churning reading, but not necessarily in the way you’d expect. The Enhanced Interrogation wing of the Republican party would have us believe that it’s not torture until someone gets drawn and quartered, and certainty there’s none of that kind of stuff in here. If you’re looking for some Dante-esque carnival if horrors, you’ve come to the wrong place.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for documents that carefully, surgically, and systematically gut the moral corpus of an entire society, then you’re not only in the right place, you’ve hit the motherload. You’ll find this:

Several of the techniques used by the CIA may involve a degree of physical pain, as we have previously noted, including facial and abdominal slaps, walling, stress positions and water dousing. Nevertheless, none of these techniques would cause anything approaching severe physical pain …

And this:

To violate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering. Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. … We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.

And, this:

As we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering”… The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering”. Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

Now, it seems to me self-evident that, once you’re in the business of carefully parsing the word “pain”, once you’re cheerfully debating the atomicity of the phrase “pain and suffering”, then you’ve entered a dark and scary place. And if, furthermore, you happen to be sitting in the justice department while you’re doing this, and your mad ravings not only have the force of law, but will in fact be put into practice as soon as your leather-winged emissaries can beat a path to whichever fetid torture chamber your opinions were expressly written to justify, then the whole country is in a dark and scary place.

To be clear: what’s frightening about this whole thing is not that these people legalized torture — it’s that they changed the definition of torture so that they wouldn’t have to bother. You don’t need congressional approval to eviscerate words, or to stuff their hollow carcasses with your own twisted, self-serving perversions. What you need, apparently, is faceless lawyers in dark subterranean cubicles scratching out poorly-argued legal opinions on preordained decisions. What you need, most crucially, is moral vacuities with their hands on the level of power, people willing to subvert goodness and decency in the name of — what? Security? Paranoia? Power? Probably all those things, and a lot more. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that one of the core assumptions of our democracy — that you can codify morality in law, and place those laws in the stewardship of human beings — is now null and void. If you control the language that underlies those laws, and are willing to subvert that language, all bets are off.

So who owns morality? The obvious answer here is religion — but religion is, if anything, a worse steward than the law, precisely because morality is kind of the point of religion, and because it has so routinely failed us. I’ve seen arguments that the Old Testament contains some of the earliest moral arguments in human history, and I suppose that’s true. Commandments five through ten are still good, solid advice: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat on your wife, honor your parents, don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. However — the prime real estate in that list of to-don’ts, its first four items, are devoted to the proposition that God will absolutely kick your ass if you worship other gods, or make statues, or say His name in any context other than base supplication, or work when He doesn’t want you to work. The Ten Commandments are half moral treatise, half naked power grab.

Which is, in microcosm, the problem with all religions. They start with the premise that you are here to please your creator, and all the other stuff — all the good works — are ancillary considerations. It’s a key tenet of Christian theology that being a good person will not get you into heaven: only believing in Jesus Christ — which is to say, getting down on your knees and subjugating yourself to His will — will do that. You can spend your life feeding orphans and pulling children out of burning buildings and donating organs to strangers, but if you happen to believe in Buddha you’re going straight to hell. And you know what they think of orphan-feeders down there.

Say it another way: the problem with religion, organized religion, is that it’s just another power structure, a pyramid of oppression with some god at its apex. Except it’s not really god up there, it’s whichever obese corrupt sanctimonious cleric has declared himself the voice of god.

I don’t think, for example, that anyone outside the Bush Administration would argue that the Catholic church’s sordid history of holy excruciations were shining example of Christian morality — were anything but the opposite of moral. We don’t have anything Inquisitional in the current state of Christianity in this country, of course, but examples of Inquisitional thinking, small and large, abound: whether it’s televangelists blaming gay people for hurricanes, or political parties using outdated religious mores to browbeat the devout into submission, or befuddled born-again presidents signing off on torture.

Having said all that: I find myself, against all odds, going to church on a pretty regular basis, and listening, every week, to a couple of hours of demoralizing cant about my flyspeck irrelevance in the face of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us 2000 years ago. I’ve been doing to this for several years now, and I must say I find it all no more convincing now than I did when I started.

But — if I grit my teeth, and ignore the fables and the dogma, I find it extremely pleasant to be surrounded, every Sunday, by a group of people who genuinely care about each other, and spend large portions of their lives doing stuff for other people with no expectation of getting anything back for it: they go on missions trips, and work at soup kitchens, they do community cleanup for no other reason that they think it’s right. And the pastors, for all their afactual pronouncements on the nature of life, the universe, and everything, are devoted, caring people, who preach without pretense or sanctimony. They’re honest-to-God role models, and I like and admire them immensely.

I don’t want to romanticize this. Churches, in the abstract, aren’t morality mills, by any means: a Pew study found that 54% of churchgoers think that torture is a right and proper way to treat your enemies. Some of that comes from the unfortunate linkage of fundamentalism with the current malign strain of Republicanism, some of it from the evil genocidal stuff in the first couple of chapters of the Bible. And you certainly find lots of this kind of selflessness outside of churches and mosques and synagogues. But I’m starting to believe that, if you could strip away all the oppressive cruft and focus exclusively on the core message of the more enlightened religions — peace, love, empathy, etc — we wouldn’t need any laws, civil or religious, to legislate right behavior.

Because somewhere between our innate savagery and the outer, societal savagery with which we’re daily besieged, there’s a diaphanous skein of moral fabric that whispers the truth. More often that not, it’s drowned out by the clangor of our own worst instincts, or by the vile prattlings of the snake-oil salesmen whose primary charter is to subvert our built-in knowledge of right and wrong. It’s there, though. I didn’t used to believe it was. But, these days, I do.

There’s a book by CS Lewis, called Mere Christianity, that starts out with one of the loveliest expressions of this core idea I’ve ever seen:

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used be called the law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong the “Law of Nature”, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with the great difference that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature, or to disobey it …

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Lewis goes on to ascribe this Moral Law to Heaven, of course, but I’m willing to bet that plain old run-of-the-mill human beings started it all. I don’t know why our species would choose to invent something as toxic to its natural savagery as morality, but there’s probably a good reason for it — evolution has little patience for the unnecessary or the vestigial.

I realize that this is all just a bunch of handwaving: another kind of faith. But, again, I’d choose terrestrial handwaving over supernatural handwaving any day of the week. The problem with attributing our morality to an Infallible Omnipotent is pretty obvious: it doesn’t work. Something as creakily defective as our moral sensibilities clearly aren’t the work of an Intelligent Designer: they feel like the work of a Bumbling, Inept, Compromised, Conflicted, Occasionally Good-Hearted Designer. Which is to say: us.

But wherever morality comes from, the fact remains: even the best moral instruction isn’t actually teaching us anything. It’s unlocking things we already know.

So where does that leave us? In a not-very-good-place, I think. Morality is, first and foremost, a very personal thing, and second — if you’re very lucky — an intimately shared experience, one person to another, community to community. A kid helping a blind man across the street. A mosque sponsoring a poor child in a country thousands of miles away. An engineer giving up a six figure salary to teach in a low-income district. Morality is a lovely and fragile thing, a butterfly flitting through the landscape of the apocalypse, and when you see it in its purest form, it’s beautiful, and devastating.

But as soon as you try to scale up to the institutional level, it disappears: evanescing off the hide of the Beast like mist. It’s not that corporations, governments, and religions aren’t moral entities: it’s that they cannot be moral entities¹. Morality is a personal affair, and large institutions are apersonal: they’re controlled mobs, basically, both more and less than the sum of their parts. Sure, these giant entities sometimes make gestures toward the moral: but the gestures are always hollow, hedged, and easily compromised.

Which makes things difficult. Every aspect of our lives is controlled, in one way or another, by these institutions, and there’s little hope that they’ll ever govern according to moral principles. It feels like the only thing we can do is what we have been doing: muddle through, keeping an eye on the leviathans, and relying on people who are willing to slingshot their moral sensibilities at the bad guys until they stagger, and fall. Then gird ourselves for the next onslaught.

Maybe there’s another way. Maybe one day we’ll evolve a species of morality that’s better able to withstand the annihilating pressure of the institutional collective; maybe we’ll find a way to govern from the base of the pyramid, and filter our innate sense of right and wrong up to its apex. I’m not optimistic. But as long as this thing is inside of us, I’m hopeful.

lovely post. Every once in a while, I wake up to the strangeness of this flow of sensations and memories we call our life. And I realize I’m not the only one.

Cheney must sometimes do this, also. He must break out into a cold sweat and wonder what evil deity would have stranded him on a such a weird planet that its intelligent beings would be capable of producing a document like the Magna Carta.

From a structural point of view, we have a constitution that provides for how laws are to be written. Yet it seems that Cheney, Addington, et al preferred to roll their own laws altogether. What angered me the most, when this all began to go down, was that they were willing to send grunts to life terms in the brig as a political expedient, but none of them were willing to take responsibility themselves.

Morality should be closely tied to the animal feelings of love and shared experience that burn in each of us (even people like Cheney). But love itself can become twisted into hatred if we perceive a threat to those whom we privilege with our love.

Perhaps the real problem is that humanity itself cannot scale – that we’re simply not cut out to exist in the vast numbers that we do. But we do exist in those numbers, and we do muddle through. Nicholas Mosely calls love a “system of impossibilities”. As he puts it “Stories are the symbols we use to hold the impossibilities.”

For me, our entire human world is a system of impossibilities. Yet we manage to juggle all of this and we keep getting through.

Yes. MiniTruth, obviously.

But I also enjoy the altruism of churchgoers, and the recognition of other values than $s.