March 14th, 2007

Something really came into focus for me just a moment ago. I mean, right this instant I had a spark of revelation that simplifies much that was previously dense and labyrinthine.

If you are like me, you will have experienced a progression of moral understanding that ultimately ended in despair. The basic steps are as follows:

  1. As a young child you had to be reminded when you were acting amorally. You needed an education of some sort to recognise those times when you felt shitty for doing something "wrong". You know what I mean: Kicking the puppy or stealing $1.40 from your sister's piggy bank ... breaking a toy that belonged to a friend. Oh, sure, you may have learned to pretend that those feelings didn't exist, but if you are reading this and not dead, in prison, or straight-jacketed, then you were a normal kid with a normal sense of morality, and you just needed prompting to recognise those "trangressional" feelings.

  2. As you got older and approached young adulthood, you no longer needed assistance in identifying those feelings you got when you acted amorally. Maybe you ignored or tried to bury those feelings, or maybe you found ways to pretend that you weren't feeling them—most commonly, by thinking that only children had qualms about acting a certain way. Perhaps you learned to laugh off those feelings (especially in front of the opposite sex).

  3. By young adulthood—in university or college, especially—you really came into your own about acting with moral responsibility. Maybe you marched, maybe you sang slogans in the streets. Perhaps you wrote letters to the editor or your government. You might have started drafting a novel or other literary work to demonstrate your moral framework and to express your bafflement at the fact that not everybody saw the world with the same moral eyes you did. You couldn't understand it, but you Just Knew that you had to somehow educate the world to see what was so painfully obvious about acting with moral responsibility.

  4. Then you hit the "adult" brick wall: Morality became very complex and untenable. What is moral and proper for you might not be that way for someone else. And you could be sure that somewhere there was someone the complete moral opposite of you and you had no way of having common ground with that person. Furthermore, trying to assert your morality on that other person would be an asshole kind of thing to do, wouldn't it? You had to be a contextualist to preserve your own moral code, even though that meant acknowledging and justifying the existence of other, opposite moral codes.

  5. Oh, and then folks with some other, contradictory morality started to impose their moralistic views on yours, didn't they? And don't they continue to? And aren't you completely nailed to the ground since fighting back with your own sense of moral rectitude about yourself is nothing more than chest-beating loud idealistic posturing? By trying to impose your moralistic views on someone else you are actually contradicting those moralist views, aren't you? And, damnit, those other folks who are hammering you with their own views are positively gleeful to point it out to you, aren't they?

So what do you conclude from all this? Do you just decide that there is no moral position you can adhere to as "the right one"? Is it the ugly truth that one is one and the other is the other, and never the twain shall meet? Well, if you are like me, you sort of have to do that, don't you? You can still go around proselytizing your own code of conduct to those who already mostly agree with you, but you are kind of stuck if someone doesn't agree with you, right? You can't just try harder and talk louder than they do in hopes that they'll suddenly shut up and start listening to you (even if they clearly seem to think you might do that if they speak loudly enough).

Well, this is where the shaft of sunlight fell upon my head and shoulders a few moments ago: I realised something that unifies all moral codes as one. It identifies and segregates the posturers and people just using your moral code against you as a hammer so that they can take what they want under the guise of open-minded contextualism while they are really flexing their selfishness and greed.

It is merely this:

Morality is based on compassion, on empathy for our fellow humans.

As soon as we stray from that basis, then we suddenly have multiple and clashing senses of morality. But if we remember always to keep compassion in our hearts, then our minds will always come up with an iron-clad notion of what is moral and what is amoral. As long as our hearts stay in focus (remember, that was what we started out listening to) then we no longer have to question our moral sense. Pretty much all humans are born with compassion and empathy ... it's just that the most of us lose some or all of the willingness to listen to what those feelings are telling us as we get all bruised and battered during the normal course of a life. But listening to them informs us as to our moral path, and the world becomes greatly simplified, doesn't it? In the conflict of moralities, the most compassionate one wins—and I challenge you to think of a situation where it isn't obvious which side is the more compassionate one.

I just wonder if we can be big and emotionally strong enough to let our compassion and empathy guide our own sense of morality. It's a hard realisation to wake up to when we suddenly discover we aren't living within easy reach of empathy for our fellow humans. It's a real kick in the teeth to find out that we are wrong about our convictions. Most people haven't done it since their childhood ... some people have never even had one of those moments (the aforementioned dead, incarcerated, or straight-jacketed folks, for example). But no matter how painful that realisation is at first blush, if we grit our teeth and open ourselves to it, and if we subsequently strive to remember compassion, we can always feel strong and true in our convictions.

At the very least, we should take some time to sample the air up there. We might really like it.

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