lilgrasshoppah

Let’s face it: Morality is a sticky subject. Stand outside an abortion clinic, or bring up hot-button subjects like gays in the military… or nudity and profanity on T.V… and witness the big kafuffle that occurs. Morality is also mighty confusing, as a subject for conversation. What’s moral and what’s not changes from region to region… generation to generation… even person to person.

And, regardless of what mustachioed villains in hundreds of silly movies insist, nobody says, ‘For those of you not paying attention, I’m immoral! I’m the black hat! I’m the bad guy!” Well, maybe some do, for effect. But, those gays on parade believe themselves every bit as moral as the Marines on drill who despise them, and won’t let them join their little club. Those abortion doctors believe themselves to be under a compassionate moral imperative to kill babies to save mothers… not unlike the compassionate moral imperative the antiabortionists believe themselves to be under to do the exact opposite. Faced with this intractable state of affairs, most people will tend to avoid discussing morality. Never mind that erecting and obeying taboos is morality, too.

But that’s not why I chose to be immoral. (Relax! It’s only for effect.) I have a powerful hate for ossified moral codes because the causes of human behavior are internal, but a moral code… ANY moral code… is external. And that makes it ineffective.

Let’s say you’re cold. Let’s say you buy a coat to fix your chilled state. Let’s even say the coat serves you well. It’s a good damn coat: the best. Let’s even say you look hot in your coat. What happens when spring comes? Do you still wear your coat? What happens if, in the dead of winter, you coat gets torn, or stained, or even temporarily of little use (‘I’m going shopping, no point lugging this big coat around the mall all day!’)? The coat gets ditched. Why? Because when the coat is not useful, it is a burden.

“The clothes make the man.” What a cheap lie! I could be crude and give you the recipe for making a man… but I can’t afford an obscenity lawsuit, so no recipes today. Clothes make the covering for the man. Clothes are devices that a man uses to communicate his desire for his peers to view him as a man. The clothes that made the man in Glasgow included a skirt at one time. But forget loincloths and kilts and togas and flowing robes, and other such exceptions to the Western rule. Let’s be real ethnocentric and assume that a businessman’s attire (complete with vestigial vest and tie) is ‘the clothes that make the man.’ How big should the lapels be? How loud, long, or wide the tie? Shall there be a vent on the back of the jacket? One pocket, two… or none… on the front breast? How wild can we be with color: is plum or green okay, or must we confine ourselves to more sedate hues? What about fabric: is a man not a man because he wears silk instead of wool-blend, or what? And if the rules all change tomorrow, what then?

You see? Manhood is internal, clothing is external. The clothes do not make the man; rather the man makes the clothes. And then he sells them for $2000.00 a set. Clothing reflects what we say it reflects; otherwise there would be no fashion industry. Further-more, because fashion rules are so arbitrary and changeable, and because clothing can be easily removed and discarded, the system lends itself to hypocrisy. In other words, we can use clothes to project an image contrary to our true nature or feelings. Richard Nixon, for example, wore a suit his entire professional life; and he was a crook.

Jesus Christ wore a very expensive garment for his entire ministry. (Ha! Tricked ya!) But that isn’t what people noticed. On the morning of Christ’s execution, Pilate brought out the condemned criminal and shouted to the assembled crowd, “Look: the Man!” And not for Jesus’ fine apparel, for that had been taken from him. Jesus was standing there: practically naked, bleeding and in agony from the scourging, his face bruised by the priests and the Pharisees, weak and dehydrated… but, despite the outward appearance, Pilate perceived Jesus to be an innocent man. “Ecce Homo!”

In fact, let us pause here for a sec, and consider Jesus. We are, after all, a “Christian” country. This is, after all, a Christian column. So okay. What sort of man was Jesus? Well, his very first miracle involved turning water into wine, didn’t it? Not only that, but he performed the miracle late in the feast, when, according to the master of ceremonies, most everybody was already intoxicated. And, just to add the cherry on top, it seems that Jesus was a pretty good vintner to boot.

Jesus started his ministry by talking to a Samaritan woman at a well. To the modern person, unaware of ancient customs and prejudices, maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But it was. First of all, she was a Samaritan woman. Now, to say that Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along then is like saying Jews and Arabs don’t get along now. The Jews hated Samaritans, and the feeling was pretty mutual. No self-respecting Jew would ever dream of chatting with a Samaritan, for any reason, at anytime. But Jesus did. In fact, he did them one better by talking to a Samaritan woman. But at least she was an upstanding, well-respected, well-liked woman by the well… right? Well no. Ancient wells were like modern water-coolers. The community’s women gathered there to gossip, bond, and what have you. But in the account, the woman was there by herself, having, evidently, chosen a time when she could be by herself. Odds are: she’s an outcast. What Jesus says about her could be why. “You spoke rightly when you said ‘a husband I do not have,’ for you have had five husbands, and the man you are living with now is not your husband.” That’s a pretty impressive tally, even by modern standards. Yet, Jesus chose to minister to her first, even though there were tons of other Jews he could have talked to. Why?

And it wasn’t a fluke. Jesus closest associates were “tax collectors and sinners”. His friends were usually poor and powerless: the people who failed more often than they succeeded. Why didn’t he court the favor of the wealthy and the powerful? In fact, why did he go out of his way to insult, aggravate and annoy the wealthy and the powerful? Many of those healings he performed on the Sabbath could have kept a day or two. But Jesus chose to break the rabbinic law, right under the very noses of the rabbis.

Jesus’ detractors frequently accused him of gluttony and drunkenness. They derided him for “breaking the Sabbath.” They were horrified by his group of companions. They were doubly horrified by his habit for throwing out the money changers from the temple. In their minds, he was a rabble-rouser, a firebrand, a revolutionary. They were afraid of what the Romans would do. They were concerned with external morality, you see. They never managed to see what lies beneath the barest surface. They never really wanted to.

In fact… what did the Scribes and Pharisees do, exactly, to earn the Christ’s disfavor? What was their crime? I mean… they were sexually chaste, they obeyed the Law religiously (heh, heh), they were pious, I bet a number of them gave to charity. Jesus even told his disciples to copy what the Pharisees said… just never do what they did. So what was it Jesus hated? Hypocrisy! Jesus’ favorite epithet for them was “hypocrites!” You see, it wasn’t so much that the scribes ‘would bind up heavy loads’ on the people, it’s that they refused to help the people with those loads. It wasn’t that they strained out the gnat; it was that they gulped down the camel. It wasn’t that they were so exacting in minor things; it was that they neglected the more important things.

Jesus called the religious leaders of his time “white washed graves”, because they were ‘outwardly beautiful, but inside was filled will all manner of corruption.’ Furthermore, the Christ gave his followers a single, comprehensive law that replaced the whole Torah: that they were commanded to love one another, even their enemies. The Pharisees required unreasoning adherence to a lengthy, Byzantine, and outmoded, moral code. Jesus required only love.

The Golden Rule: what does it mean? “You must do unto others as you would have done to you.” Most people, even devout Christians, get it backwards. They say “Do onto others as they do unto you.” They put the onus on others. They make others earn good treatment. ‘You treat me nicely first, and then I’ll treat you nicely.’ But that’s not what Jesus actually said, is it? He said, figure out what you want most, and give that to everybody else. Is Mavis from your church bugging you because she never invites you for coffee? Invite her for coffee! Maybe she’s intimidated by you! Does James aggravate you because he sings off-key? Well sing louder! Maybe he just needs somebody for him to follow! In fact: you forget what I just said. I don’t know “James” or “Mavis.” And I don’t know you. You have to decide what your friends need. You have to decide what your enemies need. Most importantly, you have to decide what you need. And live it.

Finally, every case of genocide in history has been preceded by [usually spurious] moral outrage. How’s that for irony? The best modern example is what the Nazis did to the Jews. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and that bunch accused the Jews of all sorts of heinous crimes, before they began butchering them by the millions. But there are other examples. What the European invaders did to the natives of the Americas. First they maligned them, and then they slaughtered them. Cortez and his cronies were so horrified by the slaughter that the Aztecs made to honor their Sun God, Quetzalcoatl, they immediately slaughtered the Aztecs to honor their Son-God, Jesus Christ! How it works is, most people won’t support bald imperialism. “We’re taking it because we want it, and you can’t stop us,” doesn’t work as a reason for taking another country’s stuff. It’s immoral, see? But if they have some sort of moral defect, well then we have to invade… heck, we’re practically obligated too!

And again, because external morality can change like that <finger snap>, an invader with his mind set on genocide, and a gift for spin can make up any reason he likes, and people will support him. That’s morality’s job, see: to create us versus them situations. Us: the innately superior adherents to the moral code, and them: the poor saps who are deficient, in some way. Ethics, on the other hand, presupposes everybody to be equal, because we have to treat others as we want to be treated. Would we like it if somebody took all our stuff because they didn’t like some quirk of our culture? Okay then. That means we can’t take theirs. Ethical people see no “Them,” for there is only ever “Us”.

This is it. I don’t care what you call the thing that modifies your behavior: morals, ethics, or Allbran® cereal. The point is: you can’t expect it to have a lasting effect if you wear it like a coat… if it is external to your experience. If it’s not inside you, if it’s not motivated by love, then it will turn you into a hypocrite. And I’ve always said, “It’s better to be thought of as immoral, than to be a hypocrite.”

ADDENDUM:

Whenever you talk about atrocities like the Holocaust, people are quick to disavow all responsibility. “We had nothing to do with that!” They even say it over glasses of schnapps, “Maybe iz zee uzzur unitz zere was zee occasional how you zay, ‘bad happeninkz’, bot in mien unitz, Vee had nussing to du wiz zat keelink of zee Jooz! In fact, I knitted zocks for zee Resistance fighterz!” This is essential to a moral code: somebody else does the bad thing. If you don’t speak German, then those “Ehffing Krauts” killed the Jews; if you do speak German, then the “other Germans” did. Either way, unless your name is Adolf Eichmann, or Reinhardt Heydrich or Joseph Mengele, or Heinrich Himmler, you personally had nothing to do with the actual Holocaust. Somebody else lacks the moral fibre and courage and strength, etc… somebody other than you.

I’m gonna tell you something real interesting about the human genome. There are few differences between any two. In fact, to us, The Untrained, there are no differences. Now to a fierce individualist such as myself, that’s a little depressing maybe… but what does it mean? Where am I going with this? Simply this: we have more in common than not. More of me went into making the Holocaust than not. Because 99.999999 etc % of my genes belonged to Reinhardt Heydrick, you see. 99.999999 etc % of my genes also belonged to Adolf Hitler. Hence, almost all of what makes me human conceived and implemented the horror of the Holocaust. When I understood this, I understood that it’s not even a case of, “There but for the Grace of God goeth I”… rather it is “There but for the Grace of God I went.”

We have to take responsibility for ourselves. But what is this word ‘responsibility’… what does it mean? Lots of people, even myself for a time, take it to mean “accept blame,” with the intent of punishing the offender (ie: “you didn’t clean your room; you’re grounded, mister!”). That’s not the way I intend to mean responsibility. “This is your mess. You made it, you have to clean it”… that’s what I’m talking about. Everybody is human, and human is everybody. You have to take responsibility for yourself. That means never dismissing “other people’s atrocities” as an anomaly of their culture. Every human will behave according to certain behavioral patterns if you apply the correct stimulus. This is unavoidable. You can’t wish this fact away. Given the right push, everybody will kill their neighbors for appalling reasons. You have to clean that mess up in yourself before you hope to help people clean up that mess in themselves. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about removing the rafter from your own eye before attempting to remove the straw from your brother’s. This is what ethics is all about.