What does it take for a whole society to acquire a moral compass? Or, what does it take for an individual? Here is how mine evolved. It began of course at home with my parents, neither of whom led lives that could be called moral or ethical paragons. My father was an unchurched agnostic/nonbeliever with limited education. I also suspect he might have been involved with crime. My mother was a backslidden church girl who wanted all the freedom she could have to dance, smoke, drink, and sleep with her boyfriend (following her divorce from my father) if she wanted. I was taught to obey the law since it was better than spending my life in jail, and basically to do as I was told. I did appear to have a natural empathy and kindness that my mother praised and encouraged.
I learned a lot about ethics and values in school, with various teachers pulling to encourage us to do the right thing. Some were actually inspiring. There was also a lot on TV. There is always a lot on TV, which is to say, next to nothing at all. Generally I was taught that force and violence were the best way to get anything done. Thank you Uncle Sam! Or which is to say I lived and coped and struggled in a moral and ethical vacuum up until shortly before my fifteenth birthday when I became a Christian.
My life and experience as a Christian has been very deep and intense and still, forty-five years later, I am feeling the reverberations of this all encompassing experience. I certainly learned a lot about morals and ethics through my daily Bible readings and studies and as well through conversations and dialogue with other Christians, ministers included, and through my own journeys of prayer and contemplation in my stumbling efforts to learn to hear the voice of God. In the late nineties I became more exposed to humanism, Christian and secular, and became richly informed about the importance and permanence of the fundamental human rights as promulgated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various UN covenants and charters.
I believe that most of us have an inherent sense of right and wrong, but that this in many cases remains in a rudimentary and undeveloped state. Our ethical and moral sense also is sadly fragile and vulnerable and apt to be sabotaged or even killed off by indigent circumstances, which is to say that poverty and threat of hunger can be great motivators for those seeking a career in theft, fraud, prostitution and selling drugs.
I have often struggled with this idea. It is often said, and I agree up to a point, that when one is faced with poverty, unemployment and starvation, they should not be blamed for turning to crime or prostitution in order to survive and feed their loved ones. I am thinking here for example of the various Latin American drug dealers in my own city who send the proceeds of their disgusting trade back to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Colombia to feed, clothe and educate their loved ones. These are the same guys who shed copious amounts of human blood in Latin America as paramilitaries and government thugs and have applied their transferral skills to their new lives in Canada.
It is very heartwarming to think that these thugs, while beating one of us bloody, senseless and near death to get at our wallets, cares enough for their extended families back home that they would wire our hard earned dough through Western Union to their loved ones back at home. This also brings to mind with how situational indeed our ethics become when we are under duress. When I was growing up the concept of beating the Ten Commandments into your kids was still very strong and widely held. But in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties a much gentler and kinder form of child rearing was gaining ground. Self esteem became the buzzword for child development. It was no longer considered appropriate to hit your kids and spanking became child abuse. For the first time perhaps in history a generation was growing up and coming of age that had never been struck or physically abused by their mothers and fathers. Crime rates began to plummet dramatically, this while they were electing conservative politicians promising to get tough on crime and fill our prisons with unrepentant thugs.
I heard on the radio just the other day about the concern that children are being raised too generously; that concern about self-esteem and hurt feelings has made today's young adults absolutely useless for competing for good grades in university and later in the globalized marketplace. Lovely, gentle sensitive young people being let loose in a hyper-Darwinist eat or be eaten jungle.
So, what do we do about a moral compass? There are many campaigns and projects in action for upholding and promoting human rights and caring for and aiding compromised communities in developing countries and much of this is being spearheaded by young people who grew up being nurtured and loved instead of spanked and shamed.
Does this suggest hope? I do hope so (pun intended!) In the meantime we have tonnes of work to do. I am not going to suggest here that everyone reading this post turn to religion or become Christian converts but I am still going to recommend religion for one simple reason: each of the world's great religions offers a very detailed and complex and thorough moral and ethical template. These templates need to be learned, re-learned, absorbed and inwardly digested if they are to benefit the rest of humanity. I am not recommending fundamentalism and in fact I am recommending against fundamentalism. Rather that our sacred texts be studied and read, selectively, through the lens of love: love towards God as we understand God and love towards our fellow beings, human and otherwise.
By doing so we will become examples and role models and through our own struggles to grow, to love and to live out radical ethics will we also be empowered to inspire others to do the same. Herein lies the secret of our healing.
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