From Whence Cometh Ethics and Morals?

Nature Coast Unitarian Universalists

Sunday morning, July 25, 2004, Bill Chess

When I moved to Citrus County six years ago I subscribed to the Chronicle so that I could keep track of local news and politics. I noticed a frequent column by Charlie Reese and at first glance I decided that I was experiencing my first “Southern Moment”, a right wing red-neck conservative viewpoint. This from myself, a “Northern Liberal.”

But as I continued to read the column I found myself more and more in agreement with what I was reading. This guy kept making sense! He challenged my assumptions on the “civil war” to the point that I now insist on calling it the “War Between the States.” He caused me to read more and think more on the subject. I’ve come to the conclusion that the root causes of that conflict were the usual causes- that is big money and power: Northern big money and power against Southern independence.

Slavery was a side issue, and might well have taken care of itself as the economics for it were becoming less favorable all the time. But that is another topic which I’m not prepared to address now.

His latest columns on the Iraq debacle make a lot of sense.

I certainly don’t agree with Charlie Reese all the time. His column the weekend of July 11, is so far out I won’t even try to deal with it. But his column of June 19 at first seemed to be one of those disagreements. But after careful thought, I think he got it mostly right, his conclusion just is a bit off.

I want to use the column as a straw man this morning and see if I can shoot it down a bit.

The column was entitled “Religion is Indispensable.” The first paragraph reads: “I have come to believe that one can have a successful Christian society, Jewish society, Muslim society or Buddhist society, but not an agnostic or atheistic society that is successful.” (he doesn’t seem to realize that a Buddhist society usually is an agnostic society)

His final paragraph reads: “The bottom line is that if we become an immoral people, we will eventually lose both our prosperity and our liberty. A free society cannot exist without trust, and it is morality that cements that trust. We are drifting toward the abyss, and we had all better think seriously about why this is happening.”

That paragraph I agree with. But Charlie equates belief in a supreme being with morality.

Now you and I know within our hearts that morality can and does come from other sources than belief in a supreme being. We see every day that the morality of our UU families remains well and firm whether or not our individual family members have opted into the God thing or not.

But here is where I depart from some of my more vehement Humanist UU brethren. I don’t think we have ever seen a truly atheist culture from which to judge whether morality can arise from such a culture.

We humans derive our basic morality from many sources, beginning and most importantly from our parents. Our parents influence our first development of a sense of right and wrong. Our surrounding society lends more influence to that sense and if we have developed the habit of reading and listening, there is a constant flow of support.

Our morals and codes of conduct were derived over thousands of years in the presence of God and the gods. Godly religion was intimately mixed with most human endeavor. So who is to say whether our present codes of morality could have grown in any other way? We don’t have the data.

We do know that we can successfully divorce God from morality. We are doing it and so have others throughout the ages.

But I, for one, don’t feel that I must divest myself from all references to God in my everyday life. There is too much good literature and philosophy out there to want to clean it all up.

To many people, the church and its teachings are a large part of the support of “right living”. And even the atheist does not live in a vacuum. He/she cannot help being influenced by the surrounding culture.

I can attest to all that. I grew up in an atheist family, first and second generation. But the moral teachings of my parents were very positive. And they also believed in reading and using judgment. So I was free to read anything, but was supposed to use my mind in evaluation. I read the Bible. I didn’t believe all the God stuff but a lot of other things shown through. Jesus had a lot to say on human interaction, morality and how we should treat one another, for instance.

But as I grew older I also read Robert Ingersol, Shakespeare, Emerson, and a lot of the other literature of our culture. There is a lot of morality to come by here. And lets not forget the pre-Christian works: Aristotle, Plato, and those other Greeks. Not that I read them in my youth, I’m only beginning to now.

My son grew up in an atheist/ agnostic family. He also went to UU Sunday school, which as we know deals with morality and human relations in a non-God Centered way. He was and is one of the most well read people I know. Often he knew more about the religion of his playmates than they did. He went on to be a philosophy major at Princeton. (Thank goodness he also took lots of math and computer science- so he makes a good living.)

His sense of morality and public responsibility is strong and he and his wife are raising a couple of very moral children.

Morality- the sense of right and wrong- can and must come through absorption from the culture surrounding us.

The problem Charlie Reese is having is not with Atheism/ Agnosticism; it is with amorality.

Problem one: We have a society which is growing children from children parents. The child parents lack a sense of morality and thus never impart it to their children. The children grow up in a culture which is totally mixed up. Loyalties to the group (often the gang) have a higher position than loyalties to mankind. And getting the necessities of life (which are hard to come by in the traditional ways) take a higher priority than doing what’s right by your random fellow man/woman.

Problem two: Within our more affluent culture there has crept in a sense of entitlement, which promulgates into the generations. People think they are entitled to anything they can get, in spite of whether it injures a lot of other people or not. The Enron affair is only the tip of that iceberg. And I’ll wager that a lot of those people are regular churchgoers and certainly profess a belief in God. But their culture is certainly is an amoral one.

Much of our business relationships are moving into an amoral culture. The emphasis on the “bottom line” regardless of the effects on the individual employee or customer or on society as a whole permeates “big business.” There are many exceptions to this and in some instances the moral route leads to better business, but in many instances the moral business can’t stay “competitive.”

And I dare say most of the leaders and management consider themselves moral, god-fearing individuals.

And problem three: This is the age-old problem of the ideas of the enlightened ones being hijacked by those who desire power and control. The teachings of Jesus, Mohammed, Gautama Buddha, Confucius and the Jewish philosophers, and many others have been taken over and codified by the preachers, imams, popes and rabbis to the point that the reality behind those teachings has been distorted and lost.

People can, and do, recover those teachings. Our whole civilized moral code has much to be grateful for those teachings.

I’ve been “listening” a book. Aristotle's Children by Richard E. Rubenstein. This is the publisher’s blurb about it:

“He brings the past to life in this engrossing story of social, religious, and scientific revolution during one of the darkest periods in European history. When a group of Dark Ages scholars rediscovered the works of Aristotle, the great thinker's ideas ignited a firestorm of enlightened thought. This is the endlessly fascinating account of the pivotal period in history when the modern era took root. “

It is very interesting to me that in spite of the seeming atheist stance of Aristotle, Christian Scholars began to draw a whole new philosophy from him. They went through a lot of mental gymnastics in order to fit his ideas into Christian theology. And, it must be noted, many died horrible deaths as heretics. Modern enlightened Christianity has been the result.

Here in the South liberal Christianity is in the minority. The straight jacket of codified Christianity permeates the majority of churches. But as we know our various friends in the Methodists, Presbyterians, Liberal Baptists, Unity, etc. practice a form of Christianity to which we can relate. (I won’t go so far as to say “be comfortable in”). We can also relate to our Jewish friends, and our Bahaii friends.

In short, we can relate to anyone who does not insist that theirs is the only “truth” and all others must be put down.

To return to Aristotle for a few minutes: I want to quote a passage from “Aristotle’s Children.

“People are not prevented by sensory data from understanding the universe, Aristotle insists. On the contrary, “common sense” experience is what makes consensual understanding possible. Nor are we naturally so passionate, so self-centered, or so fallen in sin that our conclusions are incurably subjective and biased. Mere opinion can be either true or false, but true knowledge, in Aristotle’s view connects us with realities that exist objectively, as well as in our minds. What gives him such confidence in the power of reason? The answer lies not so much in his glorification of the mind as in his conviction that the universe itself is meaningful. To know, Aristotle maintains, is to understand the causes of things. This sort of understanding is possible not just because humans are naturally smart, but because in a sense the universe is “smart,” too. There is a deep correspondence between the way the world works and the way we work. We have our reason, which makes it possible for us to think logical, purposive, patterned thoughts, but the universe has its own logic and purposes. If it did not – our thoughts would disappear into that void like light lost in pure darkness.

Unlike the Jews, Muslims, and Christians who would one day seize on this insight as proof of the existence of a supernatural Creator, Aristotle held that the natural universe, although meaningful, is self-sufficient. And, unlike the secularists who would one day deny that it has any intrinsic meaning at all, he asserted that it is full of purpose. Everything that exists, he taught, strives to fulfill itself – to realize (or, in his language, to “actualize”) its inherent potential. This great law makes nature comprehensible and invites us to fulfill our own destiny by learning to comprehend it. Wisdom is the knowledge of causes, but, consistent with Aristotle’s emphasis on a developing universe, his definition of “cause” is broader than ours. It includes not only a thing’s “efficient” cause – the preceding event or condition that ordinarily produces it – but its “material,” “formal,” and “final” causes – the stuff the thing is made of, the patterned way in which that material is transformed, and the purposes that guide its transformation. So, if we are to understand a particular person fully as a natural creature, we must know not only that she is the product of the sexual union of her parents but also that she is a fleshly creature animated by a soul – an individual whose natural aims are to preserve herself, continue her species, and become a self-conscious being.

As an aside, Aristotle believed so firmly in the power of reason that he often rejected experimental method. He reasoned various things but never checked them out in the “real” world for their veracity.

So here we have the very rigid, codified, Christianity of the Middle Ages suddenly introduced to Aristotle after over a thousand years. It created a struggle within Christianity, which continues over to this day.

Buried within his writing are codes of morality that may be sufficient unto themselves. Christianity attempted to make them fit within the god concepts of the church. This may well have been the first beginnings of the enlightenment.

The morality of Aristotle was sufficient without references to God or the Gods. The Christians were the ones who forced God into the picture.

I may seem to have gone off my topic but I’m trying to point out that morality and codes of ethics have been with us always and have been a developing, not a static situation.

Another aside: I don’t know how many of you are able to get C-span 2, but over every weekend they broadcast “book TV” which features authors of current non-fiction books talking about their books and fielding questions from the authors. On Saturday, the 17^th, I heard Diarmaid MacCulloch speaking on his recent book, “The Reformation: A History.” I thought the lecture and questions to be fascinating. I might even get the courage to read his book.

So my message this morning, “From Whence Cometh Morality?” is that morality comes from human culture. It has been derived experimentally over the millennia from the many lessons learned on how people can best get along together and how treating each other honestly and well can result in the greatest good for the individual and for society as a whole.

It is spread from parent to child, from village to individual, from nation to village. It is intermixed with superstition and fear. It is intermixed with love and companionship. It is the result of a lot of things that worked out well and a lot of things that were disasters.

Without it lies chaos. Those on the amoral track are doomed to repeat all the mistakes until their progeny re-learn the truths. Then again, maybe we all are doomed to repeat those mistakes.