What is Moral?

I was listening to the news on the radio the other day and heard a snippet of news that astounded me. In response to the ICC (the International Criminal Court) calling for Netanyahu’s arrest, he vehemently called the Israel army “the most moral army in the world.” On what planet is killing children and innocent women and men considered moral?

Oh yeah. This one.

I sat and considered how someone could think this — someone whose holiest book contains the 10 commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses which states “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” And then I thought about the part of the same Bible that celebrated the future King David by the women singing “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” (1 Samuel 18:7) Basically, Saul was the King’s son but David was the favorite because he killed more people and that bitter rivalry fueled all sorts of mayhem and murder. So the King made David the chosen one. Is that moral? No. But it makes for good drama. (Think of the Bible as the Netflix of its time.)

This, my friends, is why I don’t believe we should take the Bible word for word. Sure, it’s a sacred document of what people once believed and the stories of their inhumanity. But it’s important to define morality for modern times.

Killing people is not moral.

Nor is lying, stealing, or cheating.

Nor is name-calling, making fun of others, or bullying (Republicans and Democrats both guilty).

I remember the feeling when I read the whole Bible from front to back and I realized it was a tragedy. Literally, it was a Tragedy. God was (and probably still is) constantly disappointed in “his” creation.

A few years ago when I wrote a book about love that never got published, and I found this nugget of insight from Bill Barr, who speaks for the religious and political “right:”

“Among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives. But where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is the system of values that can sustain human social life? The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion. This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”

LOVE! I want to shout into the void. The answer is love! Love is the only creed you need.

In the same Bible, Jesus himself says so in multiple ways. But those words get lost in the war-mongering, morally “righteous” passions, and the politics of ignorance and revenge.

This past weekend I went to church. It was a beautiful church right next door to my apartment in NY that I have walked past a thousand times. The evening before there was a wedding (that’s the photo I posted), which seems to be the primary use of the church now that the original owners seem to be strapped for cash and customers. The inside felt like a carcass of the patriarchy — cold white marble male statues and stained glass windows with hundreds of men lost to the sands of time. The progressive group that was renting the church for their temporary home had some beautiful modern music with a full mini orchestra. But even with their LGBQT “wokeness,” the rituals of the church felt stale and dated. Although they had gluten-free communion wafers, I did not partake. Besides, who knows what’s in the chalice they dip the wafers in? I walked outside afterwards to the ancient and glorious trees planted over a hundred years ago and there I felt the presence of God. The God I know and love.

Morality is a lot like Justice. Once, I tried to read Amartya Sen’s epic tome on justice and basically had to give up because he said the truth out loud — justice is always in the eye of the beholder, as is morality.

One of my favorite thinkers of all time is Carol Gilligan, who has spent her whole 87 years studying gender, morality, and humanity. In her latest book, In a Human Voice, she reveals the evolution of her thinking and observation. I’m going to quote a long bit here because it is so perfect and relevant to these times:

“The internalization of the gender binary and hierarchy marks the psyche’s induction into patriarchy…Organized around gender and privileging the voice of a father or fathers (patres), patriarchy is at odds with democracy, which rests on a premise of equal voice or equality. But patriarchy is also unnatural — at odds with our human nature. Love and empathy threaten its hierarchy of privilege and power, and our capacity to give voice to our experience breaks its silences. To maintain orders of living where some humans are considered more human than others, it is necessary that those at the top not register the feelings of those who are beneath them and for the voices of those at the bottom not to be listened to or taken seriously. To conceive of human capacities as being either “masculine” or “feminine,” to divide reason from emotion and the self from relationships, is to sever connections that are essential to registering our experience and thus to navigating the human social world. As neuroscientists and experts on trauma concur, separations once viewed as signposts of development are now recognized to be manifestations of injury or trauma. The separation of reason from emotion and of the self from relationship are manifestations of moral injury…Moral development then depends on resistance. As a healthy body resists infection, a healthy psyche resists moral injury.”

Ironically, (or not), I went to church on Father’s Day. The topic of the sermon was wrestling with the idea of God the “Father.” Here’s the thing: Fathers are important. Good fathers are often rare and you are lucky to have one if you do. Feminism arose out of a dearth of good husbands and fathers which made a woman’s life a living hell. Not an imaginary hell, but a real one. We also saw Suffs on Broadway, which I highly recommend and adds some color to my commentary.

How about we just all try to be good PEOPLE? Mothers. Fathers. Daughters and Sons. HUMANS. Let’s not kill anyone or cause intentional injuries which will just cause the kind of trauma that only grows and expands like a cancer on humanity. There is no moral justification for war. And until we all realize that, our social media feeds and lives will continue to be stained with images of our inhumanity and immorality.

I will end with one more quote from the wise Carol Gilligan:

“Among the deepest insights I have come to in the course of my work is that the requisites for love and the requisites for citizenship in a democratic society are one in the same. Both depend on our having a voice, the ability to communicate our experience, and on our desire to live in relationship, not alone or walled off in silence.”

Here’s to love, my friends. The only moral code that matters.