Why Are We Good?
The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville
Asheville, NC
August 10, 2008
READINGS
From Genesis 18:16-33
The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” Then the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.”
So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom 50 righteous in t5he city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for the lack of five.” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find 45 there.” Again he spoke to him, “Suppose there are 40 found there.” He answered, “For the sake of 40 I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let the Lord be angry if I speak. Suppose 30 are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find 30 there.” He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose 20 are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of 20 I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose 10 are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of 10 I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.”
From May Sarton
Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.
Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.
Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor
SERMON
It is one of those little-cited passages in the Hebrew scriptures from the life story of Abraham, part of a grim chapter that when it is read is cited as an lesson of the destruction that awaits evil doers. But as this passage suggests the story is more complex than that. In fact, the story tells us little about the “wickedness” that is supposed to have been practiced in Sodom and Gomorrah. The only sin that the Bible presents, contrary to the florid preaching of fundamentalists, is not homosexuality, but a threat by a group of men to gang rape two strangers whom Abraham’s brother, Lot, offered to put up for the night. Lot hardly acquits himself well in that interchange, offering to let the men have their way with his daughter instead, viewing the violation of his child to be a lesser offense than the violation of strangers. The episode ends when the guests reveal themselves as angels and blind all the men at the door. The next day as Abraham and some of his family escape, the story says these angels see to the destruction of the cities.
But let’s step back for a second and look at what the story tells us about the interchange between Abraham and God before that. It begins with this conversation that God has with himself, “Should I hide from Abraham my plans to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? No, he’s really a part of this story. I need to clue him in.” So, God lays out his plans. Now, does Abraham demur, simply bow to the Almighty and go on? No. He raises a question: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” God accepts the question, and so they go about haggling until God agrees that if just 10 good righteous people can be found he will spare the cities. The story suggests that those 10 are never found and as Abraham and his family flee fire and brimstone rain down.
Whether or not we regard that ultimate judgment as just, the story raises two issues. First, moral judgments are tricky. They involve many factors and competing values. We don’t know at the end whether God got tired of haggling or that he and Abraham were agreed.
But even more important, Abraham’s question raises the issue of how we know what is morally just and true. This is a point that also resonates in one of Plato’s earliest dialogues in which Socrates asks one of his young pupils, how he knows whether the decrees of the gods are just. Are they just simply because the gods declare them? In that case those dictates are simply divine whims. Interestingly, this very point arises in the Bible only four chapters after the episode of Sodom and Gomorrah, when God demands that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. This time God gives no reasons and Abraham asks no questions, leaving generations of readers puzzled and terrified.
The other alternative, Socrates says, is that moral reasons exist independent of the whims of the deity. This is what Abraham’s question of God in the story implies: that God, in Abraham’s words “the Judge of all the Earth,” is obliged to act justly. How are we to read that? I read it to say that justice, that moral action is not a cut and dried thing, not a matter of rule books and prescriptions, but a matter of principled exploration grounded in deep appreciation.
Philosopher Susan Neiman (1) points to the story of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah as a kind of touchstone for helping us attain what she calls “moral clarity.” She complains of the current state of affairs where she says the debate over morality is centered in two camps: one, which she identifies as the religious perspective, declares that moral judgments are not ours to discern but are given from on high; the other views all morality as constructed, a system of rules put together to serve the best interests of all.
The problem with the conventional religious perspective, as Neiman puts it, is that it “reduces us to the moral level of four-year-olds. If you follow these commandments you’ll go to heaven, and if you don’t you’ll burn in hell is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which we raise our children. If you clean up your room you’ll get the cookie, and if you don’t you’ll stay inside.”
But, she says, “Those of us who have raised (children) . . . know that even if we rely on bribes and threats in the short term, the moral behavior we seek to instill requires us to get beyond them. We want to prepare our kids to be responsible and generous and straightforward even when rewards are not forthcoming.” The conservative religious response, of course, is that it is not bribery but faith that guides the decision to place one’s confidence in divine decrees. The problem is that it is not always clear what to have faith in. The scriptures that purport to direct us are unclear, and blind faith offers little comfort.
The problem with a constructed morality is that it always comes up short. No matter how clever or wise the system there inevitably comes a point where morality and self-interest part ways. We can tinker with the system, but in the end are left with little more than a shrug of our shoulders and the suggestion that the enterprise of moral discernment itself is a mere exercise of interest-based politics.
As disparate as these two perspectives are, Neiman says, they share the viewpoint that “morality must be commanded,” either by God or by the systems we create. But what about those, she says, “who believe that being moral is not a matter of following orders . . . but about the dignity of freely choosing to do right?”
It is a pertinent question for us to consider here, for I believe that we Unitarian Universalists are among the group that Neiman identifies. We understand the moral life to be centered in free choice by and among people of inherent worth and dignity. And yet, to follow this path has consequences. It means that we give up the notion that morality arises from some transcendent source. The image we end up working with is not that of Moses on Mt. Sinai receiving tablets engraved by the Almighty but of Abraham haggling with his Maker over what justice demands.
So, if we are to go this way, where do we begin? If morality has meaning and is not a mere construct, where does it come from? Why are we good? Almost a century and a half ago when Charles Darwin published his “Descent of Man” he took note of a curious pattern across species. Many birds, mammals, and primates seemed to behave in ways that we would interpret as moral: showing self-sacrifice, care for the sick, sympathy for injury. This observation is part of what informed his conclusion that, as he said, “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not kind.”
Darwin was careful, though, not to impute anything like what we consider morality to animals, insisting that he felt true moral action required intellectual reflection and the ability to compare our actions against a universal code. Few others, though, were willing to go even that far. Thomas Henry Huxley, who supported evolution so strongly he became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” insisted that morality was precisely what distinguished humans from animals. “The ethical progress of society,” he said, “depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
This was consistent with the widespread, though mistaken, view in the 19th century that Darwin’s work revealed a brutal and heartless dynamic at work in the world known as “survival of the fittest.” Nature was “red in tooth and claw,” each creature striving for the main chance against every other creature. Rather than a font of morality, nature was awash in depredation.
This perspective was in tune with the prevailing Calvinism among Protestant churches, the notion that the world is a source of sin and depravity and that we humans, too, were born with the stain of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden. From such a perspective, the suggestion that we humans, independent of divine supervision, could be depended on to freely choose the right was ridiculed as hopelessly naïve. Instead, they insisted, self-interest assures that we will always look out for number one. H.L. Mencken nicely laid out this perspective when he defined conscience as “the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking.”
But not everyone saw it that way. The philosopher John Dewey observed that, “I question whether the spiritual life does not get its surest and most ample guarantees . . . when it is found that man in his conscious struggles, in his doubts, temptations and defeats, in his aspirations and successes, is moved on and buoyed up by the forces which have developed nature.”
In recent years as the genetic connections to other species has been made clear, a new generation of scientists has plumbed these connections more deeply to make an even stronger case than Darwin’s: that what we might call moral traits, such as an emotional response to others’ suffering, which we see especially in higher primates, are part of the evolutionary package that we received and operate within us. The moral impulse is not a veneer that our evolutionary advancement slapped on top of a beastly essence but is part of that essence, part of us to our core.
To say that the moral impulse lies within us, though, is not to say it always operates. Together with the lessons to be good we are also taught that life is not fair. Not everyone, we learn, can be depended on to act morally, and we become vigilant and adept at spotting selfishness and hypocrisy. So, two researchers recently asked the question: which lies deeper within us, the impulse to protect ourselves or the impulse to act morally?
To answer that question they designed an experiment. They invited research subjects to choose between two tasks on a computer: an easy hunt through photos that takes only about 10 minutes, or a more tedious exercise in mental geometry that takes 45 minutes. The subjects had the choice of how the chores would be divvied up between themselves and another person: either a computer would randomly assign them, or the subjects could assign them.
When they asked another group of people not involved in the experiment what would be fair, all agreed it would be unfair for people to give themselves the easier job. Yet, in the experiment three-quarters of the subjects gave themselves the easy job, and what is more afterwards in a survey assessing their experience they gave themselves high marks for acting fairly.
Yet, if the subjects were asked to memorize a list of numbers and retain it before being asked whether the assignments were fair, they judged themselves as harshly as the independent group did. The researchers concluded that that little bit of extra mental work left the subjects’ brains too busy to rationalize their behavior, to self-justify actions that in their hearts they felt were wrong. Instead, they fell back on their intuitive feelings about fairness.
“Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them,” wrote the philosopher Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens without and the moral law within.” Whether or not we choose to describe the moral impulse as law, there is no denying its power or urgency. We feel it in our gut, even when we try to rationalize it away.
And, while it is not the sum total of our moral awareness, it does provide us a starting point. We begin with a native empathy, a trait we find distributed widely among children of all cultures, and follow it to its natural consequences, which amount to one variation or another of the Golden Rule: do to others only what you would have them do to you. Our minds engage with our hearts and help us sort out those actions, those decisions that advance that perspective.
It isn’t always easy. We are conflicted by tribal allegiances and sensual pleasure. Our abstracting mind defines the good in absolute terms, leaping over the complexities that the world presents us. Always we are in need of the corrective of humility, a virtue that as its roots suggest carries us back to Earth, to humus and the human, not the God-like and absolute.
Why are we good? The simplest answer is that we are good because it works and because we want to be. Ethical behavior advances our interests. It serves us well. Yes, there is always someone pushing the boundaries, trying to work a deal that advantages them and disadvantages another. But we learn quickly to keep our eyes out for such behavior. As a community we can organize to stop it and, if we are wise, work at converting it, at bringing the perpetrator back into the circle of care, which, after all, is where he longs to be in the first place.
But even more it is plain that moral behavior satisfies a deep need bred into our species from its earliest days. We are meant for each other, and we know that in our bones. In commandments and moral absolutes we look for an easy way of nailing down the conditions that will put us and keep us in right relationship. Sad to say, life isn’t that simple. We need to be supple and open, flexible enough to adjust to circumstance. We need to be ready to haggle with those who present themselves as presumed authorities.
And yet, at the same time we must be centered, centered in the natural empathy that is our birthright, empathy that sides with life and with love. Come, says May Sarton, out of the dark earth that was our origin. Come into the air beyond all heaviness, where love might touch us with a primeval candor, a candor so deep that it resonates through us. If we are centered in such a place, the divisions that so often absorb us fall away. In such a place we learn a generosity of spirit and are able look at another’s pain or humiliation and see it as our own.
It is not a place that we live, not yet. There is, as Denise Levertov puts it, too much broken that must be mended. But we can aspire to it, to a life of generosity and integrity that comes closer to be realized every moment that we act to bring it into being.