A Call for Liberal Morality

Late in the 19th century, the spread of colonialism acquainted Europeans with a heterogeneous jumble of exotic societies. It was a field day for anthropologists who soon enough won a place for themselves as serious scientific observers. What did they see? As certainly as the sun never set on the British Empire, it was plain to the anthropologists that there were superior races, white of complexion and christian by preference, and inferior races, customarily with more generously endowed skin pigmentation. Superiority implied moral acceptability. Inferiority confirmed an outlook on life that was by turn "savage," "primitive," "degraded," and so on. The white man dutifully bore the burden of elevating these uncivilized heathen to the tenets of moral excellence that the white man possessed. Missionaries proliferated.

Following World War I, with colonialism increasingly discredited and humanist revolution in the air, the moral superiority to which the white man laid claim, was increasingly questioned. Closer scrutiny of the practices of the empire builders made it clear that for all their vaunted moral excellence, the behavior of the white man was little better, and perhaps much worse than that of the backward savages whom he professed to enlighten.

The reaction of the anthropologists was decisive and unforgiving. No morality anywhere could be taken as universal. One could not judge the morality of any other culture by the morality of one?s own. Different strokes for different folks. Cultural relativity entered common parlance as a touchstone for tolerance and a benchmark of worldly understanding. It passed into currency as a humanitarian mantra. Suffering a bad press among enlightened intellectuals, the very word morality virtually disappeared from the humanist lexicon. We knew about the sort of folks who were likely still to employ the "m" word and, perish the thought, made judgments about "good" and "evil." Fundamentalist believers, bigots and people who?d probably never gone beyond the 3rd grade in school, that's who.

We knew better, and in the certainty of our belief, we left the battlefield free to occupation by defenders of the faith. We simply deserted. What we left behind was indeed a battlefield, one on which morality has been the central issue ever since, one consequently in which liberals have been trounced for decades. We needn't have been. Is morality in fact so provincial a sentiment that smart folks should banish it from their speech? Purge it from their awareness?

Years ago, when cultural relativity first took hold, a type-case was offered from among the practices of the Inuit, referred to then as Eskimo. Setting out on their annual trek across the frozen wastes the Inuit would leave behind members, generally the very old and infirm, who were not going to survive the journey. Alone in the cold, so soon as food and fuel were spent, they would perish. How heartless, how utterly heartless. Could these people be called human? Why, yes, of course they could, as human as we ourselves. That was their custom, it defined their morality, and the rest of us needed to respect it.

Truth is, Inuit morality goes deeper than the utilitarian concern that cultural relativity gives them credit for. Can anyone doubt that when the family was compelled to leave grandma behind they gazed back with heartbreak eyes as their sleds glided away over the hardpack? Inuit reverence for life was and is no whit inferior to ours, nor is it of a different brand, and, despite the practices that we may observe, the same can be said for every group of people on the face of the earth.

Given a society where rape, especially of young women, under certain conditions is an accepted practice, is there anyone willing to say, "Well, that's their custom. No blame. It's not for us to judge"? However deeply ingrained one's sense of cultural relativity may be, one is hardly likely to condone rape. Look into the heart of a mother whose 13 year old daughter has been seized and violated, and see if you can be morally non-judgmental. Look into your own heart.

We are all human. Our hearts open to the same sentiments of love and close down in response to injury and assault. Human morality, we may justly conclude, is universal. Serviced by the same flood of hormones and subject to the same longings, it is endemic to the human condition.

Who then is best equipped to defend the morality in which we all share simply by being human? Those who who pile high their assets while letting the poor fend for themselves, who send off their children and the children of others on wars of conquest and acquisition, who impose restrictive covenants on the behavior of others, all the while claiming the moral high ground, who cry out with shouts of right-to life and demand capital punishment for the condemned, who pollute air and water and field, ripping forests from the soil and paving over wetlands? Can these be the defenders of the morality in which we all share?

Or, on the other hand, those who care for the poor, the aged and the distressed. Who look upon armed conflict always as a last resort and peaceable collaboration as a choice mode of relating with each other. Who are prepared to extend compassion to everyone, whatever their marital practices may be. Who respect people, all people and all living things, respect the land that gives us life, respect the air that passes through our lungs, respect the waters that quench the thirst of plant and animal alike. Can these be the defenders of morality? The answer would seem to be clear, and those of us who count ourselves among the latter have every right to proclaim our defense of moral values.

When George W. Bush tells us that we must fight against the Axis of Evil, we cringe at the word. "Evil?" Evil is a word that goes along with the belief that certain people can be possessed of the Devil. We know that there is no devil. We consider it presumptuous, self-serving and gratuitously deprecatory of George Bush or anyone else to call someone evil. It's an ugly thought, filling us with a feeling of disgust, and those who employ it are surely reprehensible. Is there really nothing about human behavior however that we can rightfully call evil? What about behavior that transgresses the innermost sanctums of human morality, actions perhaps of George W. Bush himself? Back in the 40s there was a radio serial dealing with the exploits of a crime-fighter known as The Shadow. "What evil lurks on the hearts of men?" the announcer inquired, beginning each installment in a darkly somber tone, "Only the Shadow knows." We knew too, for in those days the idea of evil had not yet been fully co-opted into the fundamentalist arsenal to be made the work of Satan. We knew evil in Nazi Germany and in Fascist Italy, and we had no trouble recognizing it elsewhere along the highways and byways of human folly. Divorced from its satanic associations, and relieved of allegations of genetic inheritance, we can see evil for what it is, a maximal dysfunction in the human psyche, and, yes, it?s all around us. Nevertheless evil is a word that liberals cannot use. Thanks to the fundamentalists, it has become firmly attached to images of forked tails, horned heads and cloven feet. Sulfured fumes cleave to it. Still we can recognize its reality and with or without the good offices of The Shadow we can do our best to deal with it.  As it is, there are other words, not yet purloined by fundamentalist usage, in which liberals can articulately express their moral values.

Value itself. Liberal values include the right of every child to have a decent meal in the morning and a well-funded school in which to learn, every family to have an adequate dwelling in which to shelter itself, all wage earners to have properly paying jobs and all retired people a life sustaining income, everyone to have full medical coverage, no-one to be sent off to war until all avenues of peaceful defense have been exhausted, government that functions in the interest of the people rather than for the profits of large corporations, an equality of rights for everyone regardless of qualifying characteristics whatever they may be and, yes, the right of people to marry as they wish. These are liberal values. They define liberal morality and voicing them as such, with pride and conviction, they should be on the tip of every liberal's tongue.

Spirituality, there's another word that liberals can claim as their own. For the past three decades spirituality has been the focus of the liberal quest for a morally meaningful existence. Teachings of gurus, workshops and retreats in enlightenment, along with a continuous flow of self-help books claim preeminence in their lives, as liberals seek to enhance their hold on spirituality. With plausible justness, liberals may regard their search for spirituality as being substantially more satisfying than the practices of the churches that they've left behind, where moral rectitude is often more visible in disregard than observance. Despite so widespread an interest in and pursuit of spirituality, who ever has heard the word voiced in the exhortations of liberal politicians? Are they too embarrassed, reluctant perhaps to be confused with the advocates of moral righteousness who so often are neither moral nor righteous? Are we?

Morality? We own it.
Burt "Daz" Alpert. Kapaau, HI 11/7/04