I was dreaming today, as I do every day. I wander in and out of wherever I am. And I was dreaming of a world where the Church researches, and understands the psychodynamic roots of these “sins”, and rather than viewing them as moral or spiritual failings, sees them as what they are: predictable results across statistical populations with certain common psychological histories.
The farther I go, the more I see, the more I feel that morality, per se, is stupid. Fucking stupid. It is not that I don’t believe in doing the right thing. It is not that human beings are not happier when the people around them behave in predictable and harmonious ways.
It is simply the case that water tends to flow downhill, and people tend to implement the patterns with which they were raised. They tend to become what they see, and they tend to repeat what they become.
Now, for some, “virtue” is easy. Virtue on my reading and rendering is simply enlightened common sense. It is intelligent selfishness. It is seeing the big picture, and being personally integrated enough to act on it.
For many others, and I would include myself here, we have large weights placed on us, and we are cut in a thousand places. We want to get rid of the weight, and avoid being cut again. For many, this means cutting others first, resisting others first, mistrusting them first. It means in no case being open, or trusting anyone enough to hurt us again.
In Christianity we are told to love. How can you love, when you are bleeding, and the people who cut you preached love? Can you reconcile those wounds with charity and caring? No.
So my dream is that notions of “morality” coupled with judgment gradually give way to on-going efforts at understanding, remediation, and teaching.
To be clear, we need social and cultural codes. We need to know what to expect from one another. We need an internalized voice telling us what is right and what is wrong. I do not dispute any of this.
I guess the question I want to ask, which needs answering, is “How do we make all the things we want more likely?” How do we make what we call morality more likely? How do we build empathy in people? How do we build self knowledge? How do we build perceptual capacity, such that they can see far down the road?
As for myself, I am still a sinner. I still am often wracked with pain. But I do have a vision.