What Is Morality?

I simply point out that this is an issue on which people of equal intelligence and equal good faith and equal vehemence have differed and have differed within this chamber.

-- Michael Mukasey, responding to Senator Richard Durbin during the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on 1/30/08

No signs from Heaven come today
To add to what the heart doth say.

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Yesterday, your friend and mine, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, again refused to voice an opinion on waterboarding. You can watch excerpts from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing as provided by Democracy Now!. There are a lot of things lately to which my response is mostly sadness, since my anger is reduced to impotence, and this is another one of those things. As quoted above, Mr. Mukasey contends there is an open debate on the issue of waterboarding between people of "equal good faith." I have great concern for those of you who believe that Mr. Mukasey's position has merit. I am at complete loss to discern the good faith inherent in the resurrection of a practice that has been unequivocally perceived as torture for 500 years.

What is morality? What is there to tell us that an action is right or wrong? There are studies exploring what innate sense we might have as a species to guide us in moments of uncertainty, but we don't seem to have settled much. For the most part, we're left to settle this ourselves in our own way, by following the dictates of our faith or our own conscience. I suspect that when things are most uncertain, it is our conscience alone that must determine the course we pursue.

So what is conscience? I'm sure I don't know. I believe conscience is something inherent, but also that it can grow and mature. I believe it's something with which we must take great care, as it's very fragile. I'm not going to be precise here, but I do recall that even the Bush Administration draws the line at interrogation methods that "shock the conscience." In that context, it is assumed that people of "equal good faith" may experience that shock at different points on the spectrum of these activities, which leaves us in considerable difficulty to address the issue on a global scale.

So, I don't have any answers, at least for you. For myself, there is no debate. If you knew everything about me, you might believe that I am moral, or you might not. I certainly do things that some would call immoral, and for that should I be dismissed? If there's anything beyond all our capabilities, it's the attempt to impose what you should or should not believe. If we peer into the central core of American values, you will find this sanctity of the innermost individual beneath all else. I hope it's not lost on you how much that's paradoxical to this can also be found, as we often so gratefully cede the burden of absolute freedom to "higher authorities."

The story of The Grand Inquisitor appears about one-third of the way into Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. It's located in Spain during the time of the Inquisition, and describes a brief reappearance in its midst of the Christ, who walks amid the crowds healing the sick and raising the dead. The old Inquisitor immediately calls for His arrest, then visits Him in His prison cell for questioning, but Christ is silent. Unable to contain himself, the Inquisitor offers his defense of the path that his religion has followed, and why Christ Himself had become an impediment to the people's best interests.

We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written: "Mystery." But then, and only then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all. And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones who could become elect, have grown weary waiting for Thee, and have transferred and will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner against Thee? Thou didst Thyself lift up that banner. But with us all will be happy and will no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves. Others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another. The rest, weak and unhappy, will come fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you. Save us from ourselves."

-- The Grand Inquisitor (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

I will not argue that freedom is not a terrible burden. I have struggled with all sorts of freedom all of my life, and though I've been modestly successful in retaining a measure of freedom, it's come at a great price. It's for that freedom that I have not remarried, that I have broken, for now, my ties to lucrative employment, and devote myself to the exercise of my freedom with as little restriction or consequence to others as I can assemble. I am as free from the daily indignities as my imagination and ill health can ever permit, and it is a burden, and a pressure, that weighs on me more than you know.

I can make almost all my own choices within this framework, or take no stand in any debate and withdraw from view, but in this paradise of uncoerced freedom I find myself explaining myself to Christ just like the Inquisitor, and cannot say if I have any argument more compelling. I only know -- but I know it deeply -- what I feel.

I'm told that Michael Mukasey has a portrait of George Orwell on the wall of his office, and his explanation for this is his admiration for the "clarity" of Orwell's writing. You can find elsewhere on this blog that I recently re-read Mr. Orwell, both 1984 and Animal Farm. There are a couple of spots in 1984 when Orwell's writing achieves a high degree of clarity: one place that contains excerpts from an underground book that exposes the behavior and motives of the Party, and the other when O'Brien, in a scene very reminiscent of The Grand Inquisitor, offers his view of events that have led to the imprisonment/torture of Winston:

You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.

-- O'Brien (George Orwell, 1984)

There are an unsettling number of points with which I am in complete agreement with O'Brien, including doubt whether reality exists in its own right. There is Being, and there is Becoming, and there lies freedom. What you do to inform that Becoming is up to you.