The Impossibility of Morality

We have dark sides and do bad things. How come we all think we are good people?

Part of our political, and temperamental, divide revolves around how seriously to take morality. How idealistic to be about goodness, how hard to try, or whether to be more realistic to be about our dark side. For all the platitudes and commandments, the sad fact is that morality is impossible, so the question is perhaps more how intensively we blind ourselves to darkness rather than how dark we will actually be.

Weird, right? But the closer you look, the more impossible it is to follow any system of morality. There are Jains who will not hurt a fly, let alone eat meat. But plants have feelings too. And our guts contain astronomical numbers of organisms in a roiling dance of macabre death. What about them? Existence as a human is unavoidably destructive. Simpler moral systems preach kindness to others. But again, existence requires feeding one's own fire, and that must come at cost to something, or someone. Every trade is unequal, even if voluntary. Employees are notoriously exploited to give more than their fair share. The Earth is relentlessly exploited. There is no end to our appetites, as long as we are alive.

Psychologically, we build up defenses to say that we are no worse than others, that we are good people. Even if we are bad people, we say that we have been driven to crime, and it is no worse than the rich people who thoughtlessly abuse others. Or if we are a presidential candidate, we say that we are saving the world, and making America great, and the subject of cruel witchhunts. Self-defense is one more essential part of living, even if it comes at the expense of seeing the world clearly. Unflattering visions of our way of life are rejected and repressed, the more so if they come as criticism from others.

Defensive blindness is integral to "modern" life. The agriculture and food processing industry keeps the slaughterhouses hidden, the feedlots and inhumane poultry coops under wraps. The less we know, the better we feel. Money is the ultimate screen against the squeems and qualms of existence, shielding us from the rapacious mining that our electronics drive in tropical forests, the slave labor that makes our clothes, and countless other immoral and destructive processes we are ultimately responsible for. Clear consciousness of all this would make the whole system collapse.

Protesters carrying the pine tree flag of Christian nationalism. While doing good things for the country.

Religions offer their own forms of defense. Confession in the Catholic church is a classic way to touch the darkness, but then to be absolved and feel good again. Exorcisms are offered as well. Protestant approaches tend to focus more on works, like community service, or in fringier precincts, on sermons of self-glorification. Everyone who is reborn in Christ is part of the club, and though a sinner, is also good, glorious, and heaven-bound. Possibly, even, in the Mormon system, himself a god. How they engage with moral darkness varies tremendously by religion, but the common need is to control it, in ourselves and others, sufficiently that our self-image of goodness and light can be preserved.

The extensive repression of moral darkness leads to the countervailing temptation to take another peek at it, under controlled conditions. It is the inspiration for much art- the detective thiller, the horror movie, the general apparatus of drama. Without darkness, there is no interest or light. And people differ markedly in their approach to such material. The more liberal and optimistic tend to focus on the light side, not the dark side, and do so politically as well. They have more moral idealism and hope, which means they have more repression of darker tendencies. Kumbaya is sung. Conversely, the more "realistic", conservative attitude scoffs at the do-gooder idealism of the left, and sees darkness around every corner- in foreigners, in sexual transgression and expression, in fluid social systems, in change itself. They recognize that moral aspiration is futile- such as the woke trend of recent times .. the bending over backwards to every minority group, micro-aggression, every insect and animal, and the climate.. is putting up an impossible and futile bar. That sticking to basics and tradition is going to get us further than such refusal to recognize the dark reality of human existence. 

These valences are apparent in the Palestinian dilemma. As the Palestinians were expelled from Israel during its establishment, the Jews proclaimed a right for Jews all over the world to come to Israel. Meanwhile, the UN created a right of return for Palestinians, to the very same land that formed Israel. It was the ultimate expression of bleeding heart unrealism, and has led (in part) to the existentially stuck misery of Palestinians for all these decades, as the UN took it upon itself to nurture an absurd dream of return and set up a now-permanent refugee apparatus of feeding, schools, and health care, all of which fuels the seething anger and terrorist dreams of ever-growing generations of Palestinians.

Another example is the US war in Vietnam- a curious and tragic mix of blindness, idealism, and realism. We wanted to help the (South) Vietnamese defend themselves from communism. In light of what happened in North Korea in the ensuing decades, this was not a bad goal. North Korea is moral darkness incarnate- a cruel and criminal dictatorship. But once the enormity of the task became clear, the moral realists took charge, with the aim of bombing Vietnam and its neighboring countries into submission. But even such extreme measures failed, leaving us with the ashes of horrible means used in the service of a futile goal. The US media was increasingly unwilling to hide the horrors, bringing into American consciousness all this darkness, which turned out to be unbearable.

So, is it better to blind ourselves to the darkness, and risk destruction and error, or better to be realistic, explore it, even celebrate it, as the Homeric epics do, and gird ourselves to deal with it, and deal it out to others? As in most things, societies are probably best off with a mix of perspectives. This mix is perennially expressed in our political spectrum, though of late the right seems to have gotten caught up in a peculiar reaction against the pieties of the left. As the left has gained the cultural and governmental high ground, as shown by the triumph of gay rights, ever-increasing concern for racial minorities, and a rising tide of official movement on environmental concerns, the right has turned apoplectic. They seem to be saying ... "We love our trucks, we won the continent fair and square, and we won the racial contest as well.."- leave us to our spoils, and don't be so concerned about "fairness" .. life isn't fair or moral, but goes to the darkest, baddest winner. (One can hear echos of the Confederate South in all this clearly enough.) Those on the left who are besotted with woke-ness and fairness will be singing a different tune when they are not at the top of the heap anymore, in their well-gentrified, rich and safe neighborhoods.

Perhaps this portrayal is extreme, but extreme concern for the moral fairness within a society can blind us to other issues, such as the competitive underpinnings of life, both within and verus other societies, and the ultimate impossibility of being totally fair, or moral, as historical actors. A balance of moral idealism and realism about unavoidable dark aspects is needed, but not in a conflict that tears the society apart. That depends on communication between the two sides, and less totalizing certainty from each side's respective mechanisms that repress doubt and screen (or valorize, in extreme cases) various different aspects of darker morality. Religion is notorious for reshaping its adherent's realities and protecting them psychologically from their own evil actions. But left wing certainty functions similarly, with its echo chambers and pieties. So, as usual, deeper insight is needed, mostly of our own blind spots and what they are hiding, but also of how such mechanisms work across the spectrum.

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