In my home state of Kentucky, college basketball is our religion. We all know it and we all agree upon it, at least tacitly. Our catechism begins, “On, on, U of K, we are right for the fight today,” and ends, “We will kick, pass. and run ’til the victory is won.” Granted, it’s no “Song of David,” but the steady time signature can keep huge crowds plowing along on roughly the same beat. It binds us together in acts of vicarious catharsis, a solidarity that I take to be the point, more or less, of organized religion.
So earlier this fall, when a grassroots movement began in Corbin, Kentucky, to introduce a bill before the state legislature that would require the Ten Commandments to be posted in public buildings, I simply took it as testament to the fact that basketball season hadn’t begun. But here it is December, the Kentucky Wildcats are 3–0, and still the Ten Commandments are popping up on classroom and courtroom walls in Pulaski, McCreary, and Harlan County.
The Kentucky General Assembly passed the same bill into law back in 1978, only to have it struck down by the US Supreme Court two years later. But decades have passed, and last week a sizable religious contingent took to the steps of the state capitol, rallying again for public display of Mosaic Law. When I turned on the news, I saw teenagers wearing what looked like sandwich boards, each one embossed with one of the commandments. The girl who stood closest to the camera was holding a placard that read in large block letters: THOU SHALL NOT WORSHIP ANY GRAVEN IMAGES. I wondered: When was the last time anybody even saw, much less worshipped, a graven image? The images we worship these days are the opposite of graven; they are created by pixels—images of celebrities, or people who want to be celebrities, endlessly reproduced on the screens of our TVs and electronic devices. And while I would argue that worshipping these images does pose serious problems for American adolescents, that’s not why the schools and courthouses of eastern Kentucky were filling up with the Ten Commandments.
So let me move on to the other commandments. As for the latter half of the Decalogue, there usually isn’t much objection, even from the most strident antichurch quarters. Commandments six, eight, and nine (killing, stealing, perjuring) offer undeniably good advice for anyone who wants to stay out of jail. In my state—and I don’t think Kentuckians are unique this way—disregarding the tenth commandment about your neighbor’s wife is a good way to get yourself killed. And conversely, being faithful to one’s spouse (number seven) can prevent a lot of heartache all around. In the word of Pulaski County judge-executive Darrell BeShears, these later proscriptions are just “good rules to live by.”
No, it’s really the first few commandments that ultimately get the attention of the chief justices. In fact, the first commandment presents such a theological and political snare that a serious thinker might never even move on to the second. Thou shalt have no other gods before me has always troubled theologians, seeing as it catches the one-and-only-God admitting to the existence of other gods. And that, of course, is the real problem. About 15 percent of “other” Americans—“other” being the statistical category to which they are usually relegated—believe in other gods. Or in no gods. Or in goddesses. Or pagan spirits. And therefore, out of respect for every citizen’s religious liberty, the First Amendment bars the state from endorsing or enforcing—from establishing—a particular religious point of view. Such is the ACLU’s argument whenever it is summoned (in McCreary County it was contacted by the judge-executive’s own cousin) to mount a legal defense for civil liberties.
But personally, I have another problem with the Ten Commandments: they simply aren’t all that inspiring. After all, what student or citizen was ever stirred to intellectual creativity, much less self-realization, by a list of ten things he or she cannot do? It’s a low bar, a dreary set of prohibitions by a god who doesn’t seem to put much trust in his chosen people. It seems to say: If you can’t be good, at least don’t be bad. Good advice for a penal colony, perhaps, but not for the one democratic institution—public schools—where we put our hope and faith in the generations to come.
I would like, therefore, to propose that another set of injunctions be hung publicly as an alternative to the Ten Commandments. This credo is at once inclusively and uniquely American. I am speaking of Walt Whitman’s poem “Laws for Creations,” which goes as follows:
LAWS for Creations,
For strong artists and leaders, for fresh broods of teachers and
perfect literats for America,
For noble savans and coming musicians.
All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world,
There shall be no subject too pronounced—all works shall
illustrate the divine law of indirections.
What do you suppose Creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free and
own no superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but
that man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
And that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach Creations through such laws?
This poem has a lot to recommend it. “Laws for Creations” is shorter than the Ten Commandments, for one thing. And Whitman’s penchant for repetition makes it easy to memorize. More importantly, it never mentions the word not. This is significant, because whereas the Ten Commandments obviously fell from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Whitman derives his laws from the other, neglected Tree of Life, which also stood in the middle of the early paradise.
From the Tree of Good and Evil, we learned to judge the world, and to judge each other. It was only after Adam and Eve ate from this tree that they felt shame about their nakedness. When Yahweh found them stitching together fig-leaf loincloths, He asked why, and Adam responded, “Because I was naked.” That’s how Yahweh knew the first humans had eaten from the forbidden tree: they spoke a new language—the language of judgment.
Before that, they spoke only a poetry of naming. When Yahweh bestowed upon Adam and Eve the task of conferring names upon all the beasts of the garden, He allowed them to take part in the mystery of creation, making words out of the same substance—pneuma, breath—with which He had called the world into being. But saddled with the new knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve abdicated their role as poets and became, to Yahweh’s great disgust, critics.
Consider the telling comment that Yahweh makes to the angels after he finds the primordial parents dressed up in fig leaves: “Man has become like one of us, he knows good and evil” (3:22). Such an extraordinary admission actually allows us to answer Western philosophy’s most foundational question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” That is to say, why does the world exist in the first place? The answer, we learn here, is that Yahweh wanted to create a world that would operate outside the knowledge of good and evil—a world without judgment. There is no other accounting for his single, arbitrary prohibition against eating from the second tree.
Yahweh must have grown bored with his own dry realm of unchanging, infallible laws. In the middle of a brilliant legal career, Yahweh realized one day that He hated his job as high judge, ultimate arbiter. So He set up a potter’s wheel in the shed out back and spun the universe into being. It was a work of art, a world where beauty trumped law and desire was the syntax of design. Which is to say, it was a very Whitmanesque kind of place. And that is the ontological and theological realm Whitman calls us back to in “Laws for Creations.” If we turn our attention back to the Tree of Life, he urges, we might begin to understand how the natural laws of this world—“the divine laws of indirections”—are synonymous with the laws of the Creator.
It was a tenet of transcendentalism—the antinomian American religion that Ralph Waldo Emerson invented and Whitman readily embraced—that the natural world is a scripture we can translate if only we pay close enough attention. (In another poem, Whitman called the flowering world “a realm of budding bibles.”) What we need, say Emerson and Whitman, is already here. For Emerson, the study of nature is a religious sacrament because we come to know the Creator through the creation. What’s more, we come to understand the correspondence between the natural world and our own true natures. We see that both are the work of one Creator, and we see that the kingdom without is reflected by a kingdom within. That later kingdom is our evidence—all we need, said Emerson—that we still carry within us a divine spark, an ember of the world’s original light. And for that reason, said Whitman, we can walk free and own no superior. We can trust that all true acts of inspiration come of that freedom—what Emerson called instinct and spontaneity—a freedom cut loose from the doctrine and dogma of dying institutions. In the end, transcendentalism created its own kind of trinity whereby to study nature is to study the self and to study the self is to discover one’s one divine nature.
When Whitman assures us in “Laws for Creations” that “there is no God any more divine than Yourself,” he is confirming Emerson’s intuition that we still carry within ourselves a portion of that original, divine light. He is saying that the laws of Yahweh-the-artist manifest themselves in the laws of his creation and that they consequently become the laws of the heart. “And that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean.” Indeed, in the world’s oldest religious scriptures, the Vedas of India, we do find this ancient idea:
The individual self, deluded by forgetfulness of his identity with the divine Self, bewildered by his ego, grieves and is sad. But when he recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own true Self, and beholds his glory, he grieves no more.
[trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester]
This notion of God as a creative force dwelling within each of us seems to me much more inspired and inspiring than the idea of God as a judge who constantly watches us through a surveillance camera that we have internalized, a crippling mechanism that William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles.” Unlike the Ten Commandments, “Laws for Creations” doesn’t tell us what we cannot do; rather it tells us what we can. It calls us to our higher selves. It calls us to be artists of our own lives. It calls us to be statesmen instead of politicians, makers not of mere commodities but of genuine, enduring artifacts, teachers who inspire in students a sense of self-cultivation—“the unfolding of [one’s] nature,” which Emerson called, “the chief end of man.”
Right now our students are too often the acolytes of the vacuous images that move across their screens and dominate so much of their mental theater. I see this in my own students, and as a result they are often hesitant to stand apart, to appear different, to speak from the heart. If hung in the homerooms of American public schools, “Laws for Creations” would urge them to look away from the virtual world that technology has surrounded them with and to look within themselves for sources of their own individual character. “Laws for Creations” would urge them to act as magnanimously as men and women who still carry within themselves a vestige of the divine. Imagine schoolchildren beginning each day on that ennobling thought.