3

Caught on the Wrong Side of History

In these oh-so judgmental times, one action, email, or comment can obliterate a lifetime of work.

Ever more are caught on the wrong side of history . . . A costume they wore decades ago, a joke posted a drunken Saturday, a Tweet, a defense of a friend who did wrong. They can all come back to haunt. It does not matter that at the time whatever you did seemed harmless, funny, or reflected the period’s zeitgeist. One’s social capital can evaporate in an afternoon, because of things one did decades ago or something one said seconds ago.

It can be devastating not just to do things oneself but to have any kind of association with anyone considered “evil.” We increasingly lump together the few who do monstrous things alongside those who were their friends, who attended a dinner, who were included in a group photo, got a donation or support.

BTW, acceptable is not Right, legal is often not Right, but a key question one might ask is how much awareness there was there, “back then,” of what you now know is absolutely RIGHT and WRONG.

And what if what you were taught back then, by those you most admired and loved, turned out to be WRONG, WRONG, WRONG?

Just Who Is Supposed to Teach us RIGHT and WRONG?

When I lecture about ethics, I begin with the question:

So . . . just who teaches us what is ethical?

Then I sit back, listen, and write answers out on the blackboard. While the emphasis and timing may vary, the cast of characters is usually quite similar. Mom, Dad, elders, teachers, clergy, the Holy Book, friends, neighbors, government, lawyers, coworkers, doctors . . .

After a while the class relaxes, many share the same experience, the same teachers and traditions. And these days almost all younger folks believe they know Right from Wrong.

After all, they were brought up to be outstanding and upstanding citizens.

Then I show them a picture of a building in downtown Charleston, SC. A few recall their happy visits nearby: great pecans, nice handicrafts, good bars . . . But then one asks: what an odd looking building; why does it look like a cross between a warehouse and a fort? The answer is it was designed to keep and display the most valuable goods of the time:

The classroom gets very, very quiet at this point. Gradually a few speak up: How Could They?! This is so WRONG! Savages! So here is the curious thing:

EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE ROOM KNOWS

IT IS WRONG TO ENSLAVE HUMAN BEINGS

Period.

So what the *~#^&*%$#! was wrong with our ancestors?

After one allows shock, and absolutely justified fury, to work itself out for a bit, then one might come back to the original question:

So who teaches us what is ethical?

Put this in the context of Charleston circa 1800s and now let’s go, one by one, through those folks you just told me teach you Right from Wrong . . . Imagine yourself a child, immersed in learning within one of these prosperous, white, Southern genteel homes . . . What was cute little Junior learning about Right and Wrong?

The word “snob,” shorthand for someone who lives Slightly North of Broad St., allegedly comes from Charleston.

Start with those closest to you: dear old Dad, who likely owned slaves and taught you that they were essential to the family business. How about sweet Mom? She kept slaves in your house; some of them brought you up. That dear old nursemaid who helped bathe and care for you? Down in the kitchen, the kindly black woman would feed you your favorite dishes and sweets? Throughout your early childhood, you may not have realized these nice folks were slaves. But one day, you finally perceived that kindly Mom could be quite “tough” on the help.

If the household help was ordered whipped by Mom, or raped by Dad, would the slave tell the kids? What would be the consequences? Or worse yet, if the kids witnessed violence by their parents against the slaves, would they absorb this and think this is how one can treat those of a different skin color? That it is “just a part of the natural order of things”?

The stereotypes and the whitewashing of this kind of “service” were so ingrained in America’s psyche, for so long, that Quaker Oats built its brand and image based on former slave Nancy Green, the “domestic ideal” of Southern traditions.

Perhaps you have heard of Mrs. Green? Aunt Jemima.

And remember old Rastus admonishing you to eat Cream of Wheat?

Or Uncle Ben’s wild rice?

There were houses that, in the context of the era, treated slaves with some relative respect and freed some of the kids—think Thomas Jefferson. But there were many horrid human beings like Mrs. Henry R. Schoolcraft. She “rebutted” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with a book of her own, The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina. A typical passage? “God has placed a mark on the negro, as distinctive as that on Cain; and I do not believe there is a white man, woman, or child, on the face of the earth, who does not, in his deepest heart regard the African an inferior race to his own. The fiat of the great God Almighty, the researches of ethnology, history, and experience, and our very instincts, teach us this fact.”1

How could someone have been so wrong, so deluded . . . and referencing scripture, to boot. Horrible stuff, surely a trip to Sunday school would correct this misconception for little Junior? Except the guy in charge of church doctrine, the Reverend Richard Furman, ran around arguing: “The holding of slaves is justifiable by the doctrine and example contained in Holy writ; and is; therefore consistent with Christian uprightness, both in sentiment and conduct.”2

Wait, what, huh?

How in the world could a most distinguished Baptist preacher possibly argue such a thing? Well, what if he were selectively quoting the Bible?

Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.

—Ephesians 6:5

Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect.

—Titus 2:9

In fact there are passages in the Bible where GOD orders his followers to enslave the vanquished. You can seek further enlightenment to the Reverend Furman’s positions on slavery by traveling to Charleston and doing research at Furman University, and praying for guidance in Furman Chapel . . .

Of course there are other passages in the Bible that could justify freeing slaves or rebellion, though these were not often quoted in a Charleston church back then. Some bibles, distributed to West Indian slaves, were “slightly” edited and titled: Parts of the Holy Bible, Selected for the Use of the Negro Slaves. The British 1807 edition only included 232 of the Bible’s 1,189 chapters. For some reason, they failed to include Galatians 3:28: “There is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

OK. So maybe our young chap merely needed to find a really distinguished medical doctor and ask whether black, white, and other “races” were really different or one and the same . . . Enter one of the most distinguished of MDs, J. Marion Sims, the founder of gynecology. Despite knowing the most intimate secrets of the human body firsthand, somehow Dr. Sims came to the conclusion that it was OK to experiment on slaves.3 (And you, too, can jog by the Sims statue in Charleston, or by the entrance to the Alabama State House, or, until 2018, in New York’s Central Park).

So maybe the young man simply needed go off to college to learn about the evils of slavery, and that it is just plain wrong to own human beings? Well, here at last there is good news. When the University of South Carolina sought to upgrade its scholarship, it recruited and landed an Oxford man. President Thomas Cooper, was a no nonsense chemistry professor, lawyer, medical doctor, and philosopher. He was a defender of the French Revolution, of the Rights of Man, of freedom, and an abolitionist. Hallelujah, in 1787, the learned Dr. Cooper published Letters on the Slave Trade arguing: “Negroes are men; susceptible of the same cultivation with ourselves.” Who was to blame was clear: “as Englishmen, the blood of the murdered African is upon us, and upon our children, and in some day of retribution he will feel it, who will not assist to wash off the stain.”4

Cooper’s opposition to slavery lasted all the way . . . to Charleston. Once ensconced in the South, he decided it was just dandy to own slaves, that blacks were biologically inferior. He published a series of pamphlets defending slave owners. He reversed his arguments despite fully understanding the eventual consequences of his and his fellow citizens’ positions; in 1827 he gave one of the first speeches predicting the dissolution of the Union.5

Want to know more? You can research at Cooper Library at USC.

He, too, is a Charleston honoree.

Well, God bless it! There oughta be a law! Especially in a country whose core founding document, the Declaration of Independence boldly states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .” Surely there were some legal statutes that guided young folk to navigate the right ethical river? Well . . . no, actually. Slavery was legally codified and protected, among others by the DC Bar, in its Slavery Code.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, or to insist too much, but . . .

Just exactly who was supposed to teach kids, back then,

that owning human beings was ABSOLUTELY wrong?

If everyone around you is teaching you the wrong thing . . .

How do you get WOKE?

Forty to sixty percent of African Americans can trace part of their ancestry through that city. Racism still persists in parts of what is nicknamed the “Holy City” (because of its abundance of churches). Why did the majority not speak up as hundreds of thousands of people were sold and held in slavery in and near Charleston?

Even if our young chap were one of those rare ethical leaders who realized, during this horrid period, that something is just really wrong, and even rarer, if he were one of the few in Charleston to speak up . . . What might have been the consequences of acting on this belief in the 1840s to 1860s? It is an ugly fact that slavery was the fundamental basis of the Southern economy: “By 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”6 Might any young person have been kicked out of school, lost his job, been ostracized, beaten, maybe killed for believing that slavery was evil?

Is it a touch understandable (not justifiable), that even those who intuited the truth rarely spoke up, much less acted? Why did it take so long for any U.S. president, even Abraham Lincoln, to issue an Emancipation Proclamation? (“I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of our Lord 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free”)

Even in the midst of the bloody Civil War, having majority of the US population accept emancipation was touch and go, because so many kids were taught, for so long, by many who they cared for, loved, and respected that slavery was the way things were meant to be. Lincoln gradually built a fragile coalition of support, but it was only after the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln began to state, publicly: “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”7

And being against slavery did not imply being in favor of complete equality. In September 18, 1858, Lincoln argued: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”8 That was still the public position of many prominent US leaders a century later, and, for a growing number of retrogrades, even today.

Post-emancipation, it took the US population a long, long time to begin to ensure blacks consistent access to polling booths, juries, intermarriage, housing. Yes, the confederate flag was eventually lowered in Charleston . . . in 2015. But even today, some might venture that there might even be a person, or two, walking around not just in the Carolinas, but perhaps even in the White House, who might be just a touch racist. The journey to equality is far from over.

It was not just the nasty white Southerners that enslaved. (Although the South did systematically institutionalize slavery across generations) So too did the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Turks, Chinese, Nordics . . . The Russian Vikings were so fearsome that the populations to their south were known as “Slavs” (slaves). For millennia, people were, in many places, the source and the repository of wealth.

Perhaps no civilizations spent more time attempting to understand codify, debate, and systematize ethics as the Greeks and the Romans. And yet, during a time when Rome was importing over 400,000 slaves a year, can you remind me just how many of the great philosophers were abolitionists? It was too much a part of the infrastructure, of the ways things are, of everyday life, for most intellectuals to actively oppose such a horrendous practice.9 Slaves were treated in every conceivable way, from the most despicable torture and murder through being honored scholars and tutors. But they were not free, and that was, and is, fundamentally wrong. So across time, across civilizations, why did so many behave so heinously? Why was it broadly acceptable to own humans, and what finally changed?

Let’s try two theories:

So then . . . why did the United States, allow legal discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national origin up to July 2, 1964?10

Is it merely a coincidence that Britain was one of the first countries to ban slavery? Might the fact that Britain industrialized early, and was not a major direct beneficiary of the slave trade, have anything to do with this? In the United States, is it surprising that as the North industrialized, it banned slavery, while the South, which depended on agriculture, fought to preserve an abhorrent practice?

Throughout history, across civilizations, many convinced themselves it was OK to own people.

Why did an evil practice, that lasted millennia, begin to disappear soon after the Industrial Revolution?

Might it have anything whatsoever to do with one gallon of gasoline = 400 hours of manual labor?

It even took the “Great Emancipator,” Lincoln, a long time to realize how wrong he was. At first, he argued against emancipation. Then “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land . . . What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”11 But Lincoln learned, changed, evolved, and in his last public address he advocated full electoral rights for blacks. People learn. Laws eventually change to reflect evolving ethics.

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857, denied citizenship to slaves (7–2 decision)

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, allowed “separate but equal” segregation laws (7–1 decision)

Where in the world was the logic?

How could a majority of the court have defended these horrors?

Does historical context and individual actions during that period matter at all? If Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln can be so wrong on such an important topic . . . are we just that much smarter? Or should we judge the past with just a touch more humility and nuance? Unless we understand how so many could have participated in, protected, and spread such abhorrent practices for so long, we will never understand how so many of us today can tolerate things that our descendants will see as completely immoral tomorrow.

The history of slavery is one extreme example that the ethics of a society, what is legal and acceptable, changes over time. Enlightenment often dawns gradually, in tentative steps, often as new technologies give us options, gradually allowing us more grace and compassion towards those we have so far considered “others,” “different,” “not like us.”

In today’s WOKE culture, we judge ancestors harshly. Universities, town squares, statues, and revered old buildings generate serious heartburn for enlightened activists. Good old Bryn Mawr recently suffered a huge brouhaha over one of its most distinguished leaders, M. Carey Thomas . . . a trailblazer obligated to switch graduate schools several times because women “did not usually get PhDs”; Thomas became suffragette who advanced women’s rights, birth control, and even, quietly, gay rights. Not good enough. Now students want all of her legacy erased, because she reflected the racist and anti-Semitic biases that were standard during her tenure. One particular cause of outrage is that when a black student applied to Bryn Mawr, Thomas urged her to go instead to Cornell (and even paid part of her tuition). Thomas explained in a 1906 letter: “I should be inclined to advise such a student (an African American) to seek admission to a college situated in one of the New England [sic] states where she would not be so apt to be deprived of this intellectual companionship because of the different composition of the student body. At Bryn Mawr College we have a large number of students coming from the Middle and Southern states so that conditions here would be much more unfavorable.”12

Hmmmm, in the context of the segregated Jim Crow South of the time, was this really the worst advice?

Did anyone else offer to pay this young student’s tuition to any school?

Should Thomas’s entire legacy really be erased?13 Were there other figures, running other schools, during this exact period, who acted in a far less progressive, far more racist and cruel manner? Should we just judge all past actions by our current standards? Maybe should we just quit republishing most books written before 2000 because they might offend someone?

Speaking of which . . .

In 2018 the Association of Library Services for Children took Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name off an award that dated back to 1954.

Yes, the author of Little House on the Prairie was not, by any means, enlightened vis-à-vis Native Americans.

But do the norms of the time matter?

Or should Mark Twain be banned for using the “N word” over 200 times in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

(And DON’T YOU DARE play “Baby, Its Cold Outside”)

What should be removed, erased, and what is best left alone is an important debate. Perhaps assorted Yalies should enlighten us . . . John C. Calhoun, a Yale valedictorian, the seventh VP of the USA, revered throughout the South, was no Jefferson and no Lincoln. He was a slave owner, an architect of Southern secession. Over decades African American students justifiably protested the Yale college named after him, as well as the stained glass window in the Calhoun dining room, depicting slaves carrying bales of hay.14 One day a kitchen worker decided enough already, and destroyed part of the window with a broom. After being charged with a felony, protests grew, and an embarrassed Yale backed down. Protests continued. In 2017 Yale decided to rename the college after Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist and navy rear admiral.

OK, fair enough.

But while we are still on the topic of Yale, somewhere within this complex tangle lies the biggest bombshell. Turns out Elihu Yale made his money swindling his company and profiting off the slave trade . . . In one of his official portraits he is sumptuously dressed and seated, attended by a servant with metal collar around his neck. Just to make sure you know that he owned these folks?15

This portrait hung for a century in the Yale Sanctum Sanctorum, the Corporation Boardroom.

So what now? No more “Yale?” Interesting debate . . .

Should there also be any discussion about context, in debating the differences among M. Carey Thomas, Laura Ingalls Wilder, John C. Calhoun, and Eli Yale? Should Yale also eliminate a college named after Benjamin Franklin? He, too, was a slave owner (and a notorious womanizer). Yep, Franklin made mistakes, many. But do we really want to judge him and George Washington in the same way as we do Calhoun? How about Thomas Jefferson? His son, Madison Hemings, published an extraordinary primary document in an Ohio newspaper in 1873. Unfortunately, the narrative fit neither the agenda of the Left nor the Right, so almost all ignored the narrative of Thomas, the kind co-parent. Despite being raped at 15, Sally Hemings’s thirty-eight year relationship with Jefferson was neither just that of a sex slave nor that of an insignificant, inconvenient woman. Yet it took until June 16, 2018, for the pooh-bahs that run Monticello to open an exhibit acknowledging the truth and welcome the other half of Jefferson’s family home.16 (And that occurred after violent denunciations and long debates over the accuracy of DNA paternity tests.)

Might it be better to pick targets of scorn and erasure carefully, and not just carpet bomb the past? If someone in the context of their time was particularly cruel, erase all trace, or exhibit the wrongs in a museum, and do it with prejudice. Remind today’s racists, misogynists, and assorted creeps that their historic legacy will eventually be erased.

I am not trying to justify the horrendous treatments of human beings across millennia. Rather I am pointing out it can take long time for a majority to become enlightened. That even after initial recognition of wrongs and reforms, civilizations can and do, still, enable actions and allow institutions that will be ethically indefensible in the future. For most, awareness of just how wrong something is tends to dawn gradually, spread slowly, and then the actual implementation of new laws takes a loooooong time.

There is good reason to continue fighting. It took the US Supreme Court until 1967 to allow interracial marriages (which, BTW, a majority of Americans did not support until 1991). Yet, despite recent severe setbacks,17 the acceptance of overt racial discrimination has dropped decade by decade. As the military, sports teams, colleges, and a host of institutions desegregated, it gradually became cool to be with, to befriend and partner, with those who had so far been considered “the other.” Marriage patterns changed. In 1967 only three percent of marriages crossed ethnic-racial lines. By 2018 almost one in five did.18 Again, technology had a lot to do with this change. TV and radio brought an onslaught of diversity into our living rooms through Jackie Robinson, Lt. Uhura, the Jeffersons, the now discredited Bill Cosby, Motown groups, Tina Turner, Muhammad Ali . . . Alongside “those likable folks,” we also saw pictures, newsreels, movies that brought home just how horrendously many women, people of color, and gays were treated. Gradually people began to feel this is just not right and speak up. This battle is far from over; mass incarceration continues and #BlackLivesMatter are realities. But we are far better off than even decades ago.

Ironically, in 2019 America more people marry across racial divides than political divides.19

Then again, maybe YOU know, or may be convinced that you know, exactly what is Right and Wrong, how to fix it, and how to bring your fellow citizens along from one day to the next toward absolute truth. You may believe you would never, ever, under any circumstances have accepted slavery, no matter when and where you grew up or what you were taught.

Maybe.

Maybe your teenage self would have been so enlightened, so self-secure that living in the South in the 1840s you would have been the one true voice. And certainly you would have been marching at Selma a century later, and sat right next to Rosa Parks . . . Just as today you are marching and practicing civil disobedience, daily, against taking thousands of kids from their parents, caging them, losing them.

As @matthewwmiller points out:

If you have ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany

Or during the civil rights movement,

Congratulations: you’re doing it right now.

Otherwise, in the twenty-first century, the United States would not still be separating thousands of children from their parents. Child kidnapping and “re-education,” be this under Stalin, Mao, an Argentine dictatorship, or under an US president, are crimes against humanity. You too will be judged by what you tolerate today. Ethics can be a historical quicksand. Judge those who still quasi-enslave and steal children today with extreme harshness. Act. But also realize there is a small chance that even twenty-first-century enlightened you might have acted differently if you’d been educated in the nineteenth century . . . As playwright Jean Lee puts it:

“I feel like compassion is very out right now.

Curiosity is out.

What’s in is condemnation and punishment.”20

More Recent Ethical Quicksand: LGBTQIA

One of the reasons this topic of shifting ethics is so relevant and personal for me is because I spent my grammar school years going to San Ignacio de Loyola from 7 to 8 a.m. every morning. The Jesuit faced the cross, not the congregation. He preached in Latin. It was a beautiful church. And I was bored out of my mind. We had no cell phones to distract us, and I . . . I already knew what was Right and Wrong. Everyone had already taught me. Momma, Poppa, teacher, preacher, Holy Book, laws, peers . . . So I absolutely knew . . .

Being gay was evil, illegal, and unnatural.

Against God’s orders. Period.

No need to question, ask, consider.

So one of the worst things you could call someone was PUTO!

A host of epithets, swears, even beatings, on the school playground, all occurring under the watchful eyes of the priests, reinforced the idea that any kind of alternative sexual choice or identity was just plain wrong. MDs, psychiatrists and prosecutors agreed with priests: being gay was a criminal sickness, brought on by a bad brain and poor parenting.

Through 1968, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual listed homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”

By 1968, an enlightened group of shrinks reclassified homosexuality as a “sexual deviation” in its DSM-II.21

Trans wasn’t even a word we knew back then; it was inconceivable.

Then, fortunately, I was lucky enough to go to one of the most progressive high schools in the United States. Except that, at the hallowed Andover, there was no discussion of being gay, much less approval or support. There was no reason to alter one iota that which I had learned in Mexico. It took a further fifteen years after my arrival before the Phillips Academy Daily Bulletin published a tiny announcement that read: “Discussion of gay rights, sexual preference, and related topics. All Welcome.”22

Thus establishing the second oldest high school Gay Student Association in the country.

It wasn’t until freshman year in college that I finally met, and befriended, an openly gay person. Ben Schatz was loud, angry, funny, passionate, and always willing to teach his conservative, straight, macho Latino classmate why discriminating against people for their sexual orientation is just plain wrong. Turns out that I was far from the only biased one. After graduating, Ben went to law school and tried an experiment. He applied to hundreds of law firms. In half the applications he identified his leadership in gay activism. In the rest he did not. His response rate? 3 percent if “gay,” 17 percent if not.23

So today, when I hear someone being berated or boycotted for discriminating against someone for their sexual orientation, I have several thoughts:

I was just plain wrong, for so many years.

It pains me.

What gradually became obvious to me, because I lived within a liberal, educated, urban environment, took a lot longer to reach many people.

The first country to recognize gay marriage? The Netherlands, 2001.

So here is the odd thing . . . If ethics are absolute and fixed, how in the world did our attitudes toward something so religiously and socially codified change so fast?

In 2007 34 percent approved of same sex marriage.

By 2013 a majority of Americans were OK with it.

By 2017 > 64 percent.24

If ethics do not evolve, how can the next generations believe things so very different from their ancestors? How can this type of fundamental shift happen over a single decade, sometimes even within the same age groups? (And BTW, are we all done now with learning what is Right and Wrong . . . or might you too, someday, be suddenly whipsawed onto the wrong side of history?)

On the one hand, the spread of AIDS drove visibility. Acting up, protesting, showing up in huge numbers, became a matter of life and death. More and more came out publicly to try to save their lives by acting as one, to push drug research, to seek support from medical professionals and the government. The devastating images of sons, lovers, and friends dying young created a huge dissonance with the church’s hellfire and brimstone denunciations. These were people we knew, not reviled caricatures. A few public figures, like Princess Diana, showed compassion and care, enabling others to do the same. Their initial fortitude gave us all courage.

Globally, there is a close correlation between media freedom, internet access, and acceptance of homosexuality. Yet again, technology, especially social networks, TV, and movies, drove a rapid ethical transition. Hollywood changed. Some watched Ellen DeGeneres’s ABC sitcom, Ellen. Others got their exposure to normal, functional, funny gays through Will and Grace, Modern Family, Roseanne, or Grey’s Anatomy. Suddenly movies, actors, news began portraying this lifestyle as something different and cool, within the realm of the everyday.25 After gays turned up in everyone’s living room, many were less terrified of coming out, marching, speaking up. In overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland, Growing Up Gay, a documentary telling the stories of eight LGBTQIA folks, got huge ratings, so more family members and friends came out.

As the mainstream media picked up greater numbers of stories of police beatings, random assaults, firings, and bigoted behavior, a general sense of “this is just not right” tilted the moral ground toward gays with historically lightning speed.

Yet despite all the cute Will & Grace episodes, and horrid images of Matthew Shepard, who was tortured and left to die roadside in Wyoming, too many have still not gotten the memo, including Vice President Pence. He feels the old standards of Right and Wrong, those he was brought up with, the ones he learned from parents and church, are under siege, that society has lost its way, that things are moving way too fast. He finds many of today’s rules and mores and pronouns unrecognizable. He is not an outlier. He, still, represents a large constituency.

In 2018 same-sex sex is still criminalized in 72 countries.

In 12 of those countries it is punishable by death.26

Culture wars occur during times of extreme technological transition.

Consider North Bend High School in 2018:

LGBTQ students at the rural school on the Oregon coast have been harassed, threatened, bullied, and assaulted just for being who they are. What is worse is that when these students turned to the adults in charge to protect them, the school administrators, teachers, and staff not only ignored their pleas for help. Instead they told one of our clients she was going to hell for being gay, subjected LGBTQ students to harsher discipline than their straight peers, and equated homosexuality with bestiality. We also learned that both LGBTQ students and straight students have been forced to recite Bible passages as a punishment.27

Some are so thoroughly bigoted and religiously ideological that they will never listen. Recall the now-divorced protector of the sacredness of the family, Sarah Palin? She helpfully clarified her stance: “They are misquoting me. I said I didn’t hate people who engage in homosexual behavior . . . I simply said by legalizing it you are opening the door to many other things such as bestiality, child molestation, and abortion. See . . . these things are all interconnected. Where are the limits?”28 But even some of the most conservative, like Dick Cheney and Senator Rob Portman, changed their minds when confronted by a gay child . . .

Putting aside religious and political ideologues, there are a lot of decent folks who were taught the right answer was X and now a large chunk of society is yelling at them and telling them they are bigoted jackasses. And, should they dare defend what they were brought up to believe, they are pilloried by virtual mobs that seek to get them fired, shut down their businesses, make it hard for them to go out publicly. Might this kind of confrontation lead to a little resentment and backlash?

Easy to judge, easy to condemn today . . . in retrospect. But how many of today’s older, loud, and judgmental voices stood up in class, at home, at work, among their peers to fight discrimination against gays a few decades ago? Certainly, some spoke out bravely, early, and often. But a majority either thought it was OK to discriminate or just went along with existing mores. Many who knew it was wrong did not want to make a fuss.

Shame and blame are easy. Throughout history, a lot of us were taught ethics through fear: do this or be shamed. Do this or you will go to HELL! Do this or we will torture you, burn you, or behead you . . . Today, it is not just conservatives that mercilessly dish out fear and punishment. The extreme Left is equally prone to name and shame, convinced their cause and opinion is the One True Way.

Recognizing people grew up in different eras, with different educations . . . not so much in vogue. To address ethical questions effectively today, one needs to abandon absolutism and return to a concept largely absent from our Left-Right political divide, and from our generational, racial, and religious culture wars:

Humility

And more kindness towards others.

On all sides . . .

Endangered and Extinct Religions

At this point, one reasonable response, from some, to all this ethical discombobulation might be:

Hey, just wait a second—I am a person of faith.

I know Right from Wrong.

I know God’s word.

Maybe . . . but do you understand just how often God’s word gets edited?

Throughout history one of the leading causes of death has been religion. Be it the Crusades, the Inquisition, jihads, Pogroms, and so on. People conquered, burned, sacked, raped, tortured, sacrificed, ostracized, and mutilated in the name of the one true God(s). It is hard to overstate just how ironic this is; recall one of the TEN COMMANDMENTS:

Thou shalt NOT kill.

Wow.

Sense any ambiguity?

Doublespeak?

Wiggle room?

And yet . . . “The Old Testament contains 600 passages of explicit violence, around 1,000 verses detailing God’s own violent punishments, and most significantly over 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people . . .”29

Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them . . . as the Lord your God has commanded you.

—Deuteronomy 20:16

Popes believed this. There were just “a few” folks burned at the stake or tortured to death as heretics. And there were “just a few” murdered during the Crusades and Holy Wars. Even today, every army unit hosts chaplains. By day, all the soldiers are trained and ordered to kill. By night, chaplains whitewash.

In any given era, a particular religion, its leaders, its core tenets, may seem close to all-powerful. But over time religions must either adopt and adapt or go extinct. (Time changes Dictums: until Pope Francis, no successor to Saint Paul advocated banning the death penalty and life imprisonment worldwide.)

Because most religions refuse to recognize that ethics can and do change, they are often really lousy at evolving, learning, changing.

Initial rituals often harden into deep “meanings,” which then harden into absolute “truths.” Once these truths are in place, sometimes neither evidence nor reason can dislodge them. Societies and religious leaders grow ever farther apart; which is why 99 percent of all religions went extinct or are seriously endangered. That is why, when you go to an art or archaeology museum you primarily walk through room after room full of dead gods. (Look—there be the gods of Light, Rain, the Underworld, Sun, Moon, Seas, War . . .)

When was the last time you ran into a Quetzalcoatl worshipper?

Zarathustra?

Osiris?

Zeus?

The religions that survive long-term tend to evolve and speciate.

Their ethical precepts adopt and adapt.

Take the teachings of the first man who connected a tablet to the cloud, Abraham. Out of that seed grows a wondrous variety of Jewish thought and worship. From extreme Orthodox through very progressive. And everything in between. A thriving ecosystem that allowed a persecuted diaspora of folks to adapt and adopt to different cultures, for centuries, while maintaining a core faith.

Judaism also branched into different species. A Jewish Jesus begat Christianity . . . And then Christianity began to branch out and speciate: Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Church of Rome, popes of Avignon . . . Speciation and subspeciation continued. Roman popes begat Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians, Carmelites, Trappists, Barnabites, Somascans, Theatines . . .

You can enjoy the rest of this book, recalling religious schisms, sipping a nice Châteauneuf-du-Pape.30

People who think the word of God is THE WORD OF GOD tend not to realize that the original Bible was not written in English. And they do not understand that several Gospels were edited out, while those that remain are also heavily edited.31 Fortunately, the Bible, the word of God, and hence Christian ethics, has evolved, or been reinterpreted, since the good old days of the Old Testament:

Anyone who attacks their mother or father is to be put to death.

—Exodus 21:15

Observe the Sabbath . . . Anyone who desecrates it is to be put to death.

—Exodus 31:14

If a man has sexual relations with a man . . . They are to be put to death.

—Leviticus 21:9

Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . and the entire assembly is to stone him.

—Leviticus 24:14

If a man commits adultery . . . both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.

—Leviticus 20:10

(If) no proof for the young woman’s virginity can be found the men of her town shall stone her to death.

—Deuteronomy 22:13

Christianity, as practiced today, was not a given. Had fundamentalist Jews not killed many of the Romans, post-crucifixion, it is likely most “Christians” would have continued identifying as orthodox-fundamentalist Jews, perhaps within a church led by Jesus’s brother, James. But during the first Jewish-Roman War, culminating in the deaths at Masada, most everyone who followed Jesus, and met him, was killed, or exiled and scattered. None of the Gospels were written while Jesus was alive, and none by someone who actually met him. Although Jesus had many relatives, none survived long enough to guide the Jewish-Christian church in the long term.32 So, unlike Islam, there were no relatives left alive to fight among themselves and re-interpret his legacy. Instead, a Rome-based church, sanctioned by the Romans and supporting their interests, became something rather different: a more tolerant, inclusive church. One that increasingly put the Old Testament aside, as well as Judaism, assembling, over centuries, a New Testament. The Bible, the word of God, evolved.33

As the church grew, power and riches centralized; corruption culminated in the Borgia popes. Eventually mass corruption (pun fully and irreverently intended), plus the printing press, led to new bursts of speciation. Into the spiritual vacuum, enter Martin Luther and Calvin, pointing out the “slight” discrepancies between word and deed. And suddenly Christianity went through its own Cambrian explosion: Calvinists, Anglicans, Unitarians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Puritans, Pentecostals, evangelicals, Anabaptists . . .

Last I looked there were dozens of subspecies of Baptists,

ranging from the ultra-liberal to the fully Trumpian.

The precepts and practices of “Christian ethics” radically changed over time. Religions that continuously clash with their worshippers’ daily customs, or fleece their adherents, eventually empty their churches of all but the most fundamentalist . . . Which leads to some interesting questions vis-à-vis the third BIG Abrahamic branch—Muslims. After Muhammad’s death, these folks also speciated: Sunni, Sufi, Shiite. But after various family and military squabbles, things settled way down. And there has been relatively little speciation, and, these days at least, seemingly ever less tolerance for the unorthodox.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

The point is, as religions are challenged by shifts in technology and in culture, they adapt, or they become ever more fundamentalist and exclusionary, eventually dying off.

Usually religions and technology are seen as opposites.

But sometimes they are symbiotic. They coevolve.

Powerful technologies often spread religions and their ethical mores. Gods went global during ages of conquest. As empires spread so, too, did their gods. People who discovered new ways to ride and created more powerful bows, stronger swords and armor, guns and cannons were able to conquer ever broader “ethical” swaths. Conversion was usually a particularly brutal practice. Usually backed by powerful and cruel armies.

Foreign priests who showed up trying to debunk traditional gods were rarely coddled . . .

unless backed by armies.

Thousands of old gods were buried, burned, forgotten. Enormous lost cities are still being discovered. And sometimes a significant part of what is left is a crumbled altar hosting a jumble of abandoned gods.

Now, thanks to new technologies such as enhanced satellite imaging and LIDAR (Light Detecting and Ranging) a new specialty, space archaeology, allows us to discover more and more sites worshipping the formerly divine. Perhaps no one has uncovered more new sites than the author of Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology, Sarah Parcak. If you meet her, you might have no clue that she discovered Itj-tawy, a city that was for centuries the capital of Egypt until the Nile changed course. Or that Harrison Ford considers Sarah a real-life Indiana Jones.

But power alone is not enough to embed a long-term successful religion. Religions thrive when they successfully improve the lot of their followers. Applying a new discovery, consciously or not, sometimes changes many lives. For instance, one reason Islam spread so fast was its health benefits: during a time of horrid plagues, many religions shunned baths. (Nope, no nakedness!) Islam, on the other hand, dictated you must wash your face, hands, and feet, every time, before you pray. And these folks were praying five times per day. Guess what happens when one side of the aisle humbly asks for God’s protection, while practicing elementary hygiene. And guess what happens, on average, to the folks who don’t . . .

The same is true for food. During a time of trichinosis and swine flu, guess what happened to those who, for “religious reasons,” gave up pork. And guess what happened to those who did not. Guess why, in hot desert climes, both Jews and Muslims ate strictly kosher and halal—that is, animals that are slaughtered on the spot and then bleed out—versus folks who ate animals that were long dead in the heat. Or those who shunned shellfish because they were often full of contaminants and parasites before drainage-treatment existed.

(Gee, might that be one reason for such an overlap in dietary restrictions for Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims?)

When challenged, or enabled, by new technologies, the ethics within a religion or across religions can evolve without requiring a higher power’s return to Earth to preach or present new tablets.34 Religions often change as technologies twist and warp positive practices, sometimes in weird ways; by law, Islam granted wives, daughters, and other female relatives a far greater share of an inheritance than their supposedly more “enlightened” Western counterparts. British law was just the opposite. As long as you are first out of the womb, and have a little penis, you get everything. Does not matter if your siblings are smart, hardworking, conscientious, and that you are a drunken, lazy lout. By law they get nothing.

We would almost all agree the first system is fairer. And it worked out really well for Islam until the era of capital accumulation and global trade. Folks would pool savings and send off some ship to bring back goods years later. If someone died under Islamic law, suddenly the partnership had dozens and dozens of contentious claims and interests. It was that much harder to settle and relaunch. In good old England, there was only one voice to partner with, per share, again. A voice that could again deploy capital and easily rebuild and extend agreements. Capital accumulation and corporations grew fast under one system, foundered in the other.35

To get a sense of the magnitude of displacement and angst caused by rapid reversals in ethical tides, one needs to look no further than one of the most open-hearted and moral figures on the planet today. This man:

One can, and I do, disagree with many of the fundamental rulings and interpretations on a host of issues espoused by the traditional Catholic church, or a host of other religious leaders today.

Perhaps even including “just a few” highly politicized and wealthy “evangelicals.”

But while one may disagree with specific issues, one may feel the pope is too liberal or too conservative, or that he ignores core issues, like predator priests, for far too long . . . The bottom line is that Pope Francis is a far better man than I, and dare I say it . . . maybe even better than most of you. He is a flawed man trying to do the right thing, sitting in a tough spot. He attempts to guide a global religion while observing that within a single map, from Scandinavia through the North Africa Coast and Turkey, one finds everything from full rights and marriage for gays through jail and death penalty. His priests and his flocks reflect these divides.

So, while in some of the richer parts of his realm there are frantic cries for liberalization on contraception, gays, and divorce . . . many others feel he is moving too fast, being too secular, not respecting the quite conservative mores of his predecessor. The pope is emblematic of someone caught within the institutional undertow of ethical tsunamis. Consider excerpts from his letter to Carmelite nuns in 2010, while cardinal, as Argentina was voting on the Marriage Equality Act: “Here is also the envy of the Devil . . . Do not be naïve: It is not a simple political struggle; It is the destructive attempt towards God’s Plan.”36

Three years later, as pope, during an interview in the aisle of a plane, he unleashed controversy and FURY when he uttered a single sentence when asked about gay priests:

Who am I to judge?

What Pope Francis understands, far better than most of us, is: “we grow in the understanding of the truth . . . There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”37 And, wow, is he getting pushback from conservatives for this way of thinking. Wisconsin’s Bishop Robert Morlino oh-so-subtly argued: “It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation . . . If you’ll permit me, what the church needs now is more hatred of homosexual sexual behavior.”38

Who said evolving ethics is easy?

After the unquestioning and unbending moral certainty of Pope Benedict, the current pope feeds conservative fears: “I would not speak about ‘absolute’ truths, even for believers. . . . Truth is a relationship. As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.”39

The greatest fears of those unanchored by shifting ethical norms can be summarized in four “isms”:

Universalism. Liberalism. Ecumenicalism. Relativism.

Their response? No salvation outside the Church.

Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.

Today’s surviving religions are a mélange of what worked to draw believers to a house of worship, and to then to adapt to the changing times’ culture and technologies. Some religions navigate change by focusing on the infallibility of God but the fallibility of Man, something on the order of: even though imperfect, man, and sometimes even woman, can be “enlightened” and reach a new understanding of what God intends. That allows an evolution of the playing out of moral precepts, allowing an ongoing mashup of religions and ethical learnings.

While individual religions and their leaders disappear over time, some core ethical-spiritual notions are passed on, evolve, and are repackaged and transmuted. Gradually a series of legitimate core concepts spread globally. So we see a gradual convergence on a set of principles common to major religions, and common to nonbelievers. No one understands this better than Karen Armstrong, a former abused nun. Throughout her career as an author-religious historian, she focused on the commonalities of the world’s religions and argues that all major religions, at their core, are based on one precept:

“The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical,

and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others

as we wish to be treated ourselves.”40

Not a bad map for future ethics . . .