Beyond Good and Evil, Again

My disenchantment with morality began a long time ago, a combination of the counter cultural zeitgeist of my youth and my innate skepticism. Or maybe like most kids I didn’t like being told what I couldn’t do.

Part of it was the nonsense of sexual morality, the popularity of sexual liberation, and the onset of adolescence. In the days before AIDS it was kind of a no-brainer. (For the record, before you start thinking of me as a golden age swinger hopping from bed to bed, I was too shy to put much of anything into practice. A lot of my life is merely conceptual. The idea of being sexually restricted was enough to piss me off.)

Little by little it was also the pettiness of morality. Too often it was a matter of turning impropriety into sin, observing that people would be condemned to damnation for very trivial infractions. Thankfully I had a working class family of a generally secular bent with a more or less tolerant attitude, not because they were intellectuals (though most of my family are very intelligent) but because they recognized that we all make mistakes, that we all fall at one time or another, and that it’s only the chronic failures that you have to watch out for (but those failing individuals are still family and you don’t give up on family).

Also, that it was okay to do bad things to bad people (obviously missing that New Testament lesson of being pure enough to cast the first stone). The most memorable lesson was Little House on the Prairie, the television show, when Half Pint pushes Nellie down the stairs with a smug grin. It’s okay because we all know what a bitch Nellie is.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve been losing patience with dichotomies and the concept of purity. I like the Yin Yang thing where if you cut it in half you can never just have black or white, though I’d like to add a few more options.

Life is too complex and too subtle.

When I was about forty I was introduced to the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Generally there’s a conflict between people’s needs rather than a clash of good and evil; someone’s excess deprives those who are prudent; there’s a strange craving for power rather than respect for independence. Whatever the circumstance, the bad guys aren’t really bad and the good guys are not perfect. At worst it’s an issue of selfishness versus sacrifice for the common good. (I don’t mean to imply that Miyazaki or the Japanese lack morality. Only that those values are often much more complex and compassionate than those we’ve inherited from the Judeo/Christian/Islamic heritage.)

As I look into overcoming those inherited values I do not take the reactionary course of Nietzsche, in his way just as trapped as his Christian father, nor of the clichéd Satanist, turning everything Christian on its head. I just want to move on, dropping the whole thing like the rotting carcass it is. I want to be done with black and white, either/or reductions. I want to understand as much of the complexity of life as I can, and that requires a different way of looking at things.

Personally, I’d look to writers and the arts rather than to churches for lessons in life. It’s too easy to condemn from the pulpit. It’s too easy for the television evangelist to cover his corruption. It’s too easy to sway the masses, at least for a few minutes, into casting that first stone.