Morals aren’t much discussed at the moment. Even at church, the discussion is more about compassion than morals. I suspect there is a very solid moral philosophy that underlies the calls for compassion, but few of us pick up the corner of the carpet to look carefully at those foundations.
There have been theologians who have struggled with the absence of any historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. They’ve not been popular with organised religions, but have opened minds.
And there are politicians, Mr Carney of Canada, who have stood before the leaders of the world and said, “The emperor has no clothes, and we’ve been pretending he has. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s deal with the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be.”
Does moral ambition lie underneath our assumptions about the world? Do we assume everyone is generous, despite evidence of wasteful billionaires? Do we assume the taxpayer is basically honest, despite the gas companies paying no tax, no resource royalties and demanding subsidies for years on end? We pretend that money is valuable, despite the fact that we hold in our hands a piece of pretty plastic of no inherent value in itself. It is that pretence that binds us together in a social contract? It generates trust.
What happens when, like this week, key partners show they don’t trust us and only play if they can win? How do we respond? What is our moral ambition in these circumstances?
We know that kindness and cooperation generate civility. We know that civility generates peace. We know that peace generates economic progress. We know that economic progress generates relationships across the world. We know that relationships across the world bring us together as one human family on a finite planet.
Is this knowledge or moral ambition? We also know that rudeness generates fear. And that fear generates detachment. We know detachment generates “us” and “them”. And that “us” and “them” generate cruelty. And that cruelty generates war.
But, and here’s the really difficult bit: we know that war generates innovation that, in turn, generates new economic opportunities, the generation of relationships across the planet and the determination to avoid war.
So what underlies this knowledge? What moral ambition supports us at these times? The certainty that we are morally superior is a dead-end. That certainty fits nicely into the “us” and “them” category.
Creation takes time. Destruction can be instant. And yet destruction is creative in unimagined ways.
Early in the nineteenth century, we travelled by horse and cart and carriage. During that century, populations moved into towns and train lines were built across productive lands, breaking up villages and relationships much like highways do today.
Destruction and creation seem to go hand in hand. I can’t see a balance between female destruction and creation, and male destruction and creation.
The First Nations peoples of North America had a Council of Men and a Council of Women. Men could only destroy things at the behest of women. And women create things at the behest of men. That was a very tight fit. None of us were free to kill, or main, or destroy “our” property. All was communally owned and communally managed. And the result was an environment that supported the people, one that the people worked to maintain.
And now? While women have insisted that the nations of the Earth get together and talk with one another, the men have taken hold of those institutions and used them to force their will on others.
And the moral stance? The ambition? It must be that Norway’s first female Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, espoused in “Our Common Future”, “to meet our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs”. In other words, to maintain our planet for future generations so we leave to them all, if not more than, we inherited from our ancestors.
The Westender will soon be sharing ways we in West End and its surrounds can do that in our small patch of the world.
Kerry McGovern
