Why Morality Matters

If we search for light in darkness, we can see a tiny spark in the official response to the brutal police murder of Tyre Nichols. By historical standards, it was instantaneous. Not three weeks after his death, the five officers who had killed him had been fired and indicted for murder.

There have been many unjustified police killings of Black suspects and bystanders in recent years. In nearly all, the official response was agonizingly slow and inadequate. In comparison, this response was truly at “warp speed.”

More important, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis—a woman!—called it like it was:

“This is not just a professional failing. This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual. This incident was heinous, reckless and inhumane.”

When was the last time you heard a leader of a police force speaking in such stark terms of basic human morality? Usually, what we get is bureaucratese, the law, defensive “spin” on the evidence, and sometimes a resort to the “thin blue line.” From the chief to the DA, most police and their apologizers form a defensive crouch like the ancient Roman “turtle,” shields out in all directions.

There is right, and there is wrong. Increasingly, the difference gets lost in a dark melange of power, self-interest, over-zealous advocacy, self-justification, money and political polarization. Not this time. In the dismal amoral society in which we find ourselves today, this is progress.

But unjust police killings are just the tip of the iceberg. For some fifty years, the tobacco industry denied that its products were killing millions before their time, even as its own research revealed the deadly cause and effect. For an equal time, the fossil-fuel industry denied the chief cause of global warming, in the face of its own research. An Olympic-class liar, George Santos, is now a member of Congress. No Republican seems prepared, let alone eager, to recognize the glaringly obvious, that he doesn’t belong there. Whether as profits or political power, might outweighs right.

After repeatedly stretching facts and legal theories (of a stolen election) beyond any rational elasticity, Rudy Giuliani reportedly faces disbarment—over two years after his lies nearly helped steal our democracy. And, lest we forget, the greatest “advance” in communication history, aka “the Internet,” is mostly set up with algorithms that amplify lies because they shock and outrage people, attract clicks, and so help sell stuff.

Our ancient ancestors knew better. They put prohibitions on lying and murder right into the Ten Commandments. They knew that most people are not abstract thinkers, and that raw self-interest is a powerful motivator for evil.

So they made morality simple. Then they made sure to drum it into ordinary people’s heads, day after day, Sunday after Sunday. They relied on ten simple moral principles. In the original Hebrew, the Commandments are even shorter than in English.

Today we have an infinitely more complex and powerful society. We can make mRNA vaccines at “warp speed” and send people to the Moon (again!). But we’ve forgotten the basics of human civilization.

If you want to know why we have so many unjustified police killings, watch Wesley Lowery, author of They Can’t Kill Us All, explain on PBS’ Washington Week. [Set the timer at 19:06 or see transcript below.] He reports that roughly six out of ten police officers, once fired for misconduct, get re-hired by the very same police department that fired them. Of course some of the rest get hired somewhere else, just like the predatory pedophile priests who got transferred to new parishes where they could predate again. Lowery reports that some jurisdictions don’t even allow any authority to talk to cops accused of misconduct for seven to thirty days after the event. This gives them ample time to weave a consistent and credible fabric of lies to defend the indefensible.

This sort of thing, says Lowery, varies widely from locality to locality, along with the power of police unions and the whims of cities, counties and states. Many, it seems, are more interested in the power and comfort of those charged with protecting us than in the Ten Commandments.

Human morality is no accident. It’s not something arbitrary. Nor are the two most important “bumper stickers” in human history: Jesus’ admonitions to “Love thy enemy” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

On the contrary, human morality is rooted in our species’ fundamental evolutionary path. It’s rooted in science.

Individually, we are small, slow, weak and (our few geniuses notwithstanding) relatively stupid. Together, we can fly around our planet in a day, put satellites into orbit, travel to the Moon and (soon) Mars, and create mRNA vaccines against Covid in less than a year. Everything we are and have depends on our communication, cooperation, and ultimately on our empathy. Our grapefruit-sized brains and opposable thumbs matter only when we work together for the common good.

Distrust or hate each other, and everything falls apart. And lying is where distrust and hate begin. It’s happening within Russia as it commits and denies daily atrocities in Ukraine. It’s happening within our own country, rotting from the inside even as it tries to stem the atrocities in Ukraine.

Even among our greatest thinkers, few have told us that “morality” is a practical, cause-and-effect thing, part of the science of living well. Among the greatest (and most recent) who did so is the late Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

A year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, King gave a speech explaining his personal epiphany that turned him against the War in Vietnam. It’s a gorgeous piece of English prose, full of biblical and other literary allusions. But most of all, it’s a work of supreme logic. It’s a piece of cause-and-effect deduction worthy of a physicist, engineer, or prophet.

King predicts the consequences of our continuing that war—the most catastrophic foreign-policy blunder in our history. He sees how it would corrupt and weaken our society, exacerbate inequality, stop Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” dead in its tracks, set back the causes for which King later gave his life, and ultimately make all of us Americans and our entire species worse off.

Looking back from the perspective of 56 years later, it’s impossible not to view King’s speech as prophecy, and him as a seer. Only three years after his death, with the publication of The Pentagon Papers in 1971, did our people come to realize how big a part official lying, by both soldiers and statemen, had played in that disaster.

Those of us who are religious might think King divinely inspired. I just think he was smarter—a lot smarter—than the rest of us. He applied his superior intelligence and legendary mental discipline to detect the signals of history through the noise of racist and militaristic chatter. Like a modern American Nostradamus, he analyzed cause and effect and came to sound conclusions that (unfortunately for us) have stood the test of half a century and counting.

Far from having a “monument” to him that doesn’t even show his face, the Reverend King should have his bust in front of the Capitol, or on the Lincoln Memorial. His image should sit at the seat of our modern liberty, just as Sir Isaac Newton has his bust in front of The Royal Society of London. As long as our Republic stands, every visitor to our capital should know who was one of our greatest modern thinkers, what he looked like, and that he was Black.

But I digress. King understood, as few in human history have, that human morality is a science, not an art, far less a religion that can only be taken on faith. There is a direct line from what we nebulously call “morality” to human peace, happiness, tranquility, and (yes) prosperity. Far from being better off when everyone is selfish, greedy, profit-seeking and power-seeking, we are better off when we work together, cooperate, and “love” each other as Jesus advised.

Whenever we as a species have broken that rule, catastrophe has ensued. Keep the peasants who grow your food so lowly—in esteem and income—that they can’t feed or house themselves, and you have a bloody revolution (the French one). Call people “souls (души)” who (and whose progeny) belong to the land you own, as if they were trees or foxes, and you have another, even bloodier revolution (the Russian one). Let leaders on another continent take the wealth of people on yours, but don’t let them help select those leaders, and you get a third kind of revolution (our American one). Keep people as property and treat them like animals (often worse!), and you get our Civil War, still the bloodiest in our history.

The cause-and-effect aspect of morality is not confined to history. Take jobs away from people who work with their hands. Sell those jobs to peasants abroad who are willing to work for less. Let the resulting riches accrue to the most privileged here, who brag about raising millions of Chinese out of poverty even as they wax obscenely wealthy and our broken workers turn to opiates. What do you get? You get the modern GOP, with its theft of working-people’s support. You get Donald Trump, extreme libertarianism, a broken society and a nearly broken democracy.

Build private companies that preferentially feed people lies and misinformation because they’re startling and help push ads, and you get a huge fraction of people who have no clue what is true. Tell people falsely that a big election was “stolen” by fraudulent voting, and you get the first attack on the US Capitol and its leaders since the War of 1812.

Keep eleven million mostly-Hispanic serfs in bondage by subjecting them to instant deportation with a phone call, and you can have low-priced, docile labor. You can even demonize them and build a useless wall to draw the votes of dupes. Maybe you can scare more migrants from coming. But eventually you come to depend on the migrant surfs’ labor, and your society can’t bear the contrast between ordinary paid labor and their serfdom. So it begins to rot from the inside, as it fights itself over more migrants coming in, even while neglecting and tormenting those already here.

Human morality is not rocket science. Conceptually, it’s much simpler than making mRNA vaccines, putting people on the Moon, or even running an efficient airline. It all boils down to the Golden Rule, or its simpler corollary: treat people badly and meanly, lie to them, and, eventually, they will do the same to you. Cooperate with them for a common purpose, speak honestly to them, listen to them, empathize with them, and give them an honest choice (or vote) and they will help you build a great corporation or a great nation.

So “morality” is not just the province of religious leaders, teachers, nannies and today’s “day care.” It’s the science of living within our evolutionary means and limited individual capabilities. As our Founders dimly recognized, it’s the way to “form a more perfect Union.” It’s the route to, and the scientific rationalization for, the “equality,” “justice” and “de-marginalization” that all oppressed people seek, especially here at home.

At the moment, we human sheep have gone far astray. So have we Americans. We’ve worshiped the false gods of profit, self-interest, and ultimately oligarchy for far too long. We’ve lied to ourselves so long and so often that many of us actually believe—with something like religious fervor—that yet more selfishness will make us all better off. So our nation is rotting from within, even as we face the greatest challenges in our history: a resurgence of brutal military imperialism in a China and a Russia armed with modern science and nuclear weapons.

Truly we have lost our way. Only by paying a decent respect to our greatest thinkers, including King, can we find our way back. Our time is short, as China prepares a land grab in Taiwan and Russia prepares for a brutal, if suicidal, spring offensive in Ukraine.

We can win, but only if we change our ways quickly. We can’t be strong unless we are good. We can’t be good unless we are moral. Chief Davis’ candid admission of how far the Memphis police fell from grace is just a starting point. But it’s a desperately needed beginning.

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