This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal. Each
issue of the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal is published by High Plains
Arts and Sciences; P.O. Box 620604, Littleton Co., 80123, a Colorado
Non-Profit Corporation, under a Public Domain Copyright, which
entitles any person or group of persons to reproduce, in any form
whatsoever, any material contained therein without restriction, so
long as articles are not condensed or abbreviated in any fashion, and
credit is given the original author.!
"Morals are the nagging fear that somebody somewhere may be having a good
time." --H. L. Mencken
What is the difference between one of us and Oral Roberts? Well,
hopefully there are lots of differences, but the top one on my list
is that I work on being ethical and he is a moralist.
The moralist knows how everybody else should behave in order to be a
good person, avoid Hell, fit into decent society, etc., etc. He is
quite likely to feel that he is a valid exception to all his own
rules, since he can handle temptation and control his outcomes. His
main characteristic is frantic paranoid distrust of other people. No
one should be seen nude, for instance, because this would be
un-bearably sexually arousing and lead to promiscuity, neglect of
ordinary duties, etc. He knows he can control himself, but everybody
else has to be "protected" from their evil impulses. His
major defence is projection: "I'm not oversexed, and of course
I'd never want to be or want to be unfaithful to my wife, but that
woman in the (name situation or article of clothing) sure is asking
for it. Ultimate expressions of this type of thinking are
wife-beating -- one man said, "When I walked into the self-help
group I thought that when they heard what I'd had to put up with
they'd congratulate me for not having killed her." -- and
witch-burning -- "I am a good person. Bad things do not happen
to good people. A bad thing has happened to me. Somebody did it! Kill
them!"
In essence, the moralist is saying "It can't be my fault (I'm not
able to face the idea that it might be my fault). It must be somebody
else's fault. If people would just follow these few simple rules,
which I'll be glad to explain to them, nothing would go wrong and I
wouldn't have to feel anxious. But since they won't all follow my
rules, everything is their fault, not mine, and I don't have to feel
anxious."
To me this is nauseating. I have no idea how you "should"
behave; who are you? What's the situation? Who else is affected? Even
then, the best I could offer would be some suggestions of courses of
action which might have good results -- but I don't believe there are
any simple rules for human conduct which are always "right."
What I do believe is that ethical behavior consists of choosing your
actions such that you can look at yourself in the mirror in the
morning without flinching. Which means I can see a Corsican being
ethical and killing another person as part of a feud; a gypsy being
ethical and defrauding a gaujo. I suspect that what I mean here is
that ethics impel you to be true to your own values, while morals
make you want to
But being ethical implies that they are your own values, which you have
thought through and decided to accept, and not just the ones you have
swallowed whole from your family or culture.
Marjoe, a famous evangelist who later went straight, described preaching
hellfire and damnation and then going back to the motel and making
love to his girlfriend of the moment -- who had to be flown in from
New York so the locals wouldn't know what he was doing. Oral Roberts
says people have to give him $8 million, or God will "call him
home." These are examples of people whose highest priority is
influencing others, making the right kind of impression - the
actuality doesn't seem to be really relevant to their choice-making
process.
The ethical person, on the other hand, may not care at all about the
impression he is erig; he will say in total sincerity "I know I
look like a fool for doing it, but I couldn't have lived with myself
if I hadn't." Or even harder, "I know you think I'm being
hard and cruel, but I honestly believe this is the best solution in
the circumstances."
Next issue (are you holding your breath?) the difference between act
idealism and absolute idealism, or how to tell a witch from a
fundamentalist without a score card.
The Spinster Aunt .......... FROM RMPJ, 2/3/1987