Devil’s Ethics

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It’s that time of year when state employees (even part-timers) are subjected to ethics training. Each year the irony of the situation becomes thicker and more viscous. You see, those of us who have part-time engagements are often on the receiving end of ethical violations, and we know better than to make ripples since we are disposable. I’ll say nothing of the well-known (almost infamous) ethical history of New Jersey, but today’s headlines suggest an even higher power when it comes to unethical actions. An Associated Press story bears the headline “U.S. biological horror stories brought before commission.” The report concerns official United States studies conducted on its own citizens by exposing people to and deliberately infecting them with various diseases. This may come as a shock to many, but already in the 1980s it was documented that America’s guinea pigs were its own citizens.

Leonard Cole’s Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, published in 1988, exposed many documented incidents of biological agent testing on non-consenting, and unsuspecting citizens. The testing was done in the name of national security (for which you may now be groped by any TSA official whose hands are not otherwise engaged). As this report demonstrates, our own government has viewed those of us not in positions of power as manipulable, expendable, and somehow less valuable than those elected by schemes they devise themselves. Democracy, it seems, is not free.

We are expected to heave a sigh of relief (come on now, everybody, it’s okay) since the history exposed is between 40 and 80 years old. That’s ancient history, right? An industrial-military complex today would never violate the rights of citizens. At least not officially. At least not as long as the Freedom of Information Act ensures that citizens have access to records (several years after the fact), and as long as it is not deemed a matter of national security. The color of your underwear and the shape of what is beneath are government assets. Also, so is your immune system. Otherwise you are free to live your life uninhibited. Unless, that is, you are a state employee with an extensive ethics background. Excuse me, but I’ve got to get back to my ethics training.

Tax Dollar Peep Shows

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Yesterday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger ran a column by Paul Mulshine entitled “It may be 2010, but it sure feels like 1984.” The topic, of course, is the increasingly invasive procedures that TSA officers have been granted. For a guy who “held it in” every day for the six years of middle and high school because of bashful bladder syndrome, the airport has begun to feel like the shower room after gym class. Having been raised with the idea that certain body parts were to be viewed by God alone (and the occasional physician), being undressed in front of others was a nightmare scenario. I still avoid public restrooms when at all feasible. Now TSA officials have tickets to a free “scope and grope” fest whenever you want to fly. I say the terrorists have already won.

Perhaps by coincidence, in trying to keep up with my daughter’s reading assignments, I have started to reread Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The grandson of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, Aldous had written a foreword in 1946 that was affixed to the front of my college edition of his novel. In it he states his bleak vision of a future where governments have all become totalitarian and control vast numbers of slaves made willing by apathy (read “world-wide web” or “Internet”). Showing your private parts to a total stranger who then gets to grope you later? This is freedom? Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Have these TSA officials been trained, seriously trained, to deal with the fact that they see what many people would pay good money to glimpse? (Well, not in my case, but you get the picture.) Where are their credentials? No, wait, don’t show me that! If I decide to display myself in public, I could easily be arrested for indecent exposure, but if a pervert wants a free look, all s/he has to do is apply to TSA. What will it take for Americans to shake off their electronically induced haze and say “No more!”? Perhaps I am alone in feeling vulnerable naked before strangers. Perhaps others enjoy giving it all away. Is it not better to survive that flight so that another stranger gets a gander at the jewels when you fly back home? You can kiss my arse goodbye and call it government work. 1984? Brave New World? I think Silence of the Lambs might be a better paradigm.

Escanaba in da Moonlight

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My daughter was ill at school recently and I went to pick her up. It has been a few years since this has happened, so I guess I’m a little out of practice. In the school office there is a Star-Trekish device poking up through the counter where visitors check in. I was instructed to put my driver’s license on the device and an eerie glow emerged from it as they scanned my card. You are not allowed to leave with your own child, even if the school calls you, without being scanned. A New Jersey license is a real hassle to acquire with multiple forms of ID required – this isn’t the Midwest where you just turn in your expired license and they hand you a new one. Every four years you have to prove you are who you say you are. As we climbed into the car, I was glad for the school security, but I couldn’t help remembering.

I grew up in western Pennsylvania where deer worship was the dominant religion. The first day of buck season was a school holiday; I can’t recall if doe opening day was just a half-day or not. We could not graduate without passing a course called “hunter’s safety” which involved detailed instructions on how to shoot rifles and shotguns. My high school – God’s truth – had a rifle range in the basement and you were allowed to bring your rifle to school as long as you checked it in the principal’s office. When I tell others about this they don’t believe me, but when I ask my high school friends they all remember it that way too. Now that my stupidly smiling driver’s license image is floating around the school mainframe as a potential kidnapper for picking up my own daughter, I think about the difference in times.

Kids had guns in my high school in the late 1970s, but they knew that it was wrong to shoot other students. It was a small town, but we were all taught the rules of engagement and we knew that other human targets were outside the scope. Every year there were accidental hunting fatalities (Dick Cheney would have felt right at home), but the schools were used to address that issue. Today I see wind-bag politicians trying to cut back on education as much as possible and I see kids who don’t know any better killing their fellow students indiscriminately. No, I’m not nostalgic. I do not own a gun. It is my belief that children learn from adults, and when politicians say through their words and actions that looking out for number one is all that matters and that bullying (yes, Mr. Governor) is appropriate for getting what you want, I think it is no wonder we find ourselves with children who can’t tell right from wrong. I’m ready to watch Escanaba in da Moonlight and pray to the god of the deer.

Deer God...

Higher Ethics

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As a part-time public servant (I teach part-time at two state schools, Rutgers and Montclair State) I am required to sit myself in front of the computer for over an hour each year to watch a slide show on the ethics expected of public servants. Probably the first time this was a good thing since I had seriously been considering taking a tip-jar to class with me to help meet the costs of living in New Jersey. You see, part-timers do not get benefits. Some, like me, teach twice as many courses as their “full-time” colleagues and get paid less than half of what their betters do. I am a bargain-basement public servant. I figured a tip-jar might just help to cover mileage (not reimbursed). As I listen to the stern-voiced lady spilling out all the unethical practices (like tip-jars) that can lead to the dismissal of bad public servants, my mind can’t help but to wander to what Bruce Springsteen famously called “the mansion on the hill.”

Froma Harrop, a journalist in Providence, wrote an op-ed piece on higher education that appeared in yesterday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger. After surveying the situation at her local Brown University, Ms. Harrop laments the seemingly endlessly escalating costs of higher education. In the past four decades tuition has increased an average of 15 percent, whereas incomes (at least some) increased at an average of 6.5 percent. She notes, however, that the money is not going to professors or academic programs. The lion’s share of university money goes to sports teams. Students who often have trouble passing my admittedly easy introductory-level courses are pampered, petted, and preened by the university. The average undergrad has plenty of stories to tell of how they have been forbidden goods and services that the university reserves for its sports stars. Ms. Harrop also cites the fact that the number of administrators has nearly doubled in the last 30 years. For all that, the schools haven’t become more efficient, just top-heavy.

So as I waste an evening looking blankly at my computer screen, I realize that I am a public servant. Strictly part-time. I also realize that many public servants – those who hold high political office come to mind – earn far more than they strictly need. In fact, the benefits package alone of some of these “servants” would easily support a family of three mere mortals. And they don’t even have to make their own car payments. As an undergrad I took enough courses in ethics to officially declare it a minor. I have studied religion, a discipline akin to ethics, all my life. As the stern-voiced lady tells me all the bad things I cannot do with state money, I wonder what the top public servants are doing tonight.

Corporate Kindergarten

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Ever since the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, has been under pressure not unlike the oil well itself. He has had to announce his resignation, having become the public face of the oil spill. Not an image anyone wants. Musing on the fact that he is being forced out as the head of one of the world’s largest corporations (which earns billions of dollars of profits each quarter) Hayward has stated that life is not fair. Welcome to Kindergarten, Mr. Hayward. Ask any of those millions of poor who’ve never been given a chance at a decent life and they will tell you. The lamentations of the rich are more annoying than jock itch. These guys have had it so good for so long that they’ve forgotten what it is to participate in the struggle for existence.

Not content to lament the fact that he still has an exorbitant salary within the company – being sent to Siberia is a great hardship, even if you have a mansion there – Hayward also stated that BP’s response to the tragedy is “a model of what corporate social responsibility is all about,” according to the New York Daily News. His words ring truer than he realizes. This is indeed a model of unbridled greed and utter disregard for either the planet or those who get in the way of corporate acquisitions. Yes, the response reveals what truly drives the corporate world. If the rich are left alone, they will allow life to remain just tolerable for those on the bottom.

Having learned very early that life is not fair, I have watched the response of the uncivilized wealthy to their various slings and arrows with a slurry of bemusement and rage. What separates those on top from others is their ruthlessness, not their intelligence, or, please!, their worthiness. Experience is the best teacher. I worked my way through three degree programs and earned exceptional teacher ratings for over a decade before being thrown in the unemployed slush pile. I routinely watch colleagues earn far more for doing far less while future prospects grow blacker and blacker. Oh, my heart goes out to Mr. Hayward. It is obvious he missed Kindergarten. Maybe the second-floor maid will be able to fill him in some day.

Soaring ever higher

Our Daily Bread

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Over the weekend when my wife wanted to escape the East Coast heat wave and eat out in an inexpensive, but air-conditioned location, we ended up at the local Panera. While we were there, she mentioned that Time had just run an article about the chain because of its new, non-profit wing, the Bread Company. This store opened in Clayton, Missouri, and the store offers the option of paying what you can. Intended to help out the hungry but disadvantaged in an affluent St. Louis suburb, the customers are encouraged to pay more, if they able, to support those who can’t afford to pay. To the surprise of those on Wall Street, it seems to be working.

The article states that some wealthy take advantage of the system. No surprise there, we will always have the rich who feel the world owes them still more. Nevertheless, a successful company that offers to feed the hungry who can’t afford it – could this be a Gospel dream come true? It is easy to be cynical when the daily news feeds us a non-stop conveyor belt of corrupt politicians, CEOs greedy beyond the pale of human ambition, and the overall lack of concern among the privileged. Fat guys wearing cufflinks, jowls redolent with satisfaction, stare at the camera and inform us that they know what they are doing. Obviously.

In a nation as religiously inclined but as socially inert as the United States, it does me good to see a wealthy company offering something back to the community. The modest profits from the Bread Company are not channeled back into some executive’s already overstuffed wallet, but into community programs. I’m sure the cynical will say it’s a publicity stunt to win more customers. Perhaps so. Those who need help are nevertheless still able to access it. In a world where something as basic as bread is daily denied from many because those at the top can never have enough, it does my weary eyes a great deal of good to see any company with a modicum of social consciousness succeed.

A little bread shall lead them

Life in the Laboratory

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Nancy Gibbs’ essay “Creation Myths” appears in this week’s Time. Leaping off from Craig Venter’s “creation of life” in the laboratory, Gibbs asks who the final arbiter might be in this world we’re creating in our own image. The more I ponder the question, the more I realize that no person really decides how far we will go and the implications will only grow more and more unanswerable. We all attempt to construct the world according to our idea of how it should look; it is not a question of if we create the world in our image as much as it is whose image will prevail. As I noted in a recent post, no one person has all the answers. What each of us does impacts all the others just as a wave influences everyone in the sea. We fear science taking the prerogative of creating life because we are fully capable of imagining where it might go, but we just don’t know.

As an individual who has often been on the receiving end of other people’s visions of how this or that institution or company should look, it is my humble assessment that we have already lost control. We never really had control in the first place. At the end of the day, who will really be able to prevent another Gulf oil spill from occurring? Make what laws we will, other creators will find ways around them. And as in Gibbs’ article, the rest of us will simply have to react. No one is really in control.

Perhaps this is the real reason that religion is so appealing. It is terribly, terribly convenient to have an omnipotent divine entity on whose anthropomorphic shoulders we might cast our worries and burdens. Whether we believe in predestination or not, it is comforting to suppose that when it is all over God will somehow sponge up all that oil (preferably squeezing that sponge back out into BP’s great, sturdy tankards of crude), or stop that evil clone we’ve engineered, or stomp out that hyper-aggressive virus we’ve unleashed. We may make laws against creating life or human clones in the laboratory, but it will happen nevertheless. Gibbs wonders if scientists are about to cross some moral Rubicon. My answer is simple: we crossed that Rubicon long before the river itself flowed, when we first put our webbed feet out onto dry ground and began our still uncertain journey to the future.

God exits, stage left

Casting the First Stone

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I’m not overly nostalgic for a guy interested in ancient history. I tend to look at the more recent past as a via negativa for the young who might make a difference today. Very occasionally, however, aspects of society were handled better back in the 1960s and early 70s. One of the most obvious instances of a more sane society was the segregation of politics and religion. Prior to the rise of the “Religious Right” as a political machine the religious convictions, or lack thereof, of politicians played little role in their campaigns and American culture itself was much more open. A story from today’s MCT News Service illustrates this all too well.

In an article entitled “In S.C., religion colors gubernatorial race,” Gina Smith reports on the various religious slurs that now pass for political campaigning in that state. “Raghead” (for a former Sikh), Buddhist, Catholic, and “anti-Christian Jewish Democrats” are among the aspersions freely cast by those without the sin of a non-evangelical upbringing. As if only Fundamentalists are capable of making the right political decisions. As if Fundamentalists ever make the right political decisions. Fundamentalism is a blinding force on the human psyche, and those who are misled by religious leaders who claim unique access to the truth are to be seriously pitied. Conviction that those most like you are to be trusted most may be natural, but dogged belief that pristine morals accompany any religion is glaringly naïve.

The American capacity for belief in fantasy worlds is in the ascendant. No matter how many times Fundamentalists or Evangelical politicians are arrested or forced from office for the very sins they rant against, their overly forgiving constituencies come flocking back to them. Commit the sin of being born Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic and no quarter will ever be offered. No, I have no desire to go back to the 1960s, but I sure wish politics would.

Jurassic Playground

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Over the weekend I watched Jurassic Park for the first time in many months, perhaps even years. Despite the caricatures that substitute for believable characters, the dinosaurs are mostly believable and the warning tone appropriate. Throughout Dr. Malcolm cautions against “playing God” – an interesting perspective for a character who ascribes so fully to chaos theory. So when the television was off and the dinosaurs once again safely extinct, I continued to ponder this notion of “playing God.”

Quite often the phrase occurs in two main contexts: those of science and ethics. When humans have discovered the naturalistic explanation for a phenomenon and devise a human means of altering it, we are then in the realm of “playing God.” It seems to me that this is only a difference of degree from what people, and other creatures, have always done. Does not every action we take have endless ramifications? In our own little chaotic system, our decisions and activities impact others just as surely as a T-rex stomping through the park. It is only a matter of degree.

As human beings we may be the only animals that consciously “play God,” but the truth of the matter is that we are all pieces in an intricately interconnected system. Animals, even plants (behold the kudzu!), influence the activities of others, changing courses of rivers, degrading the environment, blocking the paths of ants, ant-eaters, or ant-eater eaters. What could be more natural than “playing God?” This, of course, doesn’t change the ethical angle, but throws it open much wider. Should we clone dinosaurs? Should we clone people? Don’t ask me – I’m too busy playing God in my own little corner of the world.

T-rex plays God

Cryptid Be Thy Name

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While poking around the internet last night to take my mind off the heat and humidity surrounding me, I stumbled across an article entitled “The Religious Struggle over Cryptozoology” on a site called Science and Religion Today. The piece was written by Joe Laycock, a doctoral candidate at one of my alma maters, Boston University. Having just finished Bruce Hood’s Supersense, there was a pleasing euphony in the coincidence. Cryptozoology is the study of unknown animals, and is not necessarily based on the supernatural (although it may fall within Hood’s definition of it). Laycock notes that two religious elements in society have latched onto this study: New Agers and Creationists. Creationists, it seems, see in certain cryptids, such as the Loch Ness Monster, hold-overs from the Mesolithic Era that prove the Mesolithic Era never existed. God can still make dinosaurs today, therefore the Bible (which doesn’t mention dinosaurs at all) must be true.

The draw of the unknown

One of the most welcome parts of Hood’s thesis was its consonance with Stephen Asma’s On Monsters, a book I’ve posted on before. Both authors explore how the human psyche reacts against what it perceives to be “strange mixes,” beings that cross-over between readily defined categories. Hood addresses this by tackling the concept of “essence” while Asma notes a dread accompanied by a sense of wonder. Hood demonstrates that from a scientific point of view, there is no such thing as the “essence” of a person, object, or living thing. Such ideas are the cling-ons from the era of souls and radically distinct species and genders. Closer observation has taught us that many such things are more of a continuum than a series of sharply defined types. Religions prefer to have fixed categories. Religious ethics often depend on them.

Laycock suggests that both New Ageism and Creationism “can be read as a religious response to the cultural authority of science.” Religions fear that which can be empirically demonstrated since it throws the god-of-the-gaps into the dryer and he comes out smaller each time. This is so, despite the fact that Creationists crave scientific respectability. While teaching my course on Myth and Mystery at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, I dwelt on cryptids for a few sessions. They are indeed often surrounded with a religious mystique. I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss the possibility of undiscovered species, many new ones are described by science every year. Nor would I say that they are supernatural. Nature has ways of surprising us still, and as Asma clearly demonstrates, we still have a need for monsters.

And With Perfect Teeth

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This week drug stores across the country will begin offering a testing product that will help assess genetic predispositions to various diseases and weaknesses. Potential parents might learn what debilitating illnesses could plague their children. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate needless suffering and create a world involving less pain and wasting away? Who wouldn’t want to know in advance? Ethicists are up in arms for such knowledge is surely a dangerous thing, just like an overcrowded lifeboat.

Ancient peoples had their own way of dealing with such dilemmas – blame the gods. Disease was not the result of genetic predisposition or even microbes. Illness, plague, pestilence and degeneration were the punishing weapons in the arsenal of ill-tempered deities who didn’t really understand what it was to be mortal. In Ugarit the archer-god Resheph was the divinity who brought pestilence. Shooting from afar with his fiery arrows he could topple cities and nations. Yet few prayers to him are recorded. Better to appeal to a higher power, an outranking deity who might overturn random suffering.

With the loss of many gods comes the loss of the right of appeal. Should the one God be the one who sends disease, to whom can prayers be offered? For many prayers to Jesus or even to Mary are made to circumvent the sad lot poured out upon a destitute humanity by an implacable father. People now recognize genetics and microbes, but still talk to the spirit world about woes and fears. Starting on Friday, however, there will be a product locally available that might provide relief in advance. Who’s willing to take on the gods and give Pathway Genomics a try?

Ape Versus Primate

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I have just finished reading one of the most important books I’ve found in quite some time: Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape. My attention was first drawn to the author when Rutgers University sponsored a talk he gave in the fall that I was unfortunately unable to attend. Simultaneously I saw his book footnoted in a text I was reading and decided to follow up on it. In addition to containing fascinating, documented anecdotes concerning ape behavior (he tells of a bonobo that attempted to help an injured bird fly!) de Waal holds a mirror up to the great apes and sees humanity reflected back. His discussion of the origins of morality makes far more sense to me than any theory I’ve seen a professional ethicist concoct. Our sense of empathy, de Waal notes with considerable evidence, derives from our common ancestor with the apes.

After discussing the understudied trait of kindness in the apes, de Waal writes: “With morality firmly rooted in sentiment it’s easy to agree with Darwin and Westermarck on its evolution and to disagree with those who think culture and religion contain the answer. Modern religions are only a few thousand years old. It’s hard to imagine that human psychology was radically different before religions arose. It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality clearly predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply these tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in the works since time immemorial” (225).

These might just be platitudes if ample evidence did not demonstrate their veracity. Apes plan ahead, recognize fairness, and can even see issues from the point of view of others (something Gorgias Press might benefit from learning). They are clearly inheritors of the moral sense that evolution has crafted among all cooperative animals over the eons. Religions like to lay claim to the origins of morality: we behave this way because our god told us to. In a sense that may be true, but only if the “god” is nature itself and the instruction it gives is the way for a species to thrive. Caring for one another, all religions aside, is the formula that evolution presents as the most successful choice of natural selection.

Turn a Priestly Eye

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In the local newspaper today there are two stories involving priests and money. One focuses on a British priest, the other on an American priest. The story on page 6 states that a priest in England is receiving harsh criticism for having stated in sermon that the desperately poor are morally justified in shoplifting to survive. He added that this should only apply to large chain stores and not small, family-run businesses. On page 11 is the story of an American priest who won $100,000 in a televised poker tournament. Since the money is being given to the parish it is a light-hearted human-interest story.

What I find disturbing in all of this is the larger message. Yes, priests need to be involved in the financial affairs of the world — we’ve created a culture so focused on money that it is impossible to avoid it. Yet the distinct tone of the news stories is telling. The priest advocating shoplifting to save the poor is suspect since he challenges modern mores of property ownership. The Bible advocates landowners leaving some of their hard-earned crops for the destitute to glean. The priest who won an enormous pot playing a game is simply a creative individual raising church funds in new ways. The Bible states nothing about gambling for money. Somehow I can’t reconcile the two stories.

Everyone feels the economic pinch in hard times, but few in our society really know what it means to experience true deprivation. Would it not be better if the church could devise a system that ensured fair allocations of resources without having to advise petty theft or playing one’s cards close to the clerical collar?