Endgame Vol.1 (5 page)

An action’s morality—or at the very least its perceived morality—can shift depending not only on one’s perspective, but also of course on circumstance. For one example of this, let’s talk for a moment about sex.

I have a friend who was a virgin into his thirties, mainly because he was terrified of women, terrified of life, terrified of himself. One day he somehow got hooked up on a blind date—the first date of his life—with a woman, also in her thirties, who had one child. This woman, too, was frightened, but of something else. She was afraid of raising a child by herself, of growing old with no one at her side.

That first night they had sex, at her instigation. My friend, who had never before spent any real private time with
any
woman, was hooked. It felt good to have someone want him. She, in her desperation and loneliness, I thought, took advantage of his naïveté and fear to quickly reel him in.

That’s how I saw it at the time. And though I felt protective of my friend, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t feel it was my place. I’m glad now that I didn’t because I was wrong. Meeting her, and having sex with her, and entering into a relationship with her, was the best thing that ever happened to him. Their love became the centerpost of his life, and he is a far better and happier man for it. She, too, is happier than she would otherwise have been.

I knew someone else who, by the time he was thirty, had long lost count of his sexual partners. They had to number in the hundreds. The number really doesn’t matter. His compulsion does. He knew only one way to relate to women, which was, to use his word, to “bone” them. I didn’t know him very long, but in
that short time he told me, or attempted to tell me before I’d leave the room, of his sexual encounters on the presidential yacht (he was a lobbyist, with access to the president, or at least his yacht), in elevators, in the bathroom of an airplane, in the back seats of enough cars to make his own parade. His sexuality was objectifying and harmful. It was clear from his accounts—although equally clear was the fact that he did not allow himself to become consciously aware of this—that his sexual use of women hurt many of them: he kept asking me why I thought so many of these women insisted he never under any circumstances contact them again.

The point is simple: life—and morality—is far too complex to allow us to say that sex is either good or bad. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not. It is possible for a sexual act to be profoundly moral and beautiful, and it is equally possible for other circumstances, participants, motivations, to cause it to be just as profoundly immoral and/or ugly. Sometimes sexuality can be neither moral nor immoral, and carry no particular moral weight. Of course sex isn’t the point. Remaining open to one’s current experience is. Life is circumstantial. Morality is circumstantial. An action that may be moral to the point of obligation in one circumstance could as easily be just as immoral in another. This is true of any action with moral implications.

None of this is to say that there are no moral absolutes. It’s merely to say we have become confused as to what they are, how we can discern them, and having discerned them, how we can make sense of them and allow them to guide our lives.

Years ago I got into an argument with a woman over whether rape is a bad thing. I said it was. She—and I need to say that she was dating a philosopher at the time, and has since regained her sanity—responded, “No, we can
say
that rape is a bad thing. But since humans assign all value”—and presumably both she and her philosopher boyfriend meant most especially those humans who have most fully internalized the messages of this culture, and who therefore receive its greatest social rewards—“humans can decide whether rape is good or bad. There is nothing inherently good or bad about it. It just is. Now, we can certainly tell ourselves a series of stories that cause us to believe that rape is bad, that is, we can construct a set of narratives reinforcing the notion that rape is harmful, but we could just as easily construct a set of narratives that tell us quite the opposite.”

There are two ways in which she was absolutely correct. The first has to do with the importance of stories in telling us how to live. If the stories you heard from birth on repeat to you in one way or another the messages that industrial civilization benefits human beings; that “civilized” people do not commit atrocities (they are, so to speak, civil); that violence is “barbaric,” and that “barbarians” are violent; that someone who is violent is an “animal,” a “brute”; that only the most successful at dominating survive; that nonhumans (and many humans) are here for us to use; that nonhumans (and many humans) have no desires of their own; that sorrow, anger, frustration, loneliness will somehow dissipate if only you buy something;
²⁹
that the government of the United States (or Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, or Luxembourg, for that matter) has your best interests at heart; that working in the wage economy, i.e., having a job, is natural, normal, desirable, or necessary; that the world is a vale of tears and that you will go to a better place when you die; that the morality of violence or any other action is simple; that those in power are too strong—or perhaps they rule by divine right or its modern equivalent, historical inevitability—to be brought down; that we would all suffer if civilization were taken out; that there have been no other ways to live that have been more peaceful, sustainable, and just plain happy than civilization; that those in power have the right to destroy the planet, and that there is little or nothing we can do to stop them, then of course you will come to believe all of that. If, on the other hand, the stories you are told are different, you will grow to believe and act far differently.

The second way she was correct is that it’s clearly possible to construct stories teaching us that rape is acceptable. The Bible certainly stands out as an example of this. Further, given that 25 percent of women in this culture are raped during their lifetimes, and another 19 percent have to fend off rape attempts,
³⁰
it seems pretty obvious that a lot of men have learned well the lessons that women are objects to be used, and that men have the right to do whatever violence they would like to women. These stories are told to us by people like, to choose just one egregious example among an entire culture’s worth, Brian De Palma, director of such films as
Dressed to Kill
,
Carrie
, and
The Untouchables
, who said, “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach—chopping up women, putting women in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?”
³¹
Even more to the point, he also said that “using women in situations where they are killed or sexually attacked” is simply a “genre convention . . . like using violins when people look at each other.”
³²

Similarly, we can create a series of stories that cause us to believe it makes sense
to deforest the planet, vacuum the oceans, impoverish the majority of humans. If the stories are good enough—effective enough at convincing us the stories are more important than physical reality—it will not only make sense to destroy the world, but we will feel good about it, and we will feel good about killing anyone who tries to stop us.

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You’ve been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog-shit hot dogs, dog-shit ice cream, General Tso’s dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn’t taste that good.
³³
Or if you cling too tightly to these stories you’ve been told about eating dog shit (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make the example a little less silly, substitute the word
pesticides
for
dog shit
. (Who was the genius who decided [for us] that it was a good idea to put poisons on our own food?). Or, for that matter, substitute
Big Mac
™,
Whopper
™, or
Coca Cola
™. Physical reality eventually trumps narrative. It has to. It just can take a long time. In the case of civilization, it has so far taken some six thousand years (considerably less, of course, for its victims).

It took me a couple of years to articulate a response to my friend. One afternoon I called her up. We went to dinner.

She said, “Well?”

“Water,” I said.

“Water?”

“Water.”

“That’s it?” she asked.

“It’s everything,” I responded.

She didn’t understand.

“Your basic point was that nothing is inherently good or bad . . .”

“Right.” She nodded.

“And that the stories we tell ourselves determine not only whether we
perceive
something as good or bad, but whether it in fact is . . .”

“Yes,” she said. “Because humans are the sole definers of value . . .”

We’d been through this before, and I’d been through this with so many other people, too. Once I had an office at a university next to that of a philosophy professor. I wandered in sometimes to chat, but was always quickly repulsed by his relentless strangeness and illogic. “Because humans are the sole definers of value, nothing in the world has any value unless we decide it does,” he said time
and again, as though by repeating his starting assumption enough times he would force me to accept it, just as the possibility of failing his class forced his students to do the same. I fled the room each time in disarray, but I’ve always wished I would have returned with a hammer. He would have asked about it, and I would have replied, “If I hit your thumb, you won’t
decide
cognitively that getting hit by a hammer hurts. Not getting hit by a hammer has inherent value, no matter what you decide about it.”

Unfortunately, this form of narcissism—that only humans (and more specifically some very special humans, and even more specifically the disembodied thoughts of these very special humans) matter—is central to this culture. It pervades everything from this culture’s religion to its economics to its philosophy, literature, medicine, politics, and so on. And it certainly pervades our relationships with nonhuman members of the natural world. If it did not, we could not cause clearcuts nor construct dams. I once read a book on zoos and wildlife in which the authors asked why wildlife should be preserved, and then answered their own question in a way that makes this arrogance and stupidity especially clear: “Our answer is that the human world would be impoverished, for animals are preserved solely for human benefit, because human beings have decided they want them to exist for human pleasure. The notion that they are preserved for
their
sakes is a peculiar one, for it implies that animals might wish a certain condition to endure. It is, however, nonsensical for humans to imagine that animals might want to continue the existence of their species.”
³⁴

I told my friend this story.

“Were they serious, or ironic?” she asked.

“Dead fucking serious.”

She replied, “They’re full of shit. The arguments are unfounded.”

I raised my eyebrows.

She said, “I’m not so hard-core as I used to be.” She’d long-since dumped the philosopher, and started making sense again. “If the stories we live by are going to mean anything, they have to be grounded, anchored. We have to have a reference point we can rely on.”

I said, “I can name for you something that is good, no matter what stories we tell ourselves.”

“And it is . . .”

I held up my glass. “Drinkable quantities of clean water.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Drinkable quantities of clean water are unqualifiedly a good thing, no matter the stories we tell ourselves.”

She got it. She smiled before saying, “And breathable clean air.”