The compass is gone, and in its place there remains a profound cultural distress concerning morality and its meaning in the post-religious milieu. "Is it possible,"one asks oneself, "to retain the barometer beyond the mythology, the scriptures, that invented the instrument? Is it necessary? Desirable? Are these laws--designed to battle the demon of self--functional beyond the reach of pride and shame?"
Their original construction, in actuality, does not discourage behaviors that are either amoral or immoral. In seeking to define the individual (and the species) as sullied and sinful, the ethics of the bible or certain other "sacred texts" instead requires evil so as to justify its proscriptions against it. Therefore, the very substance of this moral teaching carves space for the "good self," the "new self," out of the presumption of a sinister darkness and a corollary of gnawing guilt. In short, the mega-meme of Christianity (like an advertising huckster) cultivates a sickness in the soul that then requires the specific balm that only faith can provide.
Formulaically, this dependence of goodness on evil persists across a variety of moral cosmologies. So universal is this either/or conception of the universe, that the absence of this dichotomy is perceived not as an alternative perspective but as ambivalence, a soul adrift, or as a typical form of desperation; to lack this bristling choice between right action and wrong action is seen as equivocating and thereby sinking into the miasma of a dangerous moral relativism. Even if this relativistic outlook is translated into the idea of empathy, the latter-day pharisees will not make room for a morality that is not fundamentally tied to the propagation of authority and its whims of judgment.
Thus, the starting point must be even further out. "Morality" as a term must itself be abandoned. It must be replaced by something that leverages the complexity of momentum, intention and meanings and allows action (and thought) to be contextualized rather than criminalized. To be open to the breadth of human experience and knowledge requires the student to--either as savior or saboteur--don pioneer regalia to captivate the carousel of being in its artless rise and fall.
