Morality musings

Part of me believes it is simple to know right from wrong, simple to take a moral stand and be on the right side of history. A childhood integrity that I refuse to lose. These truths feel self-evident.

Living in a society that espouses lofty virtues but accepts injustice, isolation and inequality as a normal part of life, creates a unique confusion. I, like many, trick myself into thinking that I am somehow not part of the problem, or that it is ok because it is normal. Or that the status quo is better than drastic unpredictable change.

When we grow up, we realize that our self-interest can feel at odds with what feels right, as we find out way through a scary human built world.

Many people seem to think they’ve figured out the solution. Just as so many people in far left and right movements throughout history thought. And trails of atrocities that somehow were justified by moral purity require a dissonance too big for my small mind.

We long for knowing in a marketplace of other people’s opinions discussed as fact, at whose bidding we do not know, we navigate history that is contested, selected, erased, and re-written, and harden into a world of us vs. them.

Atrocities are justified, excused or ignored all together, meanwhile guns fire and bombs drop, social justice and safety becomes a blood soaked trade of horror for horror.

We pick sides out of desperation, stand enraged and justified. We retreat into tribalism. We forget that these sides did not always exist, they were formed by other peoples some time ago, who also took sides out of desperation perhaps.

We harden into positions. “Kill or be killed.” Oppress or be oppressed. Our basest instincts carried out into the world through technologies that should never have existed in the first place.

This disillusionment must be seen for what it is, a fundamental, deep seated moral injury. A destruction of our purity of hope, of belonging, of trust in self and other. Its a very real, possibly universal psychic injury. One cannot exist in this world and not experience moral injury.

For those not directly impacted, in response to this injury, the human mind and heart can engage in several different processes, and understanding these human tendencies is crucial for inching toward conflict resolution.

Some of us harden into depressive realism, give up our idealistic instincts and see them as emotionally driven childlike impulses. This may include dissociating from our hope and sense of shared humanity, forget that it existed, and even cut off from awareness the resulting depression. At worst, it can result in regressive and oppressive reactions out of a lack of trust in anything better. This is often a very human stance of self-protection. It is, at its core, a trauma response.

Some grasp more intently to a sense of righteousness to prevent the feeling of our conscience closing in on us. It can feel like it keeps our moral hearts active. It simplifies sometimes complex systems to make things feel clear cut. It keeps the depressive realism at bay, at least a little. At worst, it can lead to burnout, self-sacrifice, refusal to learn new information, and furthering divisions. This is often a very human stance of self-protection. It is, at its core, a response to trauma.

We must find a way to break through our fear and hatred of one another. We must listen to each other deeply and with the trust that we can heal, and hold tenderly onto facts which engage our most divisive minds so as not to become a mirror of that which we hate.

As many have said, if those of us not directly involved cannot do it, how can those more directly affected ever hope to do so?

Can we confront our violent tendencies (most of us have them), our internalized hatred (most of us experience it), our self-protectiveness (most of us have it, and its a good thing to have), and the polarizations we project onto the world?

The failures of today and yesterday do not destroy our inner knowing, though they may obscure it. The impossibility of peace does not destroy its worth.

Learning to be human is learning to live justly while navigating our needs for safety and justice in the midst of more problems than any of us can solve individually.

It means we are frequently complicit while we must also never accept that this is how it must be, and know that worthiness is inside of us even when we fail to realize it.

Even when we fail to realize it.

We can and we must find a way to come together across generational trauma and harm, contradictory histories, to focus on our shared dreams of safety, to build bridges, to tell truth, to listen and to reconcile.