A strong criticism of the new religious view that I describe -- vast and wondrous but hard to grasp -- comes from thinkers that describe "ethics and morality", one being a practical companion to the other. The thought is particularly challenged by early StarTrek plots, which were explorations of the 19th century discovery that cultural evolutions of people who stayed in one separated place, like an island or a valley, resulted in unique ways of life. The basic theme was that they could get themselves into inconvenient and even civilization-destroying predicaments, but that the Enterprise crew should not intervene in the usual Empire-powered way. This did not "catch on" in the larger American mind.
The continuing confirmation of how intertwined is being of any kind has to be understood as coming from sources like Quammen's "horizontal evolution" or the context of ecology where one adaptation responds to the next. This moral/ethical principle is inevitable and universal relationship. Not only is it our fault that the arctic is melting and the Amazon/Siberian forests are burning, all due to the most innocent hamburger or Sunday afternoon drive, but also who I am is the result of all of time before me and will determine what happens to future living things everywhere on the planet. It's a pretty impossible burden to bear, even by keeping it in mind all the time. One of my early influences was the parable of visiting the past and stepping on a dragonfly that was a crucial element in evolution.
In seminary ('78 to'82, which seems necessary to say since so much of thought is chronologically anchored by names and events) we were concerned about Jim Jones, partly because one classmate knew someone who died there, and about economic inequality which seemed a matter of advantages rather than any deep mammalian drive to dominate. All we had to do was jigger society a bit. But there were classes aimed at equipping us to do battle for the good, the right and the inconvenient.
One of the most valuable basic courses was from Don Browning, who addressed reality first by defining the methods of decision making. Were we depending upon rules, in particular classic Christian rules; upon principles; on the example of individuals; in terms of resulting good; in the numbers of people spared? Does the end ever justify the means? When discussing some concrete puzzle back in Portland with my much-respected minister, he was jaunty but truthful to himself when he said, "always." Do what may be destructive but justified. He lost a bit of my respect at that point. I'm intolerant, which is often a characteristic of morality.
We spent a lot of time on the sort of dilemmas one must act on in hospitals, like whether to excise a wide disfiguring area of flesh in order to make sure a cancer has been eliminated, or would it be better to just take an amount away that had a high percentage of effectiveness? We did not address any of the questions about fertility that preoccupy the right, the trope of the helpless child or pre-child who is vulnerable to death. If we did think about babies born without being viable outside the womb, we didn't talk about the emotional, only the rational.
But the practical presentation of ethics at a major university was limited. Meadville/Lombard was included in a "cluster" of small denominational entities and our student body was required to meet all the standards of a U of Chicago MA at the School of Divinity, a stringent set of classes and tests that some felt were unjustified for nice suburban congregations. Having to pass a French test was an early hurdle. We knew that we were technically admitted to the Div School because in their original founding documents they were required to include a certain proportion of actual practicing clergy among their Ph.D. candidates. We were a fudge to compensate for the change of society from learned clergy to a more therapeutic and enthusiastic sort.
I knew that I was only attending the UofC because of being admitted as an inclusion from M/L (I turned 40 there) and was a bit embarrassed about it. I never could have been admitted on my own, though my GRE scores were pretty good. But I was very much in favor of a meritocracy that gave the minds there so much respect. They were indeed brilliant. But only in one way. The poets among us at M/L were hamstrung by the tests.
The Div School depended upon discretion. If a person (not necessarily from M/L) wrote an exam text that didn't meet the PhD standards and style, the answer was taken to a faculty woman, a nun, who personally judged it with total secrecy. She approved of poetry. She never handled any of my tests and I did learn a bit of print French, but it was a fudge. Big universities do that. Is it ethical? No one asked until now.
The personal case that stuck with me was the final test of an ethics class which was made in a private oral interview. I went to it exhausted, insufficiently prepared, not entirely persuaded of the material, and feeling stubborn. I should have been flunked, even by own standards. But the professor, making what he considered an ethical choice, gave me a B, which at the U of C is about the same as an F. I was only going to be a congregational minister.
He considered me a lesser mind destined for a lesser role and therefore deserving of exemption from the higher standard. Later, back in Montana, I heard an education professor say to another professor that he had lower standards for tribal students because "they'll only go home and teach other Indians anyway." Many indigenous people have depended on D.Ed. degrees to be a move towards professional life. I made an offhand remark once to one of these tribal people (very respected and effective) that this was true and he never felt the same about me again.
Gatekeepers who stoop in this way evidently think we'll never figure it out, but we do. The results of this silly wound stick with us, even after we understand that the gate was only necessary because a fence had been established to exclude us unless we had a favor from a controlling class. So one ultimate moral concern of this new radical monoexistence (which is full of variation) has to be about the placement, nature and justification of fences of every sort. Gender, nation, employment, skill, education, ability and capacity must be carefully invented and then torn down when no longer justified.
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