NOW WHAT?

When I took an admirable ethics class from Don Browning at the U of C Div School, it was a revelation, because he presented various ways to approach the problem of choosing an honorable path of action in a really difficult ethical dilemma.  Short of the Ten Commandments and “long” of Jesus Golden Rule of Love, what other methods were there?  We all try to use heroes as guides, their examples as much as their advice, though they tend to be a little culture-bound or knocked off their pedestals by later revelations.

The idea of doing the most good for the most people but the least harm to the most vulnerable is popular, but intersected by the high value of materialism, so that we only think of giving or not giving people money.  What “good” are we talking about?

God has dissolved except among those who took Him as their role model and identified so thoroughly that now they think they ARE him.  Psych categories like sociopath or narcissist are equivalent to evil until they are complexified and therapized in human shortfalls.

The Rule of Law, which we once thought was such a high standard and endorsed by everyone conscientious, turns out to be easy to overturn when the basic constituency doesn’t believe in it, finds it a nuisance, just ignores it.  Dissolve God, erase written law — oh, all right -- so easy and sometimes deserved.  We admit that anthropology in the 19th century has taught us all that it’s relative and it depends on whether the results concern who is “in” versus who is “out” and therefore not included, like women and slaves or the indigenous.

So why not be an anarchist and just let things happen.  Let everyone be exposed to the virus so we see who is “fit” enough to survive.   If you don’t seem to “fit” the occasion of the moment, you’re toast -- not history.  The kicker is that only the survivors (not the winners) will find out who it was that fit.  If they turn out to be different from you, you are probably gone, maybe before you celebrate your triumph.  Or maybe, if the unfitness was late enough in life that you could reproduce, only your scarred great-grandchildren will realize the trap you set for them before THEY die. (Climate change would be my example, but a broken economy might also work.)

That is, fitness is a quality determined by time, not by dominating everyone else at the moment.  There’s a kind of natural law to behavior and theories that overrides any piece of paper, any conference, any inherited paradigm.  

Fitness in terms of survival is dependent on variation.  The idea is not to preserve everyone, but only the ones who fit the new world.  The dinos die, the little mammals live.  If the idea of the global is one big sameness, then global will only last until it doesn’t and then everyone is gone.  But the genius adaptation of the hominins was being able to change — not just themselves but also the environment and the interface with it, plus the ability to work together and adapt the ways of doing it.  

What Trump never seems to grasp is that he’s a survival experiment and that if he doesn’t help his enablers, whether Mafia or Putin, he’s expendable.  Maybe he realizes that now . . . almost.  Or he would if his humanity weren’t being sludged into mush by dementia.  More likely it is the next generation that will pay.  Look at the children of our major evangelists, like Billy Graham.  All they know is going back to the past, which is not a good idea for fitting the future.

This is like chess.  What counts is the pattern, not the chessmen, each of which has a prescribed and restricted move.  It is a time art, so the pattern moves.  If a person has the right kind of brain, all the possibilities present all the patterns, and the person wins.  But trying to play chess on a parchesi board is hopeless.  A monopoly board even less.

The globe not only is covered with tectonic plates that move the continents through the oceans and climates, smash them together to make mountains, pull them apart to make new seas, but makes the oceans higher or lower and changes the patterns of the wind.  No sooner do we settle in and lose respect for those patterns, that we forget that whatever fitness we developed earlier might doom us now.  Arctic blast where you are?

So politically, it turns out, abandoning the rule of law and the pattern of educated and cultured people, dumps us into crime and chaos — and also destroys the party we rode in on.  Because human social groups change even more than the geography of our country.  The qualities that created one “ethic” is not the same as the next.

Frat boy movies about drunkenness, sex exploitation, and inherited wealth have expanded to take over the White House and the Supreme Court.  Literally.  Where is the movie about the graveyard that comes next?  It will be a cemetery next to the one for the aged congress folk who tried to capture all the wealth they could. Now they are close enough to death that they are well-advised to take the money and run before the guillotine gets to them or at least death in prison.  They are like the person who figures they will enjoy life later but dies on the first day of retirement.  They do not look fit, not even Jim Jacketless Jordan.

Some people are immune to HIV infection.  Some climates will destroy Killer Hornets.  There is always a saving remnant — but is there?  The last rhinos are staggering along alone.  The last passenger pigeon is “stuffed”.  Are we going to be the last democracy?  Are we going to have to pay all the medical bills for those throngs of people who rushed out to catch the virus?  How many years will it take to resolve all the inheritance issues?  What happens to the homes and gardens while the courts can’t keep up?

Of course, Don Browning continued his work after the class I took in 1978.  Though he has passed on, he expanded his thought to what he calls “practical theology”.  I just accidentally bought the book he called “Fundamental Practical Theology“ so I’ll spend the afternoon reading it on my computer.  If I can figure out "Kindle."  It may answer the question of what we do next.