Cedric Mayson
SPIRIT LEVEL
Where do morals come from? The rules about right and wrong must have originated somewhere.
Does goodness matter? Is it important that the ancient command to “love your neighbour as yourself” has been modernised to “use your neighbour for yourself”? Is it okay to kill people who kill people, to show that killing people is wrong? Should we only copulate to populate, or can we fuck for fun? In a world needing redistribution of wealth, is it wrong for those who are starving to steal from those who have too much? Why tell the truth if a lie saves trouble?
Some say that morals came from God who sat down with Moses on Mount Sinai and wrote the Ten Commandments with his own finger – they are certainly thousands of years old. Some believe God spoke through Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount; or sent instructions through the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammed at Makka. They claim that being loving, merciful, generous, honest and chaste are divine edicts.
Others think we discovered morality as we went along. Our forebears realised that human community could survive and develop only if people were caring, honest, just, truthful and forgiving. They deduced a collective wisdom about what worked for society and that was good.
Powerful convictions about positive behaviour emerged deep in our subconscious, as strong as any god. Self-taught or inspired by God, a strong ethical sense emerged in the school of human experience throughout the world.
And now it is threatened. The dipstick shows that our spirit level has gone down and the morality which drives human relationships is failing. Whether its source is divine or social, morality has been superseded by “what I want for me”. We have adopted Western thought forms, theology and politics with their individualistic emphasis and they don’t deliver. Many sense a quest in our collective psyche for something more realistic than contemporary “popular” religion. Threatening people with punishment by a divine bogeyman seems a very negative way to encourage beings made in the image of a good god.
We are like the children of Israel who became fed up with waiting for Moses to come down from talking to God, and made a god of their gold to worship. We worship the god of personal possessions and it has undermined both morality and religion. Is there another answer?
Ubuntu is on everyone’s lips. It is an insight from African spirituality in building human community. It recognises a co-operative process to discover what helps us all, to seek consensus and enact it, and a spirituality found through sharing. There are no myths of divine instruction, no history of reliance on priests, no temples or religious institutions.
Africa does not normally see spirituality in terms of devotional meditation, abstract contemplation or buildings, but in terms of how we relate to the community in daily life. Morality comes from translating togetherness into our relationships with everyone – their person and health, poverty or wealth and land.
We require a renaissance of spirituality which is not diverted into remote, oppressive religious superstitions, but rediscovers humanness.
Like the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Qur’an and the great devotional texts of Hinduism, the focus is not on a god in the sky but on a compassionate, just, caring, wise, humanity – in Africa.
What we need is a peoples’ revolution of collective goodness.