The conversation is as old as our family line is long. I remember hearing a version of it as an impressionable kid and as a nonplussed adolescent.
I heard it again this week. It goes something like this:
”Everything’s gone to pot. It’s society’s fault. If we hadn’t strayed from the path of (insert theistic teaching of choice) the world would be a better place. Society has become godless and immoral.”
As a wide-eyed youngster I drank it in. The teenager in me gave a barely perceptible shrug and probably sloped off to listen to The Wall. But as an adult, it made me crinkle my brow.
Can we blame our modern ills on the fact that we’ve abandoned some or other god? Surely not?
Let’s whip out the timeline. If modern humans are about 150 000 years old, give or take a few millennia, there has to have been a moral code by which we lived before the suite of modern god options came about in the past few thousand years. The ”decay” of the modern world can’t possibly be because we don’t all now subscribe to one particular belief system, when there are a whole lot of useful ones out there, including humanism, which is steeped in morality.
Surely, the principle of ”do unto others” goes back as far as the caveman?
The debate is profoundly relevant right now. As the ashes of the xenophobic violence settle about us — putting an invisible taint on our world, leaving it grey and bleak for our self-reflection — we have to ask how we dehumanised our society so much that women could stand by, laughing, as a stranger burns to death.
The image of 22-year-old Ernesto Nhmawavane, silent and lost as he slumps beneath the weight of flames, is a shrine to our communal shame. Ironic how, in that one photo which shocked the world, he looks as though he is bowed in prayer.
Violence like this, the kind that seems so commonplace in South Africa today, is not normal to a society. The rape of a baby, so severe that her bowels spill out, is not our default behaviour. Domestic abuse, abandonment of the poor, violent crime, the world’s largest divide between rich and poor — is this the inevitable cul-de-sac which a society reaches after 350 years of social engineering? Perhaps this is where we arrive when whole communities are shoved into homelands and unravelled by migrant labour. This could be a world of our own making, after years of Bantu education; disentitlement of some and entitlement of others; emasculation of so many men; the manufacture of social strata based on a splash of pigment, or lack thereof, in a bodily organ, the skin.
Apparently 80% of South Africans regard themselves as Christian, so we can’t blame an abandonment of god for knocking our country off the moral straight and narrow (yes, I know, many devotees will say that not all of the 80% are practising).
Where do we get our morality from, then, if not from religious texts? From one another. To paraphrase the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, we get it from a ”steadily shifting consensus” about what is right and wrong in our time. He suggests we get it from legal judgements, parliamentary decisions, journalistic editorials and dinner party conversations.
We glean it from pop culture and the child’s playground, from great works of fiction and our intimate daily affairs. We pick it up at the feet of philosophers who constantly debate and self-examine. We learn, as little ones, that if we punch someone, we’ll probably be punched right back. We get it from witnessing tremendous pain or evil and knowing, instinctively, that we don’t want that to happen to us. The principle of ”you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, intrinsic to social animals, has always been key to our survival in a wild, wild world.
What is ”good” is determined by an ever-changing consensus, says Dawkins, part of a shifting moral zeitgeist which adjusts itself as it learns from history and navigates current events. That’s how society has come to agree that slavery is wrong; why we frown on racism; why the torture of humans or animals is punishable by law.
Some research out of Harvard suggests that our morality comes from the ”wellspring” of our intuition, which ”functions below the radar of consciousness”.
Our morality, or our lack of it, comes from the human condition, not any prescribed text. In times of calamity, when society’s structures collapse, we are just as likely to descend into a Lord of the Flies scenario, even with millions of Bibles and Qur’ans in circulation. Consider: apartheid came about in spite of so much Christianity; the Bosnian War (and genocide), where regional tensions built between Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christian; the Third Reich, which emerged out of a mostly Christian culture; the Israel-Palestine conflict. History is riddled with examples of human conflict erupting in spite of — and sometimes because of — religious zeal.