I don’t like to do what everybody else is doing. With the world now a-flutter over the obvious issue of the presidential nominations, everyone’s simultaneously uninformed and misinformed aunt and uncle is spouting barrages of stupid opinions from the “If that abortion-crazy Hillary Clinton becomes president, I’ll kill myself” all the way to the “If any of those Jesus-crazy Republicans become president, I’ll move to Canada just like I said I would last time only for real this time; who’s got the pot?”
I find it boring to add another voice to the inane chatter. The last time I picked any winning candidate anyway was back in 2000 when I was 14 years old and actually supported every winning candidate in the local, state, and national elections. Over the next few years, I had a massive complete turnaround in personal political opinion and was ready in 2004, a more mature new adult, to support every losing candidate in the local, state, and national elections. These are the only two elections I actually remember, the first marked in my memory by arguing loudly about nominations at the cafegymitorium lunch table of my Junior High before both parties started flinging packages of frozen fruit at each other yelling, and the latter by maintaining in a very loud voice that goddammit, Wesley Clark was at least a liberal with balls to the contemptuous, shaking heads of my more-hipster interlocutors in the otherwise quiet auditorium of our High School musical practice. I stand by my political history.
Regardless, because everyone else is talking politics, I want to talk instead about something more abstract, which I think underlies the issue: morals.
When most people hear the word “morals,” they probably think about stern Protestant Ministers telling you not to have sex. That’s what I think about, and I never even had a Protestant Minister. Pretty much everything besides sex we (inaccurately) call “ethics,” so when someone wants to talk to you about “morals,” you can be pretty sure that even if they pussyfoot around it, they actually want to talk to you about sex. And you can also be pretty sure that you probably shouldn’t listen. At least, not literally and bindingly. What you should do is listen for purpose and motive, and if you agree with them, then take them into account for making your own decisions, and if you don’t, then what I would do is either politely nod and ignore them, or whip out your dick and piss on their face depending on how much they annoyed you and how much you respect them in general (note that option 2 is very difficult for women to pull off correctly, so ladies should stick with something more their forte like “giving the finger” or maybe even “crying”).
Sex is a representative issue, often on our minds, at the bottom of issues spanning our entire lives. Shakespeare would tell you that the dominating male fear is being cheated on and lied to by a woman, and that the dominating female fear is being dominated and controlled entirely by a man. Freud would tell you that if you’re a man, you’re secretly gay, and if you’re a woman, you want to run around and cut off penii. (Penii is the plural of penis, right?). I’m positive it’s all a lot more complicated than that. Or maybe a lot more simple. But if there’s one thing in human life that holds the most potential for meaning, for purpose, for bliss and despair, for human nature and desire and soul, it’s sex. What you do in your sex life is important to your life. To who you are.
Religion is something I almost never engage directly, because I find that it’s pointless to discuss religion with all but a very, very small, select number of people. Somehow, however, the issue is always intersecting with what I consider more important questions than the bland, narrow-minded, and ignorant notions that are most often invoked by the blanket title of “religion.”
Here’s one I want to be known for: Religions give God a bad name. If you don’t believe me, I can’t convince you, and that’s okay. But think about it sometime.
Religious people actually give religions a bad name. Because most often the actual, educated leaders of a religion don’t actually condone the ignorant, hurtful, closed-minded stances that pious extremists take. In a trial for teaching intelligent design alongside evolution, for example, supposed experts called to testify were asked to describe what intelligent design meant, and they described evolution instead. Many of the poverty-stricken people of African countries perform female genital mutilation on their children because they ignorantly believe it’s a tenet of Islam, even though it is not. At the very least, if you’re going to be a pious extremist, you should know what your religion actually teaches. And not fucking cut your children.
Faith, in some way, is necessary for all of us; it is not something to have and hold, it’s something to always be looking for, a struggle. Art – all art, visual, literary, musical – is honest, affecting, direct, and relatable most when the artist is searching. When the artist doesn’t know, just doesn’t know, when he or she is reaching out and desperate and firing on all cylinders just for something to hold onto and fight for, filled with doubt; then, then is when what is said and done and felt and showed is most deeply human and true. Because we don’t know, really. Even when we say we do. On the inside, we were all just pretty much thrown here and each other’s empathy and experience and help and brotherhood is all that we can rely on at this very moment. Caring enough to search, and knowing that there’s someone else here also searching, is what is human.
I was getting my car fixed again a few weeks ago (It’s had several problems since I came to Marengo for Christmas Break, and I’m convinced that’s because it hates this place and is acting out), and the mechanic was complaining, in Spanish, about how his colleagues have all of the knowledge and the experience to do any job – they’re mechanics after all – but they just don’t have the motivation to tackle the really big jobs. They only want to deal with oil changes, tire changes, small maintenance work like that; while he is willing to take apart entire engine blocks and rebuild them if that’s what the job requires. In describing how they aren’t willing to take on real challenges, his phrase was “No quieren batallar.” There’s no exact idiomatic translation, but roughly, it means, “They don’t want to take on the fight.” This, I feel, is how too many people are internally regarding their own beliefs. They’ll either accept what they’ve been taught or just not worry about it at all. The “meaning of life” is something they don’t want to think about or care about. We all have the faculties to – and this is the most important part – care. They don’t want to take on the fight. It’s not preaching or knowledge that makes faith. It’s the fight.
Whenever I rock out to Relient K, I also get really annoyed and send them an email to “stfu about Jesus.” I do not want rock musicians my age preaching to me. I could tolerate rock musicians older than me preaching to me, only because they probably have (a lot of (illegitimate)) kids by now. But even kids do it. I went to a show with the Almost a few months ago, and at the end of their set, the frontman (who is also the drummer/vocalist from Underoath) told us something to the effect of “Whatever it is that you believe in, whatever it is that works for you, that is cool, but I have to say that I owe it all to Jesus,” and my friend Ann who was there burst out into laughter. I kind of did too, though I tried to defend him, “At least he said whatever it is you believe in is cool.” Thanks for that, Aaron Gillespie.
It’s hard for me to answer the religion question in any way that doesn’t make the asker hate me, though I think that’s because the type of people who ask you what your religious beliefs are are the type of people who would hate me anyway. The devout Christians hate me because I drink, smoke, swear, and write essays like this one. The rationalist Atheists hate me because I have faith in a loving higher power. I don’t hate anyone except the Scientologists.
I’ve finally gotten around to reading Yann Martel’s so-far-excellent Life of Pi, within which “agnostics” (which is what I go by for the sake of simplicity when someone asks for and wants a short answer) get harsh treatment. The narrator, in my opinion, is too distrustful of doubt, which is something we should embrace. Nevertheless, I love most of what he says. There’s a section wherein the main character declares that “a quickening of the moral sense,” an “alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones” is “more important than an intellectual understanding of things.” That statement is followed up by this one: “realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably” (Martel 63).
[Note the MLA-style citation… I can’t not do that…]
What struck me in this passage was the understanding – seen as completely obvious by the character but clearly invisible to the majority of people who bother to use the word morals – that morals and love are connected. That love, in fact, is the simple most important thing upon which morals should be decided.
It’s easy to want hard-and-fast rules. It would make life easier, after all – to know always what is right and what is wrong. At least we think it would. The problem is that, in a list of the way that things should be, so ordered, so sensical, so linear, every human life is an exception. To try and tell people what they can and can’t do is nobody’s right. Nobody understands anyone else so well, any other situation so well, any other place and time so well as to say what is right and what is wrong for anyone, much less for everyone. You should never take another human being’s word as the end of the buck. You should never let the condemnation of a person or society or rule keep you from love or sex or companionship or relationship that you truly believe in. You'll regret it. The things that truly matter to us and impact our lives come along so rarely that they’re worth holding on to. Those are the heroic acts of our stories for a reason. They’re worth it.
It’s also easy to say that you should just do whatever you want. I understand this, and I think to a point it’s a side effect of religions giving God a bad name, and of moralizers giving morals a bad name. Hedonism can seem the more enlightened,
I’ve been immoral and/or amoral by the definitions of most belief systems. I’m probably being one or the other right now. And yet. It doesn’t seem right to throw out the word, only because I don’t follow it, or because it has been corrupted. Like the word faith. Something that has been devalued and twisted, through misuse. But still calls, somehow. Somewhere within, we all yearn for faith. We want to believe with all of our hearts that we have a real purpose and that our actions and relationships have enduring meaning beyond ourselves. Faith drives everything with meaning. And we’re right.
Sometime in the Spring of last year, while sitting in the class that introduced me to Critical Literary Theory, I began setting out the foundations of what I hope will someday become my artistic movement, and that of those who feel and think with somewhat of the same purpose that I have: the New Idealism. In my notebook, I wrote out some basic beliefs that the New Idealism would uphold and propagate. The very first point that is written there is “Sincerity” with the parenthetical “Real empowerment, Real faith.” Directly below that is this: “The Caring Morality.”
That is what I believe in, the Caring Morality. It has no rules, it has no easy answers or encompassing model. It’s about only doing the things that you believe in. It’s about going out of your way to do things that are helpful to yourself and helpful to others, not ones that are harmful. Sometimes it’s very hard to know the difference. Sometimes it’s very easy. Take on the fight. No lip service to your own beliefs, no hypocrisy to who you know you are. What is vital is that you care enough to give a shit. That you realize emotion and soul are more important than rules, while accepting with that the responsibility that you have, to invest in empathy and meaning. To not do what you don’t believe in, whether it’s sex or ethics or everyday decisions. And to not give up when it comes to what you do believe in, whether it’s people or futures or everyday decisions.
That’s what I believe in. And it is, I believe, what human beings were born to do best.
As Pi Patel would say, should you go for the easy list of unbreakeable rules, or for an uncaring nothing at all, you lose out so much in your life, on the “better story” (64). And then, if we do, when my grandchildren read this essay in fifty years, I will look like a fool.
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