Is There an Objective Right & Wrong?

Is There an Objective Right & Wrong?

The Roman dramatist Terence once exclaimed in his play The Self-Tormentor, “How much evil is sanctioned by custom!” Custom, habit, and the status quo can blind us to social injustice simply because we become so accustomed to these conditions until they slowly become invisible to us until an artist, author, philosopher, or foreigner opens our eyes and shows us what had always been there, but we never saw before.

Or a later generation sees what had always been there and protests the injustice of those conditions. In our own times, consider the changing attitudes toward an acceptance of Same-Sex Marriage, LGBTQ Rights, Black Lives Matter, Equal Pay for Women, Minority Rights, Animal Rights, and the insistance that the Rich and Corporations Pay Their Fair Share of Ttaxes.

Is right and wrong in the eye of the beholder, or is there an objective right or wrong which remains right or wrong no matter whether someone or the modern Zeitgeist accepts it or not?

And if there is an objective right or wrong, who put it there? God? But what if you don’t believe in God? Can you have an objective right and wrong without God?

Can you have an absolute morality based solely on do unto others as you would have them do unto you?

Would the alternative be the lawlessness of the jungle?

Or does right and wrong change over the centuries or does it always remain the same? Does it differ from culture to culture, or only in superficial ways, but its underlying core principles stay constant?

How do we know what is right and wrong?

Should we listen to our conscience, religion, society, authority, reason, or emotion?

If they conflict with each other, which one should we follow, or does it depend on the person?

Or do we find or invent what’s right or wrong ourselves?

And how do we know we’re right if we do, or that we’re not simply deluding ourselves or rationalizing our own desires?

Or is it enough that we honestly believe that we’re doing the right thing as long as we’re not hurting someone or some innocent creature in the process?

These are some of the basic questions that everyone asks who wants to live a life of integrity, and which the Greeks and Romans also asked themselves.

There is also the growing perception today that our state and federal government no longer serve the people of our country but rather the wealthy, the giant corporations, and the banking interests, all of which, it is claimed, are destroying our democracy.

This is shown by the indifference of many politicians of both parties toward the general welfare; government’s assault upon our democratic institutions and regulatory agencies regarding the environment, clean air, workplace conditions, the social safety net; its attack upon human rights, civil rights for people of color, the rights of minorities, racial injustice, injustice against women, and the denial of voting rights to minorities. These are moral issues that deal with social injustice that undermine trust in our government and democracy.

It is claimed that these actions have resulted in a loss of faith in the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the Courts of Appeal; that we live in a Big Brother police state where everyone and everything are closely monitored and controlled to serve the interests of the powerful; that we are fighting a new and dangerous enemy today as hostile as any foreign power against which our fathers and grandfathers fought, a hostile power which is our own government, which unabatedly conducts class warfare against its own people.

This new social awareness has led to questions about our society’s structural evils, the way our government is set up so that our legal and financial systems themselves have become so irredeemably politicized and corrupted by the wealthy and corporate interests that cause many of the problems that beset our nation today.

Some raise the question that so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few that this is nothing else but legalized theft and class warfare against the 99%.

Instead of focusing on these structural wrongs and imprisoning those responsible for those social ills, society blames the victims of these unjust conditions because the guardians of our national welfare who should be addressing this moral rot are themselves corrupt and will never change a system which they themselves are profiting from.

The free press and a few representatives of our religious institutions decry these social ills, but government simply turns a deaf ear so that the moral cancer daily grows worse.

Can one’s religious convictions ever be a disguised form of bigotry toward others?

Should laws always favor corporations, business, and the wealthy who victimize the overwhelming majority of the people for whose rights and welfare this country was founded?

If your view of morality moral if it infringes upon the rights of others?

Is a government just and moral if it visits suffering on its own people?

Should government ignore the poor and do the bidding of the rich?

Can you have honest government without old-fashioned values and morals?

Is everyone equal under the law or are the wealthy and powerful “more equal than” everyone else?

When conditions have reached such a sorry state, has it lost the moral right to govern its people?

Do you have a position on these questions? Should you, or is it somebody else’s business?

“How sacred is the poet’s task! He snatches all from destruction and makes men immortal,” is an unusual quote by the Latin poet Lucan on the overlooked role of poets who have always been the recorders of heroic deeds.

They recall to mind the famous lines in one of the most important books of the 17th century by Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which he refers to the role of scholars, historians, and poets in rescuing from the eternal night of oblivion famous historical and literary personages: We are the living tombs, registers, and as so many trumpeters of their fames: what was Achilles without Homer? Alexander without Arrian and Curtius? Who had known the Cæsars, but for Suetonius and Dion?

Poets immortalize the heroes of old and their golden deeds to live on forever; but, most of all, they celebrate the larger significance of those lives as role models for their culture.

Poets are their nation’s myth-makers, who explain a people to itself and how their heroes embody the ideals and virtues that make that people unique among the nations of the earth.

However, we must always remember that the accounts of these poets were not written on oath, and that there is doubtless some embellishment in their accounts that may border on hagiography.

Lucan (39–65 CE) was the nephew of Seneca the Younger and an epic poet, whose renown is based on his poem The Civil War or Pharsalia that depicts the military struggle between Julius Caesar, seen as the destroyer of political freedom, and Pompey, its preserver. Nero thought that Lucan was part of a conspiracy against him, so had him arrested and ordered him to commit suicide when he was only 26.

“All ancient poems are such sacred things” is one of hundreds of note-worthy lines by the Roman poet Horace that underscores that these ancient poems were composed for cultures that had existed long enough to understand that human existence was full of misery and that those who were responsible for this evil enjoyed great wealth and happiness, while those who were good had nothing but poverty and suffering for their portion. If God was all-powerful and all-good, why does he let such things happen?problrm og zzzztheofivy

The title of an influential book by Rabbi Harold Kushner states the problem succinctly, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” a modern updating of the age-old question of theodicy or “justifying the ways of God to human-kind,” or the problem of evil in a world created by a supposedly all-good God. It sets out to explain how, despite universal tragedy in the world, there is nevertheless an underlying purpose and that we should therefore never despair.

Such books and poems try to make sense of a world despite its apparent senselessness. A more recent book that draws the opposite conclusion is *God’s Problem* by the New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman**. It is a more skeptical view of the same problem. Read both works and see what you think.

Once a culture begins to struggle with these kinds of questions, it has reached a degree of maturity that looks at human existence as something both mysterious and tragic. These ancient cultures produce poems upon which they have meditated for centuries about life’s ultimate meaning and purpose that may give human beings consolation and hope.

Another such book is the Bible’s seven-page Book of Ecclesiastes, a highly skeptical, some would even say nihilistic, book that has been the object of enormous scholarly controversy for thousands of years. Why was this book ever allowed to remain in the Bible, so much at variance is its message with the other books in that same Bible? If you read it, you will see how its reputation is so richly deserved in embodying much of the questioning spirit that pervades ancient literature that calmly faces the eternal questions of life.

There are those who read it and are shocked by the despair in its pages, while others see it as a book of great wisdom. Many scholars maintain that it reflects Greek influence, which saturated the Near East a few centuries before the Common Era owing to the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Is Poetry Religion & Religion Poetry?

There are poets who mesmerize their readers, and there are also highly educated, cultivated, and refined readers who cannot abide poetry of any kind. Thus, the old adage, De gustibus non est disputandum, or There is no arguing about tastes.

There are also some who approach poetry as their religion and Eucharist, their only source of spiritual nourishment having nothing to do with organized religion or religious belief, but is nonetheless profoundly spiritual.

Poetry is their Scripture, with Shakespeare, Dante, Emily Dickinson, or others who are their guides to the Sacred. They cannot live a day without spending at least an hour being caught up within the sublime poetry of their pages. Poetry is for them an addiction as desperately vital as breathing itself. Poetry for them is their religion, while religion is poetry for others. In this Age of Ecumenism, long may both thrive!

Others prefer to learn wisdom by reading wisdom literature itself. This was certainly the way among ancient peoples, although most of them simply listened, since they couldn’t read. Those who wrote or collected these stories like Aesop, Phaedrus, Babrius, and Avianus were psychologists as well as literary artists whose tales were perennial sources of inspiration, strength, and healing to those who heard them recited from memory by those who carried this wisdom from village to village in the ancient world.

If you are among these seekers of wisdom, you already keep yourself open to inspiration no matter where you may find it since it can be found wher-ever you look. What source is the best? It depends on the person, for whatever speaks to you and helps you to grow is a portal to a special place you can visit again and again and never touch bottom.

Aesop and Dickens

A ten-year-old who has read Aesop’s Fables can better understand human nature than a classmate who hasn’t. Or take the novels of Charles Dickens, with their galaxy of unforgettable characters, crustaceans, and gargoyles: Mr. Pickwick, Wilkins McCawber, Sam Weller, Alfred Jingle, Sidney Carton, Mr. Bumble, Bill Sikes, Fagin, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Madame DeFarge, and Wackford Squeers.

All of these literary characters inhabited the collective imagination of the English-speaking world until a few generations ago. He still has his devoted readers, but they pale in number when compared to the audience of sitcoms.

Aesop and Dickens fast-track our understanding of human nature and character types some of whom are encountered in life. Moreover, Dickens softened the Victorian conscience by exposing the institutional injustice and oppression of the poor, which the Government, the Church, the Uni-versities, the Law, and the Press refused to acknowledge.

Those who staffed these institutions were quite comfortable living their cozy middle-class lives and never wanted to find out the truth of what life was like beyond their comfort zone.

What is Wisdom and How Do We Get it?

Belief is a magical kingdom and fairy tales, dreams, myths, and fables with their symbolical language are part of that kingdom. The key to under-standing them is not by being literal-minded, but by surrendering oneself to the spell of these stories and interpreting them figuratively to reveal themselves in their magical way. If you have an interest in the language of myth, dreams, and fairy tales, you might want to read the works of Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim, especially his book, The Uses of Enchantment.

And while you’re reading these stories, you cannot do anything or be anywhere else more important because your life may have been preparing you for these very moments — even the dry spells in your life make you more receptive to understanding what you need to understand at these moments in your life.

So, whether it be times of depression, disillusion, indifference or meaninglessness, never waste these experiences because they may be preparing you for such encounters by the inner hunger they produce in you for reading these texts.

Social Protest Literature

Finally, there are stories about human freedom, dignity, and social justice in a world that cannot afford to admit the need for these things because society has been arranged to weaken our belief in these ideals to lessen our resistance to oppressive conditions. You might call these kinds of stories a countercultural presence that gives those who read them strength and hope never to surrender to the “official” view of anything whose purpose it is to distract a population from such moments of introspection and healing.

As you grow older, you begin to see things you never noticed when young: that too many people aren’t given their rights because those in power don’t want them to have them. Denying what is owed them in justice naturally makes people’s lives much harder than they need be. If you read the ancient texts of every civilization, especially their religious Scriptures and prophets, they all talk about how wrong it is to deny people their rights.

The Old Testament Psalms and Prophets have always been a source of immense comfort and healing for people during times of personal or national calamities down the ages.

But one need not stop there. There is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Hinduism’s Upanishads, Buddhism’s Dhammapada, Zoroastrianism’s Avesta; The Analects of Confucius, The Tao Teh King of Taoism, The Koran of Islam, and the Gospels of the New Testament — wherever you find your inspiration.

If you come from a background where you haven’t experienced these problems of oppression and the denial of social justice, consider yourself fortunate because most people experience nothing in their lives but continual heartache. Wherever you look in history, you see the same struggle unless mention of it has been suppressed, which always happens for political reasons lest it prove an embarrassment to those in power.

Try to look beneath the surface of things even today and you will see that these same age-old problems are still very much with us. Whenever and wherever people aren’t treated fairly or are scapegoated because they are different or poor, you know that these people are being wronged and have done nothing to deserve this inhuman treatment.

Instead of confronting the real causes of the problems that exist in every society like greed, lust for power, and social injustice caused by the wealthy and corrupt government and business officials, these persecuted individ-uals are themselves unjustifiably blamed to distract attention from the actual causes that always have to do with the policies of those in power.

In the past, you would never find these kinds of stories in history books or in official sources of information because the country’s leaders didn’t want word to get out lest it create civil unrest among the oppressed who would discover just how many other oppressed workers there were like them in other parts of the country.

Government and Big Business never wanted to reveal to the public how terrible labor conditions were and the many labor strikes that were occurring in other parts of the country to prevent national uprisings or revolution. The news was therefore censored to favor the rich and powerful.

The oppressed always took courage and resisted when they understood that there were hundreds of thousands just like them in different parts of the nation also suffering from social injustice. Those unfair conditions had always been there, but many became so used to them that they thought that this was the way life was “supposed to be.” At least that’s what they were taught, so that gradually they came to accept those conditions as inevitable and never protested.

The problem, however, was that those conditions weren’t inevitable at all, but simply the result of political decisions made behind the scenes by the rich and powerful, who always have the strength and patience to bear the sufferings of the poor! If you want a good introduction into the modern American struggle that goes on even today behind the scenes, read the works and columns of Ralph Nader. Many think he’s a saint, while a few believe he’s the devil incarnate.

Indifference toward the suffering of others has always been one of the strongest weapons the powerful have in weakening the natural instinct of human solidarity against all forms of oppression by trying to divide the poor, the working poor, and what’s left of the middle class against themselves by turning different religious, ethnic, and racial groups against one other to distract them from their common enemy, their powerful oppressors, who are working “to divide and conquer.”

However, today’s Black Lives Matter movement is catching fire all across America as pubic recognition is now increasingly being paid to the classics of Black writers who try to educate the White population about what our nation’s Black citizens have always had to endure as witnessed by these ten bestsellers: The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin; Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; The Ways of White Folks, Langston Hughes; Native Son, Richard Wright; Race Matters, Cornel West; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; and Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon.

It’s what the entire Privatization Movement today is about in America — getting rid of the notion that we’re all in this together, so that it’s harder to organize against social injustice. It’s why the political Right has always been intent on weakening and abolishing labor and teacher unions and any organization that pursues the Common Good?

In unity there is strength to resist this systematic attempt to disenfranchise the American worker, and why those in power want to abolish public schools and replace them with charter schools that forbid unions.

Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.