Excerpt from What We Leave Behind

Internal Morality (p. 185)

From chapter "Morality Revisited"

Earlier in this book I mentioned R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience. The fundamental point of that book seems to me to be that people act according to the way they experience the world, and if we can understand their experience we can understand their behavior, no matter how nonsensical it may seem to us on the outside. So within his skewed perspective, Josef Stalin’s actions made sense. The same can be said for Dick Cheney; for Ted Bundy; for Herb Mullen, the serial killer who murdered people because voices told him this was the only way to prevent California from sliding into the ocean in a massive earthquake; for Richard Trenton Chase, the serial killer who blended his victims’ blood and organs, then drank this mixture because he heard voices telling him this was the only way to keep his own blood from turning to powder. From the outside the actions of these people are clearly insane (and immoral), but if you’re the one hearing those voices, the actions can begin to make sense to you.

We can say the same for a culture that values gross national product over the life of the planet. From the outside it is clearly insane and immoral, but from the inside there is a sort of internal consistency: it can be made to make a kind of sense.

The psychologist Lundy Bancroft also helped me understand that everyone, no matter how abusive or depraved, has an internal morality that guides actions. Bancroft works extensively with perpetrators of domestic violence. He wrote, “A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients. An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client who ever said to me: ‘There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.’ He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.”

So from an abuser’s perspective, his wife refusing sex may be wrong, and him beating her because of this may not be wrong.

From a slaveowner’s perspective, a slave refusing to work may be immoral, or wrong, and him beating the slave because of this may not be wrong. If it’s necessary to teach other slaves, or potential slaves, a lesson, hanging one or two from the nearest railroad trestle may in this perspective not be immoral, but an entirely appropriate response to the threat that nonworking or uppity slaves present to the current righteous social order.

From the perspective of the standard European or later American of the last several centuries, Indians refusing to give up the land they call home (but don’t properly use) is immoral, wrong, and selfish. Killing these Indians and taking their land is not only right, but is divinely ordained. It is, of course, one’s Manifest Destiny.

One’s perceived sense of entitlement can certainly influence the perceived morality of one’s actions. Let’s say you’re white, you’re rich, and you live in South Carolina in 1857. Society tells you it’s acceptable for whites to own blacks, that blacks are inferior—not really fully human—and are meant for servitude. God has ordained it such, given you dominion over them. You perceive blacks as resources. Your entire economic system is predicated on this perception, this servitude. And besides, this perception, this servitude, makes you money. You perceive—honestly perceive, as honestly as Herb Mullen perceived that voices were telling him to kill in order to prevent an earthquake—not only that God approves of what you’re doing (with this approval sometimes manifested by you making lots of money) but also that slavery is moral, and that attempts at slave liberation are immoral. You do have an internal morality. The fact that others may find your actions immoral does not mean you don’t have a functioning internal morality.

Now, let’s say you’re white, you’re rich, and you live in Crescent City, California in 2007. Society tells you that it is acceptable for humans to own land, and to own trees, and to profit from the flesh of murdered trees. Society tells you that trees are not real beings—they’re not subjects, but objects—and that their value is derived from how much money you can make off of them. God has ordained it such by giving you dominion over all nonhumans. You perceive nonhumans—in this case trees—as resources. Your entire economic system is predicated on this perception, this use. And besides, this perception, this use, makes you money. You perceive—honestly perceive, as honestly as the slaveowner, as honestly as Richard Trenton Chase perceived that voices were telling him to kill in order to keep his blood from turning to powder—that this perception of others as resources, this slaughter of others for money, is moral, and that attempts at stopping the economic system that is based on this perception, this slaughter, are immoral (that is, when you don’t perceive them as incomprehensible and silly). You do have an internal morality. The fact that others may find your actions immoral does not mean you don’t have a functioning internal morality.

The bottom line is that it’s inaccurate and not helpful to say that some people have no functioning morality. Every action and inaction reveals your morality. Every action and inaction is your morality. Let’s revisit Jack Forbes’s quote, this time changing the word religion to morality: “‘Morality,’ is, in reality, ‘living.’ Our ‘morality’ is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our ‘morality’ is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think—all of these things—twenty-four hours a day. One’s morality, then is one’s life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived.” He continues, “‘Morality’ is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not ‘theistic,’ is it not ‘atheistic,’ it has little to do with what white people call ‘morality.’ It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our morality. If we experiment on living animals, that is our morality; if we cheat at cards, that is our morality; if we dream of being famous, that is our morality; if we gossip maliciously, that is our morality; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our morality. All that we do, and are, is our morality.”