Moral Muscle

I follow several spiritual blogs and – despite my own declared atheism – find them generally fascinating. After all, the dilemmas we face are the same for all, regardless of the spiritual solution we find to make our peace with them.

In all of the discussion of god’s will and man’s responsibility (often paired with the difficulty of the challenges to be overcome in the pain and suffering of the world) I find little mention of a simple fact.

Willpower, and thus moral will, is a muscle. Like all muscles, it responds to stimulus and exercise. This is why we teach our children to share at a very early age, to respect others. We know that the practice they gain in this monumental task of viewing the ‘others’ welfare as inseparable from our own, is time well spent. Kindness to a puppy does generalize, as the law has recently acknowledged in the US with the increased emphasis on criminalizing cruelty to animals. Just as those who practice evil by beating/harming defenseless animals often graduate to beating/harming defenseless humans – kindness practiced in consideration of the welfare of a bumble bee helps acclimate the human heart to the practice of compassion and kindness to fellow humans.

At the root of this will-to-good is connectedness, which it appears we once had in abundance. In many cultures throughout the world man saw himself as brother to crow, to wolf My Christian readers may forgive me for the observation that, in the west, the heart of the disconnect was excused by the religious teaching that nature and man were distinct, separable, and nature was to be used for man’s ease. As I read the many contradictions in the various chapters of the Bible – I notice that this same God ALSO made both nature and man to cohabit in the same space, to live together in the common good.

The other disruptor was that other western god, Science, which feeds off hubris and, while telling us we are inseparable with nature and cannot live alone, contradictorily is continually pushing us towards the attempt to do so.

Both Science and this version of the western God share responsibility: Science as hubris, religion as apologist for wrong-action.

Where is will-power, the moral will to save ourselves, our planet, the whole of this intricate world/creation we evolved in/were gifted with?

It isn’t just city folk who are missing the connection between man and nature. I grew up in an area where kids couldn’t safely enter the growing fields because of the prevalence of chemical poisons. Nature was the enemy-with-many-faces: insects, blights, molds, disease, birds, critters. Better to stay locked up in the house.

The rift is healing, one field at a time. Many of our ancestors simply burned a forest when the fertility of their fields gave out – some subsistence cultures in the world still do.
But the collective world knowledge can now reunite us with the fabled past, that distant memory of fecund soil, bird song, bubbling springs. Just as a child needs to work hard in order to learn to walk - falling, pulling himself up, and falling again; we need to work hard to get our collective feet under us and pull ourselves into a new world.

It’s still possible. But time is running out. Do we have the will to make it happen or will we endlessly avoid the truth, letting greed and sloth choose our path - one Chicken McNugget at a time?