"Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Isaiah 55:1
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| Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1667 |
Almost twenty years ago now, I read a book called “Modernity and the Holocaust” by Zygmunt Bauman. It rearranged my brain.
I was a university student getting the liberal education I always dreamed of, filling my mind with good ideas that I still believe are immensely important. But the nagging idea this book left me with, the one that unsettles me to this day, is that no knowledge or college degree is enough to settle questions of morality.
The book points out at length that the institutions that cure disease and foster great art and music can be the same institutions that commit atrocities with similar zeal and sleek efficiency. Nuclear technology can power millions of homes or wipe out humanity. Chemists can make food more abundant or use that same research in a gas chamber. A degree makes no moral guarantee about how a person uses their knowledge.
Institutions alone, even ones with expertly crafted safeguards through bureaucratic process, are not enough to maintain morality. It cannot be outsourced to them.
Morality only exists within people.
It is generally frowned upon to talk about the Holocaust, in part because it is not pleasant, but also because, as most critics point out, we shouldn’t overdo the argument that so-and-so we don’t like is a Nazi, or that this civil rights violation or that is equivalent to genocide.
But at the same time, and this is the major point of the book, the Holocaust’s relevance will always be necessary so long as we have modern institutions that require moral guidance. As Bauman points out, “our anxiety can hardly abate in view of the fact that none of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible have truly disappeared, and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities” from happening again.
Today, this is even more alarmingly true.
Bauman, borrowing heavily from decades of Holocaust research, argues the Holocaust is not an aberrant blip in the steady triumphant march of progress that modernity pretends to offer. The Holocaust was a product of modernity.
He quotes Henry Feingold who made this chilling observation:
“[Auschwitz] was a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts…Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backwards nations would envy. Even the overall plan itself was a reflection of the modern scientific spirit gone awry. What we witnessed was nothing less than a massive scheme of social engineering.”
And here’s a question for today: if moral safeguards in the 2030s were to fail like they did in the 1930s, what technology and institutional processes might we use this time to perpetuate atrocities against another undesirable group?
Would there be an app for that?
I don’t believe we are there yet, but I do think institutions meant to protect us from our more savage impulses are cracking at an alarming pace.
On the heels of a century of some of the greatest technological advances humans have ever known, we should be congratulating ourselves. We have a device that fits in a pocket containing the entire repository of human knowledge about art, philosophy, and scientific advances. From social networking to information sharing to hailing the arrival of artificial intelligence, we might think that at last we have done it. We have finally put to rest the animal within, smothered it with angry emojis and kicked it out of society via cancel culture until at last man’s evil nature is put in its place. We can now move into the technological utopia that billionaires like Elon Musk keep telling us about, where in twenty years we will become so enlightened that even work and money will be optional thanks to the shimmering new world they are ushering in. We might even colonize Mars.
Instead, what I see is the sliding morality of institutions that have degraded to a level of crisis. Not necessarily because deranged criminals and imbeciles exist in positions of power. They are not entirely new. What is turning this moment into a crisis is how woefully unprepared we, ordinary people, are in dealing with it. It is the unprecedented level of moral vacuum in not only the systems meant to protect us from these kinds of savage and lunatic tendencies, but in a significant portion of the population who are more than willing to put up with an immoral tyrant, even to the point of cheering him on.
And, like the railroad that once transported raw materials for building a nation now used to carry undesirables to death camps, the technology we use to comment and read about the news is also assisting in the dismantle of public discourse and the erosion of basic facts. Anything you want to believe about whatever newest event, it's like a choose-your-own-reality. The loss of both morality and truth in our technology and media consumption is completely staggering.
But instead of blaming the technology for this sliding morality and truth, we need to start seeing the problem in ourselves.
We just don't have the strategies in place for when people no longer even care about right and wrong so long as their own team wins, or will lie to our face as the video plays and not even give it another thought. We know how to deal with law infractions and immigration issues and debates about infrastructure and health care. Not well, mind you, but at least there’s a manual. These issues and differences of opinion are expected, and escalating conflict is safeguarded against within that structure But when the moral foundation of an entire portion of people starts to evaporate before our very eyes, when neither facts nor morals no longer matter, it’s sheer panic from there on.
As we watch the buildings of government and scientific advancement become hollow and fill up like whited sepulchres with the institutional decay of washed up government officials, crackpot health officials, and flagrantly immoral elected officials, now might be a good time to pause and wonder if we, the people, have lost something along our way to find greatness.
What we are facing are glaring blindspots in our political and social discourse. We can see the obvious pathology that allows for atrocities and moral failures at home or abroad, but we still can’t see them as the product of the very systems we admire so much and expect to maintain and distribute moral authority and truth to us like pamphlets. We see the current breakdown as an aberration from an otherwise healthy system, and that if we'd just stick to the institutional script, everything would be fine.
We think of secular institutions as guardians of morality, when in reality all they can do is package and distribute the morality of the people operating within them.
We are literally shocked by this, so we assume we must not be going far enough. Maybe if we entrench ourselves even more into better technology, as some urge us to do. Or perhaps if we lean even heavier into fighting for constitutional rights, maybe flip over some tables in the sacred temples of due process, or protest the abuses bigger and harder. But as important as all that can be, none of that succeeds in instilling morality into what is now a vacuous space in a growing chunk of people. In the words of Elijah when the people tried to call to their idols to send fire from heaven to consume their offerings, “Perhaps if you pray louder! Your gods must be sleeping!” (1 Kings 18:27, very paraphrased.)
All this brings me to say something about Prime Minister Carney’s comments. He has been an important first among global leadership to say the gig is up and we need to face the facts. Bless him for that. And really, he is doing well what he was hired to do, which is to protect his nation’s interests, the same as any head of state. After all, he isn't there to preach a sermon and restore the moral conscience of the world. He's there to establish international policy.
After the gaslighting we have been hearing for the past year from institutional powers (or the last three hundred years, depending on your skin colour) it feels, at least at first, like a breath of fresh air. “The rules based international order” is over, he says, and since nostalgia is not a policy, let’s take the sign out of the window and refuse to live within the lie. Either fight for your place at the table, or take your place on the menu. (And presumably, if you're Canadian, just make sure you say “sorry” first before you politely eat your weaker neighbour.)
But this outlook, however pragmatic or realistic, is not the moral high ground we think it is. After all, we are still maintaining that someone must be on the menu. We just need to make sure it’s not us.
After the full meaning of such an ideology settles in, we might start to feel even colder at the bone.
As Dr Stacey Patton smartly points out, “Black and colonized people should hear something even starker [in Carney's address]: our people have always been the damn menu. The only difference now is that more countries fear being served alongside us.”
This is where we are. As the appetites of global powers become more insatiable, as the bulging pockets of billionaires become an even greater obsession, the institutional powers that serve the few are starting to turn not only on marginalized groups, but on their allies, on their citizens, on their very own who thought they had an in with the cool guys. It is not the injustice against them that wakes us up to the lie. It's when the injustice begins to reach us.
If a group of leaders are nodding their heads in agreement that it’s time to activate survival mode and disengage from the game of rules that was, at last we say it, always a farce, well just hold onto your butts. We might start to see even more pragmatic hold-your-nose-and-swallow-in-the-name-of national-security kind of deals, not less, because, so the argument goes, this is the new world order. When the big boys stop playing by the rules of the game, you take what you can get.
One has to wonder, as we scramble to rearrange our economic and political alliances to accommodate the unhingement and lawlessness in primary global powers, who will take up the torch now? Who will “preach good tidings unto the meek, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, and open the prison to them that are bound?” Because it certainly isn’t the government or the technocrats. They aren't even pretending anymore. Perhaps a charity organization here and there, powered by the good will of an ever shrinking percentage of the population who can afford it, or even have the time?
But here is what I have come to believe, and I don't hear enough people saying it: morality cannot be adequately maintained by secular institutions. It is maintained by religious ones.
We should always work to improve and defend good secular institutions. We should protest, speak out, and fight to maintain the inspired institutions of liberal democracy. We absolutely should.
But when all this is over, don't expect the vacuum of moral authority to be filled by a simple restructuring or retrenchment into institutional law. As Carney acknowledges, we can't go back to living within the lie that global power structures are going to promise morality, or even basic security. Maybe they never even did.
Make no mistake. Fighting fascism is not enough. As Dr Stacey Patton explains, “the collapse of a lie does not automatically produce truth. It produces a vacuum. And vacuums are filled by power, not by conscience.”
So how do we resurrect our collective conscience for moral truth?
Like we learned in the Holocaust, the capacity for great evil is never neutralized within a modern institution. It remains baked into every single one of them.
Unfortunately, this includes the decay of religion into an institutional bureaucracy, which we have watched over the past century. For Christians, many have witnessed a hollowed out form of our religion, totally divorced from the teachings of Jesus to become a mere extension of the institutional power structure. Alliance with institutional powers to create the rise of what we call Christian nationalism is absolutely not the savior we are looking for. History is explicit about where that leads.
The way out of this mess, the only way out in my opinion, is to rebuild our collective morality. This will include revitalizing religious community building.
It can't look like a talent show for modern day Pharisees who have made an art out of straining at gnats to swallow camels by disregarding the suffering of the marginalized. It will include something much more potent—a return to radical Christian love.
To offset the rise of demoralized institutional power, religious people of every creed, Christians and non-Christian alike, will need to work together to rebuild a moral foundation where everyone is at the table and nobody is on the menu.
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