As a kid, I grew up internalizing two messages from my Sunday school classes. One had to do with my place in the spiritual world (“God loves you”) and the other had to do with my place in the physical world (“Be nice to others”). For me, God was spirit and Jesus was ethics, being and doing, praying and living. This dualist view of things is neatly captured by the two suggestions Jesus gave to his disciples. One suggestion had to do with love (love God, love one another). The other had to do with action—which should be obvious from the fact that it begins with the word “do.”
As I find myself drawn into the progressive Christian fold, I hear a lot of talk about how we should think about our spiritual tradition. This is understandable. Most of us come from a spiritual practice that emphasizes the regular and dutiful repetition of foundational statements about the nature of God. God is great. God is good. God provides us with our food. The progressive point of view begins by questioning whether these foundational statements are so foundational after all. But I have heard much less about how we should think about our ethical tradition: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Part of the reason we feel no particular qualms about adopting the Golden Rule as a reasonable guide for our living is that it doesn’t violate the first part of the progressive argument. In fact, there’s nothing about it that requires us to believe in a deity. It speaks to the way we relate to one another. This is very much of a piece with progressive thinking. It has the further attraction of being a universal rule. The Ontario-based web site, religioustolerance.org, presents versions of the Golden Rule (aka the ethic of reciprocity) in 21 different world religions and notes that “there is a growing consensus that all humans are equal in importance.” It goes on to say: “In our opinion, the greatest failure of organized religion is its historical inability to convince their followers that the Ethic of Reciprocity applies to all humans, not merely to fellow believers” (emphasis in original). The sentiment sounds progressive, doesn’t it?
This raises an interesting question: how could we have been so insightful as to articulate a universal ethic that has stood without revision for more than 2000 years, and yet have failed so miserably when articulating a reasonable theology? Or is it possible that the Golden Rule doesn’t stand on such a sure footing after all?
Historically, our theological shifts have happened because they have been forced to confront challenges from experience. For example, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo presented the world with a new understanding of our (increasingly marginal) place in the universe. The church resisted, but cumulative models based on empirical findings have shrunk the spaces where God can present as a credible notion. And while the Renaissance could unseat our acceptance of ecclesial authority, there persisted a sense of unity through the Holy Spirit. But even that came into question with the emergence of psychoanalysis and neuroscience which cast a cloud of skepticism over even our most numinous apprehensions of divinity.
And yet, as empiricism went running roughshod over all our convictions, it left our ethic intact. In fact, the brilliance of the Golden Rule is that it is detachable from our religion, like a modular piece of IKEA furniture. Even better: its truth is empirically verifiable, or so the game theorists tell us. We can develop computer simulations that model competitive scenarios and these clearly demonstrate that altruism produces the best outcome. And our most enlightened economists offer a global vision of altruism in which wealth is optimized and the poorest nations are lifted out of poverty.
But there are two problems. The first is philosophical. Altruism is a function of motive, not outcome. It’s wrong to say that the Golden Rule promotes altruistic behaviour, because altruism and behaviour are like apples and oranges; they grow on different trees, one moral, the other, ethical. Altruism happens deep within us and reflects a private orientation towards the wider world. Behaviour happens in the wider world and reflects the outcomes of our private orientation. So, for example, the press may hail me a hero for leaping onto a baby to protect it from falling bricks, and perhaps I was indeed motivated by compassion, or perhaps I merely wished to save myself a lot of bother sifting through rubble and consoling distraught parents. The outcomes may be identical, but it is the private motivation which determines their altruistic character. The problem with the Golden Rule is that it is entirely consistent with the second scenario; it need not demand anything of me as a moral being. The most that can be said is that it promotes an enlightened self-interest.
The second problem flows from the first but is a little more practical. Heeding today’s enlightened economists, we nurture a utopian vision—peace and prosperity, where children no longer wake up to a hunger that never goes away, and where people no longer war with one another to secure scarce resources. Do unto others … Lift them up just as we would be lifted up. Isn’t this the outcome that all liberal North Americans crave? The global application of the Golden Rule?
But this is where, after 2000 years, the Golden Rule finally collides with empiricism, and like our theology, it requires some adjustment. There is a fact which the Golden Rule could not possibly have anticipated when introduced to a small village in Roman–ruled Palestine: that one day human beings would live to the limits of the planet’s resources. For 2000 years, we have been making two assumptions whenever we cite the Golden Rule. We have assumed that “others” refers only to humans. And we have assumed that what we would want others to do unto us would be rational. But experience shows that neither assumption is valid.
In his book, From Naked Ape to Superspecies, David Suzuki identifies as our greatest failing the emergence of a dualist world view. This is the view that detaches human beings and their rational brains from the natural world and holds rationalism over and against the world. This is akin to the view I mentioned at the outset, the view I learned as a child in Sunday school that detaches the spiritual from the ethical. Instead, ecologists have traced a radical interdependence. We are not something apart from our bodies. We are not ghosts in machines. Instead, body and spirit are a unity. In the same way, as a species, we do not live apart from our world. We are embedded in it and utterly dependent upon it. What would we do unto the bacteria living in our guts? What would we do unto the dirt in our gardens?
This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the first two parts of its Fourth Assessment Report. The findings are unequivocal. Climate change is real and it’s our fault. At the same time, Tonga and Viet Nam have become the latest members of the World Trade Organization, hoping that participation in liberalized trade will promote economic growth so that they can become more “developed.” What we would have others do unto us is to make us wealthy. If we accommodate others by encouraging them to become wealthy too, then (according to the terms of the Golden Rule) we grant ourselves license to acquire more. But, for some resources, more is impossible. Global oil reserves are finite and now quantifiable. Global water cycles provide a fixed amount of fresh water each year. And with a swath of rain forest the size of Greece cut down each year, the Amazon could be barren by 2020. There is no more.
The Golden Rule has reached its limit and now needs an adjustment. The work of our ethic can no longer begin with others, but must begin with an inward gaze. We must examine our desires. What would we have done unto us? More? What would an ethic look like if it demanded that we hope for less instead of more? What words would we use? I expect it would no longer be quite so pithy as our beloved Golden Rule. But pithy never made anything true.