Seeking the Moral High Ground
Editor's Column from LCV Winter 2009-10

Many of the founding fathers and signatories to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, having observed the tyrannies perpetrated by monarchies and organized religion, were duly skeptical of too much concentration of power in too few hands. Most of the best-known eschewed any particular denomination and many simply considered themselves deists without subscribing to any particular denomination or sect. I speak here of the original and greatest patriots in the American political canon. 

In designing a secular state, they fiercely separated it from any church. At some point they, as I found myself so doing as my son rounded into his teenage years with an eye cocked towards manhood, were obliged to confront the conundrum: what moral authority does a secular person or society base moral law?  Referencing indirectly philosophies of natural law such as those enunciated by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the signers of the Declaration declared certain laws, i.e. natural laws, to be “self-evident.” They further rested their rhetorical lever on a similar fulcrum by decreeing certain rights to derive from these, including ”life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is of passing interest to note that in an earlier draft “private property” was also included in this litany, but it did not survive the editor’s pen, perhaps by virtue of the limited length of the parchment. What is significant, however, is that they felt compelled to ground the justification for their rebellion from England and their founding of a new form of government on human-framed or articulated principles deemed universal and absolute.

Bring the Lesson Home
Possessing only a modicum of the founders’ learning and certitude, when it came my turn to instruct in matters of moral law to my son — aided by a minor declension in his grades that enabled me to exact learned study over one summer as a toll to indulge him in playing football in the fall — I took refuge in the lessons of literature and assigned him a course of study. The theme I bid him explore across these works was “What is the basis of moral authority for a secular person?”

Seeking a range across literature and culture, and knowing he had recently read as a school assignment Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, in which he confronted notions of power and social responsibility, I asked him to read and write a short essay on Sophocles’ play Antigone, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. This was one of those life lessons in which the journey was more important than the destination. There was no easy answer in these works. For instance, at what point on the moral spectrum does the surety and legitimacy of conscience of Antigone or Thoreau slide into the deluded fanaticism of a Jim Jones or David Koresh? How does an individual plot his own legitimate moral compass?

Older Sources
Rather than dictating principles to him, in setting this object lesson in motion, I was reminded of my own youthful journeys when I was surprised to discover that familiar codes of moral conduct coexisted with the Old Testament and long predated the New. The Cyropaedia or “Education of Cyrus,” written in nearly 500 B.C. by the Greek historian, chronicler, and mercenary Xenophon, attributed moral precepts to the ancient Persians that I had always been taught only belonged to the western Greeks. After all, the Greeks dismissed the Persians as an inferior people, calling them barbarians, or literally, those who spoke like goats. Yet in the Cyropaedia we find the monarch “was educated in conformity with the laws of the Persians; and these laws appear in their care for the common weal not to start from the same point as they do in most states. For most states permit every one to train his own children just as he will, and the older people themselves to live as they please; and then they command them not to steal and not to rob, not to break into anybody's house, not to strike a person whom they have no right to strike, not to commit adultery, not to disobey an officer, and so forth; and if a man transgress anyone one of these laws, they punish him.”

The simple answer to determining the basis for moral authority is that it is not simple. If anything, people in many cultures across history have learned that what codes such as the Ten Commandments gain in clarity, they suffer from rigidity and orthodoxy and most importantly from not being discovered through a process of self-questioning and exploration. As in the humanities generally, each individual must engage in good faith their own navigation between obligations to the self and to society.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief