“People have no decency anymore.”
My amazing mother was decrying the moral state of the world. In her lifetime, a great sea-change has happened. She is the daughter of a successful entrepreneur and Nevada politician, who had been a municipal judge and then a state senator from the late 40’s to the early 1970’s. Raised in privilege, she told me of a time when her father would come home and announce that he had a “road man” in tow. This was a man that was traveling, on the road, a hobo. The man would be expected to work hard until dark, get a hot meal from my grandmother and then hit the road with the $10 her father would hand them.
This worked like a charm because, she said, “people had basic decency.” Even if they chose a way of living that was what we’d now call, “countercultural,” they could be depended upon to work hard, respect the home, and do what was expected. This was the reality during her childhood. To my mother, who has as pure a heart as there is, the world has run amok, lost their spiritual base, and become “ungodly” to the fulfillment of Biblical scripture.
To illustrate, she told a story of my brother who had taken his family to compete at the talent portion of a county fair (as usual, one of the boys placed). A teenaged girl, she said, was brashly running around topless, using language that could be called foul even in this age. She said that this was indicative of the moral state of the United States and western culture in general. She expressed fear and frustration, and pined for a day when community had been established by way of shared values of decency and basic goodness.
I’ve thought a lot about this over the past few days.
For the record, I don’t disagree with some aspects of my mother’s assessment. I agree that the world has become a scarier, more fragmented place. Bringing a traveler home from the railroad is no longer a good idea, if it ever was. We could point to case after horrific case where that hasn’t worked out too well for such a compassionate family as might do such a thing. Moreover, we live in a nation divided by opinions that are fueled by impassioned and often thoughtful argument on either side of issues from race to religion to the purpose of government to the definition of freedom to women’s rights to those of workers, water and our non-human relatives.
Why are we so fragmented? It’s simple: we’re in the middle of a cultural evolution, the magnitude of which humanity has never seen.
“An evolution?” I can hear my mother say. “You call this an evolution?”
Yes, and here’s why: there’s a subtle but meaningful difference between “well-behaved” and “good.”
When I left the family Church after 43 years and six preceding generations of devotion to it, it was because it had ceased relevance to me. I had found to my own satisfaction that it was not entirely what it purported to be. That was all it took. Where I had once been very well-behaved, and certainly “good” in many ways, that form of goodness was no longer interesting to me. Why? Because the premise, to me, was flawed. I had been “good” for the wrong reasons. I had mostly been “well-behaved.”
I didn’t want that.
For a while, I felt out of sorts to an extent that I had never felt. My family was the first casualty, and then a job selling medical supplies that seemed at odds with the truth that was upwelling within me. I moved into a tipi on a friend’s acreage in Central Oregon. Maybe the action most incongruent to my past was that I now occasionally shoplifted because, why not? The point is that my whole value system had been tied to my religion. When it became less than true to me, I explored my own boundaries rather than those that I had accepted as a matter of course. I had no other option.
Over time, I learned the law of karma. Sure, you can steal that jar of peanut butter, but believe me, you pay for it in other ways. Karma is not the bitch she is often named, generally by the misinformed or vengeful. Rather, she’s the teacher of the mindful explorer. I learned that stealing something I wanted made me poorer as a person, in keeping with the ironic and even playful nature of the universe. It affected me because I was interested in living by the heart. Sure, I could justify it mentally, but my heart was still undeniably affected. Therefore, I ceased. I experienced the walls of that particular action and the result was a certain understanding, a certain goodness that is beyond living by “thou shalt not steal” simply because the god of the Old Testament spoke it, and I feared the consequences.
I can tell story after story of the explorations of a man that lost his whole value system and has gained it back piece by piece, experience by experience; not always via “the hard way,” but often. I can do this because I’ve lived it for the past nine years.
I submit that the power of the habitual western values made people in this culture merely “well-behaved.” Drugs were not a common experience in my mother’s youth, aside from alcohol. The sexual revolution hadn’t happened – there were still many taboos that have vaporized today. The wars we’d experienced as a nation had narratives that were easy to buy into, like the defeat of fascism and the defeat of Communism, including a brutal dictator named Hitler.
However, beginning in the 1950’s, the cultural changes that had been festering since the start of the Industrial Revolution started manifesting. The post-war boom brought prosperity within easy reach of most Americans, and most Americans took advantage of it, incorrectly judging its seductive nature as harmless. A book called, “On the Road” depicted the life of a group of free-wheeling hipsters bouncing between coastlines with no purpose other than hedonistic ones. The beatniks followed, and then the hippies, each less confined by mores that were not demonstrably tied to happiness and a joyful life. Vietnam began, as dubious a war as there has ever been, providing “I told you so” fodder to the demonstrators that had begun to see the real state of the union.
Religion became a barrier to deep connection with God, rather than the sole possessor of the stairway to heaven – especially as it was seen as the seat of so many of the values of their parents’ generation. Information has since become far more readily available, making the secrets of the preacher, the politician and the profiteer all that much more prevalent. So much of what we now hear does anything but build faith in these once-pillars of a well-behaved culture.
As I look around me, I see much in the way of exploration. The mores that my mother grieves are now a couple of generations past. The topless teen that appeared to the chagrin of my brother and my sister-in-law is the result of the cracks in the bedrock of a well-behaved, easy-to-rule culture. That does not mean there are not consequences to our actions. For instance, this young lady is likely exhibiting behavior that will cause her pain. The point is that we are being called as a culture and as individuals to deeper personal responsibility; those not tied to fear of God, but of attraction to our souls who come from “God,” as defined by the heart and personal experience rather than dogma.
In the end, we’ll get there if we survive our cultural errors. The cost will be high to some of us who fly a little close to the flame, singe our wings and drop into the fire. But for the thoughtful among us, or the merely lucky, what will emerge will be a culture that understands deeply what it means to be a community, to be connected, to be compassionate, to be fully human.
I just hope I survive my own processes long enough to see it happen.
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