Читать книгу Spiritual Envy - Michael Krasny - Страница 13

As a college student, I decided I could create my own set of commandments. I had read all of Ernest Hemingway and realized that, in spite of the nihilistic view found in his powerful short stories and his novels such as A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, there was an appealing code. At least it appealed to me. Or, I should say, parts of it did. Despite all the blustering machismo and small-minded prejudices in his work, the Hemingway code was rooted both in the idea of showing grace under pressure and in acting in a manly and stoic way in the face of adversity and accepting an existential reality that precluded faith. Though Hemingway exalted the Catholicism he was born into and influenced by, he nevertheless accepted the notion that existence preceded essence, that we create who we are by our choices and actions despite a deterministic universe and regardless of what we are born with, or what, my mother would insist, was ladled out to us by God.

Hemingway also believed one could be drawn into a nearly communal ethos with others who were like one in spirit and sensibility, into the he-or-she-is-one-of-us ethic. When, in The Sun Also Rises, Brett Ashley in effect releases the young bullfighter Romero from her hold, she tells Jake Barnes it’s what they have instead of God. Jakes replies, “Some people have God.…Quite a lot.” Brett says then, “He never worked very well with me,” and Jake responds by suggesting they have another martini. In Hemingway’s world we are connected to those we like, and who are like us, by pleasures such as liquor and a stoic view of life, by a code and commitment to a life of action, by a belief in a here and now without frills. Life is a quest for transient pleasure and courage, where we must accept the one and only predetermined certainty — our fragile mortality.

Other writers too — philosophers and poets — provided me with a tentative and evolving blueprint as I planted myself in the world of ideas and embraced the life of the mind. Albert Camus especially affected me with his notion that the only valid philosophical question was whether to commit suicide. The quest for knowledge itself became an integral part of my developing code, and I absorbed as much as I could from great writers, philosophers, and poets. If I was to have a higher purpose or a sudden blitzkrieg of faith, it would have to enter without being wished for. It would have to be genuine, convincing. I continued to long for that kind of certainty, a certainty that I knew only a form of spiritual sustenance could provide. But in the meantime I settled on the idea of developing a code based on my Jewish cultural traditions and on what I derived from the writers, like Hemingway, and existentialist thinkers, like Camus, that I was intellectually drawn to and who believed in the power of the human will. I was convinced, by the age of nineteen, that once death arrived, it meant the end of consciousness, the big and lasting sleep.

I came remarkably close to dying, in fact, in a speeding car driven by a liquor-swigging fellow student named Dave, who lost control one night on a slick wintry Ohio turnpike as a giant rig bore down on us. It was astonishing how narrowly we escaped death’s jaws. I saw the truck’s lights glaring directly at me and was sure my life was about to end — until I realized we’d skidded off the road and flopped into a huge snowdrift on the side of the turnpike, which had only recently been plowed. I crawled out first and stood watching as Dave rushed out of the driver’s seat and buried his flask in the high snow that had miraculously cushioned his car. He then fell to the ground and kissed it.

In the instant when I had stared into the truck’s lights and believed my doom was sealed, I had thought that I, at nineteen, would barely have an obituary. A sentence or two would sum up my life. It seemed as if the experience of coming so perilously close to death should have set off in me a charge for God, gratitude for life and for having suffered no physical harm. But by that point, only a year after the Cuban missile crisis had knocked me to my knees, something had shifted.

I was more of an agnostic at this time, although I still couldn’t fully embrace the word. Standing in the snow I thanked God for saving me from collision with the rig, but I did it in a mealymouthed, automatic way. I was certain that, had I been killed, I would not have entered an afterlife. My doubts about such concepts as an afterlife had become too strong, stronger than my previous willingness to accept the comforting notion of a life or form of ongoing consciousness after death, some soul transmigration or ascent of the soul to a higher reward or descent to punishment. I was with Dylan Thomas on this: “After the first death there is no other.”

Nevertheless, belief in God was another matter. Faith-based existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber, and great thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre who denied the existence of a higher power, had already imprinted me with their ideas, as had poets like Thomas and a myriad of other writers and thinkers I greedily ingested. All of them had contributed to the life philosophy I was formulating. Ideas had begun to percolate in me, assisted by my ambitious reading and my desire to form a code that fit my personal, evolving brand of agnosticism. This code recognized no afterlife, no involvement by God in human affairs, and included my own doubts about God and the Ten Commandments. It wasn’t that I found anything objectionable about the Ten Commandments or about making them the guide-posts for my life. But the first four were connected intimately to a God I had come to question, and the other six seemed too absolute. A code birthed in agnosticism, I was beginning to realize, had little relationship to absolutes.

I had been troubled early on by the absoluteness of the prohibitions in the Ten Commandments. Even as a boy I had doubted that the commandment not to kill fit every instance. Did it really apply to battle or to self-defense? Was it all right to kill a figure like Hitler or Stalin to prevent mass slaughter of others? What about the killing done by the state in response to heinous crimes? And what about the killing of animals?

These questions provided fodder for late-night adolescent debates, and for later discussions that would metamorphose into more serious and weighty moral analysis. They are the questions of one who questions. They can lead, ultimately, to confusion and indecision, even to the comedic. Was there, I asked my students decades later in a literature class I was teaching, an ethical imperative not to eat meat because to do so meant animals had to be killed? Plants at the time were being heralded as living creatures that supposedly exhibited responses to human touch and sound. They were, at any rate, life-forms, and they too had to be killed if humans were to eat. One could, I noted to my class, limit one’s diet to fruit, but that would mean complicity in abortion. So, I concluded, to be absolutely moral, one had to not eat.

And what of the absoluteness of the commandment not to steal? You cannot read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables without recognizing the injustice done to poor Jean Valjean when he is forced to serve nineteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to survive. And yet, we were commanded by the highest power never to steal. How absolute was that commandment? Or, for that matter, any commandment?

As a kid I took the commandment against stealing seriously and refused to go along with my pals who urged me to be their partner in swiping clothes from Cleveland’s May Company or cigarettes from the corner pharmacy. “Klepto,” I called one kid who seemed to take inordinate pride in what he could steal. He was cunning enough to get away with a lot of petty heists. Why, I wondered, wasn’t he being punished? I chummed around for a while with another guy, whom we called Jake the Thief. I thought he was a colorful character, and he went out of his way to win my approval, which flattered my boyish ego. But we all knew he stole things from people’s homes, even the homes of his supposed friends and neighbors. My dad put it best one day when he said to me of Jake: “Your friend has larceny in his heart.” And Jake, whose father was a bookie, predictably found himself, as the years progressed, in serious trouble for check forgery, trouble that he managed somehow to weasel out of. What, I wondered after Jake’s arrest, would be the ultimate punishment for all his theft?

Jews did not seem to believe in hell, really, and I certainly didn’t, so where or how would punishment for theft occur if not on earth? And what of those who, like Jean Valjean, stole out of desperation? Were there exceptions to the commandment? Mitigating circumstances? Get-out-of-violating-the-commandment-free cards? I raised such questions inwardly, and they sounded to me even then a lot like Philosophy 101. They suggested, as I continued to grapple with them in college, that I might need to join what by then were the growing ranks of secular humanists, who were vilified for holding views tantamount to moral relativism. Yet how could one be absolutist about any of the commandments five through ten? I loved my parents and felt the value of the commandment to honor them. But I knew there were abusive and dishonorable parents who deserved no honor. Parents who were cruel to small children deserved punishment. In fact I felt outraged enough about violence against children that in such cases, were I guaranteed immunity, I could possibly have personally violated the commandment not to kill.

If the commandments were listed in order of importance, how could the one obligating us to rest on the Sabbath be more important than those forbidding us to steal or kill or the one commanding us to honor our parents? The holiness attached to the idea of keeping the Sabbath is allied with the belief that creation was completed in six days and, therefore, like the first three commandments, fundamentally tied to belief in God and his filling a short-term work order. This commandment is viewed as absolute by many Orthodox Jews, who, believing they must rest on the day of rest, refuse to drive, answer the telephone, push a button on an elevator, or even flush a toilet.

I knew Jews like that when I was growing up, including some of my neighbors. They refused to do anything other than walk to and from the Orthodox synagogue they could not afford to join. An itinerant freelance rabbi named Katz (my friends and I called him Rabbi Katzintoochas, meaning “Rabbi Katz in the ass”) taught haftarah bar mitzvah preparation to their kids and others whose families couldn’t afford to join a synagogue. Rabbi Katzintoochas would park blocks away on Saturday and slink over to the home of those he was teaching haftarah that day, to avoid being seen driving his car on Shabbat. This was during the days when I would play hooky from Sabbath school on Saturdays. One Saturday my friend Froggy and I got into the rabbi’s unlocked car and stayed crouched down until he furtively made it back to where the car was parked. When he opened the door, we sprang up immediately and shouted in unison: “Good shabbus, Rabbi!” I honestly feared Katzintoochas was going to die of cardiac arrest.

My point is that absolutism leads too often to hypocrisy, but also to rigidity and fanaticism. In many cases, it leads directly to religious fundamentalism, which — as writers like the ex-nun Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, have shown — can breed murderous acts. During humankind’s time on this planet, there has been far too much absolutism, and far too much absolutism remains the global order of the day. But there has also been, believers will argue, too many exemptions from the commandments, too much sliding away from the requirement to follow the will of God as set forth to Moses on Sinai, too much moral relativism.

Can one say that adultery should absolutely never be committed? Poor Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, impelled by desire she could not understand and a maddening search for fulfillment. Or Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Literature had the unsettling effect of expanding my empathy for fallen women, who defied God’s seventh commandment. How could one not empathize with Anton Chekhov’s sweet, tortured, religious Anna, married to a flunky, or with men like her lover, Dmitri Gurov, whose wife was hard and unyielding, the chief characters in the magnificent love story “The Lady with the Dog,” which Vladimir Nabokov called one of the greatest stories ever written?

And what about Theodore Dreiser’s George Hurstwood, in Sister Carrie, who is both an adulterer and a thief? He feels compelled to steal from the safe of the company he works for so he can run away from his stultifying bourgeois life and his cold and materialistic wife, Julia, and find a life of love with the vital, fresh-faced Carrie Meeber. Hurstwood winds up a lost vagrant, but the point is that we feel empathy for him as we do for Willa Cather’s effeminate and foppish Paul in her classic story “Paul’s Case,” the story of a young boy who, like Hurstwood, is driven to steal. Paul wants to escape the dull, severe Calvinism of his boyhood home and the neighborhood with the odd Shakespearean name of Cordelia Street, where all the boys are brought up to be the same. Paul knows he is different. He, too, meets a terrible fate, throwing himself in front of an oncoming train rather than going back to the intolerable psychological oppression of his school and Cordelia Street and his motherless home. The real questions we must ask about transgressions such as adultery and theft are: when should empathy override the absoluteness of the commandments, and when should mercy override justice?

Literary characters helped subvert my sense that the commandments were absolute and provided me with a greater understanding of the wide and complex range of humanity and its frailties. This in turn increased my empathy, which I was obliged to fold into my evolving personal code. Empathy did not mean allowing, or making ready excuses for, moral transgressions, but it did mean one had to determine the nature of transgressions and their often moral complexity. One had to wrestle with what was right and what was not — as well as with the more formidable moral question of good and evil.

Hester Prynne, for example, is the adulterous wife of Roger Chillingworth in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter, and Chillingworth is a man whom Hawthorne makes us see as evil. Hester, whom Hawthorne compares to the before-her-time Puritan-era feminist and banished heretic Anne Hutchinson, is drawn into adultery with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who tells her their adultery has a sanctity of its own. It might be difficult, as D. H. Lawrence has suggested, to imagine those two at it in the woods, because Dimmesdale is so fraught with pained asceticism. But given Roger Chillingworth’s evil nature and Hester’s humanity and vitality, one understands her violation of the commandment that ultimately condemns her to wear the ignominious letter.

We realize that Hawthorne is dramatizing in The Scarlet Letter the shocking and heretical notion that people are in wretched and abusive marriages that make them capable of falling in love with, or making love with, others. There is also, in the character of Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s idea of the negative path, of Hester personally gaining greater empathy and a more profound understanding of her own humanity and the humanity of others because of her violation of the commandment and the punishment she endures. She becomes nobler than all the religious Puritans who condemn her and turn her into a pariah.

As long as marriage exists, adultery will be seen as a sin, because marriage, like the Ten Commandments, has been tied to belief in God, even though marriage wasn’t much of a religious phenomenon before Christendom, and specifically Catholicism, linked it to the church and made it a sacrament. According to feminist scholar Marilyn Yalom, the Greeks and the Hebrews saw marriage as a contract, similar to a promissory note today, with concomitant civil or financial consequences if broken. Yalom says marriage had the imprimatur of the gods in ancient Greece and Rome but was by no means an irreversible affair since divorce was permitted in the ancient world and even common in Rome.

In a number of states in this country, including New York and Florida, adultery and physical cruelty were for many years the only grounds for divorce. Now adultery, in the non-sharia West, appears nearly commonplace. A long-running syndicated reality television show called Cheaters catches the unfaithful, both married and unmarried, with hidden cameras, and the episodes turn into confrontations between the cuckolded and the faithless. And it seems as if almost every day some political figure, too, is exposed as an adulterer. These would-be public servants may aspire to nobler ideals, but they succumb to transgression, the word adopted by Tiger Woods following his notorious car accident that apparently was tied to an argument with his wife over his adultery.

Even popular attitudes toward adultery have changed with the times, as television and film no longer make it de rigueur for an adulterer, especially a woman, to wind up dead. And in the real world, both the Prince of Wales and John McCain had adulterous relationships without ever being much stigmatized for it. Britain has become, for the most part, a nation of nonworshippers, and morality in the United States has changed exponentially despite the high percentage of those who call themselves religious. Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. president who rose to the Oval Office with a divorce in his personal history, which would have been morally unacceptable only a decade earlier. Morality and religion are not necessarily mutually bound, but the weakening of the force of the commandments has made them less viable and has also strengthened religious fundamentalism and the inevitable hypocrisy and absolutism it breeds.

The first four commandments are tied to God, the last four to property. Theft and adultery — both essentially crimes against property, since marriage was viewed as a form of ownership — were prohibited for the same reasons as bearing false witness and coveting what belonged, or was seen as belonging, to another. All four are clearly about possession and ownership, and the prohibition against adultery is also about keeping vows and ensuring that men do not abandon their wives and offspring. Though the stricture against bearing false witness has often been seen in a broader context as a prohibition against lying or mendacity, the commandment historically has been tied to notions of property and ownership. And how absolute can one expect to be on the subject of lying, even on lying while under an oath to God? My mother, who believed God marked down every single lie in a big book, still liked to emphasize that there were differences between big and small lies, even so-called white lies calculated to keep someone’s feelings from being hurt. Not coveting what another possesses might be the most vexing commandment of the final four, since coveting seems almost an intrinsic part of human nature.

I had a religious-minded Catholic crony in high school named Wayne, who was aching with lust for his neighbor Jerry’s blonde, big-busted wife. Wayne confessed to me one day that he regularly masturbated, sometimes two or three times a day, while thinking about her. He also revealed that he simply couldn’t get over the fact that Jerry was a jerk to his wife, mean and bossy, unable to appreciate her sirenlike appeal the way covetous Wayne did. Wayne was fearful God would punish him for coveting his neighbor’s wife. He told me he confessed to his priest and actually asked the priest if this meant a place in hell would be reserved for him, and whether jerking off so much to her image could make him lose his sperm supply. He had heard somewhere that the Bible warned that a man only had what he described to me as “a thousand loads.”

Murder remains for many the central commandment despite its position at number 6, and despite all the murders that God, if he is truly omnipotent or involved in human affairs, is complicit in or simply uninvolved. The greatest moral seriousness is still attached to murder, especially premeditated murder, which is one reason why it is so often popularly dramatized. The sixth commandment has the greatest currency even though the world is awash in murder. Most who believe in God accept prima facie that God, regardless of how we reckon with his inscrutable nature, does not countenance murder, even though God himself has been given a James Bond–style license to kill by his true believers, who frequently also give themselves license to kill in his name.

If higher intelligence manifests directly in our lives, one has to reckon with the kill toll, and especially with the number who die horribly and for no reason, or by the hands of others in God’s name. But behind the sixth commandment, and anchored to its ongoing power over us, is the value attached to the preciousness of human life. Why human life should be more important than other animal life is a question I leave to philosophers like Peter Singer and others who argue that perhaps it shouldn’t. But spiritual seekers, and hordes of the secular minded, and those of little or no faith all still confirm the sacredness of human life and the tradition that has come down to us from the sixth commandment. Even atheists speak of the sanctity of human life.

Yet if one assumes that God directs or intervenes — the God most people believe in and worship, the God who supposedly commands us not to kill — he can perhaps be seen as the greatest and most random of killers, one for whom murder is an ongoing specialty. He is the one in whose name fervent believers have for centuries killed. This same God, the faithful would quickly argue, grants us life and all the wonders and joys of the planet — even though the planet may be, without any guarantee of divine intervention, perilously close to nuclear annihilation or ecologic catastrophe or asteroids or staggering losses of precious human life from a yet-to-be anticipated pandemic. That same God instills in us, according to believers, all that is holy, good, and true and grants us life everlasting, while nonbelievers cede none of this and do not attribute our virtues or strengths or good health or good fortune to God.

The great twentieth-century novel and short story writer Flannery O’Connor, as devout a Catholic in her daily life as most pontiffs or priests, created one of literature’s first mass killers, the Misfit, in her most famous and widely taught story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Misfit kills people randomly, an entire family in fact, but he broods over theological questions such as whether Jesus actually raised the dead. His words to the grandmother, a foolish old lady he is about to shoot to death, hearken back to those of Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, who says that anything is permissible in a world without God. Had he been there to see Jesus raise the dead, the Misfit says to the grandmother, he would have known. Since he was not there he cannot know, and so he might as well kill people.

Was the main problem of the past century, as W. E. B. DuBois, the author of The Souls of Black Folk, famously proclaimed, “the problem of the color line”? Or was it what Flannery O’Connor recognized as finding God and knowing what God was capable of performing or allowing, and knowing whether he was in his heaven or in our lives? I’m left, like the Misfit, with the inability to know, but I lack the desire to succumb to what I see as the evil in a code like his — one in which there is no stricture against killing or doing mean things. Speaking of Jesus as the only one who raised the dead, the Misfit tells the grandmother: “If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”

I can offer no good reason why killing (or any other form of meanness) is not permissible, other than the importance of adhering to human-made laws or to one’s own code. The Misfit wished he could have been there to see Jesus raise the dead, and I wish I could know whether God really handed commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. The real challenge of hewing to the particulars of one’s own code is to stand behind it in times that require courage and in moments that put life and death on the line.

In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s character Raskolnikov makes philosophic attempts to be a Nietzschean superman and kill, without conscience, his old landlady. from this, we have come, in the United States, to an age of the Misfit and an age in which the moral weight of murder has diminished. Mass murder and serial killing especially have become a significant part of American life and popular culture, and subjects of philosophical meditations on evil and a world without the moral force of God. In the past few decades, so many infamous figures have been identified with serial killing that someone produced a collection of serial-killer playing cards — featuring the likes of John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, members of the Manson family, and other representatives of mayhem — apparently worth collecting like the traditional bubblegum cards of my youth.

I knew we had crossed a Rubicon in America in 1991 when Silence of the Lambs, a Jonathan Demme film about not one but two serial killers, won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, given to Anthony Hopkins for his chilling performance as Hannibal Lecter. In 2007 Javier Bardem won an Oscar for his equally frightening portrayal of a serial killer in the Coen brothers’ film version of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. The idea of an entire family senselessly murdered was still horrific new fictional territory when Flannery O’Connor’s famous story was published in 1955. And that shock factor was still powerful a decade later when Truman Capote published In Cold Blood about the real-life murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas.

We in the West are not yet desensitized to murder in any way remotely comparable to that in parts of Africa and in the Middle East, where ongoing carnage suggests that life is intolerably cheap. But we have become, thanks to a glut of media murder portrayals, increasingly inured to the kind of killings that once precipitated great shock throughout the land — Charles Whitman in his University of Texas tower shooting innocents like ducks in an amusement park, or Charles Starkweather and his childhood companion, Caril Ann Fugate, murdering indiscriminately throughout the Midwest in a spree that would later be immortalized in the movies Badlands and Natural Born Killers and in Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”

Popular culture has continued to ratchet up the thrill kill numbers in films, and society has become used to daily feedings — via magazines, newspapers, tabloids, and television newscasts — of homicides, serial and mass murders, and senseless mayhem, along with the glut of television shows about crime scene investigations. One longs for restoration of the sixth commandment to people’s minds, rather than to watch a population become more and more desensitized to the moral force of that commandment’s prohibition against murder. If God’s concern about murder necessitated the sixth commandment, what are we to make of the remorseless and psychopathic killings in the world or, for that matter, the spate of fictional killings that Americans seem to feast on that have made murder a kind of meme?

I’ve heard normally good-hearted, decent people who have been emotionally wounded by a spouse, or enraged at the treatment of one of their children, or financially crippled by deceit, speak seriously about wanting to hire a hit man. Where is God in all this? What exactly is his role? I take up these questions in the next chapter, but here i’ll say that, if one is uncertain of him or his involvement, or if one doubts the absoluteness of his thou-shalt-not commandments, then perhaps one is obliged to create a code of one’s own or a different conceptual rendering of Almighty God. Isn’t that what family members or compassionate caregivers must do when they opt for euthanasia rather than ongoing suffering, in spite of how they may feel about the absoluteness of the commandment against murder?

The late comedian George Carlin had a riff in which he talked about our not needing the first four commandments and the desirability of combining the rest of the commandments to reduce their number. He irreverently called the commandments “bullshit,” a political and religious marketing ploy designed to control people, whom he dismissed as being mostly stupid. He then whittled the number of commandments down from ten to two: be honest and faithful, and don’t kill anyone. Or at least, try not to kill anyone. He pointed out that the devoutly religious seemed to be the ones most capable of killing, and, of course, they do so in the name of God.

Moreover, Carlin thought that not coveting was stupid, since coveting goods keeps the economy going. As for honoring one’s parents with obedience and respect, he said obedience and respect had to be earned and should be based on the parents’ performance. Carlin’s routine is a potent mix of rhetorical observation combined with the cleverness of a comic who loved being iconoclastic and broke from his Catholic upbringing. In fact, Carlin made it sound as though God had nothing to do with the commandments. Hustlers cooked them up, according to Carlin, and decided on ten because of its strength as a number in the decimal system and its relevance to things such as decades and top-ten lists.

It is highly likely that the Ten Commandments came from human beings, rather than God, and that each of the three different versions that appear in the Bible was written by the presumed author of the book in which it is found. Some, however, assume that humanity’s greatest ethical code may have originated in Egyptian or Hittite writings. Regardless of its origins, one still has to ask whether there could have been a guiding hand, a supernal force, behind the commandments. The answer: We don’t know. Or at least, I certainly don’t know.

Those who believe in the absoluteness of the commandments cannot create a slippery slope of circumstances that might allow for certain violations. Instead of tying myself in a knot trying to negotiate the absolutism of the Ten Commandments, or simply becoming a card-carrying secular humanist, I elected, in college, to remain in doubt about both God and his stone tablets. There were simply too many necessary exemptions. Prohibitions against bearing false witness and coveting were especially difficult to establish as absolute. I recall one of my young students, in an all-too-revealing display of our shifting moral sands, discussing the Ten Commandments with me and saying, with absolute seriousness, “I know we’re not supposed to covet our neighbor’s wife, Dr. Krasny. But what if our neighbor’s wife is hot and wants to hook up?”

Why did I decide not to go with what my ancestors went with (if they were my ancestors…), a code that has endured for centuries and continues to have the respect of even nonbelievers who have deleted God from their mental hard drive? Surely it wasn’t a weakness to take the Decalogue as inherited wisdom? The simple, unvarnished truth is, I wanted my own set of commandments, my own ethical code, my own personal morality, my own certainty, if I could find it, without the necessity of a divinely prescribed moral platform. But why? Why not stumble through life without any steadfast commandments at all, living as many others do, devoid of divine rules?

A credo for life could simply be an agnostic credo — call it an agnostic’s obbligato. I could spend a lifetime vacillating, seeking, fluctuating, and moving between momentary and ever-changing certainties and doubts — call them life’s antipodes — between belief in nothing and belief in something, a dialectic with no terminus or synthesis, just like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with its two acts of waiting for the mysterious and unseen Godot, who never manifests. In Waiting for Godot there is no third act, only the play’s two tramps floating upright in an anarchic sea of nothingness. Was that what some of the religious folk vilified as moral relativism? Morality, it seemed to me, could be strong and resilient and in flux without being relative or absolute. Theories of post-structuralism and the Gallic musings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes would usher into my head that era’s zeitgeist, the certainty of uncertainty, itself another absolute. I felt myself shifting, in some new form of agnostic dualism, between the certainty of uncertainty and the uncertainty of uncertainty.

I could, I knew, try to keep the commandments in my own way, and I could draw on an ethical code of my own. Such a code of personal commandments began to take shape in my mind and centered on ideas of trying to be truthful and honest and civil and kind and humane in all my dealings with others, and on accepting my own existential limitations. Perhaps the work that had the most effect on me at that point was Waiting for Godot, which spoke poignantly of the human condition and the existential dilemma we all face, as well as of a transcendent force that can be a raison d’être and a harbinger of hope and purpose, and yet never be seen or met or known. Beckett denied that Godot stood for God, even a diminutive one like that suggested by the two additional letters. Yet it is hard to escape the feeling of agnosticism conveyed by the play.

Agnostics wait. But more important, agnostics need to find a way to fill time and amuse and entertain and invent for themselves while waiting for a higher authority or higher meaning that may not arrive. Like the two Beckett clochards Vladimir and Estragon, we all need to establish a code of some sort that can at least keep us in the game. The time-filling activities of Beckett’s two protagonists are, for the most part, trivial and inconsequential and replete with frivolous language play. But this seems to be a good deal of what Beckett wants to point out to us about the human condition. As Joan Didion’s character Maria Wyeth, in the famous Hollywood novel Play It as It Lays, discovered, you either opt out of the game or you stay in. Camus instilled in me the notion that there is no question more essential than whether to stay in the game or withdraw voluntarily. It seemed only sensible, therefore, for one who elected to stay to find a code, a workable, if not adjustable, and nonabsolute paradigm.

It was Hemingway and Beckett and Camus, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Martin Buber and T. S. Eliot and Saul Bellow and basic classic teachings from antiquity, such as the golden and silver rules, that propelled me to establish a code of my own. It seemed axiomatic that much of the distilled wisdom in the major religions, and in the works of great writers and thinkers, who at that point in my life seemed to nearly all be men, had to do with loving and caring for other human beings, trying to do good deeds, and if possible, giving of oneself. I couldn’t love my neighbor (his stereo was too loud and his body odor too acrid), but I could act respectfully and show kindness until or unless neither worked and I was provoked to act otherwise.

There was no heaven-sent reason to show others kindness and respect, especially those who seemed ill deserving. It would not ensure me a place with the angels or assure approbation from an invisible deity. But I felt that by acting with respect and kindness I was doing something pragmatic that would not only serve my nature but also my desire to be liked and get kindness and respect in return. I could reinforce my decision by telling myself, in ways that Bellow had seeded in my thinking, that I was seeking to be a good man, a mensch, endeavoring to act with rectitude, seeking to live in truth or at least seeking my own truth without harming or hurting unless provoked.

Spurred on by a course taught by a wonderful professor and T. S. Eliot scholar named Eric Thompson, I decided that, for me, a principal thou-shalt-not would be not to treat people as objects but to strive for what Martin Buber brilliantly identified as I-Thou relationships, in which one spoke ontologically, with one’s entire being. This was a challenging personal commandment, and, like the commandments from Sinai, it was not absolute.

Avoiding objectification of young women was especially challenging. I was an overly libidinal young man in those prefeminist days, which the comic Lily Tomlin called “the decade of foreplay.” I was on the make. The male code I absorbed from those around me, particularly my guy friends, was a Don Juan–Hugh Hefner code contrary to the higher-minded, Martin Buber–based one that was also forming in my mind. The guy code was more like what a sleazy guy in my neighborhood we called Slimy Hymie described, when we were kids, as the goals of the Four F Club: find them, feel them, fuck them, and forget them. During my adolescence, Playboy magazine was a major influence. I avidly read Hugh Hefner’s philosophy, a manifesto on what it meant to take up a hedonistic way of life tied to a notches-on-the-headboard ideal that would become identified a generation later with the figure of the player.

I liked girls and I liked sex, and I liked the feeling of conquest that came with what we then called “getting girls.” But it was all terribly confusing, because there were girls I could get and girls I could not get, and did getting a girl for the sake of sex mean I was taking advantage of her or objectifying her? Being a would-be rake seemed cool even though also predatory, but the newer wave of feminism that would insist on not objectifying women — and eventually on full sexual equality — and throw everything out of whack had not yet begun to lap at young men like me. As long as I didn’t take someone against her will, I thought, whom was I hurting? And I told myself that I had been hurt by what I saw as unrequited love, by young women who had fat-out rejected me. Codes in conflict!

Sometimes, mostly because of my own insecurities, and in accordance with what Harvard psychologist William pollack aptly calls “the boy’s code,” I would be cruel or aggressive, would ridicule and make fun of people, but I would also feel defensive and insecure about my masculinity. I wanted to follow the commandment I had given myself not to objectify other human beings, not to see them as separate from their humanity. Thou shalt not hurt or objectify others seemed a sound, sensible commandment for me to follow scrupulously. But I found I was capable of mischief, of unwittingly hurting others or hurting them out of carelessness or out of the adolescent glee that came from putting others down. Moreover I could not be saintly or pacific, both noble ideals, because I was driven by another code rooted in my boyhood and in American film culture. This one could be whittled down to the idea that, if someone messed with me, I would mess with him or her in return.

It didn’t matter that I fed myself one of my mother’s favorite platitudes — that two wrongs don’t make a right — whenever I felt hurt or mistreated, rejected or disrespected. I wanted payback, which seemed appropriate when someone did me wrong. There was nothing philosophically high-minded about such feelings, but they were undeniable. If God or the universe wasn’t going to mete out punishment to others who screwed me over, or who screwed over the people I cared about, then I had to step up. This was principle. It was fairness. It was justice. I discovered, of course, that such thinking can be self-aggrandizing, not to mention self-endangering and self-defeating. Or just vainglorious, as in an episode with Andy S., though in that case I did manage to keep another commandment I had fashioned for myself — I kept my word.

Fast-forward. I’m a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin. I’m months away from leaving Madison for San Francisco, and I’m living with my girlfriend and future wife in an off-campus apartment. Andy S., a neighbor down the hall and a compulsive dope smoker who lives with his girlfriend, Cheryl, suggests we engage in a couple swap. I politely decline. A number of weeks later, I finish my class miles away from the apartment I rent on campus. I go to my car, open the door, and get in. All the knobs on the car’s dashboard have been removed, as has the lighter and ashtray. The seat belt is fastened across the steering wheel. I find this bizarre and perplexing, and I phone in a report to the police. Then I drive back to the apartment and park for the night. The next morning, I discover that all the items purloined the day before are back in place.

Around the time of this incident I also notice profane graffiti spray-painted on the wall outside my apartment, and I receive a couple of weird, incoherent late-night phone calls. It all seems to add up to menace. I buy a handgun. I’m not enthusiastic about the idea of owning a handgun, but I had been reading Malcolm X and Franz Fanon and, as usual, was strongly influenced by what I was reading. Turning the other cheek was not part of my morphing personal code. If some potentially malignant force was out there and was after me, I would be prepared. I related all this to Andy and a couple of other neighbors. Andy took it all in and asked incredulously, “You really bought a gun?”

Months later, only days before I was to leave for San Francisco, I learned that all of what had occurred had been done by Andy. A stoned Andy apologetically informed me of this and said he had simply been playing pranks on me. He had intended to tell me everything, but had become afraid once I purchased the gun. I thanked him for his truthfulness and assured him that, in telling me, he had done the right thing. But I also told him that it was my code to do something back. I would have to even the score. We shook hands and I thanked him again for coming clean. I had not the faintest idea what I would do as payback, but as often happens when opportunity and imagination meet, I came up with what seemed like the proper action.

A thug who drove a big Harley motorcycle periodically visited a young woman in one of the apartments on our floor, a not-too-bright beautician named Meg. She had two Chihuahuas, named Mañana and Tortilla, and this beau of hers, who looked like a motorcycle gang member, was often drunk and unruly and had on at least one occasion, it was reported to me by another neighbor, punched one of Meg’s Chihuahuas. I had had an unpleasant exchange of words with this character one night over his disorderliness and had sized him up then as a sot and a brute. After my talk with Andy, I noticed that the thug’s motorcycle was parked in the apartment drive, and on it I left the following note: “I live in apartment 23B. My name is Andy S. I bashed into your Harley.”

I was tempted to add “tough shit” but decided against it. Vainglorious? Yes. But I had kept my word and had, in my own mind at least, evened the score. I was, I told myself, being true to my personal code. It didn’t even matter to me that I didn’t know what transpired between Andy and the thug. (I do know, however, that Andy lives and thrives!)

Thou shalt not be rude or discourteous also seemed a worthy and ennobling commandment to follow. I was drawn to acting with civility and gentlemanly affability, provided there were no scores to be evened. Civility and gentlemanly affability were, in my mind, strongly linked to not objectifying others. But civility posed a problem when I was confronted by rudeness or, worse, what I took to be lack of respect for me personally or someone I cared about. And to what extent was I supposed to follow a code of gentlemanly affability when faced with manifold human discourtesy, stupidity, and cruelty?

With the long, hippie hair I had as a PhD student, I could incite others simply by my appearance and did so one day in a 7–11. A Wisconsin good old boy in hunting attire pointed me out to his buddy and fellow hunter. “Hey, Clyde,” he said, “is it a guy or a girl? Why don’t we pull its pants down and see if it’s got a dink.” I let the moment pass and stared malevolently at the guy as he paid for his goods and left the store. I felt every muscle in my body tighten, and I realized I was ready to fight, almost hoping for the opportunity to prove my strength and manhood. How foolish to be ready to fight over words, to not forgive ignorance, but how red-blooded American to want to kick ass.

Thou shalt do good deeds was another of my personal commandments. Sometimes this one was difficult to obey because my temper was short or others didn’t seem to deserve even common kindness. I wanted to do good, to be a mensch, but what did it mean to do good, and how could I know whether my motives were good or I simply wanted to feel good about myself, to be well thought of? And did it matter?

I wanted to think that good deeds were tethered to rachmones, the Jewish compassion for those less fortunate, or to tsaddaka, the ideal of charity. But how to turn rachmones and tsaddaka into real deeds was a basic challenge, since I also dearly wanted to avoid being made a sucker. Charity seemed the noblest of virtues, but the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides pointed out that the highest form of charity derived from an absence of egoistic desire and an absence of hope that others would recognize one’s charitable deeds. How was it possible to eliminate such motives? Well, what about the case of sir Nicholas Winton, who set up a rescue operation in Prague in 1938? He was a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker who personally saved the lives of hundreds of mostly Jewish children by finding funds for their transport to safety and for their repatriation or foster care. He told no one. Not even his wife, Grete, knew of his heroic deeds until 1988, when she discovered a scrapbook of old correspondence he had kept.

I went one day, as an undergraduate, with a group of fraternity brothers to an orphanage and spent an afternoon playing with and giving piggyback rides to orphans. I left feeling good about what I’d done and about myself, but I also reflected that the Polaroids taken of me with various orphans on my back would come in handy to show girls what a swell guy I was. I wondered, though, how genuine such acts could be if they were done partly because of a need for the approval of oneself or others. Was intention immaterial? Should my code be dictated by circumstance, and should it shift according to need or desire? I was forming a code but had serious doubt even about shaping a code, especially one that could come close to being absolute or pure. But I was also trying to lay claim to my own commandments, my own guideposts, ones whose source and moral force was not the God I had lost but the one I still hoped to find.