The Forbidden Fruit

I am not a Christian, I am a philosopher.  That being said, it strikes me that to understand what morality is, it helps to begin with the story of the Garden of Eden.  First of all, the story of Eden is a myth of origin;  and to understand something complex like morality we could start by using our imagination instead of analysing it to death, as we philosophers have done for two and a half thousand years.

 Interestingly, no one knows where morality came from or how it came about.  Many, many philosophers since Plato, and he lived and wrote 2400 years ago, have been fascinated by the topic of morality.  They have many theories about what it is, but they have never come to an agreement.

In contrast, science is younger than philosophy;  it is only 500 years old;  but the thing about science is that even if scientists have disagreements, they eventually come around to agreeing on the main subjects.

 This has not happened with the concept of morality.  There is no agreement.  Some say morality is obedience to God’s commands, others, that it is derived from the general Good, others, that it is derived from Duty, others that it is human perfection,  others, that it is mutual reasonableness, others, that it is a special class of  (moral) sentiments, others, that it is reasoning about moral discourse.  The problem of figuring out what morality is seems an awful lot like the story of the blind men standing around an elephant trying to understand what it is, each touching a different part - the legs, the body, the trunk, and the tusks -  but none of them able to see what it looks like as a whole.

 Take the ten commandments in the Hebrew Bible, an early written attempt to summarize core moral principles,  supposedly written in stone and brought down from the mountain by Moses to give to the Israelites.  One of those commandments refers back to Genesis:  observe the Sabbath, you must set aside the seventh day of the week - just as God rested on the seventh day of creation.

Whew!  Creation must have been a hard job for God.  Doesn’t God sound like a cranky old man who needs a breather after a hard week  creating the  Universe? According to Genesis, God liked to walk in the cool of the evening. (Naturally, because in the part of the world where Genesis was written - the Middle East - the midday sun is beating down on you.) Genesis is folksy and makes God to be sort-of like one of us.

 It’s likely that Exodus, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was written by a different writer than Genesis.  One of the things that the book of Exodus does which Genesis doesn’t, is create a strong sense of identity for the Israelites.  Genesis is about the beginnings, lost in the mists of time.  Exodus is about establishing a powerful group identity.  A desert tribe that follows ten commandments is one that distinguishes itself from other tribes.

 For some Jews and Christians the  commandment to honour the Sabbath is seen as a moral rule, because they believe that Genesis and Exodus are both literally true, but that is not the case for the vast majority of people on Earth, who disagree. There are hundreds if not thousands of religions, all of them with different versions of the creation myth.  So a commandment to make one day of the week a day of rest because of what is written in the Hebrew Bible cannot really be a universal rule, and therefore it is not a moral rule.

Intuitively we believe that everyone is subject to moral rules.  But if there are a multiplicity of religions, then there are a multiplicity of so-called moral rules:  such as rules about forbidden types of meat, rules about who you can marry, and rules about what is sacred and what is profane.  If we go too far with this line of inquiry we end up saying that there are many cultures with many kinds of moralities.  But if this is so, then moral rules cannot be universal, which contradicts our intuitions.  It can’t be the case that morality is relative to the culture that you live in because this implies that what is morally wrong for me is not morally wrong for you.  That’s why  it’s a better idea to abandon trying to ground morality on  religion, and instead seek a more evidence-based form of moral knowledge.

So why talk about the garden?  Whoever compiled the Bible ( most probably Ezra) produced a master stroke by putting this particular story of the garden of Eden right at the beginning.  It’s actually a creation story that places the origin of morality at the beginning of human existence;  it is presented as the first story to be told, in effect.   I’m assuming that most of my readers are at least vaguely familiar with the story of the garden of Eden.  If so, or even if not, this is a wonderful story that is hard not to forget, once you’ve heard it. First, God creates a beautiful garden, full of plants and animals;  then God creates humankind in “His” image.

The idea that humans were created in the image of God is a fascinating idea, but no one knows what it means, because God is not visible to the human eye.  My concern here is that this idea, that humans are created in God’s image, since we can’t see God, is more likely to be a projection of our own imagination.  It’s more a fact that we see God in our image, rather than vice versa. And that seems to be the result in Genesis, because God is depicted as a cranky old man, who prudently stays out of the noonday sun, and needs to rest at least once a week for an entire day.

Now Plato, in my mind, the greatest philosopher of all time, claims in a book called The Republic, probably the greatest work of Philosophy so far, that apprehending true moral knowledge is like looking directly at the Sun after having lived  cooped up in a cave all of your life.   If we want to learn the Truth, Plato thought that we need to be indirect, that is, we need to learn, not from day to day experience, but from  contemplation of purer forms of abstractions such as “the Good” and “Justice”;  just as it seemed to Plato that mathematical knowledge comes from pure mathematical abstractions, rather than actual imperfect objects.   This has proven to be a much more seductive view of morality than the more down-to-earth view in Genesis, especially for philosophers.  For all we know, Plato’s parable of the cave may have had more influence on Christian Theology and Western Civilization than the Hebrew book of  Genesis.

 So, on with the story!   In the middle of the garden is a tree called the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”  God tells Adam and Eve that they can eat the fruits of all of the trees in the garden except this one.  Now, I ask you -   why would God single out this particular tree?  Why wouldn’t God want Adam and Eve to  eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?  The author of Genesis slyly supplies the hint: one of the creatures in this garden is a talking snake, who tells Eve that God does not want them to eat the fruit because if they do they will become more like a God themselves. The snake, no doubt, has a hidden agenda, which leads it to  suggest to Eve that it would be well worth it to disobey God.

Later on in Genesis, you have the story of “The Tower of Babel”, where God is quoted as saying  he doesn’t want the builders to make a tower that reaches to the heavens because they will become too much like the Gods if they do.  God, proactively causes all the builders to speak mutually unintelligible languages or "Babel", (short for Babylon, which is the writer of Genesis' little way of mocking the Babylonians) - so that they get confused and can’t finish the tower. (Is that why philosophy was invented too - to confuse people about what morality actually is?)

 So it’s as close as it gets to being official - God is ambivalent about humankind. God created them in “His” image, but is dead serious about preventing humans from becoming too much like “Him”.  After all, God, the cranky old man, doesn’t want them to eat the fruit, and yet he puts the tree right in the middle of the garden and he draws the humans attention to it further, by forbidding them to eat from it.  Any parent knows that if you forbid something that is attractive and easily accessible, you are asking for trouble.   And Adam and Eve are so, so, human, being the first of their kind.

 Just think for a minute - each and everyone of us  will want to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong.  It is absolutely a mark of being human that we need to know the difference between good and evil.  Only the human species uniquely desire this fruit, and to a man or a women, we are not capable of resisting its seductions.  But then, neither can God do anything but act the part too, by throwing Adam and Eve out of Eden for disobedience.

 The story imagines God the creator as Father, and Adam and Eve as children.  We might agree that, in real life, we do not expect infants to know the difference between good and evil,  but we expect that  they will learn the difference as they mature. In the meantime, as they are growing up, we expect them to follow our rules and commands.  The old way is that if children disobey their parents, especially their father, they need to be punished to be shown their place and to be set on the right path.  Hence the “moral”  of this story and perhaps the main reason why this particular story was chosen to begin the Bible.

From a philosophical perspective, what is going on here? First, the Biblical editor's  selection and placement of Book of Genesis implies that the acquisition of moral knowledge marks the real beginning of the human story.  God does not need to forbid the other animals from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, because animals don’t care about being right or wrong. But God is forced to throw the humans out of Eden because they cannot exist as humans without the knowledge of good and evil. Hence, having moral knowledge is exactly what sets us apart from all other creatures.  This is the irony of human nature.

 No wonder the first two humans get into such trouble; the whole thing is a set-up!  The very idea that we can gain moral knowledge by eating the fruit from a tree is simply diabolical; but what a delicious idea:  it is so physical, so scrumptious!  And yet, we all know intuitively that it doesn’t work that way -  as if we could gain moral knowledge by consuming a  pill;  we know that gaining moral knowledge is not easy -  it takes work and it involves a lot of  negative emotions and unpleasant feelings;  it can’t be right to gain that knowledge just by eating a piece of fruit -  but who wouldn’t consume this fruit if they had the chance?  No one!

God, the lonely old father, really wanted us to stay in Eden but made the serious mistake of creating the first humans in “His” image.  If God had just dropped that little requirement, then humans could have permanently resided in the garden, but then they wouldn’t have been human would they?  How diabolical!




                                                  II



  What happens  after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit?  It's one of those stories that some of us love to hear again and again, because it seems preordained,  a kind of formula:  God has created a “perfect” garden full of wonderful things, and there is just one tree and one fruit that Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat there.  Someone whispers seditious ideas into their heads and by a single act of disobedience they inadvertently destroy all that beauty and perfection. What a  tragedy!  But it is not, in fact, the act of eating the fruit that gets them turfed out of Eden, it seems instead that the consequences of  their gaining  moral knowledge is what really riles up Jehovah.
Once Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit they become aware for the first time that they are naked.  That is, they realize that they are doing something wrong, just as we would know we were doing something wrong if we walked around naked in public.  And, having acquired moral knowledge, they are motivated to correct their wrong by covering their genitals with fig leaves.  Plus knowing now that they have done wrong, they feel guilty and hide, as young children might do.

But God, who, as we all know by now, customarily takes his walks in the cool of the evening, is on to them. “Where are you and why are hiding?”  God asks.  “We saw that we were naked so we covered ourselves with leaves and hid,” says Eve.    “Who Told You That You Were Naked?”  (It’s impossible  for me to read that sentence and not imagine it spoke in a loud booming male voice.)

 The story both makes perfect sense, and doesn’t make sense at all, depending on your perspective.  It makes perfect sense if we picture God as the Father and Adam and Eve as the children,  but it makes no sense if God was a perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing being.  I’m tempted to say that Christian Theologians abandoned the Genesis image of God (as an irritable old man) and instead were more heavily influenced by Plato’s attractive idea of Perfection, which then renders the story quite absurd. But I am more interested in how morality was pictured by the author of Genesis, who, thankfully,  lived some time before Plato.

The author of Genesis is telling us that Morality is just what distinguishes us from all other animals; that knowing right from wrong motivates our behaviour in a way that does not exist for other kinds of animals, that we have feelings of guilt and regret for doing wrong, and that wrong behaviour needs to be punished.  Note the focus on wrong behaviour and on punishment.  Even the ten commandments are mostly prohibitions rather than  a “to-do list”.  This is not a coincidence.  Prohibitions are simpler types of rules, and easier to remember and to follow.  In contrast, what is permitted is impossible to detail in advance because of the sheer number of things that we can do.  This is an important point, so I want to emphasize it here: we can easily supply a short list of forbidden things, but it is impossible to list all the things that we are permitted to do, there  just are too many.

The author of Genesis may have been hinting at the idea that God didn’t want us to have moral knowledge because to some of us it seems to go beyond our finite capacity for understanding.  Better to leave that complicated stuff to God, just as parents don’t usually expect their toddlers to know the ins and outs of right and wrong.

As an actual explanation for how humans got morality, the book of Genesis is both imaginative and suggestive, but obviously it is not an  accurate or a complete picture at all.  Still it is a better account than most modern philosophical treatments of the subject, which largely derive from the works of either Plato or Aristotle.  Perhaps it is because Genesis was written independently of Greek Philosophy that it still has something important to say .  There are six basic things about morality that the book of  Genesis gets right:  that morality is a special kind of knowledge, that morality focuses on collective human interests rather than individual interests (eg. the wrong of public nudity), that it distinguishes us from animals, that it involves motivation and the guidance of behaviour, that it mostly consists of prohibitions rather than positive suggestions, and that punishment is essential in its administration.  Pretty good for the first story in the  Bible.

What Exodus, the second book,  gets right about a moral system is  that it requires  full group adherence, collective kinds of enforcement, and collective expressions of group identity. This may not be intuitively obvious to people today, but that is largely because we have successfully internalized morality and it forms the background to all our behaviour.

Many modern moral philosophers, (remember the blind men and the elephant!) with the exception of Bernard Gert,   don’t get that  what is fundamental about morality  is exactly that it distinguishes humans from other animals.   Instead, they point to  the existence of language as that dividing line.  Twentieth Century moral philosophy, often called meta-ethics, is all about the language of morality, moral concepts, moral reasoning, moral discourse, and moral expression.  It largely centers on language, ignoring the importance of punishment, group identity, simple prohibitions, and any demarcation between humans and other animals.  My suspicion is that because philosophers are so good with words and definitions, they tend to obsess about language when talking about morality.

The book of Genesis is a valuable antidote, because it avoids this emphasis on linguistics altogether.    I can see another reason that Philosophers avoid the account in Genesis too.  Evolutionary moral philosophers maintain that morality evolved gradually, so they are invested in the idea that there is no real demarcation between humans and animals.  Also, origins are not fashionable these days, for various reasons having to do with the real difficulties of looking  that far back into human history. My thinking is this:  When we try and imagine how morality originated we are undoubtedly taking a big risk, due to the lack of clear evidence.  All the same, the story of the garden of Eden does a good job of opening up the question concerning the nature of morality, and in doing so it also uncovers some of the paradoxes and complexities involved in  that understanding.

Two Versions of Reality

One hundred and sixty years ago there were two diametrically opposite views of the reality of slavery:  the view of the South that slavery was a “noble” institution, reflecting human nature, with abolitionism seen as a serious danger to social stability;  and the view of Northerners that slavery was wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to spread to the new states in the West.

In 1856 a famous incident in the United States  actually helped to crystallize this divide.  Senator Graham Sumner was an abolitionist.  He was viciously caned in the Senate chambers by a Congressman from South Carolina over his remarks attacking the institution of slavery and the immorality of the slave owners.   Sumner, who had no means to defend himself, came close to death. It took him three years to physically recover enough to return to Senate duties.   The Southern Congressman, Preston Brook was literally given a hero’s welcome in the South.

The effect of Sumner’s caning on Northern opinion was to become more profound and transformative over time.  The growing outrage over the caning of Sumner energized the fledgling Republican party, leading, four years later, to the election of America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln. But the South collectively refused to accept the democratic results of Lincoln’s election and attempted to abandon the Union en masse.  The Civil War was the result of what amounted to an epistemic crisis over the reality of slavery.

Something has crystallized over the last few days, early in October  2018. It has become apparent that the controversy over the  Kavanaugh Supreme Court Confirmation was really a  conflict over two versions of reality.  “He said, she said,”  refers to two particular views of the family, the role of the father, and the status of men and women.   

According to the Linguist George Lakoff, Conservatives see the family and by analogy, politics and society in terms of a “Strict Father”  “Strict Father” is the traditional view that the father is the unquestioned authority in the family, and the duty of his wife and children is to obey him.  Projected onto the political situation, it means unquestioning support of male authority figures and male led institutions.  It means the silencing and denigration of women who are witnesses to sexual abuse.  Projected onto political ideology it means that income assistance and universal medicare are bad programs because they reward bad behaviour.  It means inequality is good, because it reflects natural differences, eg.  males are naturally superior to females.  It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how similar this view is to the Southerners’ view that the slaveholder was a superior specimen to the slave.

Patriarchy, the unquestioned rule by males, is a breeding ground for sexual abuse, precisely because it gives men unchecked power to abuse and to cover up their abuse and silence their victims.  It is not a coincidence that religious conservatives fear feminism. Neither is it a coincidence that a mark of Fascism is the cult of masculinity. Nor, that women who publicize allegations of sexual harassment are bombarded by anonymous death threats on the web. 

Supporters of Donald Trump’s Presidency see him as the man who can get the job done.  They didn’t think that a woman was competent for the job, and their hatred of Trump’s female challenger Hilary Clinton, seemed fanatical.  Remember “Lock her up!”  I am 65 and I have never heard any group of people speak that way about a Presidential candidate before.  Trump became embroiled in a controversy involving accusations of sexual harassment and a recording in which he boasts of inappropriate sexual touching of women.  That controversy appeared to solidify and strengthen his support.  His followers seem to especially appreciate the way he openly mocks and denigrates women in public rallies and on Twitter.  There is plenty of evidence that Trump goes out of his way to denigrate his female opponents in a way that he doesn’t when talking of his male opponents.  But it’s not just words.  Trump has had multiple wives, and multiple affairs, the latest of which, he had with a porn star after his wife Melania gave birth to his youngest son.   It would be hard to come up with a better example of a “male chauvinist pig” than Trump.

What would have been political suicide before 2016 became a hidden strength in Trump’s campaign, and the only thing that could have made this possible  was his penchant for saying whatever he felt in order to deliberately offend and the remarkable way that that energized his supporters.    Donald Trump has made misogyny great again.  But he didn’t do it alone, he had help from Evangelical Christians, who are so concerned about a blocking a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a baby, that they threw their wholehearted moral support behind an amoral, lying, adulterer. 

Trump just stated that he was afraid for young men growing up in today’s world due to #MeToo and Blasey-Ford’s allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.  This is not surprising, given that #MeToo was a powerful grassroots movement that was largely motivated by the response to his election in 2016.  It’s quite possible that Blasey-Ford would not have come forward with her allegations if not for MeToo. 

Recent events testify to the fanaticism and fervour with which supporters of patriarchy want to turn the clock back on MeToo and equal rights.  Make no mistake about it -  in the Confirmation of Kavanaugh we are witnessing a powerful coordinated action to reverse progressive advances and bring back the dark ages.