Tonight I find myself in Yakima. It is 90°F, and I can’t sleep. Fires burn across the valley, making the air brown and smell like a campfire. The only sounds are homeless youth setting up their tents as I walk down the Ave trying to think. No scholarly journal asked me to write about “morality” as they did Joan Didion who published her sublime essay that has haunted me for more than 30 years and speaks to me tonight along with works by Timothy Snyder, David Graeber, and James Baldwin. Maybe they inadvertently compelled me, or the times did. I hear many powerful people invoke “morality” in ways so vacuous of meaning from anything I recognize (no thanks to Nietzsche) that it seems to have disappeared from their minds entirely. I distrusted this word then, and I distrust it more and more every day. To deal with my feelings and cognitive complexity of “morality” in these times, my mind veers to the particular.

Here are some of my particulars. Settlers stole this land from the Yakama people, killing approximately 6,300 of them before 1,200 survivors signed a treaty leaving their descendants to suffer a slow torturous violence from poverty. Farmworkers here jeopardize their lives daily picking food for others who despise them. The local news talks about the fires burning all around us, which towns should evacuate, which community center has water and cots. They never say climate catastrophe. They don’t mention the latest kidnappings and disappearances. They continue ignoring news about the poisoned water wells that run brown from faucets and smell like the massive manure lagoons created by corporate-owned cattle farms. National news is negligible here, so not many people know about the latest pardoned January 6 insurrectionist, confident in his self-righteousness that our freedom was under siege, who said, “I will not stand by and let this go unanswered.”

All these instances do not help me trust “morality” more, but in a vague sense they help me grasp what it is not, because the insurrectionist meant something quite specific. According to his beliefs about god and flag, he meant that a person has a higher duty to shoot and leave on the ground to bleed out anyone who gets in the way of sustaining his tribalized views. Many of the insurrectionists expressed this twisted sense of “wagon-train morality,” not unlike the thousands of bureaucrats, politicians, and citizens who became Hitler’s willing executioners, so they could sleep without bad dreams.

We are now in a “moral” emergency, not a quandary or call to consider, but a state more grotesque than we’ve seen in my lifetime

I am trying, of course, to talk about social codes that shape our sense of “morality,” often formed by what we learn in childhood. Like many of us, my childhood was filled with Bible stories that warned us about the “wages of sin” for disobeying the 10 Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountain, intending to instill in us some sort of moral compass. For similar reasons, we were told to memorize the Lord’s Prayer and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But these stories appear to be inadequate in preventing our tendency toward self-delusion, as the neuroscientists have explained our capacity for misperception, because far too many believed then and still believe, no matter the sin, we can obtain absolution from a priest, kneel, rub some beads, and all will be fine.

These stories were hardly sufficient then and seem less so now. After centuries of the church and social groups like the Freemasons that taught their catechism for centuries, those same men, most often men, many of them the very same teachers of virtue, killed and terrorized millions in their white hoods and from behind desks in government offices. When I was young the story about Flight 571 crashing into the Andes, and what the passengers had to do to survive, spread around the world. Many also watched Soylent Green, a popular dystopian 70s film. Both these stories were less about illuminating the complexities of our social code, but more to prevent us from crossing a line we should never cross by reminding us of a visceral feeling of revulsion if we did. Given our history with “morality” and our woefully deficient track record, perhaps it is time we try another way. If we tried to tell stories that engage our moral imagination, true stories of Tulsa, Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, the Osage, the California genocide, Zoot Suite riots, Japanese internment, Indian boarding schools, and many, many others, not as cautionary tales but with an intention of sharing more values and countering a “doctrine of inevitability,” we might see a flash of hope’s light before change’s thunder.

Many of us relied on a “morality” described as duty in the Declaration of Independence, and like stories from our childhood, this seems grievously insufficient now, if it ever was. Perhaps a “morality” from Ubuntu and In lak’ech are worthy candidates for exploration and experimentation, but we may also need to clear our heads from the imprint of white supremacy culture before we dismiss them outright or misunderstand what we see in ourselves and others. Stories of Kondiarok, a genius and chief of the Windout Nation in the 17th century graciously offered a........

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