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