The Golden Principle Reimagined
How many times have we heard the argument that it’s wrong to judge Columbus and slave-owning Founding Fathers of the United Sates by “modern” standards? Such moral relativism based on the passage of time seemed a bit odd to me, since the concept of reciprocal morality is not a modern invention. It has been around for quite a long time.
Here’s a few examples:
Ancient Egypt (664–323 BC) : “That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”
Ancient Greece (600 BCE to 400 BC) :
“Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” — Thales.
“What you do not want to happen to you, do not do it yourself either.” — Sextus the Pythagorean.
“Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you.” — Isocrates.
Ancient Persia, Zoroastrianism (500 BC) : “That nature alone is good which refrains from doing to another whatsoever is not good for itself.”
Ancient India (Mahābhārata, approx. 400 BC) : “One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self. In brief, this is dharma. Anything else is succumbing to desire.”
Tamil Tirukkural (1st century BC) : “Do not do to others what you know has hurt yourself.”
Christian Bible, New Testament (1st century AD) : “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law. . .”
And yet, most of the societies mentioned above practiced slavery and all sorts of crimes against neighboring tribes. Even Columbus was a deeply religious Christian — as were most Americans who owned slaves, and most Germans who participated in the Holocaust. Many African societies espoused their own versions of the Golden Principle, even while capturing other African tribes and participating in the slave trade. The same with the Inca and the Aztecs.
Let’s do an experiment and add a phrase to this nearly universal principle of reciprocal morality and see what happens.
“Do unto others [of your tribe] as you would have others [of your tribe] do unto you.”
That simple addition erases any contradiction in the actions of Columbus, Nazis, American slave holders, the Inca, or your average street gang. And so we come to the real root of the problem. It’s not the passage of time that changes morality, but applying that ancient Golden Principle beyond our particular tribe, religion, race, or nation.
The invention of divine moral laws was probably a positive innovation that enabled a larger group to unite and stop killing one another beyond their limited extended family and small hunter-gatherer band. The downside is that such a divinely ordained set of laws only applies to those who believe in said god.
Take the Ten Commandments as one of many examples. “Thou shall not kill” and “Thou shall not steal” seem like good guides to a universal morality (setting aside the first three Commandments, of course), but the fact that they only apply within the tribe is made clear when Yahweh — soon after issuing the Ten Commandments — orders his “chosen people” to kill every man, woman, and child of the Canaanites and the Amalekites so they can take possession of their “Promised Land.”
Here’s a few quotes from the Old Testament in case you think I’m exaggerating. (And this is only one of dozens of cities God orders completely depopulated in a massive genocide).
Joshua 6 — American Standard Version: 21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city (Jericho), both man and woman, both young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
The point is that Joshua and Saul didn’t scratch their heads in confusion at such contradictory orders, because they already understood that the commandments against killing or stealing or keeping slaves only applied to members of their tribe.
Similar reasoning allows the African Maasai tribe to assert that their god, Enkai, created all cattle exclusively for the Maasai, which they believe gives them the right to repo any cows they find a non-Maasi harboring — since the cow had clearly been stolen from them in a previous generation.
Does this sound familiar to the Israelites’ justification of their divine right to take already occupied land from the Canaanites and other tribes already living there? Or Cotton Mather’s contention that his god approved genociding the Native Amercians so Christians could put it to better use in a divinely ordained “Manifest Destiny”? Or the Incas’ prayer to their Sun-god: “We beseech thee that thy children the Incas may be always conquerors, since it is for this that thou has created them.”
In all these examples, there’s no expectation of treating another tribe as you would want to be treated yourself. Since many of these divine “gifts” sound suspiciously self-serving, I can’t help but wonder if there might be a more down-to-earth explanation, if you catch my drift?
Note to reader: I’m certainly not suggesting this about your religion. I’m sure your god or goddess is the real deal and that his or her divine gifts of other people’s property (or even of those people themselves) is totally legit, and totally not made up by a priest or king, and is totally part of some high-minded divine plan. I was just talking about all the other religions, besides yours. I hope I haven’t offended you through any unintended misunderstanding.
You might think I’m suggesting that the best way to apply the Golden Principle universally across the globe is to get rid of organized religion altogether. (This was the plan of Theon in my novel, The Immortality Contract, after all, but if you’ve read it, you already know that didn’t work out so well.)
The truth is that religion is perfectly capable of adapting to the expansion of the Golden Principle beyond the confines of its believers. We see this in Ancient Rome, where all religions were covered equally under the law as long as they agreed to acknowledge the Caesar’s divine right to rule. Monotheistic religions have proved a bit more obdurate when it comes to tolerating other gods or beliefs, or accepting a ruler of another faith, but history has proven that it’s not impossible. Many religious scholars point to Jesus’s “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,” as a clear advocacy for separating church and state. Of course, at the time Jesus said this, the Prince of Peace was living under the overwhelming might of Roman rule, and to say otherwise would have likely doomed his entire movement after his death.
Of course, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, they did a rather abrupt about-face and went on a burning rampage of any and all pagan or Alt-Christian texts they could lay their pious hands on.
Just for good measure, they even burned the famous Greek philosopher/mathematician Hypatia at the stake in Alexandria. (I named Theon from my novel after her father, who was in charge of the Alexandrian Library.) Most historians date the end of the Age of Philosophy with her execution by “Saint” Cyril in 415 AD. (I named another character in The Immortality Contract after Cyril just for fun.)
Speaking of religious warfare, I suffered through an intense religious war in my youth, as well. It was waged between Disco Crusaders and Rock-and-Roll Crusaders in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This caused me so much disgust with both religions, that I was forced to abandon my beloved Gloria Gaynor and Joan Jet and take holy vows in the Sid Vicious punk-rock cult, where reciprocal morality was practiced by hating everyone else as much as we desired to be hated in return. I’ve since abandoned all music cults in favor of Fundamentalist-Sponge-Bob-Square-Pants-New-Age-Agnosticism.
Sorry, for the digression! The point is that, despite what you might think from some rather unfortunate dozen or so centuries in Europe, even monotheistic religions can adapt and live peacefully under a common moral and legal code with other religions. Islamic empires did so for many centuries, as well, with Christians and Jews living peaceably side by side with their Muslim overlords (though they did have to pay a surcharge, which was one encouragement to convert). That all ended when terrorists wearing red x’s on their shirts invaded and started a Crusade to reclaim land that all three groups thought the same god had given to each of them [Jehovah is such a prankster!]. After a few centuries, everyone went back home with little accomplished, except that there were a lot more holes in buildings and people — thus the term “Holy War.”
Which brings me to the first really momentous semi-modern step forward for the Golden Principle. It happened on September 17th, 1787, when a backwater colony won its independence from one of the great world powers — completely on its own without any help from anyone! (Fact check: Actually, it was thanks to a race of stylishly attired fops who were constantly shouting “Sacreblue!” [which translates into real words as “Holy God!” which is considered a profanity that technically violates the Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”] But the Americans weren’t offended, since they didn’t speak baby-talk.)
But the truly astonishing thing was that the victorious revolutionaries created a Constitution that bucked the time-honored trend of claiming authority from at least one god or goddess as the source of power. Instead of sucking up to the supernatural, the writers of the Constitution omitted any whiff of a divine source of legitimacy and claimed their authority in the name of “We the People,” by which they really meant, “We the [white] People.”
Still, the only mention of religion in their apple-cheeked Constitution is the ban on religion as a test for office — and something about making no laws “respecting an establishment of religion” (clearly written in lawyer-slang), which Baptists and Presbyterians had insisted on if they were to fight in the revolution and vote for the new Constitution, since they objected to having to pay taxes to support the state church and have their ministers imprisoned for preaching without a license (Baptists and Presbyterians really are a whiny bunch).
This allowed for a multitude of religions, even the silly ones [I don’t mean yours, of course!], to fall under the same umbrella of legal protections and rights as any other citizen. Thank you Baptisimals and PresberAryans and MethodActorians!
Not everyone was pleased. Governor Patrick Henry and many religious leaders (all part of the Anglican majority that wanted to remain the official state religion) claimed that kicking God off welfare would cause people to throw all morals out the window and go on a murdering and prostituting rampage. Who would follow laws not backed up by God’s divine lightning bolts, after all?
When several women failed to become prostitutes, and church attendance actually increased due to free market competition between gods, the idea that a government couldn’t survive without a divine bouncer was abandoned.
It wasn’t until 1956 that Cold War paranoid and McCarthyist Red Scares caused congress to revive the idea of a divine mascot to help defeat the godless commies. And so, the founders’ national motto was changed from the original “E pluribus unum” (Out of Many, One) to “In God We Trust,” which ironically caused Patrick Henry’s predictions to come true on 42nd Street in New York City. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Mayor put a stop to all the prostituting, ran for president, lost, and tragically ended up as a jester performing with a trained rat named Frank in the subway later in life (Oops, I promised Susan I would limit predicting the future to my science fiction novels — Sorry!).
Broadening the umbrella of society’s laws to include all religions (and even those misanthropes who didn’t believe in any of the thousand choices available) was a major step forward in expanding the umbrella of reciprocal morality. Unfortunately, this umbrella didn’t extend to race or gender. Thus, slavery was legal for Africans, imprisonment in remote desolations was legal for Native Americans, and many rights were withheld from women, homosexuals, and other groups. Elves had it worst of all.
It would take a Civil War and a few more Amendments to widen the umbrella further — though there were (and still are) many gaps in the cloth.
I know what you’re thinking. “Is it even possible to apply the Golden Principle to everyone?”
Well, I, The Chief Prophet of the Fundamentalist-Sponge-Bob-Square-Pants-New-Age-Agnosticism Church, will tell you exactly how possible it is!
The first hurdle to applying the Golden Principle beyond national boundaries is dumping stupid slogans like “America First.” Whenever you hear this immoral slogan, shout “Sacreblue!” at the top of your lungs.
Next, start advocating for all people equally, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or nation — by imagining yourself in their place. Understand that if everyone practices this simple principle of moral reciprocity toward one another, we all benefit. It doesn’t require people to abandon their own religious beliefs, but it does require them to respect everyone’s right to believe in any stupid made-up god they’d like. (Again, I’m not referring to your god, who is totally and completely not made up and probably has a very slightly above-average IQ.)
The final step is a global agreement to adopt the Golden Principle as the highest principle of World Law. This doesn’t require a World Government. It doesn’t require complex treaties and legal documents. It doesn’t even require fried butter on a stick (but that wouldn’t hurt). All that’s needed is a simple agreement that every law, constitution, trade deal, environmental accord, and dispute will apply the principle of “Treat others as you’d want to be treated yourself.”
It may seem like wealthy individuals and nations would sacrifice more than the poor under such a system, but anyone who has volunteered to help those in need will know that the benefit goes both ways. I hardly remember most things I spent money on thirty years ago, but I still remember the time I volunteered to help build an orphanage in Mexico, and the time I volunteered at a refugee camp for victims of terror in El Salvador and Guatemala, and on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They are seminal moments in my education as a human being and still give me so many fond memories. Honestly, I wish it were easier to do more.
Treating others as you’d want to be treated simply feels good, and it’s always easier to do such things as a group or society than on your own.
In the long run, this will benefit everyone across the globe, since better education has been shown to benefit the society and the economy. Putting more money in the hands of people who will spend it, rather than hoarding it, is a well-known method of improving the economy and overall living standards for everyone. Just look at Nordic countries as an example.
Note: The trickle-down theory/religion that preaches a dogma that tax cuts for the rich benefits the economy and lowers taxes in the long run has been thoroughly disproven over the past twenty years by economists. There is no controversy about this among ninety-nine percent of economists. Google it, please!
The main obstacle to this plan is that reciprocal morality works best if most of the world signs on. It’s the same problem with climate change, stopping an arms race, etc. If this seems impossible, there’s one precedent of a mutually advantageous belief that spread across the globe to people of all different religions without a universal divine command backing it up.
The fiction that a piece of paper with a number written on it has value also depends on a large number of people agreeing to accept the same fiction. Even knowing that everyone will benefit if everyone adopts this fiction, it’s difficult convincing someone to go first. Still, the idea proved so powerful and useful that it spread until we’ve reached the point where more people believe in the value of the dollar across the world than any one god.
Everyone realizes that money is actually a worthless piece of paper with numbers printed on it with equally valueless ink, and yet the very act of everyone agreeing it has value, turns fiction to fact — and we’re all better off as a civilization for doing so. In fact, modern civilization would collapse without it. And no, money itself is not evil, it’s what we choose to do with it.
The same is true of reciprocal morality. If we are confident that others will help us when we fall on hard times, it’s much easier for us to help others when they’re in trouble. When people aren’t confident of this, they begin hoarding to protect themselves in case they ever fall on hard times, simply because they doubt they’ll have help. When we see the homeless, or people who lose their insurance when they are laid off, or starving refugees fleeing famine, this reinforces the idea that we must look out for ourselves because no one else will.
This is why people in Sweden and Norway score so much higher on happiness surveys than those in the US and most of the world. People consistently say that they don’t mind paying higher taxes for universal education, healthcare, and all the rest because they know it benefits all of society and will protect them as well.
The wealth gap between rich and poor is vastly smaller than in the United States, yet there isn’t the same frantic hoarding of wealth for hard times, since they have the peace of mind in knowing that the rest of society will help them and their children get back on their feet if disaster strikes. They see the evidence all around them. No one goes bankrupt from getting cancer. No child is relegated to substandard education based on birth. It’s as close to a true meritocracy and the Golden Principle in action on a national scale that we have.
So, we know it can work.
Just as banking started locally, then expanded to other nations, the first step is applying the Golden Principle within the United States, since the evidence of what happens when one group is not treated as one would themselves wish to be treated is all around us.
It’s seen in the funding of education by local property taxes, where school districts with a majority of students of color receive $23 billion less in education funding than predominantly white school districts, despite serving the same number of students. It’s seen in the average poor, nonwhite school district receiving $2,600 less per student than affluent white school districts. And that’s not even including private schools!
What would the Golden Principle say about that?
It’s seen in the fact that the average black family’s net worth in 2016 was $17,150 compared to $171,000 for a white family (ten times less) — the result of a century and a half of discrimination in education, voting, economic opportunity, racist policing, racist laws, redlining, lynching, systemic discrimination, and all the rest. Such economic and educational devastation has driven crime rates higher among these descendants of slaves, and the fact that they cannot trust the police leaves them even more helpless. The same is true for many other minority groups.
What would the Golden Principle say about that?
If you’re white, and the beneficiary of generations of white privilege in the form of better public schools, fair treatment by the legal system, better representation in the government, and the opportunity to live in areas that allowed your grandparents to get government-backed mortgage loans that blacks were ineligible for because of government redlining, it’s time to ask yourself how would you feel in their place. And what would you want people to do to make things right?
Our nation espouses the principle of meritocracy, but acts like a hereditary aristocracy through our skewed tax code, inheritance laws, and all the rest of the inequities mentioned above. How many geniuses are squandered by being handicapped from the start in the service of maintaining a system that perpetuates racism, classism, and generational inequity?
What would the Golden Principle say about that?
Over and over, I hear the refrain from those in this privileged class — of which I am one — that “It’s time we all got over it and moved on. Regretting a past you didn’t even live in is a waste of time.” It’s an easy statement to make when you’re the one who has benefited from past inequities, inherited wealth and privilege in a society based to a large extent on the lottery of birth, while others are handicapped by that very historical oppression you want to dismiss as “a waste of time.”
You may object by saying you worked hard for everything you achieved. I do not doubt it. I was not born rich, and I certainly worked very hard myself all of my life; from having a paper route through grade school, collecting newspapers to recycle and delivering phone directories all over our working-class neighborhoods with my mother and other siblings, working at an Italian beef stand through high school, and working hard to win a scholarship to Art School, etc.
And yet, when I competed in boxing tournaments in black neighborhoods, and I saw the schools they went to, saw racism up close, and learned about all the conditions they faced generation after generation, I knew I was privileged.
When my grandfather returned from WWII, he got a government-backed loan on a house in a neighborhood black GIs were forbidden to move to. Meanwhile, their neighborhoods were redlined by the government, which meant the government wouldn’t insure mortgage loans like they did in the white neighborhoods, which led to a far lower percentage of black home ownership, which failed to accumulate the same wealth as housing prices skyrocketed decade after decade.
My grandfather was able to provide my parents with the down payment to buy their first house when they got married, just as Susan’s father did for us when we bought our house in North Carolina. And that’s not even considering the transfer of wealth through inheritance (remember that white households own ten times the assets of black households), which gets passed down to the next generation tax-free for estates under ten million dollars.
So, yes, I’m sure you worked hard, but put yourself in an African American’s place and understand that all they want is the same opportunity to work hard, send their kids to good schools, and all the rest that you and I benefited from.
What do you think the Golden Rule, or Jesus, or Buddha would say about that?
Putting yourself in someone else’s place requires watching Gone With the Wind and considering how different this story would look if we told it from the point of view of the slaves on that plantation, rather than the dashing and beautiful white slave owners. Did the Southern writer of this story not know the reality of slavery? Of course she did; she simply chose to ignore it to foster the myth of the gallant South fighting for high-minded principles, rather than them doing so to perpetuate the bondage and suffering of their human chattel.
The only time we see suffering in the film is of the wounded Confederate soldiers laid out in rows on the ground — or Scarlet’s suffering at the destruction of her family’s beloved plantation (a plantation built by generations of slaves that were beaten, whipped, and branded to keep them working for her family). We never see the suffering of black, or their joy at being freed.
Now imagine how you would feel if you were a descendant of a slave watching that movie. Or what it must feel like to gaze up at a statue glorifying those who enslaved your great-grandparents, or to be a Native American gazing at a heroic statue of the man who initiated the slaughter that all but wiped out your race.
That is what it means to practice The Golden Principle.
There were people at the time who spoke out against Columbus’s actions, as well as against American slavery at the very start of the practice. Would one argue that we shouldn’t judge the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center because that was over twenty years ago? Of course not. So why should we absolve Columbus for committing mass murder based on the same delusional justification that he thought this is what his god wanted him to do?
Since I wasn’t alive when Hitler ordered the Holocaust, am I not allowed to judge him a monster? What happens when the last Jewish survivor dies? Does it then become wrong for anyone to judge Hitler?
Do you see how ridiculous this is? It doesn’t mean we can’t analyze history through the lens of the distorted beliefs and conditions of the time and see what caused Hitler to believe and act as he did. Or why Columbus thought he was a moral person despite his crimes against humanity. But to say we shouldn’t judge these crimes now is to abdicate our responsibility to learn from, and not repeat, the mistakes of the past.
The history of humanity has been the history of gradually expanding the umbrella of reciprocal morality to include a greater and greater number of diverse people, but lest you think it’s inevitable that we succeed, remember how rare our system is. Notice the rising nationalism taking hold across the globe, and our own president shouting “America First” to cheering crowds like some tribal chieftain of old. Demonizing immigrants, letting corporations write our laws, accelerating the concentration of wealth at the top, and failing to live by even a modest form of the Golden Principle.
Only time will tell if we succeed in unifying under a world-wide banner of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or if we devolve back into warring tribes flinging weapons of a magnitude Columbus could never have imagined. Maybe the Judgment Day Columbus predicted is nearing after all, but it is us who will bring it about without any assistance from any god.
We the People will pronounce the final verdict on our kind and the entire planet — for good or for ill. Truly, we are all in this together like no other time in the history of humankind. The question is: Will we act like it?
My novels can be found lurking on Amazon as well as audiobooks on Audible.
Nihala — God’s Dark Algorithm
https://www.amazon.com/Nihala-1-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555412
https://www.audible.com/pd/Nihala-Audiobook/B01AIM6D00
The Immortality Contract
https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Contract-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555420
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Immortality-Contract-Audiobook/B075KLGV6B
My Artwork can be found at:
https://www.ScottBurdick.com
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