Moral Elevation, Moral Disgust & the Vastness of the View
A book about ethics by Peter Singer begins with a description of a remarkable act:
When he saw the man fall onto the subway tracks, Wesley Autrey didn’t hesitate. With the lights of the oncoming train visible, Autrey, a construction worker, jumped down to the tracks and pushed the man down into a drainage trench between the rails, covering him with his own body. The train passed over them, leaving a trail of grease on Autrey’s cap. Autrey, later invited to the State of the Union Address and praised by the President for his bravery, downplayed his actions: “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular. I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right… Since I do construction work with Local 79, we work in confined spaces a lot. So, I looked, and my judgment was pretty right. The train did have enough room for me.’
Reading that, I experienced a form of awe that’s been termed ‘moral elevation’: witnessing an act of moral beauty, we feel inspired and elevated. In a way, we could say that the whole of the dharma is about becoming sensitive to goodness. We’re moved by our own goodness, delight in the goodness of the Buddha’s generosity and, when we look into the eyes of others, goodness is the first thing we see.
But the sensitivity cultivated is not selective. We become sensitive to the whole range of moral beauty and brutality. There is moral elevation, but also ‘moral disgust.’ The neuroscientist Hanah Chapman describes the critical role that disgust plays in our morality. She writes, “The commonality between physical and moral disgust illustrates the elegant pragmatism of brain design, whereby a new set of abstract social triggers is attached to an ancient motivational system originating in the rejection of aversive and potentially poisonous tastes.” Just as rotting food might repel us, ethical harm can do the same.
Ajahn Sucitto wrote, “If you want to guard the Dhamma, protect the Dhamma and love the Dhamma – feel it in your body. The Dhamma is then not the ideas or words or expositions. It’s the immediate flexion of joy and love in the presence of goodness, and of disorientation and sickness that you feel on witnessing brutality and corruption.”
In my engagement with electoral politics in the US, there are times I grapple with moral disgust. When you see the sanctification of greed, hatred and delusion in public life, it’s hard not to shudder. Ominously, this sentiment can harden into hatred. Disgust and hate live in the same neighborhood. We must take care with our mind. We are mindful of the ways that ethical commitments can become entangled with afflictive emotion and the ways that politics function as a channel into which our defilements flow. What’s unbearable needs an object of hate, right? No.
“Justice,” Martin Luther King said, “is really love in calculation.” Let us remember our love.
Compassion is love in the face of suffering. We channel our love to alleviate suffering. Our lives are mere ripples and a dharma life propagates kindness, joy, non-divisiveness. The theologian Abraham Heschel writes, “The prophet is human, yet they employ notes one octave too high for our ears. They experience moments that defy our understanding. They are neither a ‘singing saint’ nor a ‘moralizing poet,’ but an assaulter of the mind. Often their words begin to burn, where conscience ends.” May we be inspired by the prophets in our midst.
Yet even love can fatigue our heart. Compassion devolves into compulsivity if it’s entirely untethered from equanimity. Equanimity is love in the face of helplessness. Rather than collapsing on the other side of our power, our heart remains open. Equanimity is a quiet love in the face of the endless, ungovernable nature of dukkha.
There is the risk of melodrama and the risk of nihilism. Empathy fatigues our heart when we’re over-identified with the pain. Sometimes, I feel too close to the pain and hate becomes more tenable. To mitigate this risk, the view must be expanded. It must become vast. View is not simply an idea, mere cognition, but something more like perception, something visceral. The congealed sense of self contracts our view; self-view is inherently myopic. I can’t help but be absorbed in its own time and place. So, we zoom out, outside our story – outside our place and our time. In stepping out of self-view, we extend the horizon of our care beyond the horizon of our life. Often, we hear, ‘be here now,’ but ethically speaking, here and now are not morally special. Love is unconstrained by space or time. Does my neighbor matter more than a person across the globe? Not if I’m in a place to help either. Does a baby born today count more than one born tomorrow or in a century? I don’t think so. Perhaps, the proper unit of analysis for ethics is not my life, but generational or should be measured in centuries. We experience glimpses and tastes of the vastness. Deep insight into the three characteristics engenders a sense of vastness. Dukkha, anicca, anatta. Suffering, uncertainty, centerlessness. A view, pervaded by the perception of the three characteristics. As real as all the forms, emptiness. Vastness is inherently non-violent – its perception collapses when hatred tugs. This view expresses both equanimity and compassion, urgency and patience. The wide openness distills out the melodrama but leaves love in place. “In Those Years,” by Adrienne Rich, is relevant.
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
