Righteousness is Wrong

“When you grow up, you’ll know right from wrong.”

Both my parents told me that, numerous times. Somehow I always knew there was something fishy about it. Let’s put aside that they might have meant “It’s complicated, just do as I say for now”. The premise remains. The world splits into right or wrong and one must discover what falls into either category so as to follow the righteous path.

To which I say no.

This dichotomy is pervasive in how so many of us see the world. There is good and there is evil. One is not supposed to figure it out, one is shown, and one should obey. You get it from your elders, or the clergy, or an allegedly sacred text.

In reality it’s a judgment call. Yours to make. Most of us never do. One can engage in that choice by deciding what behavior would engender the kind of world one would want to live in. But mostly each of us inherit it through cultural osmosis. This is especially true when deities are invoked. And what a god wants of you need not even make sense or require explanation. You’re shown the light, handed the Kool-Aid. And to one degree or another you drink it up.

And thus righteousness is born. My parents were wrong. I do not know right from wrong. What I do know is how toxic righteousness is. Righteousness is when your preferences are cast as not just a strongly held opinion but a fact about the universe. It just is. It is proven via its provenance not its rationality (or lack thereof).

Righteousness poses as heat, as light in the darkness, the eternal flame. But it’s worse than the fire that casts the proverbial shadows on the cave walls. It doesn’t illuminate, it sanctifies distortion. And here’s the trap: that fire feels identical from the inside whether you’re right or wrong. The flat-earther has it. The climate scientist has it. The anti-vaxxer has it. The person yelling at them online has it. It substitutes surety for the hard, endlessly iterative task of discerning what is real and what is of benefit.

What’s worse, righteousness doesn’t just mislead us about what we know. It changes what we do with what we don’t know. A verdict gets reached without anything like a protocol for reaching it. Once the verdict is in, the case is closed. No further inquiry is called for.

Righteousness does not tolerate those who dissent. It demonizes them. At best they are condescended to but all too often they are suspect, culpable, agents of the dark side. Whatever flavor of “right” you’ve committed to, those outside the cone of your stage light take the form of the bogeyman. They become an obstacle, a deplorable, a colonizer, a snowflake. They are not merely a fellow mortal squinting through their own small keyhole. They are the enemy.

Much in this world distresses me. There is no shortage of insanity, inanity, stupidity and the endless parade of heinous harm we do to each other. I’ve come to see righteousness as the star enabler. I want to say “it’s the root of all evil.” But is that not just more righteousness? Evil isn’t a force outside us. It’s the worst things humans do to each other. Righteousness is almost always front and center at those moments. More often than not those doing the worst things in history thought what they were doing was right.

The level of righteousness tracks with how awful the behavior is. And it’s the worst, it makes my blood boil. Don’t get me started …

Too late!

Look at me on my high horse. The disdain for righteousness, expressed oh so righteously. Yes, I am not immune, and I doubt anyone is.

This reminds me of a book club I once attended. A bunch of smart and generally thoughtful people reading books about politics, evolution, physics … you know, some light reading. No surprise that there were different perspectives on display. One day one of the group expressed in a weary and resigned tone the futility of our exchange. “No one ever really changes one’s mind, not on anything substantial.” I had to disagree and he challenged me on what I had truly changed my thinking on. It was polyamory.

I was all for it. I wasn’t so naive as to think polyamory would not require a careful and serious protocol to work. I just thought any reasonably intelligent person could do so. But in my youth I grossly underestimated our pre-wiring.¹ I thought that my powerful underlying emotions were mostly mere convention, the product of cultural norms. I ignored how primal and instinctual they were. I tried to opt out of jealousy, possessiveness, and anger. I failed and paid dearly for this hubris. Perhaps there is the rare person with the dedication and predilection required to successfully navigate that emotional terrain. But I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of us can’t. So I completely changed my mind on the topic.

We all fall prey to the charms of righteous indignation. We are all lured by that siren song of certainty. No doubt it has been with us from the start.

As with many of the prevailing human pathologies it is tempting to feel it’s worse than ever in these current times. It has felt like the dominant register of late. It does seem to permeate our lives.

It shows up across multiple domains. Religion of course tops the list as it’s a baked-in quality of that enterprise. Politics is, of course, fertile ground. Certainly it is the creepy bedfellow of virtue signaling. It finds its way into our personal relationships too — the friend who went down some rabbit hole on the internet and now, with barely concealed condescension, explains how you’ve been fooled.

So yeah, I really despise righteousness. Should you, dear reader? I do not seek to convince you of that here. Nor do I seek to prescribe what others should do. One thing I am emphatically not suggesting is that we take a facile relativistic approach to our values and perspective.

So what am I suggesting? I’ve got notions of course. But rather than offer my own pet dogmas I intend here to share some of my own ruminations. In many of the following essays I am examining my own beliefs and assumptions. Rather than demonize those forces that seem to be doing so much damage to our society I’d rather try to understand the motivations, and yes, the delusions that may be underlying them.

Of course, don’t take my word for any of it …

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Footnotes

1. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind both address the depth of our evolutionary pre-wiring — and how little conscious intention can do about it. ↩