COMMENTARY: Whatever happened to conscience?

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.) UNDATED _ Whatever happened to conscience? We learned to numb it. And what happens to people who numb their consciences? That’s a good question, maybe the critical social question […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ Whatever happened to conscience?


We learned to numb it.

And what happens to people who numb their consciences?

That’s a good question, maybe the critical social question for our time.

Societies depend on voluntary self-restraint. There aren’t enough police, regulators or parents to rein in our worst impulses. When”catch me if you can!”replaces self-restraint, we’re all in trouble.

The questions arise because of recent Associated Press reports on child labor in America. Despite abundant legal restraints, managers hire 6-year-olds to pick peppers and 8-year-olds to make clothing. Across the country, children toil away their childhoods, at great risk of physical harm, for a few dollars a day. Most of them are immigrants.

As I read the series, I found myself asking,”How can these people sleep at night?”What process of self-numbing allows an adult to send a child into the fields or into a sweatshop?

Furthermore, how far down the supply chain does that self-numbing have to occur in order for the practice to continue? Campbell Soup Co. officials, for example, said they were unaware their products contained ingredients harvested by children. Assuming that is true, how many people had to overlook abuse for knowledge of the facts to evaporate?

For evil to become sanitized, a lot of people must look the other way. Other farm employees, the school bus drivers who go daily past the fields, local merchants, buyers, the spouses and children of people who cause the abuse _ many more consciences are being numbed than that of the supervisor who actually hands a 6-year-old a bucket and sends her into a boiling field.

All across America, self-numbing goes on. Coal operators knowingly send men into unsafe mines. Tobacco companies knowingly manufacture a dangerous product and sell addiction to children. Liquor stores knowingly sell death to alcoholics. Toy companies knowingly sell unsafe and overly hyped products. Chemical companies and hog farmers knowingly pollute rivers. Managers trade promotions for sex. Gossips knowingly spread lies.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in her disturbing study of Nazi Germany, that evil empire could only proceed if evil became banal, or common. For something obviously wrong to proceed, multiple consciences must stop working. Entire communities must grow numb and choose not to see any connection between abusive behavior and oneself. Evil isn’t some exotic monster; evil is a smooth talker who sells us something we can learn to live with, even profit from.

What happens when our individual and collective consciences stop working? If wrong is wrong, then not getting caught or sued won’t be enough. To sleep at night, we will need mind-numbing entertainment, body-numbing chemicals, fear-numbing hatreds, anxiety-numbing shopping and reality-numbing obsessions.


To disarm our consciences, we will need to smother our passions, our ability to love (as opposed to lust) and our self-respect. One can’t turn off just one feeling. They all go off. We will need to isolate ourselves not only from the impact of our behavior on other people, but from people themselves.

To live without self-restraint, we will need to do two other things.

First, we will need to find scapegoats, someone else whose behavior can be labeled wrong and be punished.

Second, we will need to distort our sense of the holy. In place of a God who loves, we will see a God who hates. In place of a God who values justice, we will see a God who rains death on the divergent behavior of someone else. Instead of faith communities where people”walk in love,”we will pursue power conflicts and empty estheticism. Instead of basic values, we will develop exotic moralities grounded in selective compilations of condemnatory scriptures. Instead of observing sabbath and engaging in self-examination, we will listen to Christian music while we drive to jobs whose true nature we don’t dare to see.

At some point in the daisy chain of conscience-numbing, we each need to examine our own choices, not the other guy’s, and say,”No, I can’t do this. It is wrong.” Our economy would grind to a halt, but we might be less compulsive, less addicted, less depressed and less abusive. We might, in fact, sleep well at night.

MJP END EHRICH

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