METHINKS THE LADDIE DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

Moore's Law: The immorality of the Ten Commandments. (Christopher Hitchens, August 27, 2003, Slate)

The row over the boulder-sized version of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent. Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).

The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember, used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous days of unpaid pyramid erection.

So the first four commandments have almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including religious and iconographic art—and all activity on the Sabbath (which the words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). [...]

It's obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

As always with Mr. Hitchens, this is most interesting from a psychoanalytic viewpoint--reflecting the kind of rage against God that surely presages his imminent conversion to Catholicism, just as his rage at Henry Kissigner presaged his conversion to realpolitik American military interventionism.

As for the rest he achieves some comic effect only by playing stupid. To begin with, there's obviously no possibility of a stable and enduring morality without a single authority, which is why the initial Commandments describe God and our duties to him--that we recognize His supremacy, that we not imagine Him to be objectifiable, that we respect Him, that we take time to contemplate Him and His works, etc.. They not only "have to do with moral conduct" but make morality possible. The alternative to this--which Mr. Hitchens used to be an advocate of, but wisely is no longer-is to erect in His place a State which enforces its will upon us and requires all the same things...except rest and contemplation. In the absence of morality there are only man-made rules and those rules must come from a human source that we all have to listen to--the State.

As for his laundry list of wished for additions in the final paragraph, several are of course already covered by the Commandments, while others are not demonstrably immoral. A couple for instances: thou shalt not murder would seem to rule out genocide while neither "offenses against gender equity" nor slavery need be forbidden by a coherent moral scheme, rather they are fundamentally political decisions we've tacked on, and not generally for the good.

Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas offered this Summary of the Law: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." And the Ten Commandments are perfected by Christ's order to his disciples: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you..." That should adequately cover Mr. Hitchens' main objections, though it does suggest that he might be uncomfortable as a Jew--requiring that last mandatum from Christ in order to achieve clarity.

Even setting all of this aside though, when we turn to the particular question of why Americans should seek to recognize Judeo-Christian morality in public places, we need look no further than the foundational document of the nation, which reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Republic is an edifice built on one very simple idea, that God Created Man and in so doing endowed us with a small, but massive, bundle of rights that no mere government can have the legitimate authority to violate. If Mr. Hitchens is truly hostile to that idea, let him enunciate a better. His last idea--that all rights should be subordinated while the State make us all Equal--kinda went bung. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2003 1:13 AM