The False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism

When I returned to New York City after
nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, Africa,
the Middle East and the Balkans, I was unsure of where I was headed. I
lacked the emotional and physical resiliency that had allowed me to
cope as a war correspondent. I was plagued by memories I wanted to
forget, waking suddenly in the middle of the night, my sleep shattered
by visions of gunfire and death. I was alienated from those around me,
unaccustomed to the common language and images imposed by consumer
culture, unable to communicate the pain and suffering I had witnessed,
not much interested in building a career.

It was at this time that the Brooklyn Academy of Music began showing a 10-part film series called "The Decalogue." Deka, in Greek, means 10. Logos means saying or speech. The Decalogue is the classical name of the Ten Commandments. The director was the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski,
who had made the trilogy "White, Blue and Red." The 10 films, each
about an hour long and based on one of the commandments, were to be
shown two at a time over five consecutive weeks. I saw them on Sunday
nights, taking the subway to Brooklyn, its cars rocking and screeching
along the tracks in the darkened tunnels. The theater was rarely more
than half full.

The films were quiet, subtle and often
opaque. It was sometimes hard to tell which commandment was being
addressed. The characters never spoke about the commandments directly.
They were too busy, as we all are, coping with life. The stories
presented the lives of ordinary people confronted by extraordinary
events. All lived in a Warsaw housing complex, many of them neighbors.
They were on a common voyage, yet also out of touch with the pain and
dislocation of those around them. The commandments, Kieslowski
understood, were not dusty relics of another age, but a powerful
compass with vital contemporary resonance.

In film after film he dealt with the core
violation raised by each of the commandments. He freed the commandments
from the clutter of piety and narrow definitions imposed upon them by
religious leaders and institutions. The promiscuous woman portrayed in
the film about adultery was not married. She had a series of empty,
carnal relationships. Adultery, at its deepest level for the director,
was sex without love. The father in the film about honoring our parents
was not the biological father. The biological mother was absent in the
daughter's life. Parenting, Kieslowski knew, is not defined by blood
or birth or gender. It is defined by commitment, fidelity and love. In
the film about killing, an unemployed drifter robs and brutally murders
a cab driver. He is caught, sentenced and executed by the state.
Kieslowski forces us to confront the barbarity of murder, whether it is
committed by a deranged individual or sanctioned by society.

I knew the commandments. I had learned
them at Sunday school, listened to sermons based on the commandments
from my father's pulpit and studied them as a seminarian at Harvard
Divinity School. But Kieslowski turned them into living, breathing
entities.

" ... For 6,000 years these rules have
been unquestionably right," Kieslowski said of the commandments. "And
yet we break them every day. We know what we should do, and yet we fail
to live as we should. People feel that something is wrong in life.
There is some kind of atmosphere that makes people turn now to other
values. They want to contemplate the basic questions of life, and that
is probably the real reason for wanting to tell these stories."

In eight of the films there was a brief
appearance by a young man, solemn and silent. Kieslowski said he did
not know who the character was. Perhaps he was an angel or Christ.
Perhaps he represented the divine presence who observed with profound
sadness the tragedy and folly we humans commit against others and
against ourselves.

"He's not very pleased with us," was all the director said.

The commandments are a list of religious
edicts, according to passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy, given to Moses
by God on Mount Sinai. The first four are designed to guide the
believer toward a proper relationship with God. The remaining six deal
with our relations with others. It is these final six commands that are
given the negative form of "You Shall Not ... ." Only two of the
commandments, the prohibitions against stealing and murder, are
incorporated into our legal code. Protestants, Catholics and Jews have
compiled slightly different lists, but the essence of the commandments
remains the same. Muslims, while they do not list the commandments in
the Koran, honor the laws of Moses, whom they see as a prophet.

The commandments are not defined, however,
by the three monotheistic faiths. They are one of the earliest attempts
to lay down moral rules and guidelines to sustain a human community.
Nearly every religion has set down an ethical and moral code that is
strikingly similar to the Ten Commandments. The Eightfold Path, known
within Buddhism as the Wheel of Law, forbids murder, unchastity, theft,
falsehood and, especially, covetous desire. The Hindus' sacred syllable
Om, said or sung before and after prayers, ends with a fourth
sound beyond the range of human hearing. This sound is called the
"sound of silence." It is also called "the sound of the universe."
Hindus, in the repetition of the Sacred Syllable, try to go beyond
thought, to reach the stillness and silence that constitutes God. Five
of the Ten Commandments delivered from Mount Sinai are lifted directly
from the Egyptian "Book of the Dead." No human being, no nation, no
religion, has been chosen to be the sole interpreter of mystery. All
cultures struggle to give words to the experience of the transcendent.
It is a reminder that all of us find God not in what we know, but in
what we cannot comprehend.

The commandments include the most severe
violations and moral dilemmas in human life, although these violations
often lie beyond the scope of the law. They were for the ancients, and
are for us, the core rules that, when honored, hold us together, and
when dishonored lead to alienation, discord and violence. When our
lives are shattered by tragedy, suffering and pain, or when we express
or feel the ethereal and overwhelming power of love, we confront the
mystery of good and evil. Voices across time and cultures have
struggled to transmit and pay homage to this mystery, what it means for
our lives and our place in the cosmos. These voices, whether in the
teachings of the Buddha, the writings of the Latin poets or the pages
of the Koran, are part of our common struggle as human beings to
acknowledge the eternal and the sacred, to create an ethical system to
sustain life.

The commandments retain their power
because they express something fundamental about the human condition.
This is why they are important. The commandments choose us. We are
rarely able to choose them. We do not, however hard we work to insulate
ourselves, ultimately control our fate. We cannot save ourselves from
betrayal, theft, envy, greed, deception and murder, nor always from the
impulses that propel us to commit these acts. These violations, which
can strike us or be committed without warning, can leave deep, often
lifelong wounds. There are few of us who do not wrestle deeply with at
least one of these violations.

We all stray. We all violate some
commandments and do not adequately honor others. We are human. But
moral laws bind us together and make it possible to build a society
based on the common good. They keep us from honoring the false
covenants of greed, celebrity and power that destroy us. These false
covenants have a powerful appeal. They offer feelings of strength,
status and a false sense of belonging. They tempt us to be God. They
tell us the things we want to hear and believe. They appear to make us
the center of the universe. But these false covenants, covenants built
around exclusive communities of race, gender, class, religion and
nation, inevitably carry within them the denigration and abuse of
others. These false covenants divide us. A moral covenant recognizes
that all life is sacred and love alone is the force that makes life
possible.

It is the unmentioned fear of death, the
one that rattles with the wind through the heavy branches of the trees
outside, which frightens us the most, even as we do not name this fear.
It is death we are trying to flee. The smallness of our lives, the
transitory nature of existence, the inevitable road to old age, are
what the idols of power, celebrity and wealth tell us we can escape.
They are tempting and seductive. They assure us that we need not endure
the pain and suffering of being human. We follow the idol and barter
away our freedom. We place our identity and our hopes in the hands of
the idol. We need the idol to define ourselves, to determine our status
and place. We invest in the idol. We sell ourselves into bondage.

The consumer goods we amass, the status we
seek in titles and positions, the ruthlessness we employ to advance our
careers, the personal causes we champion, the money we covet and the
houses we build and the cars we drive become our pathetic statements of
being. They are squalid little monuments to our selves. The more we
strive to amass power and possessions the more intolerant and anxious
we become. Impulses and emotions, not thoughts but mass feelings,
propel us forward. These impulses, carefully manipulated by a consumer
society, see us intoxicated with patriotic fervor and a lust for war, a
desire to vote for candidates who appeal to us emotionally or to buy
this car or that brand. Politicians, advertisers, social scientists,
television evangelists, the news media and the entertainment industry
have learned what makes us respond. It works. None of us are immune.
But when we act in their interests we are rarely acting in our own. The
moral philosophies we have ignored, once a staple of a liberal arts
education, are a check on the deluge. They call us toward mutual
respect and self-sacrifice. They force us to confront the broad,
disturbing questions about meaning and existence. And our callous
refusal to heed these questions as a society allowed us to believe that
unfettered capitalism and the free market were a force of nature, a
decree passed down from the divine, the only route to prosperity and
power. It turned out to be an idol, and like all idols it has now
demanded its human sacrifice.

Moral laws were not written so they could
be practiced by some and not by others. They call on all of us to curb
our worst instincts so we can live together, to refrain from committing
acts of egregious exploitation that spread suffering. Moral teachings
are guideposts. They keep us, even when we stray, as we all do, on the
right path.

The strange, disjointed fragments of our
lives can be comprehended only when we acknowledge our insecurities and
uncertainties, when we accept that we will never know what life is
about or what it is supposed to mean. We must do the best we can, not
for ourselves, the great moralists remind us, but for those around us.
Trust is the compound that unites us. The only lasting happiness in
life comes with giving life to others. The quality of our life, of all
life, is determined by what we give and how much we sacrifice. We live
not by exalting our own life but by being willing to lose it.

The moral life, in the end, will not
protect us from evil. The moral life protects us, however, from
committing evil. It is designed to check our darker impulses, warning
us that pandering to impulses can have terrible consequences. It seeks
to hold community together. It is community that gives our lives, even
in pain and grief, a healing solidarity. It is fealty to community that
frees us from the dictates of our idols, idols that promise us
fulfillment through self-gratification. These moral laws are about
freedom. They call us to reject and defy powerful forces that rule our
lives and to live instead for others, even if this costs us status and
prestige and wealth.

Turn away from the moral life and you end
in disaster. You sink into a morass of self-absorption and greed. You
breed a society that celebrates fraud, theft and violence, you turn
neighbor against neighbor, you confuse presentation and image with your
soul. Moral rules are as imperative to sustaining a community as law.
And all cultures have sought to remind us of these basic moral
restraints, ones that invariably tell us that successful communities do
permit its members to exploit each other but ensure that they sacrifice
for the common good. The economic and social collapse we face was
presaged by a moral collapse. And our response must include a renewed
reverence for moral and social imperatives that acknowledge the
sanctity of the common good.

The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
said, "Tell me 'how' you seek and I will tell you 'what' you are
seeking." We all are seekers, even if we do not always know what we are
looking to find. We are all seekers, even if we do not always know how
to frame the questions. In those questions, even more than the answers,
we find hope in the strange and contradictory fragments of our lives.
And it is by recovering these moral questions, too often dismissed or
ignored in universities and boardrooms across the country, laughed at
on the stock exchange, ridiculed on reality television as an impediment
to money and celebrity, that we will again find it possible to be
whole.