This week, Ireland voted - in a landslide - to allow gay marriage. The vote was notable for the margin of victory, which was about 62%. There is no question that this vote is a Good Thing - for Ireland, for the world. An interesting tidbit about the vote got short airplay, though. The country of Ireland is known for being overwhelmingly Catholic. As a nation, they only legalized *divorce* in 1995. Yahoo news says “Saturday's emerging landslide marked a stunning generational shift from the 1980s, when voters still firmly backed Catholic Church teachings and overwhelmingly voted against abortion and divorce”. Until very recently, homosexuality of any kind was against the law in Ireland. People went to prison for it.
Now, this is all a good thing, I hear you saying. And yes, of course - I completely agree. But it’s also interesting. Because what’s happened here, without us really noticing, is the fluidity of morality. We’ve long understood that our modern life is just faster paced and more fluid than it ever used to be. Writing a novel has turned into tweeting. The average attention span is down to about 8 seconds, I hear. But most of us had assumed that certain issues - the bedrock of our conscience - were still pretty rock solid. And among those was morality, philosophy and religion. But that appears to me to be less and less the case. And there are really no societal conversations happening about this trend.
In an article I read recently on CNN, they were talking about what Obama might do before he leaves office with all the people - I hear it’s measured in tens of thousands - who are serving long sentences for possession of marijuana. Which, until recently, was a very serious federal offense (I guess it still technically is).
I am totally in favor of the legalization of marijuana and gay marriage. I think it’s awesome. And, of course, I’m excited that we got there relatively quickly. It’s the right answer, so why not do it sooner rather than later? But I’m also a bit dubious. You see, once things move fast, they tend to keep moving fast. And not always in the direction you want them to move. It would be terribly naive to think that all the societal movements that are going to sweep the world over the next 10, 25 or 50 years are going to be pleasant and benign. I hope they are! But hope is not a strategy.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. What do you think we do - regularly, as a society - that our grandkids will think is incredibly weird, or disgusting, or perhaps even immoral? Perhaps one day you’ll tell your grandkids that some people used to roll plants up in a tube and light them on fire and then inhale the smoke into their lungs and they will shudder in disgust. Maybe you’ll tell them that we used to get our meat by slaughtering animals instead of growing it in a tube and they’ll gasp in horror.
Maybe you’ll tell them we used to regularly wear clothes and they’ll just snicker. Or, alternatively, maybe you’ll tell them that people used to go out in the street without covering their face and they’ll be mortified.
I think it’s terrible that people used to keep slaves. But I also recall that some of our great founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, kept slaves. Does that make him morally bankrupt? Tough, right? On the one hand, we tend to regard morality as an absolute. If it’s bad to have slaves, then it was bad to have slaves back then, and people “should have known better”. But what will the future look back at us for and wag their fingers? I feel a bit queasy at the thought that perhaps something I’m doing today will be written down and judged by people a hundred years from now - or maybe, given the pace of change, even 10 or 20.
I’m certainly not suggesting that we should intentionally withhold marriage equality, or the freedom to smoke pot, just to make a point. I suppose what I’m saying is two things: one, that it’s ok to move slowly sometimes when it comes to important societal change, and more importantly, that when we do change, it’s not (always) fair to judge those of us that came before us. I still, personally, believe that there are some moral absolutes: murder, rape, theft. And I value our free thinking society. I just hope we keep it pointed in the right direction.