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This is the setup for Nick Hornby\u2019s hilarious and insightful novel\u00a0How to Be Good<\/em>, which is on the syllabus in my Current Problems in Ethics class this semester. What makes the novel particularly interesting is that within the first fifty pages, under circumstances better read about than described (you really should read the book!), David undergoes a mysterious moral transformation from a cynical and nasty piece of work to a dedicated moral and social activist.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nDavid and Katie have paid lip service to all of the appropriate liberal political and social positions ever since they met at university, but now David is sounding as if he intends to actually act on what they have always lazily claimed to believe. How is Katie to respond? How is she to cope with a husband who is suddenly attentive, pleasant, no longer angry, sharing his portion of the parenting burden without complaint . . . and who intends to turn their lives upside down? Katie is nervous, because \u201cI can\u2019t help but feel that all this sounds very ominous indeed.\u201d<\/p>\n
About a third of the way through the book, David lays it all out:<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t care enough. We look after ourselves and ignore the weak and the poor. We despise our politicians for doing nothing, and think that this is somehow enough to show we care, and meanwhile we live in centrally heated houses that are too big for us . . .\u00a0We have a spare bedroom, and a study, and meanwhile people are sleeping outside on pavements.\u00a0We scrape perfectly edible food into our compost maker, and meanwhile people at the end of our road are begging for the price of a cup of tea and a bag of chips . . . We spend thirteen pounds on compact discs which we already own in a different format . . . We buy films for our children that they\u2019ve already seen at the cinema and never watch again . . . You get the point . . . and so does Katie. At the end of his diatribe, David sums up succinctly.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a liberal\u2019s worst nightmare . . . I think everything you think. But I\u2019m going to walk it like I talk it.<\/strong><\/p>\n In short order David gives many of his children\u2019s toys and one of the family\u2019s three computers away, seeks to recruit families on their street to house homeless teenagers in their spare bedrooms, and generally disrupts house and home in an effort to\u00a0walk the talk. The problem is that David\u2019s logic is unassailable. If this is what we claim to believe, then this is what we should be doing.<\/p>\n Which monumentally frustrates Katie who, after all, has considered herself to be the \u201cgood person\u201d in this marriage for years.<\/p>\n I want to destroy David\u2019s whole save-the-world-and-love-everyone campaign, but I want to do it using his logic and philosophy and language, not the language of some moaning, spoiled, smug, couldn\u2019t-care-less, survival-of-the-fittest whiner.<\/strong><\/p>\n I share many of Katie and David\u2019s beliefs; while theirs seem to have been established primarily through education, peer pressure, and social class, I often trace most of my liberal moral and social commitments back to my professed Christian faith. Which raises disturbing to a different level, because a person of faith who actually put the fundamental tenets of the faith into daily practice would be a Christian\u2019s worst nightmare.<\/p>\n I smack headlong into this challenge every time I read or hear the Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. For the beauty and familiarity of the language can easily disguise what is most remarkable about the Beatitudes\u2014they are a crystal clear call to radically uproot everything we think we know about value, about what is important, about prestige, about power, and even about God.\u00a0They are a challenge to fundamentally change the world.<\/p>\n The Roman-dominated world into which the Sermon on the Mount came like a lightning-bolt was not that different from our own. One\u2019s status or rank in the social hierarchy depended on power, birth, economic status, education, gender, race\u2014usually some combination of the above. Those who lacked these qualities, whether through their own fault or because of matters entirely outside their control, had little opportunity to rise above their lowly state. And this, it was assumed then as it often is now, is simply the way of the world, the way things work.<\/p>\n In a matter of a few brief, poetic lines Jesus turns it all upside down. In God\u2019s economy,\u00a0none<\/strong>\u00a0of our assumptions can be relied upon and none of our common sense arrangements work. God\u2019s values are apparently the very opposite of those produced by our natural human wiring.\u00a0Throughout virtually everything attributed to Jesus in the gospels, the point is driven home. God is most directly found in the poor, the widows, the orphans, those for whom pretensions of being something or having influence are unavailable. The gospels are clear that the one thing guaranteed to make God angry is to ignore such persons.<\/p>\n The infrequent times that Jesus talks about hell is always in the context of people who spend their life ignoring the unfortunate. Because in truth we\u00a0all<\/strong>\u00a0are impoverished, we\u00a0all\u00a0<\/strong>are abandoned, we\u00a0all\u00a0<\/strong>are incapable of taking care of ourselves, let alone anyone else. The poor, widows and orphans simply no longer have the luxury of pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n Every once in a while a debate develops, usually somewhere in the South, over whether it is permissible to put a plaque or a statue containing the\u00a0Ten Commandments in a law court, a state house, or a public school.\u00a0Because of the commitment to separation of church and state established in the United States Constitution, such attempts are invariably rejected as unconstitutional. And this is a good thing\u2014I\u2019m very grateful for the sharp separation of church and state.<\/p>\n But imagine a community or a society with governing practices and policies infused with the energy, not of the Ten Commandments, but of the Beatitudes. Imagine a legislative body whose guiding north star was the mercy and compassion of the Beatitudes rather than the cold and clinical justice of the Ten Commandments. How would such a community\u2019s or society\u2019s attitudes and policies concerning the poor, the disenfranchised, those who are struggling, those who have fallen through the cracks, change as it learned to see such \u201cunfortunates\u201d not as a problem, but rather as the very face of God? Our worst nightmare.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my teaching colleagues and mentors used to love to tell the story of what happened one day after he and a colleague teamed up for a particularly impassioned lecture in the interdisciplinary course they were team-teaching. I no longer remember what he said the text or topic of the class was, but after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":12011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,14,20,21,30,40,45,48,57,59,61,73,94,101],"tags":[145,169,242,289,311,973,383,616,463,482],"class_list":["post-23321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belief","category-bible","category-books","category-change","category-christianity","category-ethics","category-god","category-history","category-human-nature","category-jesus","category-justice","category-literature","category-philosophy","category-teaching","category-truth","tag-bible","tag-christianity","tag-god","tag-jesus","tag-justice","tag-nick-hornby","tag-philosophy","tag-sermon-on-the-mount","tag-teaching","tag-truth"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2018\/04\/liberal-and-conservative-300x213.jpg\")
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