The Ten Commandments vs. Morality

State-level ploys to expose students to a morality of negatives can only negate the idealistic pursuit of virtue.

Louisiana governor Jeff Landry recently signed into law a bill requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in the state. Oklahoma’s state superintendent of schools Ryan Walters quickly followed up with an order that the Commandments must be taught in all public schools in the state. The measures have been criticized, justifiably, as clear First Amendment violations.

But the legal critics have had little to criticize about the Commandments themselves. David French of the New York Times, for example, writes that he believes in God and “the divine inspiration of scripture,” but worries that simply posting the Commandments on the wall will not make students “better people.”

This implies that there is moral value in the Commandments, if properly taught. But on their face, most offer basically useless moral advice. When examined carefully, their advice is morally destructive. No one concerned with helping young people develop a morally virtuous character should foist them on any classroom, public or private.

Consider just the least controversial injunctions on the list of ten, the “thou shalt nots” against lying, stealing, and murder. Almost every moral code outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition offers similar advice. But does simply refraining from being a manipulator or criminal make one morally virtuous?

These purely negative rules — like nearly all the other commandments — at most tell us what not to do. But they offer no real, positive goals to pursue in this life, and hence no real guidance. Without positive goals to point the way forward, the most important decisions in life are left untethered to any guiding moral norms. Which friends and lovers should one choose?  What kind of career should one pursue? Is life about pursuing fame or money or power or something else? These questions are thought to be merely “practical,” and relate to morality on the occasion that they bump up against the “thou shalt nots.”

Yet these questions are the very ones that young people who are just starting to forge a path for themselves are desperate to answer. The Commandments offer no guidance. Merely avoiding vice is not the same as achieving virtue. Young people want and need positive guidance and ideals to aspire towards. It’s why they look for role models to emulate, heroes to admire. The “thou shalt not” focus sucks all the life out of idealism.

Importantly, without any reference to positive values, we can’t even understand the negatives. We need to understand what positive values we destroy when we lie, steal or kill to know if we aid or negate our values when we kill in self-defense or lie to murderers. What about cheating on a test? Is there some difference? The glib, out-of-context Commandments offer no way to answer.

I would argue that virtues of honesty, integrity, and justice properly understood are crucially required for the values that define a successful, happy life. Like every living creature, human beings require a definite path of action to flourish. The human path is forged by the thinking and creative work we use to trade our best with our fellow men. Real honesty, integrity and justice encourage valuing the truth and acting on it. So, lying to murderers helps human values; cheating on tests only undermines them.

But that’s a position that does take an argument, one that carefully explores (in much greater space than above) the connection between virtues and crucial values. Blind adherence to a checklist of random things “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” do will never motivate this exploration.

The Commandments never offer arguments or reasons; the “thou shalts” and the “thou shalt nots” are never punctuated with a “because.” They are, after all, commandments: allegedly some commander demands that we follow his dictates, or else. The “reason” to follow these dictates is not an understanding of the value to be achieved; it is only fear of punishment.

Moral virtue is not instilled by fear. A loving parent does not raise a healthy or virtuous child by threats of punishment. A child needs to learn to love the good, to think carefully about what they want out of life and to assume the responsibility of discovering and enacting the means to that end. Motivating children otherwise is bad enough; it’s even worse that advocates of the Commandments think grown adults can be motivated by means as crude as those we’d be hesitant to apply even to dogs.

The only Commandments with any ostensible positive content are those about honoring one’s parents and God. But these offer only the façade of a real concern for values.

A command to honor one’s parents regardless of their virtue, regardless of whether they are loving or abusive, is a license for abusive parenting. A child raised by parents whose whims, orders and punishments he cannot understand already has to work overtime to avoid the temptation of believing he lives in a fearful, irrational world. Among children raised like this, some become slavish pawns of authorities. Others become abusive manipulators themselves. Only the brightest and most courageous survive with their ambition for life fully intact.  

It is bad enough when a child’s parents give him cause to believe the world is ruled by the irrational. Now consider a child whose elders teach the explicit doctrine that he lives in a universe ruled by a jealous, vengeful all-powerful sky parent who issues a litany of negative commands without reasons — the very persona of the abusive parent but now on metaphysical steroids. He is said to be the lord of life and death and the master of one’s destiny, but one cannot know what purpose he has assigned to one’s life or why. To the degree one is fed this, it encourages fear, self-doubt, and guilt, not youthful idealism. Among those who take it the most seriously, the slavish pawns become cultists or suicide bombers; the abusive manipulators become demagogues and dictators.

If the Ten Commandments are to be posted on the walls of every Louisiana classroom, it’s better that they go unread and untaught. Oklahoma students would do better to play hooky on the days they’re to be taught.

Those who take the Commandments seriously will learn only of a morality of negation, of the mind and of joy in life. For the rest who don’t take them seriously — no doubt the majority — the Commandments will teach them to associate morality with a set of stale edicts that at best bear no relevance to the big questions of living. They will learn to be bored by, or even hate, morality.

No educator looking to inspire young students with moral ideals should ask his students to study the Ten Commandments as anything other than historical curiosities of primitive and brutal desert tribes. And educators should certainly resent the government’s cynical attempt to force such a primitive worldview on the minds of young children.