Truthiness and Vicious Moral Imagination

My mother, bless her heart, was a fanatic about germs. She kept her eye on our hands and made sure they were clean if they went anywhere near our mouths. At least that is what I remember.

I think I know the source of her obsession. My diaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Just after I was born in Minneapolis, we flew to Puerto Rico, and spent several of my early years there. One day, the story goes, my mother opened my diaper and found a squirming live creature other than me in her hands, a round worm. Who would not be freaked out by that discovery? I apparently had ingested a worm egg in my traipsing about the neighborhood.

Another source for her, and subsequently the family's, germaphobia was probably living in countries where clearly ill people spat on the sidewalk, human and animal waste lingered on sidewalks, and where TB was epidemic.

The result was a childhood spent going hungry unless hands were washed and having a general sense of uncleanliness unless recent washing occurred.

The link between keeping things unwashed things out of one's mouth and healthiness was assumed. But it was truthy. It felt right, but was built on incorrect assumptions.

It turns out that children put things in their mouths in order to expand the repertoire of the immune system. Kids who spend too much time being "clean" are susceptible to asthma and allergies. (Of course you don't want your child to be consuming lead, which used to permeate household carpeting when lead was used in gasoline, and which still lingers in old household paint.)

Here is another instance of shocking knowledge leading to longstanding habit for which evidence is variable. For many years I used to make sure that when I went to sleep, my hair covered my ear. I did this unconsciously into my twenties. One day I thought about why I was doing that. Then I remembered. When I was 7 we lived in Guadalajara, Mexico. Once, when my parents were out of town, I stayed with a couple of friends who were sisters. As we got into bed, they told me to make sure to cover my ear with my hair so that flies would not lay eggs in my ear. I was a faithful practitioner until I uncovered the source of the ritual. Of course, there are some times and places when you might want to practice the ritual, such as when you are sleeping out in a tropical buzzing jungle. But Minnesota, my home base growing up, did not qualify. It took a few weeks, but I got over my own ritual obsession.

So the moral of the story is, pay attention to your assumptions. Check out the causality you take for granted. Instead of holding blanket beliefs about anything, look for disconfirming evidence so your views become more nuanced.

Our moral lives are larded with truthy attitudes and practices that fit like a favorite pair of sweat pants. But they harm others by keeping them in a stereotyped box where we don't really "see" or hear them. Instead we impose our relentless "moral mandates," and attempt to coerce them into our viewpoint. This is vice. This is brokenness. This is vicious moral imagination.

Vicious imagination may have fueled the missionary leaders who attempted to take 33 children from Haiti to the US for adoption. They had a moral mandate to save children, apparently from the children's own families! It turns out that many parents just handed over their children to the missionaries. (There is a Haitian custom of indenturing children temporarily to others for the benefit of the children.)

Vicious imagination occurs when one has a moral goal and pursues it at the expense of others. It is a righteous morality. It is often based in ignorance of one sort or another--lack of knowledge "on the ground" or in the context. It can also be based on an incapacity (or recalcitrance) for moral relationship, the ability to be emotionally engaged with the other person in the here and now. Instead, vicious imagination is founded on feeling superior to others. It is focused on the future, reaching the moral goal, to the neglect of the present.

Ah, don't we all remember times when we have fallen into vicious imagination? When we were sure we were right and had to prove it?

Mature morality means being able to reflect on our behavior and note its deficiencies in order to make improvements in the future. So instead of sneaking spinach into my husband's spaghetti sauce (for his prostate!), I learned to make cruciferous vegetables taste good (mmm, roasted brussel sprouts!). I sprinkle his romaine lettuce salad with his favorite blue cheese. Although he would rather have a meal of pure spaghetti, he eats the vegetables on the side with greater pleasure because he knows I am respecting him and his preferences.

Still on the road to moral virtue...