Photo by Daniel Guo
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Red poppies adorn the rows of white headstones, standing in rank and file across Arlington National Cemetery. Unlike the modern steel skyscrapers towering over the ground, the humble stones saluting the departed demand reverence for those who died in service of their country. In a different tone from the previous writers, I invite you to join me in somber reflection. For “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone.”
What wisdom can we draw from this solemn sight? The wisdom of Solzhenitsyn, which reminds us that the struggle of good against evil resides not in historical battlefields, but in the hidden depths of our hearts. For the screaming horrors of the past did not arrive in isolation, but arose from the numbing ignorance of our iniquity. To honor their sacrifice, let us then examine ourselves, and see what we can do to rectify our personal shortcomings, so that we may avoid the mistakes of the past. Only then can flowers of righteousness bloom once more in this Garden of Graves.
“There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one…Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”— Leo Tolstoy, Three Methods Of Reform
A strange idea has taken hold of our modern minds. Even though a sizable proportion of people believe that morality is subjective, they hold to some idea that, as a modern and scientific society, we have “made moral progress.”
This is true to an extent; as a society we shun the ownership of humans as property, and believe that each human has certain rights afforded to them. But to think that moral progress means that we are morally superior to our ancestors is a grave mistake—unearned moral valor, if you will.
We may not sacrifice infants on iron hot altars in the vain superstition that it will bring rain, but we sacrifice babies in abortions for a fleeting notion of financial security. Corruption and abuse of power remain all the same both in antiquity and in our present time. Just as science stands upon the shoulders of giants, so do our moral convictions stand upon the shoulders of abolitionists. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment with lethal shocks demonstrates how quickly we can stumble into making morally horrifying decisions.
When our own life is at stake, we would be surprised at the things we could do to survive. How else then, could “the world’s most civilized and advanced people (The people of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant) [have] embraced that slime-ball Hitler and participated in the Holocaust?”1
What a question indeed! While Adolf Hitler was certainly responsible for these horrors as the head of the Nazi party, I believe it was the moral cowardice of the German people that enabled him to get away with it. It was the average young man, drafted into the military, who carried out the extermination of the “undesirables,” rather than evil ogres and overlords.
To think that it is solely the responsibility of charismatic fascist and communist leaders for these atrocities would be naive. Holocaust survivor Freddie Katz states that “Only a tiny proportion of this century’s mass killings are attributable to the actions of those people we call criminals or crazy people... The vast majority of killings were actually carried out by plain folk in the population—ordinary people, like you and me.”
The stark reality a moral subjectivist admits is that in doing good, we are largely motivated by our self-interest. We don’t rob banks largely because we’re not skilled enough to evade jail time. Some of us virtue signal, doing a good deed for the ulterior motive of appearing good, often doing great evil in the process. Take pedophile hunters on social media: many do it for clout or emotional satisfaction, and in the process, make it easier for the pedophile to get away by jeopardizing ongoing police investigation.
It is a good instinct to want to be a hero and to see justice done. But to equate having that desire with “being a good person” is stolen moral valor.
Jesus calls out this facetiousness in the moral teachers for the lay people of his time: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.”2 (Matthew 23:25-26)
Thus, we must put to rest any idea that we are “a good enough person.”
“To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”— Confucius
How might we then “clean our inner parts” so that our moral convictions may not be vain grandstanding?
For some, they must first drop the belief that no moral facts exist. Why? First, there can be no “moral progress” if there is no objective standard we can progress to. Second, if moral facts and duties do not exist, murder and rape are not wrong in any meaningful way that is binding to anyone else but an individual and the people they have power over. Thus, to be intellectually consistent, we have to believe that moral facts exist.
The next step is to be honest with ourselves. If we do not seriously ponder the great evil we are capable of, we cannot aim to prevent gratuitous evil. This is not to be cynical, but to draw attention to the fact that “our ability to act well when the time comes depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects of attention.”3 (Iris Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good)
Why? The strength and courage to stand up for what is good comes from a deep conviction cultivated by proper attention. When the right moral choice comes at a significant personal cost, the person that has not deeply considered their convictions, if any, will not make the right choice. Had more Germans paid attention to their values, they might have stood up to Hitler before it was too late.
In other words, to become better people, we need to be careful about what we give our attention to. For Jesus taught that “Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!”4 (Matthew 6:22-23)
So, what might fixing our attention look like? The children’s hymn “Be Careful Little Eyes” gives a decent idea through its five verses which state:
There’s a Father up above looking down in love.
The low hanging fruit, the most critical but hardest to deal with, is paying attention to what we watch—to what seeds we are planting in our garden, if you will. “The eye is the window to the soul” encapsulates the point. When we scroll social media and use our phones, what are we looking at, and for what reason?
Are we scrolling endlessly on TikTok and Instagram, mindlessly laughing at memes and funny animal videos? Or are we seeking answers to questions we have, treating the internet like a library of good and bad ideas? These are good starting points for investigating our attention habits.
What we entertain ourselves with also influences us heavily. How do the movies we watch, the games we play, and the books we (don’t) read depict aspects of life? Are we engaging with them for joy, or to escape reality in harmful ways?
Additionally, music is a powerful influence on emotion and thought. If it can alter our walking pace, how much more our worldview? While I don’t claim it’s wrong to listen to popular artists, I encourage reflection: are we glorifying brokenness, or being drawn into beauty and truth?
“For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.”5 (Galatians 6:8, ESV)
“A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.”— Charles H. Spurgeon
As we tend our garden of character amidst the faded cemeteries of history, let us be contrite in our self-reflection. As the diligent gardener attends to the plants in his garden, let us uproot the thistles which occupy our attention and prune the thorns which blind our eyes to what is good, so that we may stand vigilant against the slow corruption of evil.
After all, the fight against evil does not begin in distant battlefields or grand declarations of war, but within our hearts and our daily routines.
Then perhaps, when the sun breaks through the somber clouds of the Garden of Graves, we shall find vibrant red poppies of remembrance saluting the departed.
