The wellspring of law and morality
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi
“The long arm of the law” is no longer such a proverbial phrase today. Ask those British and German men whose idea if a holiday in a tropical paradise is paying for sex with young girls and boys in exotic Thailand or Cambodia. They face prosecution at home for a crime committed thousand of miles away and the prospect of spending a good part of their lives in prison. “f*?%* their daughters and pay them in dollars”, says one character in that silly DiCaprio movie The Beach. This has to be the worst form of humiliation and contempt for the “other”. It is no wonder that these westerners who act out their sexual fantasies on innocent young children of the third world are despised even by their own society, that the only other instance where such prosecutorial resolve is applied is to those who commit crimes against humanity. In one respect, perhaps paedophilia when linked to racist contempt is almost as much a crime against humanity.
In today’s highly secularized world as God is banished from the public domain and before long, expunged from modern man’s consciousness, religion, along with morality has come to a stage where it is hopelessly old fashioned, deserving only of scorn and ridicule. Especially so in the case of Islam such that no one who prides him or herself in having acquired the sophistication of modernity wants to have anything to do with it, unless one wants to be feted as the “moderate” and “progressive” sub-species of the genus. This has become evidently clear in recent orchestrated campaigns to roll back religion as the basis of legislation on aspects that concern morality and decency. Why, we have finally completed the trajectory of man’s positivist evolution – no longer do we need the moral crutches that religion used to afford previous generations. Morality, as it relates to sexuality and fulfillment of man’s sexual needs, is an entirely private matter that the state must not interfere.
I suppose from the point of view of lay persons like us, our modern conception of what constitutes a punishable offence is premised on the existence of a victim consequent to an act (or potential victim as in under the influence). We can therefore understand why there is no disagreement that murder, robbery and fraud are criminal offences deserving severe punishments. To secular sensibilities however, adulterous sexual relations is perfectly alright because it is pleasurable and does no harm to anybody. In fact it is often celebrated in fiction as the ultimate expression of genuine love that has conquered all obstacles thrown its way, which quite often is depicted as sclerotic traditions and restrictive conventions linked to religion that society is still unable to shake off. Modern individualism and often a particular conception of liberty always try to reassure us that we should feel at ease with our bodies and desires, and free ourselves from the shackles of tradition, such that “recreational sex” has come into the vocabulary of today’s lifestyle. It is fun and creates no victims, the law should stay out of it (it is not always “victimless” though, as children suffer when marriages break up and it eats into our social welfare budget, not to mention crimes of passion from well known cases that have whet our media appetites).
If adulterous sex is victimless fun, it is blindingly obvious that sex tourists with a penchant for young boys and girls are a scourge. They exploit the most vulnerable of all sexual preys – poorly educated third world children for whom some nice cloths, sweets and a bit of money are a welcome respite from the only thing they know – poverty. Everyone agrees that paedophile sex tourists deserve the shame and long prison sentences upon conviction. In fact, we can proudly claim that this is a triumph of secular ethics. So who needs religion if we can have morality without its intrusiveness? Isn’t it time that we retire this moral crutch now that history has ended?
But between the extremes of harmless adulterous liaisons by consenting adults and paedophile sex-tourism is a veritable moral slippery slope. This is where modern man’s overweening moral self-sufficiency shows some cracks, exposing an underlying confusion. Beneath this façade of self-sufficient secular ethics, we seem unsure whether we should cut ourselves completely off our religious moorings. Take for example the case of director Roman Polanski who had to jump bail and exile himself in Paris after a conviction for statutory rape for having sex with an underaged girl.
Many people are sympathetic to Polanski because he’s such a brilliant director who gave us Rosemary’s baby, Chinatown and the Pianist. As a jewish boy growing up in the Krakow ghetto, his pregnant mother was taken away by the Nazis to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. As if that was not enough share of tragedy, his actress wife and friends were brutally murdered by the Manson gang. What his sympathizers are not saying though is what’s the big deal about having sex with an underaged girl in today’s world when many teenaged girls are already sexually active from the age of 13 – 14. They’re biologically mature, and most of them know exactly what they’re doing and doing it the safe way. Was it not uncommon that 1 or 2 generations ago girls were married at 15 or 16? Is it not absurdly hypocritical that on the one hand we encourage teenage girls to be comfortable with their bodies and sexual urges, and safe-sex is all they need, but on the other people like Mr. Polanski face rape charges for partaking mutual pleasure with them?
More often than not, in cases like Mr. Polanski’s, the “victims” are sexually experienced and mature that to secular logic such a law seems absurdly unjust. This penal code statute that having sexual relations with a girl below 18 is rape and therefore carries a heavy punishment is obviously a baggage that we have carried over from the age of faith, when religion had coloured much of our conception of morality, of what is right and what is wrong.
Yes, okay, we do encourage teenage girls to be comfortable with sex, but surely there is something exploitative about older man having sexual relations with teenage girls. How can she not be a “victim”, never mind how experienced she is – says our irrational inner voice defying our liberal logic. But increasingly we read in the papers of female school teachers going to prison for having sex with their teenage (boys) students. Here the slope becomes even more slippery. If our conception of a crime is that an act must have a victim, there is none in this sort of relationship (corrupting the morals of youth is such an ambiguous charge). Are we being just to these women teachers in search of some solace or adventure? Is this a baggage from the age of faith that we should all jettison today?
That these statutes criminalizing sexual relations between older men and teenage girls or the other way around in the modern era of safe sex and early sexuality still exist in our law looks betrays our moral confusion and hypocrisy. At another level, it is perhaps testimony that beneath that surface of modernity and our scorn towards religion, religious ethics still informs much of our law-making today. Only that we refuse to acknowledge that debt. Why this refusal to break free from the influence of religion? No matter how illogical these statutes are to the secular mind and how unjust they may seem to Mr. Polanski and the school teacher who seduced her students, perhaps deep down we acknowledge that without them human civilization as we know it cannot be sustained for very long.
If secular ethics is confused in this grey moral zone and needs to fall back on sensibilities carried over from the age of faith, it also owes a debt to religion in the more clear-cut matters of the penal code. In today’s language, murder and robbery are major crimes because of what the victims suffer, and “sin” has nothing to do with it. But the way the public reacted to the outcome of the OJ Simpson trial suggested that it is more than just about justice for the victims. Either we have not sufficiently evolved such that we still carry that primitive religious idea of “sin” or such an idea of moral right and wrong is a quintessential part of our constitution, or “human nature”.
It is not only in the area of law-making that provides citizens personal security, recourse to justice and maintain public order that we owe a great debt to religion. Extending the discussion on the conception of ethics and justice, let us look at the modern discourse on human rights which is premised on the idea of the inviolability of the dignity of man. Secular humanism might claim that it had thought out such a concept de novo, but it would be easier to admit that a good deal of it is borrowed or appropriated from religion. The “dignity of man” is a difficult concept to chew if we exclude God from the discussion. As secular humanism is the fruit european enlightenment, the religion here in question is of course Christianity, but it can be safely said that all authentic spiritual traditions share a common clear conception of what constitutes moral rights and wrongs, and enjoin the same praise-worthy values of kindness, compassion, generosity and forgiveness. The west’s (and the rest of the world that has modernized ourselves in its image) conception of virtue is a Christian ghost. Modern man in the manner of Heidegger may choose to exclude Christian (or religious) paradigms but internalize them implicitly to provide meaning and direction for our existence. But Jurgen Habermas, a later proponent of the Frankfurt School is more honest in recognizing modernity’s debt to religion. He attributes to christianity as the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, and we continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post modern chatter.
What we mean to say in all this is that despite our modernity and sense of moral self sufficiency, religion in its most generic sense is never far beneath the surface. True, religion as played out in history by men has its dark and shameful episodes, and it may be convenient to shift blame for all that is wrong with humanity onto it, but it remains the inspiration for much of our laws and civic conventions. It is the weak glue that is just barely holding modern civilization together. And beyond law and ethics, religion informs much of what we take for granted in our civilized existence – architecture, philosophy and learning, the university system, the welfare system etc.
In our relentless march to secularity, many of us may not want to recognize that debt we owe to religion but a significant section of humanity actually still does, however strange and unfashionable that may be. The most recalcitrant are, not surprisingly, the muslims whose religion spells out the moral issues, for good or bad, in more clear terms i.e. the shariah. Being the youngest of the Abrahamic monotheisms, it still has its sources fairly intact. Is it too much to ask that the muslims’ desire to recognize this debt and live their lives according to it be respected?
Dr. Mazeni Alwi