Nobody talks about conscience anymore. Back when I was Catholic when I was a kid at St Simon of Cyrene elementary school there was the sacrament of Penance, known as Confession, which entailed entering a solemn booth and confiding — confessing — sins to the priest, who fined the sinner with a penance, like having to say a rosary before you left the church, or maybe just five Our Fathers, and who gave a blessing and a prayer of absolution of the sins, and you were free to go play.
We were encouraged to come to Confession prepared to recite specific sins and how many times since the last Confession and we were taught to take some time in a pew in advance to getting into the Confession line to the booth along the wall of the side aisle of the church, and do an examination of conscience. We were expected to spend time of introspection and self-criticism and challenge ourselves to ethical standards.
The handiest checklist was the Ten Commandments. No false gods. No idols (including crucifixes, yuk yuk). Used God’s name in vain at least ten times. Honored my mom and dad, such as they deserved. I had a Sunday morning paper route but that wasn’t considered not keeping the Sabbath holy. Murder? What? And nobody fully explained adultery, so all we could guess for a while it was some kind of vague naughty adult behavior, but by puberty we learned it had to do with what what the Bible described as to “go lie with” somebody who wasn’t married to you or might be married to somebody else. If I was doing that I wouldn’t go telling Father Tainer at St Simon’s, I’d take a bus downtown to St Olaf’s or St Stephen’s where nobody knew me. Peer pressure or no, I wasn’t into stealing. And I didn’t exactly lie, except maybe to my parents when I needed to keep my privacy. And how exactly do you define covet — where do you draw the line between sincerely admiring and obsessively wanting in a devious and sinful way? This was where looking up skirts and down blouses fell, sins of impure thoughts.
The examination of conscience invited somebody to probe deeply into one’s soul and question one’s own integrity. In the Disney telling of the story of Pinocchio the puppet is brought to life as the grant of a fervent wish of a lonely, aging wood craftsman. The puppet’s tragic flaw is that he tells lies, and part of the spell that gives him animation always causes his nose to grow. To help Pinocchio learn to tell the truth the fairy angel who granted the old craftsman’s wish to have a companion provided Pinocchio with his own companion in the form of Jiminy Cricket as his conscience, a challenge to Pinocchio’s default instinct to tell lies. To deny personal responsibility.
Webster’s defines conscience as internal self-knowledge of right and wrong. Cambridge Dictionary calls it an inner moral sense that helps tell the difference between right and wrong. Oxford American calls it an inner feeling or voice acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior. Robert Wright, evolutionary psychologist and author of The Moral Animal, defines conscience as human evolutionary adaptation to securing social survival rather than objective higher moral truth. He thinks it is subject to self-delusion as to deceive ourselves about our own selfish motives in a guise of self-righteousness.
Sort of takes the starch out of the value of an examination of conscience. Apparently the conscience is highly malleable. Unreliable. Subject to rationalization. The rule of rules of last resort, the Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you — sounds a little woky in this day and age. And as rules go, this one is unenforceable. If people don’t believe in conscience anymore, and don’t talk about it, they won’t act on it, they’ll forget about it (fogettaboudit) and it will go away. With Artificial Intelligence nobody will need to remember. Those who do will be regarded as weird. Or dangerous.
Meantime this transition period seems morally unbearable. America used to be the conscience of the world. Founded in the Age of Enlightenment — the era of meaningful words — American thinkers produced documentation of aspirations to inspire the world. The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution with its Bill of Rights. Over time — mark it 250 years — the country solved its own mistakes in its collective effort to live up to its own ideals, and in so doing established a moral example of right and wrong. Human rights, democracy and liberty we preached, and in some cases fought and died for, and some died without a chance to fight, or sometimes a chance to flee for. And to back up its words, America spread generosity from its prosperity in funding world charities. Its good works building civilization around the world, from the Marshall Plan to the Peace Corps, Radio Free Europe to the USAID, from contributions to the nascent visions in the United Nations, UNESCO and countless global affiliations, established gold standards of international diplomacy and free trade. America was trusted to do the right thing.
No mo. Or no mas, if you will. The freely and constitutionally elected President of the United States, arguably the most powerful man in the world — certainly in his own eyes, the fuhrer — and Lyin’ King, leads this country with unconscionably bad acts beyond fair limits that shock the mind, as Merriam Webster might say. And he still gets propaganda support. By decree he slaps tariffs on trade and forces the wholesale prices of goods up like an extra sales tax on consumers, and claims the price of tariffs is paid by the country of export, and says the tariff money goes to pay off the national debt while making income tax obsolete. Under the tax cuts from his Big Beautiful Bill the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. He has no sense of right and wrong. He talks up being pals with fiendish dictators. He trashes our allies. He rips funding from the World Health Organization and programs fighting disease and hunger in sub-Sahara Africa. In America he defaces public monuments at will and awards no-bid contracts to construct personal projects dedicated to himself. He has summoned the Department of Homeland Security to search every city and county in the USA to seize for deportation every suspicious looking person of color. Immigration detainees suffer inhumane conditions incarcerated. Two innocent people were killed in Minneapolis by zealot Immigration shock troops doing roundups.
He started a war he cannot win short of committing war crimes. He embezzles cybercurrency. He is a convicted felon for fraudulent financial schemes. He is a self-described sexual predator. He has no conscience and he’s proud of it.
He’s the prototype of all the corrupt lawbreakers who admit no wrongdoing and will go to every length to evade responsibility for unconscionable behavior. Think about it. The President of the United States sets the bar for acting without conscience. By his powerful example, why should any ordinary person consider right from wrong? He issued over 2000 pardons to convicted insurrectionists from the January 6 invasion of the nation’s Capitol. Without conscience there is no justice. He sets the standard for getting away with cheating the law. In his mind the law is whatever he says is law, and following his regal example the attitude is spreading among the hoi polloi that even when caught with bloody red hands they can get off with a payoff and denial of wrong doing so long as they support the President. He is the Lyin’ King and deserves to be 86-ed in every way good conscience allows.
As Disney spun the fable, good things can happen from wishing upon a star. The aging lonely woodcarver got his wish for companionship in the animation of the puppet Pinocchio. Pinocchio made a wish to be a real boy, and it was granted by the star fairy (sanctioned of course by God, who has the ultimate word on granting life, I guess) because of Pinocchio’s discovery of ethics and a choice between right and wrong, and his heroic awareness to choose truth. That’s the lesson of what it takes to be real.
BK
Buffalo Kelly 