By Kerwin Holmes, Jr.

…when people are afraid of heights
    and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
    and the grasshopper drags itself along
    and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home
    and mourners go about the streets.
Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
    and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
    and the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
    and the spirit returns to God who gave it…
-an excerpt from Ecclesiastes chapter 12

This is now the second post that I have written concerning a community that I am a part of, and concerning a tragedy that once again has in a jolt turned life, for many, from the theoretical to the intensely purposeful and immanent.

As you may know, the community of the University of Virginia and the broader community of Charlottesville, along with the extended communities affected, have many within them now dwelling upon the tragic loss of three students and hoping for the recovery of several wounded and those otherwise directly affected by the violent crime that occurred on Sunday evening. The loss is real, and even for those not directly tied at all to anyone involved, the sudden shift of the air and the collective shock of the community looms large. Please, I ask that everyone reading this takes some time to consider these communities, to consider the families of those affected, and to take the time to be grateful for what community you currently possess (however imperfectly) in your various circles.

I write now because there is a gap in our society that I have long observed, and that others have observed in kind, which has concerned me for several years now. Indeed, it has been a theme in several of my posts, though not always explicitly so. I write in the hopes that that something which I am concerned about will more adequately receive a critical eye. And that subject which I hope receives its due attention is the public phenomenon of apathy, or specifically the moral apathy that has so dominantly colored the ethical landscape of our society.

I will explain moral apathy by way of testimony, but first, I do feel that there is a need (without providing too much personal detail) for me to state some things of my own short experience upon this plane.
For starters, this is not the first college/university related incident of violence that I have lived through. While I was at Morehouse College, a student from Clark Atlanta University (not a reflection of either school) shot at fellow students following a disagreement over a pickup basketball game. This was early in the Spring Semester of 2013, if I recall correctly, the second semester of my time at Morehouse. Thankfully there were no fatalities, and a student who was wounded made a recovery.
When I went off to the University of Chicago for my master’s, there were violent crimes committed daily in surrounding Chicago neighborhoods. I worked in Woodlawn Chicago for my first year. I walked to work whenever I went, crossing from the opulent neighborhood of Hyde Park into the lower class and often neglected neighborhood of Woodlawn in order to do a small part to help the community while I was there. Sadly, in June 2017 a young man close to my age was tragically gunned down just a few blocks from where I worked. Xavier Joy, I would later find out, had even enrolled at Morehouse and entered the college in Fall 2012, the same semester that I did, though I do not believe we ever met. Somehow we both ended up working in the same area years later. Xavier had a similar heart for his community. Two young men, similar in some respects, and incidentally connected in a few. Yet one of us did not make it through to the end of that year.
I’ll end my experiences there, both for the purposes of not surrendering too much personal detail, and also to not distract from the purpose of this post.
But I write those things to intimate that I do not write from a position of novel moral clarity, nor from novel moral experience.
I write with true, collected urgency.

I realize also that there will be some who will use the common refrain and response to what I and many likeminded say: “Now is not the time.” While I anticipate such reactions, I also wish to both realize and point out what such things often are: smokescreens, moral smokescreens often used by moral upstarts so that their moral message can exist unabashedly and unhindered by rival voices. In the same breath that one says “Now is not the time,” indicating via a moral claim that one should not be presently making moral claims, such a person is all but guaranteed to supply their own moral claims and measures for the issue at hand.

As an historian, I also know that such people often– not always, but often– look at horrors or tragedies of the past and exclaim aloud in moral outrage how there was often no one who spoke out nor anyone who offered moral clarity in response to such events. They particularly are horrified that no one spoke against the hegemons whose moral claims the modern person now finds despicable. Such a past phenomenon seems “medieval” to them. Of course, if one points out the past realities of fear from those in social power who silenced their rivals with similar rhetorical sleights of “Now is not the time,” the irony is lost to them.
Nowadays, personal ethical mirrors are increasingly in short supply.

But what of moral apathy, that concern to which I attempt to turn our attention? (And I do so with the sense of “eventually,” for we all must arrive to this conversation on our own time– but arrive we must.) What danger does moral apathy present to ourselves individually and to our society at large? Why must we be on guard against it, even as such a position of defensiveness makes our way more troublesome, challenging, and vulnerable?

Not too long ago, I was engaged in discussions with various people on the subject matter of absolute truth, including absolute moral truth. Our society has lost a great deal of respect for the former, and as such has naturally eschewed any sort of realized need for the latter. This is very present in the universities of our day, and also visible within society at large. It was not long ago that, being engaged in discussions with several fellow students, there arose from many the claim that morality is ultimately a nebulous agreement that the persons of a particular society come to.

Their claim: “There is no absolute morality and no absolute truth,” they absolutely claimed, “but rather there is the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ that are decided collectively in society by rule of the majority.”

In such a worldview the transcendentals are as vapid a reality as a thought that is unimagined. Nothing moral is transcendent. No judgements are beyond ourselves. There is only the “now” and the “we.”
The court of Nuremberg stands in a hung jury once again.
The court proceedings over the fate of the captives of the La Amistad swing downward into simple discussions of jurisdiction and property management.
The audible cries of Armenians are silenced in state-wide Turkish policy, public Turkish opinion, and unmarked graves.

oh, how we have progressed.

My friends, this ought not be the case. We ought not continue to live, even beyond life’s tragedies or even in the midst of them, as apathetic moral agents avoiding the inevitable and undeniable reality of transcendent, immanent Truth. There surely is both good and there is evil in this world. We cannot avoid their existence. We cannot long deny the prevalence of Truth’s judgements within our own persons, let alone in the societies that we build. As one sober lyric states, “it’s right and wrong, goes on and on and on.”

We must cast off this nefarious shadow of enlightenment and modern self-importance that produce such moral apathy that we deny the reality of Transcendental Truth and the judgements that come from it.

We must cast off this farce of modern society’s faux-sophistication that is nothing but a regression into a morally atomized and communally destructive abyss. And we must destroy the ramparts, bulwarks, and fortresses of that dark foe that holds our society in its grip such that we, in the stubborn arrogance of the “modern man,” remain shielded from real conversations– from those meant to take place upon the grounds of our universities and in the corridors of our halls of worship– blindly accepting that moral reality begins with the “we” and the “now.”

We must go to war against moral apathy, yes, even that sophisticated apathy that denies the truth that we certainly are not the masters of our own fates and the captains of our own souls (a sentiment that has somehow become marred to unrecognition from its source meaning).

Indeed, we must stop even pretending to accomplish such a feat.

The truth is that everyone moralizes events. We are all equally vulnerable. We are all fated to end our lives on this plane. We are all interdependent and all contingent agents in this world. We each individually must come to our end, and the rest of the world will continue on without us. We all must shoulder the burden of finding the true purpose and meaning that exists in this world. We all desire the transcendental answers from the actual Truth that is above ourselves. This is not the privileged musings of a prince who has sat under a tree for a long time. Suffering is real and must be truly confronted. Pain is unavoidable. Our interdependence and yet personal actions are realities that will never cease to be. Love and pleasure are also sure things. Redemption and grace are as transcendent as the Truth that they rely upon. Death, our individual deaths, comes for us all. And yet, life, life the most precious gift of all, is now in our grasps.

We all must make judgements. We all must be judged. It is not a matter of whether, but of which. It is a matter of which moral argument wins the day and whether that argument is true. We are no different than our ancestors. We are our parents’ children.

Moral apathy is a great evil not merely as it is a vice and an inhibitor of the fully human experience we have been offered, but that it also is a false choice.

No one truthfully lives in moral apathy. Rather, moral apathy is the most tragic form of the various immoral errors that one can live by. Moral apathy is the cowardice of distraction from the inevitable struggle that we all endure.

We must take this time of life, this sudden jolt of our comforts and our lives, and yet, this sudden light beam that shines itself upon truths that have always been presented to us– even during the moments of surest bliss and comfort– to seek out the Truth, to learn and to discover what is good, and to know what is evil. To see how this life ought to be, and to realize in what ways that path is corrupted both by our own deeds and by other realities in our world, even the many that are now beyond our control. It is time to realize the common struggle that we are in.

It is time to destroy our moral apathy.

I present you with a resource, a conversation starter for all of those who brave this inevitability of life and wish to truly live in purpose and in reason. It is meant for those who desire to better their own paths and in doing so to provide a better inheritance for the generations after them. You will find it in the video below, and you will also find its invitation to transcend the sectarian, with my parting words below it.

Even if we do not agree, you now know where I stand.

But where do you stand? Is the ground underneath your feet secured in the Truth?
Or are you stuck in the mires of Nuremberg, are you chained in the stale courtroom of the jury box by arguments of when human lives are valued as human, are you beset by bliss as you are the fortunate benefactor of present happenstances while others beyond your moral scope are less so?
Are you distracted by the evil god and zeitgeist of moral apathy?

But note this: Once you admit (not realize, but admit) that the moral parameters of transcendent Truth are, you also realize that you are morally beholden to the One who has set them into place.

Be aware of that.