John Henry Deutschendorf (aka John Denver) had his life epiphany when he was twenty seven years old, traveling to his new home in Aspen, Colorado. It hit him like a bomb. Before that moment, he had not known exactly who he was, what his purpose was in life, what his life meant in relationship to other people, how to express his identity and how to express his feelings. He had to think about what the wonder of that moment meant to him for several years, before he was able to fully express it fully. He finally put it all together with a lovely golden voice, using a combination of words, melody and rhythm that took him nine months to write. That song, “Rocky Mountain High”, was released October 30, 1972. It immediately entranced millions of people who heard it, and vicariously were temporarily mesmerized by the “high” that one gets when we suddenly realize exactly who we are, what our relationship is to all others, and what our purpose is in life. Here are some excerpts:
He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year
Coming home to a place he’d never been before
Left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again
Might say he found a key to every door…
He climbed cathedral mountains
Saw silver clouds below
Saw everything as far as you can see
And they say that he got crazy once
And he tried to reach the sun
And he lost a friend but kept his memory…
Now he walks in quiet solitude
The forests and the streams
Seeing grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside
Himself to try and understand
The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake…
The Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky
You talk to God, listen to the casual reply
Rocky Mountain high
Rocky Mountain high…
Delightful and fascinating. His life was never the same again.
My most important epiphany occurred a great deal later in life. I have, unfortunately, always been slow at everything. When I was five, and learning how to swim, my muscular swimming coach always called me “the old cow’s tail”, because I was always last. I also lost every foot race run in school, and that includes all grades. I didn’t experience what boys and girls do together until my mid-twenties, and did not get married until age 37. It took me twenty eight years to complete my education, when all was said and done. Slow, slow, slow.
There was also something else that I could not resolve, for the longest time of my life. Both my father and second brother were ministers in the Methodist church, and religious belief was a regular topic both in church and in family life. I didn’t get it. The morals the church preached made sense to me, but the rest did not. I could not get the Trinitarian multi-headed God we worshiped, could not exactly figure out what a Holy Ghost was, could not understand how any human could be perfect, did not fathom how any person could be born without a male to female union, could not perceive how any person could be totally dead then come back to life, didn’t quite get how angels, demons, Gods, semi-Gods, and saints all fit into the interaction all of us had with other humans, could not make sense out of the words we sang in hymns, and often found myself just standing there silent, wondering how any of this made any sense.
My religious doubts began early and stayed for the first seventy years of my life. I once wrote an essay in English class in college, in which I questioned the need for any religion, other than as giving hope to those who suffered an oppressed station in life. It was not exactly Karl Marxian: “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” but it was not far away. It got trashed by my professor, who wrote in bold letters along the side of that essay, “essentially false.” Yet in spite of my doubts, I continued to be an avid church goer throughout those seventy years. It was a built in habit pattern formed and cemented early in life. That habit pattern did not stop me, however, from being the iconoclast in Sunday school. I regularly challenged my fellow believers as to why they thought anyone could come back to life after death, and how exactly their God was manipulating world events in their favor.
In the meantime, there was life to be lived. There were children who needed sustenance, guidance and support, there were twelve hour working days, there were court trials to survive, there were divorces, there was a one year period in which my average amount of sleep per day for the entire year was three hours, there was a jail sentence for a DUI, there were political attacks to defend in our hospital system, and there was a not-for-profit company to get started, grants to be obtained. There was never a great deal of time for contemplation. It was not until after most people have retired that there was time to answer those questions which had lingered under the surface for all those years. When that opportunity finally presented itself, I spent 3 years in Bible study, read through the Bible three times, read through the Koran three times, became the intense questioner in our Bible classes, read some sixty books on morality, philosophy, physics and religions, and sought to answer these religious questions which had never been answered for me.
It happened at a completely unexpected moment. I had, as part of my extensive reading, found multiple references to the upheaval that Charles Darwin had brought about in religious philosophy by his publication of “The Origin of the Species.” It seemed time to learn more about this man and his ideas. I was fortunate enough to find those wonderful biographies of Darwin by Janet Browne, “Voyaging,” and “The Power of Place.” The story unfolded about how a young man who was a failure at following the physician footsteps of his father got placed on a voyage around the world as a companion to the captain, because Charles Darwin was a terrible misfit everyplace else. He had gone on safaris to the Scottish highlands and wondered at these strange geologic formations in those highlands, but came to no conclusions about them. His father placed him in medical school, but he did not tend to his studies there. He just didn’t succeed at anything. His father, in desperation, sent him away, and something strange happened. He found his calling in life.
Charles Darwin did not begin that trip well. He spent most of the first two months throwing up over the side of the ship. When he finally recovered enough to get his sea legs, he started noticing things. This young naturalist got his eyes opened at the great variety of life our world contained, the strange places these creatures lived, and found himself challenged to understand how they got to be who they were. By the time the Beagle finally arrived back in England, he was already famous, because he had sent back so many specimens of plants and animals that no one else had ever seen in cultivated England. Darwin still was not sure why all these creatures were so varied, some becoming so different from their close neighbors that they could no longer interbreed, and therefore became separate species. It was not until he spent an extensive time studying barnacles, sent to him from all over the world in response to his persistent requests, that it became clear to him these species were forming simply because each one was slightly different than the other. Those whose differentiation was the most adaptable to the environment from which they came were those who had the greater chance of survival, and producing progeny. Since each individual is slightly different, because of a myriad of different gene combinations and genetic mutations, and since environments were always changing, species differentiation was an entirely natural phenomenon. It was then that he had his major life epiphany.
Darwin knew why species differentiated, but no one else in the world knew, he thought. He wanted to make sure he stated it right when he published these findings and this concept, so he procrastinated endlessly. He also knew the uproar this concept would create amongst the religious members of his society. He also (perhaps wisely) did not want to offend his wife, who was a devout Christian. Then he got a letter from a friend, William Henry Wallace, who was doing field study in the Dutch East Indies. Wallace asked Darwin to send a short paper he had written for review and eventual publication. That short essay spelled out in clear terms the very same concept that Darwin thought he alone had conceived: all of the species originate in a very natural manner, without the hand of any Supreme Being in any way. Darwin was devastated. He had been royally scooped. After a fairly long period of recrimination on his part, he did send this essay to his friends for review and then publication. He felt that all he could do at this point was to accumulate all his studies together in the most complete and logical form he could do, so that no one could deny this was not the case: the species differentiate naturally, without the hand of a God. So he did that. The result was a book, called ”The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.”
Talk about being slow. I still did not get it, but felt that there was only one thing to do at this point, and that was to read the original work that began all this turmoil of thought. As I turned the last page of The Origin of the Species, I remember clearly all the details, the same as where I was when JFK was shot, and the same as the details around me when the planes crashed into the world trade center towers. My major life epiphany occurred when I was sitting in the back reading corner of the sofa in our living room in the middle of winter, with all other lights off and early darkness outside, when I closed the last page. It suddenly hit like an explosion in my mind: he is right. There is no personal God in our world. There is some force that started our creation as we know it, and there are residual forces which keep it going since that initial vast explosion, but there has been no interference by any deity at any time in any way in what has happened to inanimate and then animate life since that time. Personal Gods do not exist. All of our religions and their immense panoply of super deities and sub-deities in various layers, and devils, and kingdoms not on this earth, and promises of life after death, are all mythology. I was stunned. Life would never be the same for me. We do not live in a world protected by a loving God. We live in a world where we are all fighting for survival, and those who survive the longest are those who can adapt and cooperate with each other the most. This “each other” includes all other life, because we are all tied together as if one giant organism, all parts of which are dependent upon all the other parts for survival. We are not only all different. We all need each other.
All of this is a rather long slide to get to the major point of this discussion. The very definition of ethics must contain one very clear realization: we are all interdependent. Ethics must include deep respect for all life, in all the ramifications of that statement. That leaves us with a great deal wanting when we look at all these other values systems with which we are hit in the face, day after day, by those who claim themselves to be experts in judgment as to right and wrong. We make some awful decisions as to going to war, polluting, corrupting and destroying, when profound respect for all other life is not one of the foremost parts of our value system.
This is moral, that is moral. This is ethical, that is not ethical. Pundits, priests, ministers, editors, philosophers, lawyers, congressmen, encyclopedia authors, editors all remain deeply confused about the difference between morals and ethics, and often throw the two phrases in together whenever they are announcing their own personal preferences, as if they knew what they were saying and knew what the terms mean. In brief, these two terms are by no means synonymous, and do not belong together, joined at the hip. They have very different meanings. Ethics must at least contain one thing, pure and simple: deep respect for all life, in all the various manifestations of what that means. Morals are everything less than that noble concept. Morals refer to the individual preferences of each group as to what works best for them.
This meaning of ethics as applied to the survival of all life is vast. It means that there should be no sacrifice of any life unless that sacrifice is absolutely necessary for the survival of other life. It means that although we developed in a much different past hunting environment, all humans in the present world should be vegetarians, as much as possible. It means there should be no sport fishing or hunting, ever. It means that no life should be hunted unless there is no other recourse to preserve other life. It means we should not be super clean, always trying to kill all bacteria everywhere. We need bacteria to survive. We need bees to preserve our food chain. We need fungi to survive in symbiosis with plants so we can survive. We need insects to survive as part of the chain of life, which supports all of us.
There is a rather important corollary to having deep respect for all other life. We need to do with less. We do not need the latest and greatest of whatever products the business world has to offer. We do not need the fanciest home or the fanciest car, the toughest truck, or the most masculine motorcycle. All we need is a modicum of food, shelter and clothing. Anything more is a waste of our precious natural resources, which are needed for the survival of all life. Everything extra we have should be spent on nurturing our young, emphasizing education and learning. Everything extra we have should be devoted to taking care of our own planet, and the life that is upon it, before we try to escape into space. All other species that exist on this earth, as best we can determine, have just as much right to life as we do. If that right is not totally respected by us as we lead our own lives, then we will have caused millions of unnecessary deaths in other species, as well as finding ourselves stranded, without sustenance.
We must understand that ethics contains this complete respect for all existing life, so that we can all survive together. Anything less than this this standard is a self-directed morals system. Anything less than a deep and abiding respect for all other life is unethical.