Rules written in stone

 Christopher Hitchens’s most famous essay might be “The New Commandments.” It’s a review of the Ten Commandments, along with some suggestions for improvements.

If you’re a populist lawmaker in Texas, the kind that panders to the part of the electorate that is loud and only vaguely familiar with education, you believe that the Ten Commandments were written in stone by the finger of God at a precise moment in history and reflect eternal truths. You are not aware that there are four sets of these commandments in scripture (Exodus chapters 20 and 34 and Deuteronomy 5 and 27). And you are scandalized by the consensus among historians that the texts reflect the customs of an ancient, agricultural culture, as opposed to the pinnacle of divine wisdom.

Hitchens’s summary:

 

What emerges from the first review is this: The Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been man-made and improvised under pressure. They are addressed to a nomadic tribe whose main economy is primitive agriculture and whose wealth is sometimes counted in people as well as animals. They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate.

 

Hitchens’s essay came to mind when I was reading Aldo Leopold’s writings about at another idea — one that once seemed necessary, but which today seems like it might lead to the extermination of human beings. That’s the idea of private property — in the sense that any use is OK as long as the user (or abuser) is the owner.

Here's Leopold: 

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever “written.” Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a “seminar.” I say tentative because evolution never stops.

 

In our age, we get trivial software updates twice a week whether we want them or not. The updates are needed to keep our software running. When it comes to the moral codes we choose to run our lives by, some of us can’t grasp that ideas that are thousands of years old need to be updated.

• Sources: Christopher Hitchens, Arguably; New York: Twelve, 2021, pp. 414-22. Aldo Leopold, “A Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, p. 263.