In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck sits pondering a choice. He has been told that the Bible commands him to respect the institution of slavery, and the penalty for violating scripture is eternity in hell. But his friend and companion, the escaped slave Jim, is in danger, and only Huck can save him.
“I was a trembling,” he tells us, “because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I'll go to hell.’”
A sound moral compass is a more valuable and rare thing than people suppose.
I’m thinking a lot about compasses lately, moral and otherwise.
When I was in 8th grade, my school bundled my class off to the mountains on the Georgia-Carolina border for wilderness school. Part of it included a course in orienteering, that is, using map and compass to not die; I was chosen, as an allegedly Smart Person, to guide a small group on a cross-country, over-hill and under-hill hike.
The experience was one of my life’s many signal failures, and therefore one of my best teachers.
I dutifully got the map and compass, and tried to guesstimate where we were, using imprecise landmarks like the bend in a stream. I’d later find out that I failed to use the ruler on the edge of the compass in conjunction with the scale-key on the map to accurately determine precisely where we were starting from: precisely one mile down the road from a bridge over a creek.
So from the wrong starting point on the excellent map, I calculated a course (which would have been correct, had the starting point been right), and off we went, not striking easily across a meadow towards a ridge to a trail, but into deep woods with a muddy bottom-land ending in a a steep uphill trek through brambles.
It was disastrous.
I’m sorry, Andrew, Brent, Marcie, Molly. I didn’t mean to land us in that swamp, or take us halfway up a mountain and back.
A bushwhack walk that should have taken two hours took five.
Lesson learned, and not forgotten after a lot of decades. Shame is a lousy way to live your life, but it can be a great teacher.
Many people I talk to mistake having a moral map with having a moral compass. One of the first lessons in orienteering is about how to orient the map so you don’t walk in the wrong direction, or, as I did, the generally right direction, which can be just as bad. To look at a map and glance at the sun now and then to get East-West orientation might work if you’re looking for a continent, but not if you’re looking for a fresh-water spring tucked among wooded hills and valleys and bogs.
Most of us who’ve given it any thought have moral maps that lay out options for our personal and communal lives. We know where we want to get to. Religion holds out heaven (“the destination”) and hell (“to be avoided”) as spots on the map, but these are of no real moral value. They might tease or abuse us into good behavior, but they aren’t a moral compass.
If my goal is “Heaven” (or any other perceived moral good) I will start walking in my best-guess direction, hoping by luck to strike useful markers that will guide me to my destination. Eventually in that wilderness, Satan comes to me and says he’ll get me to that blessed destination if I’ll just bow down and worship… which is to say, if I’ll give him my compass, he’ll get me where I want to go.
And he’s not lying. He will. That’s how the world works, and Jesus called Satan The Prince of this World, who could only be driven out by enduring his own death.
So a moral compass must never be confused with a map. A moral compass begins with a starting point that’s right in front of me. If I don’t know where and who I am, in this moment, without counterfactual fantasies about my destination in front of me, I’m not likely to know where I’m really headed.
Mark Twain can be said to be a prophet of the moral compass as I’m writing about it here, a compass rooted in empathy, in ideals held as a lodestar that guide individual motions of my feet. I love that quotation from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that began this essay. If Huck were to be guided by the religious and scriptural map, he would find himself in the deep ethical woods: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and respect,” the biblical book of Ephesians enjoins. Anybody living purely by the “moral compass” of scripture, as generation after generation of American child has been urged to do, is going to find themselves in Huck’s position.
But scripture is a moral map, not a compass, and most of the musings of moral philosophy share this difficulty with it. Scriptures and philosophies of all kinds require something more elemental if we are to navigate by them: a compass and the skill to use it. Huck Finn shows us the way.
He begins with the virtue right in front of him, a right choice: friendship, love, loyalty, not the blind abstract loyalty that leads people to do horrible things, but the loyalty marked by kindness toward someone who’s put their trust in you. That’s the moral compass, and if the map says that that leads through the sloughs of hell, well, then, that’s our path.
Moral maps are about heaven and hell, about the many objectives of political or personal power and satisfaction. Moral compasses are about loving your neighbor as yourself; and if the map says that leads to hell, that’s still your best path.
Twain’s affable rejection of religion didn’t preclude some stunning insight into it. He said his best work was Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc by the Sieur Louis de Conte, a book so different in tone from his humorous and lightly ironic writing that he first published it under a pseudonym. Taught as a good Southern boy to despise Roman Catholicism, he nevertheless was led, I believe, by intense empathy and an innate sense of justice to consider what might motivate Joan of Arc, what drove her so hard to endure English brutality and martyrdom. He was fascinated by her, and said the book took “twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.” He doesn’t seem to have been tempted to become Catholic, but he recognized Joan and understood you couldn’t recognize her without empathy for her faith.
Twain remains in my view America’s most empathetic and humane major writer; he slips as easily into the skin of a religious medieval peasant-girl and her page as that of the bad boys Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. He can share the thoughts and emotions of a black slave longing for freedom and family. He tries on the existence of others like a coat, pronounces on them not in judgment but with sympathetic understanding. If his satire could be sharp, it was generally reserved for those whose moral compass had been traded.
What Joan underwent wasn’t so very different from what Jim underwent. The characters that surround them are making choices based on their moral maps: what’s good for me (or us), what gets me to heaven, what brings me power and ease.
And a boy sits on a raft, having a think while his moral compass, sound and true, spins a bit, settles, and shows true north.
We know virtue when we see it, probably because it’s rare. In life as in politics right now, it feels like everybody’s chasing the goal, running sideways and crossways trying to get there. The devil in the wilderness does a roaring trade.