Veneration of the Sacred

Are morality and respect for sacredness the same thing?

For some time now I’ve privately questioned my choice of handle here on Substack. On some level, I can’t help but feel like an online chef who’s constantly going on about pastries.

But this Wednesday marked the first pies baked by the Apple Pie family for the season. In accordance with established custom, the pies were baked as a trio. The general consensus is that we had forgotten how good they were.

To give a sense of this, our toddler is going through a rough patch with weaning. That afternoon our baby was crying and asking for nursing inconsolably until I walked him around and tried feeding him other things to distract him, eventually offering him a slice of the pie his brothers had been eating while he was in the other room. I had other tasks, so I couldn’t feed him very quickly. But this child who can barely talk, and previously couldn’t even use a fork, told me “Thanks Dad” over and again as he awkwardly scraped and prodded the pie into his mouth. Eating with a utensil was definitely unfamiliar, but by the next morning he had it well in hand for his next slice, with breastfeeding now forgotten.

So all right then. I’m not particularly good at baking, I don’t follow cooking blogs or even own a single cook book. But this is an undeniable fact of our existence: For us, apple pie is a Significant Thing.

Such Has It Always Been

It isn’t new for humans to sacralize fruit. The Biblical tree of knowledge has been variously argued to have been apple, fig, or (my preference) pomegranate. The inspiration of Dionysius came from cultivated grapes. The Buddha gained enlightenment sitting beneath a fig tree. The Goddess Iðunn ensures her compatriots’ immortality with golden apples; Xi Wang Mu does the same, but with peaches.

Image courtesy of Mrs. Apple Pie, who likes peaches

So pick a random human, any random human who lived some time from a hundred thousand years ago to the present day. Chances are, they probably see fruit as somehow special. Maybe it’s the color that stands out against the dark foliage, where ripe morsels dangle like jewels in the trees. Maybe it’s the rich aroma that stirs memories, or maybe the natural sweetness prompts this sense of reverence.

I’m trained as a scientist, so to me, fruit symbolizes something more abstract: multi-layered, cross-species cooperation. Flowering plants usually don’t fertilize themselves, but depend on insects to bring pollen from one plant to another. And fruit-bearing trees don’t generally propagate on their own, but rather have evolved to attract birds and other creatures to carry their seeds far and wide. We animals depend on plants for food, but the life cycle of fruit trees is deeply entwined with us.

All of this—beauty, rejuvination, interconnectedness—tug at something in the human psyche that seems naturally to resonate with a primordial significance. We may argue about whether fruit is genuinely sacred, but it definitely feels that way. So if I propose a moral system like Ethica Pomi that takes the cultivation, processing, and ritual serving of fruit as its foundation, even if it’s meant as a joke… is it really?

This image also courtesy of Mrs. Apple Pie

At this point, if you are a utilitarian, you’ll probably just want to stop reading this; I’d be curious about what you think of this other essay here. The point of Ethica Pomi was really just to lampoon utilitarianism by highlighting its inherent weaknesses. But if we look at morality through the lens of the sacred, I really wonder, what does this say about an ethical system like utilitarianism that tries to sacralize pleasure?

How does the shared consciousness of our species respond to hedonism? Writers across history have curled their lips on the wanton licentiousness of their compatriots. For instance, Sallust:

To gratify appetite, they sought for every kind of production by land and by sea; they slept before there was any inclination for sleep; they no longer waited to feel hunger, thirst, cold, or fatigue, but anticipated them all by luxurious indulgence. Such propensities drove the youth, when their patrimonies were exhausted, to criminal practices; for their minds, impregnated with evil habits, could not easily abstain from gratifying their passions, and were thus the more inordinately devoted in every way to rapacity and extravagance.¹

Or more succinctly, Livy:

The state is suffering from two opposite vices, avarice and luxury; two plagues which, in the past, have been the ruin of every great empire.²

Pleasure itself is difficult to regard as sacred. Where thinkers like Emmanual Kant give us lines like, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,” Jeremy Bentham enthrones hedonism, subjugating us beneath “two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure… On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.”

I absolutely don’t mean to knock down utilitarianism with this kind of discussion. If utilitarianism were a genuine description of moral reality, then any ugliness inherent to it, any profaneness we perceived by the elevation of mere hedonism to a moral good, would simply be a hurdle for us to overcome. We would just have to get used to it if utilitarianism (somehow) had been shown to be right.

But utilitarianism has always been a system ultimately based on intuition, and it’s jarring to note how utilitarianism is so totally disconnected with anything recognizable as sacred to human beings. Jonathan Haidt reported early on how morality contains a sacred dimension for conservatives;³ shortly thereafter, Jesse Graham found liberals also show a moral concern for sanctity.⁴ Maybe they’re wrong, and sacredness has no place in morality—but then, maybe they’re wrong about something bigger, and morality has no place in reality! That’s just the risk you run, being an ethicist.

Ten Moral Systems, Ranked

So revisiting the question of ranking moral systems, my current ranking of the following options now looks like this:

1. Moral Agnosticism: I’m not sure, I just like being brave, sincere, dutiful, and also nice

2. Moral Nihilism

3. Virtue Ethics

4. Ethica Pomi

5. Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations

6. Kantian Deontology

7. “Always do what authorities tell you, or else, they’ll punish you”

8. Utilitarianism

9. “I just follow my moral intuitions; I’m really never wrong”

10. “My ingroup is always right. The outgroup must be stopped by any means”

Someday perhaps I’ll explain why Kantianism gets such a low ranking at #6, why I rank Ethica Pomi higher than Haidt’s empirical work, or why Aristotelian morality does so well at spot #3. But that day is not today, because,

1. Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline. Available here

2. Livy, History of Rome.

3. Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality. Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification, 371-401.

4. Graham, J., Englander, Z., Morris, J., Hawkins, C. B., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2012). Warning bell: Liberals implicitly respond to group morality before rejecting it explicitly. Available at SSRN 2071499.