Disrupting Hell in Louisiana: The Ten Commandments Revisited

The Following is an excerpt from an Off White Paper published back on April 27, 2014. It was the final piece penned with our guiding light, the late Professor Clayton Christensen. This excerpt is part of a larger discussion of accountability that focuses on the role of religion as a set of accountability technologies. The Ten Commandment is one of the great moral technologies that probably covers 80% of the virtues needed for a just society– whether or not you are a believer or a non-believer in a higher power.

Ironically the Ten Commandments is also a great example of a disruptive religious innovation. It took the 600 plus laws (the mitzvot) of the Torah and reduced it down tot he Big Ten. Simpler and more accessible than the Old Testament, this innovation scaled magnificently particularly after Cecil B. De Mille came up with arguably the greatest marketing campaign ever– just ask Charleton Heston and Yul Brynner.

…There seems to be a more vexing problem that necessarily precedes the issue of accountability: do people clearly understand if or when they are doing something wrong?  In simpler times a good place to start learning how to behave was the Ten Commandments.  It seems we’ve gotten a little rusty on the content of those ten imperatives and prohibitions. While 62% of Americans know that pickles are one of the ingredients of a Big Mac, less than 60% know that “Thou shalt not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments.  (Then again, ten or so percent of the adults surveyed also believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.)  In fact, the majority of those surveyed could identify the seven individual ingredients in a Big Mac: two all-beef patties (80%), special sauce (66%), lettuce (76%), cheese (60%), pickles (62%), onions (54%) and sesame seed bun (75%).   “Thou shalt not kill” only beats out onions.  It’s enough to make you cry. “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun.” In one Big Mac promotion, the company gave customers a free soda if they could repeat the jingle in less than 4 seconds.

A catchy jingle undoubtedly made The Big Mac part of pop culture. Who could forget the 1975 launch of McDonald’s Big Mac?  That jingle-laden effort takes second place for “most clever marketing campaign” in advertising history. Yet it was the unsurpassed marketing genius of film producer extraordinaire Cecil B. De Mille that surely takes the cake.  De Mille gave the Ten Commandments a special place in contemporary American culture decades before they became fodder for the “culture wars” regarding separation of church and state.

In perhaps the greatest marketing coup in American history, De Mille ingeniously tapped into the angst of Justice E. J. Ruegemer, a Minnesota juvenile court judge who was deeply concerned with the moral foundation of the younger generation. Starting in the 1940s, Ruegemer had, along with the Boy Scouts’ Fraternal Order of Eagles, initiated a program to post the Ten Commandments in courtrooms and classrooms across the country as a non-sectarian “code of conduct” for troubled youth. But De Mille took us to the next level. In 1956 De Mille seized the opportunity to plug his costly epic film, The Ten Commandments.  He proposed to Ruegemer that they collectively erect granite monuments of the actual Ten Commandments in the public squares of 150 cities across the nation.  The unveiling of each monument was a press event typically featuring one of the film’s stars. “OMG!!! Isn’t that Yul Brynner?” or  ”that’s Charleton Heston!”  Absolutely brilliant!   Things remained copacetic until the 1970s as this public expression of a code of conduct was apparently non-controversial.  Then all hell broke loose leading to a firestorm that still burns to this day on the issue of separation of church and state.

  “Ten Commandments” as an expression didn’t even exist until the middle of the 16th century when it first appeared in the Geneva Bible that preceded by half a century the King James Bible, first published in 1604.  The Ten Commandments have the attributes of a disruptive innovation. They take the hundreds of laws in the bible and boil them down to ten fundamental pearls that are more accessible and usable for the masses. Obviously not covering all the bases they were clearly good enough to get the job done: to create a simple, accessible bedrock for moral and ethical behavior.  Serious biblical scholars of the Ten Commandments view the vastly oversimplified code as a synecdoche, or visual metaphor, for the much more complex set of laws and regulations.

With or without the Ten Commandments it seems that most people have internalized “Thou shalt not kill.” Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out that, as recently as 10,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer had a 60% probability of being killed by another hunter-gatherer. At some point in history, the prohibition against murder became a conscious ethical innovation.  By the eighteenth century BCE the code of Hammurabi, our earliest surviving code of law, prohibited murder yet the prescribed punishment was based on the social status of the victim.  Over a period of several centuries, our moral horizon expanded once again.  The biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” evolved to eliminate any class distinction— clearly an upgrade.

Ethical innovations come in fits and starts.  Yet over the long run ethical and moral horizons of civilization widen. Today, according to Pinker, murder rates are at the lowest in history.   In the U.S. there were 13,000 murders in 2010. If our math is correct, that represents less than ½ of one-thousandth of one percent assuming no multiple murders and no suicides are included; about one person in 25,000 actually kills someone. While the numbers are less clear on adultery due to methodological challenges and interpretations (single incident versus multiple incidents, it takes two to tango, etc., etc., etc.), lowball estimates are 20-25% of adults are guilty.  Assuming 150 million adults, some tens of millions of Americans have committed adultery give or take a few.   It would seem not all commandments are created equal– or at least obeyed equally.

Morality has become more complicated.  In simple situations with a “one-to-one” correlation — one person murders another or someone steals a neighbor’s horse, or someone lies in court — we know what they have done is wrong and we hold them accountable. But we live in a society comprised of perpetual power imbalances, multiple stakeholders, ambiguous situations, and complex interdependent systems.  Is releasing classified documents as a response to questionable or inappropriate government surveillance heroic or traitorous? The July 10, 2103, Quinnipiac poll, 55% of Americans consider Edward Snowden a whistleblower/hero while 34% believe he is a traitor– a 20% shift in favor of Snowden since the earliest polls. Interestingly, normalized polarized Americans are uniting against the unified view of the nation’s political establishment.  The situation has become even more murky, now that Snowden’s activities have been indirectly validated through the Pulitzer Prize.   Determining what is right and wrong gets pretty dicey especially when we don’t know what we don’t know. What we do know is: a hell of a lot of Americans really don’t want Big Brother reading their emails. But what are they afraid of?

Does a banker taking advantage of asymmetric information or the sheer complexity of regulations, accounting and tax codes let alone multi-billion dollar obtuse securities constitute unconscionable behavior that deserves punishment? Who is responsible for lung cancer deaths– the smoker, the tobacco company, the tobacco worker or the FDA? Who is accountable for obesity-related deaths– McDonalds, corn subsidies, the overweight consumer or all of the above? Who is accountable for unsafe working conditions in the developing world– Apple, the Gap, Nike, Walmart, the local politicians, the builder– or the consumer who benefits from cheaper prices? Or are these just acceptable “costs of doing business?”

Perhaps we are undergoing the atomization of morality. Has morality has become subject to the “distributed network effect” such that every action can find a morally acceptable pathway of justification? When systems, stakeholders, and situations become complexes replete with interdependencies, conditionality and incalculable unintended consequences moral responsibility gets spread like peanut butter across a chain of activities, persons, corporations, partnerships, not-for-profit organizations, and government agencies. Complicating things further is that every agent has an obligation of loyalty to their principal. Peanut butter consists of a whole lot of peanuts, so which peanut or employee do we hold accountable for screwing up a batch of peanut butter? In like manner, one bad apple spoils the bunch but hard to know which one once it becomes applesauce. How should we parse accountability when there is a complex chain of activities where this atomization of morality allows every individual to avoid taking responsibility for the whole.  Often times we have only an intuition that something is amiss or doesn’t feel right even if we can’t exactly put our finger on it. Executive compensation feels like stealing, the selling of tobacco products feels like killing as does serving unhealthy food to the masses.  Are these moral intuitions, like Pope Francis’s about wasting food, actually expansions of our moral horizons or just plain silly?

A new awareness of what constitutes moral transgressions must come before accountability can be effectively scaled to help ensure enduring peace and prosperity.  This new moral awareness cannot arise without a great deal of civil discourse and yes, even uncivil discourse.  Slavery was okay until it wasn’t. Gay marriage was not okay until it was. Smoking in public places was permitted until it wasn’t.  Corporate polluters were acceptable until they weren’t. Changing the moral baseline is always painful.  Issues of accountability at scale are somewhat premature until we can collectively agree what constitutes right and wrong in an extended or networked chain of “values.”  It’s hard to build consensus when everything is so damn complicated with multiple stakeholders, complex systems, and ambiguous situations. Until there is an inflection point– that quantum moment– where enough people can be energized by the intuitions of early moral adopters to see something is terribly wrong and to take action there can be no wide spread accountability.

All this calls for a new breed of moral innovators.  It will be these early adopters– gifted with unusual charisma, empathy, and humility– who expand our moral horizon. They might even have to resort to civil disobedience. They will invariably face criticism and grave risks– financial, reputation, and even bodily harm– as they excite a new moral majority– many of whom will not believe in Hell but will embrace the possibility of better “Heaven” on earth.