Our country needs a new cabinet-level position: Secretary of Moral Outrage. The first duty of the new Secretary would be to write moral guidelines for the president, Supreme Court justices, and members of Congress. Office holders who violated these guidelines would spend eternity in hell, roasting in everlasting flames, watching their souls twist and blacken, forever and ever. Their screams would provide a hallelujah chorus for the righteous, who would turn their decent faces away and assume whoever’s doing the screaming had it coming.

If this sounds extreme, consider that for most of this country’s history, we have based our public life on a book that prescribes similar punishment for those who violate its standards. The Torah, the Koran, the sutras and Vinaya, the Vedas, the stories of Coyote, and the writings of the Stoics also have versions of eternal damnation, some of them with far more subtle and sophisticated tortures than anything the Southern Baptists or the Catholics have cooked up.

Who would not welcome a situation where public officials had to balance temporal gain with eternal torment?

Any number of Evangelical ministers would volunteer in a heartbeat to be the Moral Outrage Secretary. But one of the conditions for the job is that if you want it and think you’d be good at it, you can’t have it.

It would help if we could call in an outside expert.

 

News has come from London this week that Lord Christopher Geidt, ethics advisor to Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, has resigned. Lord Geidt’s resignation letter claimed that he had been placed in “an impossible and odious position” by being asked to consider “a breach of the ministerial code.”

Johnson said their dispute was about the continuation of steel tariffs. He had, he said, merely asked Lord Geidt’s advice about “the national interest in protecting a crucial industry.” He implied that his ethics advisor had overreacted, as ethics advisors are prone to do (a previous ethics advisor, Sir Alex Allan, had resigned after Johnson’s refusal to fire his Home Office Secretary for bullying underlings and making at least some of them cry).

Geidt’s resignation was couched in careful language, no doubt made more careful by British libel law. The wide world that exists beyond our borders is full of foreigners speaking foreign languages, some of them bearing a duplicitous resemblance to English. Hence:

Boris Johnson: “I’m breaking a promise for God and Country and Queen, and for my own blatant self-interest, given that my leadership is under fire because I held illegal parties at Number Ten during Covid lockdowns.”

Lord Geidt: “You’re lying. Lying is wrong. It is a violation of honor and principle. You’ll be sorry.”

Boris Johnson: “The reasons prime ministers have ethics advisors is to provide cover for our lies, not prevent them. You’ve obviously gone rogue like your predecessor. What is it with you guys and your nitpicking? I’ll accept your resignation. Don’t expect mine.”

 

So we have not one but two high-level ethical advisors looking for work, courtesy of the country that brought us the Magna Carta and On Liberty and A Vindication of the Rights of Women and The Wealth of Nations. Also Francis Bacon and John Locke and David Hume and Edmund Burke and George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill. If you want an education that acquaints you with empiricism, human liberty, free speech, the struggle against tyranny, and the rule of law, you could do worse than read the varieties of British political philosophy.

We in America are struggling with authoritarian lies, paramilitary fascists, a congress profiting from lax campaign financing laws and inside stock market information, and a Supreme Court full of literal-minded and covertly sadistic ideologues.

Two British ethicists need work permits. We need two British ethicists.

It might be better to call them a moral tag-team, but one with enforcement powers. They’d need the ability to send the POTUS and Supreme Court justices and members of Congress to hell.

Going back a few years, here’s how that might have worked out:

Lord Geidt: “Bill Clinton, you wrecked the hopes and dreams of women, the Democratic Party, and the honor of a Rhodes Scholarship for a series of inexpert blow jobs in the Oval Office. You’ve demonstrated you have no control in the face of the tawdry temptations of power. Guess what? You’ll spend eternity in a cramped no-star hotel room with every person you ever had sex with and lied about it.”

Sir Alex Allan: “Sandra Day O’Connor, you stopped the accurate counting of votes that would have almost certainly given the presidency to Al Gore. You showed that an election was subject to political expediency rather than the careful assessment of the will of the voters. Your sentence is to have your choice for president bungle this country into terrible, futile and unnecessary wars, destroying its spirit and its moral authority, and finally, crashing its economy. You will spend your entire afterlife contemplating a handful of ashes.”

Lord Geidt: “Mitch McConnell, you stopped the confirmation of Merrick Garland as a Supreme Court justice. Your act will transform the rule of law into a generation-long exercise in nation-killing political hackery. In eternity, the corpse of your country will rest upon on salmonella-infected turtles all the way down. You will be the bottom turtle.”

Sir Alex Allan: “Donald Trump, you put self over country in an office that requires the opposite. You used your position to enrich yourself. You treated women like garbage. You subverted the legitimacy of your country’s elections and destroyed truth wherever you found it.

“You will live for twenty more years in an assisted living facility cleverly remodeled to look like the White House. Your lifelong character disorder will be exacerbated by the progression of your frontotemporal dementia. You will spend your days in weeping, enraged incomprehension. Then you will die. You won’t go to hell because you have nothing to send there.”

I could go on but won’t. Our ethics czars can take care of the rest, even though they might weary of inventing exquisite punishments for political sins, only to dump them on mediocre souls who can’t appreciate their exquisiteness.

 

For those made uncomfortable by the idea that our former colonial masters should dictate our national morality, or who say we don’t need a Secretary of Moral Outrage, we could simply conduct a national search for decent human beings, people capable of saying, “That’s wrong. You shouldn’t do that. If you do that, you’ll be sorry.” All it would require is a passing familiarity with honor and principle.

Surely people like that exist. If we find any, we should give them jobs—as congressional aides, Supreme Court clerks, and presidential advisors. They might curb the worst excesses of the people we trust with high office.

 

If you’re wondering how a simple little end-of-the-world blog became a site for a moralist rant, I’ve been puzzling over that myself. Certainly nothing in my background has prepared me to suggest eternal torment for public servants, who are given to the strenuous denial of any motive other than good will toward the body politic and the citizens within it.

That said, outrage comes easy these days. Regardless of education, job, or politics, you can probably recall the moral sense you had as a child, and confronted with a politician’s lack of ethics, shout out, “That’s wrong. You shouldn’t do that. If you do that, you’ll be sorry.”

If right and wrong remain hard problems for you, here’s a list of traditional virtues, courtesy of Japanese Samurai culture: Right decisions, Valor, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty. They’re not that different from the familiar Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance, with the caveat that if you fail to exemplify them, you have to disembowel yourself with your sword.

Aside from some creative wishful thinking, I have no idea if life has postmortem consequences. However, I’m comforted by the fact that all the deadly sins come with punishments in the here and now. If, for example, you give yourself over to Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth, you probably won’t last long as a Samurai.

We need a Samurai caucus in Washington, D.C. I’d like to see a sitting U.S. senator disembowel himself on the floor of the Senate. It would be a graphic demonstration of uncompromising ethics. Right decisions would achieve a gravity that they currently lack in government, along with Honesty and Honor and the rest of them.

Maybe Boris Johnson would start paying attention to the world outside of his pathetic self-interest. Maybe he could call on one of his former ethics advisers for an explanation of what’s going on. Maybe the Queen would lend him a sword.

 

For some time now I’ve been hoping that some brave ethical leader would point out the obvious: Vladimir Putin has adopted the seven deadly sins as marching orders. Evil is upon the world in ways that we haven’t seen since Dachau and Rwanda and Myanmar and Phnom Penh and Wounded Knee.

A nation is being deliberately erased, and a good many European countries are making the connection to the Holocaust. Europeans are willing to accept the unpleasantness involved with the imposition of sanctions against Russia and its wealthier citizens, but I think the sacrifice of lives and property by the Ukrainians dwarfs any sacrifices EU citizens will make, unless and until Russian missiles start destroying EU cities and their children.

Yet the Israelis, who founded their country on the concept of Never Again, still maintain cooperative ties with Russia and their genocidal neighbor Syria. India, China, South Africa, Iran, Brazil, Hungary, and North Korea are giving tacit support to Putin’s war. Chechnya, Russia’s defeated and terrorized colony, supplies troops well-practiced in brutality and nihilism.

If historians are still writing history in a hundred years, colonizers and their enablers will be the butts of sad jokes, people who murdered fellow humans in the name of imaginary countries. Instead of national identities, they will achieve moral idiocy, and war with neighbors and the descendants of neighbors for as long as they have neighbors, no matter what kind of peace is declared.

If Boris Johnson was going to ignore his ethical advisors anyway, he might have at least sent Lord Geidt and Sir Alex Allan to Moscow last February to talk to Putin and tell him that destroying Ukraine was, in a word, wrong and that he would be sorry if he did it. They may have been returned in a steamer trunk full of mixed body parts but at least Johnson would have known what a slippery slope it is when you base your existence on lies.

 

Decent people will turn their faces away from the Russians unto the seventh generation. If they protest their collective punishment, Americans can suggest they consider the Iraqis and the Vietnamese and the Indians.

“Americans shouldn’t have done that,” the Russians will say, and they’ll be right. Maybe they’ll connect the dots.

There will be no victors in Ukraine. Just ruins and internal passports and graves and pathetic loot from the houses of the poor, and when history gives its reckoning, suicide-inducing guilt, should anyone in Russia allow themselves to be conscious enough to accept it. In Siberia, a certain amount of painful negotiating with the Chinese. They have Russia’s back, but there’s more than one way to translate that phrase from Mandarin.

“That’s wrong. Don’t do that. If you do that, you’ll be sorry.” It’s the only solution to the world’s ills. It’s a simple phrase, easily translated into any of the world’s languages, but far too many people fail to master it, even in their native language.

We won’t get a Secretary of Moral Outrage. We won’t get tag-teaming ethics czars. We won’t get Senatorial Samurais. But we might get people who will stand close to world leaders and correctly pronounce, “That’s wrong. Don’t do that. If you do that, you’ll be sorry.” They’ll need courage and a willingness to die for the truth, but it may save them and their countries and the rest of us from hellfire.