What Does an Oath Mean?

By LANCE MORROW

In the wistful inner ear, one imagines a soft transcontinental buzz, the sound of 13,000 consciences alert and intricately working. "Well," says each troubled voice, "I'd like to strike. I think we have plenty of reason to strike--wages, hours, job strain. But I signed an oath when I took the job. It would be dishonorable to strike. We have to find some other way."

Just hearing things, of course--like listening for waves in a sea shell. It did not occur to the air-traffic controllers to deliver that sort of archaic soliloquy, haunted by scruples. Most of them judged, briskly enough, that their desire for a 32-hour week and a minimum of $30,462 per year superseded the oath to which they once put their signatures.

For a moment the issue of the violated oath did not come clear. It was deflected a little by a legal question: Don't all workers have a right to strike? Yes, said the American Civil Liberties Union. Not if they are government employees, said a 1947 law and the Reagan Administration. The strikers chose the A.C.L.U.'s view of things.

But beyond transient legalities, the strike opened the door upon a more primitive question: What is the worth (moral, financial, mystical) of a person's oath? What do we mean when we promise, when we vow, when we pledge our word? Whatever their union's legal case may be, the controllers did take an oath; was that not a binding deed? Many Americans found themselves distantly disturbed that what was once a matter of some human solemnity should be brushed aside as if it were merely a technical detail. The social edifice shuddered slightly; down in the basement, a dusty little taboo fell off a shelf and shattered.

All societies are held together by an immensely intricate webbing of mutual obligation (and perhaps by an equal and opposite network of betrayal). The system starts with nods and smiles and wordless understandings; it elaborates itself interminably through certain assumptions, casual promises, oral agreements, laborious plans, written contracts and formal vows, and ends finally in that thunderous atavism, the solemn oath: the promise with a jolt of the sacred in it, the upraised hand, the divinity standing by to witness.

With such access to the absolute, the oath has always been promiscuously and even dangerously overemployed. It works efficiently enough as a device to keep court witnesses and public officials moderately honest; there, the sworn word is directly connected to deeds and penalties (perjury charges or impeachment). Ronald Reagan had no trouble making such a connection for the air-traffic controllers. But the dictatorial and the insecure have always been fond of the oath as a way to enforce orthodoxy, to lay down a prior restraint upon people's opinions. During the 1950s the loyalty oath turned into a destructively pervasive American genre, with a legion of earnest patriots afoot, like the ghost in Hamlet, crying, "Swear!"

In the first torchlight of the primeval, oaths worked by the magic of the words themselves; later, they glowed with the power of the gods, who were invented to officiate at melodramas. Oaths should be sparingly used and specifically targeted. Their imposing solemnity can shade without warning into the preposterous, into peeled grapes on pledge night, a witch doctoring oogly-boogly like the oath that Tom Sawyer's gang swore in the cave.

One reason why oathing gets overdone is that it is so inherently dramatic, even a form of fanaticism, a way of connecting (spuriously sometimes) to the Absolute. Knights, crusaders, saints and opera singers are forever swearing: it is a lovely plot device. Ahab swears his vengeance on the whale. In Don Giovanni, Ottavio vows to avenge the Commendatore by raising his fruity tenor to Donna Anna: "Lo giuro, lo giuro/ lo giuro agli occhi tuoi/ lo giuro al nostro amor" (I swear it, I swear it/ I swear it by your eyes/ I swear it by our love). Was there ever a prettier oath? It is a form of hero's brag. That may explain why politicians are so reckless with hyperbolic promise. (Douglas MacArthur: "I shall return,'' a wonderful item of mythic public relations.) Like the ancient kings of Mexico, they like to swear that they will cause the sun to rise, the rain to fall, the crops to grow. Spiro Agnew once told the American people: "I have often been accused of putting my foot in my mouth, but I will never put my hand in your pockets." Jimmy Carter kept fixing America with his china-blue eyes and swearing: "I will never lie to you"--a daredevil approach to his profession.

Oaths have their sinister uses. They can turn into weapons to coerce and restrict. The solemn oath, of course, is not a bad way to lie. The Mafia enforces silence with an oath, and the blood oath over the centuries has killed more people than a medieval plague. But, in a free society, the oath has a crucial ceremonial function. The Hippocratic Oath reminds new doctors of their obligation, of the human context of their calling. An immigrant knows that the oath of citizenship is spiritually, almost physically, nourishing. His oath is a symbolic drama of community.

But the oath is not faring very well now. Americans, a mobile and litigious people, nimble through the loopholes, do not like to be mired down in too many promises. Getting stuck in an old promise looks more and more like a sucker's game: both morals and interest rates change too fast. Baseball players renegotiate their contracts all the time.

The idea that morality is merely subjective has been subversive. Americans claim exemption under what might be called the Doctrine of Discontinuous Selves: if people are forever "growing" and "going through changes," then the man who swore the oath, say, three years ago, is not the same one now called upon to live up to it. This discontinuous series of new selves, emotionally different selves, scatters the mind. It makes for a short moral attention span.

An anti-institutional bias has also been hard on oaths. So has that low-grade chronic ache (inflation, partly, and the erosion of dreams) that tells Americans so often that their society has not fulfilled its end of the social contract. Americans do not find themselves harmonizing much on Robert Frost's lonely, manly lines: "But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/ And miles to go before I sleep."

But promises, contracts and oaths are the acts of will and intelligence and anticipation that make a society coherent, that hold it together. If they cannot be trusted, then the whole structure begins to wobble. If the air-traffic controllers do not care to recite Frost, they might consider William Murray, Britain's Solicitor General in the 18th century: "No country can subsist a twelvemonth where an oath is not thought binding, for the want of it must necessarily dissolve society." --By Lance Morrow

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