Moral Health

If there be any timely moral messages, surely one of them must be that we are quickly approach Hell on Earth.  One reason for this is that many wonderful sounding ideas became utterly vapid morally.  My favorite example is tolerance.  At the rate we are going, we are literally tolerating the very humanity out of ourselves.  Another reason why we are quickly approaching Hell on Earth is that moral shame was deemed to be some psychological relic that merely inconvenienced people.  A third is that moral objectivity was regarded as a form oppression, a way in which the powerful imposed their will upon the powerless.  I shall discuss each in turn.

Tolerance.  The idea, of course, is that people should be receptive to different lifestyles and different ways of doing things.  That seems reasonable enough until it turned out that tolerance came to mean that nothing anyone does can be subject to criticism.  I call this the perversion of tolerance.

To be sure, criticism can be terribly mean-spirited and misguided.  It also can be quite wrong.  Interestingly, misguided and mean-spirited criticism can be right on target.  My motives for criticism a person may be woefully dishonorable—for example, the motive may be jealousy or the opportunity to ridicule in public.  Yet, the criticism itself may in fact be absolutely on target.  Of course, a wrong criticism must be rejected.  The point, though, that an ill-motivated criticism is not thereby a failure to correctly identify that a mistake has been made.

I would rather that a racist point out the grave mistake that I am making than for a friend let me proceed with my egregious error.

Perverted tolerance is simply at odds with commonsense.  Worse, it is incompatible with genuine affection for another.  It is simply not possible to care genuinely for another and not be concerned about the fact that the individual is making an egregious error.

Shame.  Without a doubt shame is an uncomfortable feeling.  But that is just the point—an internal reminder that something has gone astray.  And if a single instance of an uncomfortable feeling, namely shame, should serve to keep me on course thereinafter, then I should think that I have come out well ahead on account of that internal reminder.

This is to say that an uncomfortable feeling can, on balance, result in a considerable gain.  This, though, presupposes something rather straightforward, namely that one firmly resolves never to make that mistake again.

The very idea is that it is better that concern over shame should enable a person to stay the course than that it should be necessary for others to criticism a person.

Now, as one can see perverse tolerance without shame makes for a very losing combination.  What gets lost is none other than simple good call standards of excellence.  So from the classroom to the playground to the boardroom and the courtroom, we see that standards of excellence have fallen by the wayside.

Since we seem to be rapidly approaching Hell on Earth, it is simply not possible to maintain that we are better-off on account of these things.

The Rejection of Moral Objectivity.  Moral objectivity is treated rather like phlogiston, the supposed substance that makes combustion possible.  Just as there is no such substance, it supposed that can be no such thing as moral objectivity.  And people act as if they have driven the nail in the coffin of moral objectivity by pointing out that all sorts of horrors have been done in its name.  By that line of argument, love should have been discarded, too.  There is no shortage of downright ludicrous things that have been done in the name of love.  And then, too, people have been sorely mistaken in thinking that they were in love.

It is a mystery to me that many of the very same people who find moral objectivity an utterly indefensible notion nonetheless find the idea of a love a most defensible one.  Morality seems to be no more elusive than love.  And if there is anything we know, it is that love is that elusive good without which humanity is simply unbearable.  A like claim can be made of morality.

In case, notice that where we have perverted tolerance and the absence of shame, then it only stands to reason that moral objectivity would be abandoned.

For where there is moral objectivity, there will automatically be things that should not be tolerated and mistakes that must be corrected.  What is more, there will be shame.  Morality does not ioppress human beings.  Rather, it calls us to the standard of excellence of which we are capable.

What is stunning to me is this: It was moral objectivity and none other than moral objectivity, with all that this implies in terms of the other criteria being operative, that took human beings to the point that, at the very least, equality was recognized as a righteous ideal that applied to all human beings.  As humanity stood on the verge of achieving precisely that ideal what on earth inclined anyone to think that moral objectivity was none other than a chimera that could be roundly discarded?  Interestingly, there is a religious answer that readily comes to mind here.  The book of Proverbs tells us that Pride goeth before a Fall.  It looks like we became too besotted with our own success.

Perhaps it is just so much commonsense that a person will flounder mightily as a result of becoming besotted with her or his own success.  Well guess what?  Precisely what we get is the absence of commonsense, when tolerance means nothing can be criticized and when shame is seen as none other than ridiculous psychological baggage and when moral objectivity is viewed as no more than a dinosaur like relic.

The malleability of human beings is at once their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.  It is the malleability of human beings that makes it possible for human beings to survive in the very bowels of hell and to surmount the seemingly insurmountable.  By contrast, it is the very same malleability of human beings that makes it possible for one human being to look another human being squarely in the face and not recognize the other’s humanity.

But for their malleability, human beings would not have survived such horrors as American Slavery or the Holocaust.  And yet again, but for their malleability human beings would not have enslaved the very people whom they would have care for their children.  Nor, again, would human beings have sought sexual relations with the very people whom they sought to put in gas chambers.

Again, human beings can come to love the repentant wrongdoer.  Or, human beings can wallow in self-deception to such an extent that they fully participate in their own self-destruction.

Precisely because human beings are so utterly malleable, it stands to reason that moral training and upbringing is so very important to the survival of human beings.  And this, of course, is a point that both Plato and Aristotle saw ever so clearly.  Aristotle explicitly claimed that human beings are neither good nor bad by nature.  He held that insofar as human beings come to have an immutable moral character it is through proper moral upbringing.

One way to bring out Aristotle’s point is to look at a creature whose survival powers are rather extraordinary, namely the cockroach.  This creature is capable of surviving under a variety of rather extreme circumstances—even a nuclear holocaust.  The cockroach’s survival, however, has nothing to do with creativity on its part.  The insect does not make a rational assessment of the situation and then chooses a very appropriate strategy of survival.

It is human beings, and only human beings, who have the ability to evaluate fully their environment and then to choose a multi-layered strategy whereby they can survive.  This is something they may do explicitly.  Or, this is something that they may do implicitly relying upon well-developed moral sensibilities.

One way in which we can understand contemporary Liberalism is that it diminishes the importance of moral upbringing.  One way in which we can understand contemporary Conservatism is that it gives pride of place to moral upbringing.  This difference when played out over generations of lives makes for a most formidable difference in the character of our moral and social reality.

The contemporary Liberal conception of the self is tied primarily to the satisfaction of desires.  Liberalism has retreated so much from moral objectivity that it does not have the resources to say much about which desires should be satisfied and which should not except in the case of those desires the satisfaction of which would explicitly harm others.

The contemporary Conservative conception of the self gives pride of place to moral objectivity; accordingly, it insists that self-discipline can be virtuous even when the satisfaction of a desire would harm no one.

Now, the poignant observation that I would like to make is that it is the Conservative conception of the self—and not the Liberal one—that makes it possible for human beings to survive even in the bowels of hell.

In the face of evil, there is nothing that is more central to survival than self-discipline.  In the absence of self-discipline, the Selma (Alabama) protests against racism would have failed and have failed mightily.  Again, in the absence of self-discipline, the sit-ins in protests of racism would have never succeeded.  Precisely, what made these stances against racism possible is the immutable commitment to a mode of behavior that had as its aim to bring about a good in society.

Now the very heart of Aristotle’s point is that those who participated in these marches and sit-ins would not have had the wherewithal to persevere if they had not had the proper upbringing from the very outset of their lives.

We can now rather pointedly state the difference between cockroaches and human beings.  Evolution has programmed cockroaches to survive well in the face of a variety of harsh environments.  Cockroaches do not need proper upbringing.  By contrast, as evolution has constituted human beings, they will survive well in a harsh environment only if they bring to a crisis sufficient self-discipline and sufficient reflective powers.  And this will happen only if, in the first place, human beings have the proper upbringing from the outset of their lives.

And if anything is true, it is true that, in the name of vapid freedom, as I would say, modernity has mightily trivialized the importance of just that—the proper upbringing from the outset of life.  This is the difference between the present and yesteryear.  In the past, nothing excused the absence of proper moral training—not racism, not anti-semitism, and so on.  No child would dared have excused inappropriate behavior on her or his part by citing some social injustice against the group to which she or he belongs.

In the present, in anything and everything is an excuse for the absence of proper moral training.  Consequently, it is now commonplace that without so much as blinking people give the most ridiculous excuses for not doing what is so profoundly and manifestly appropriate.  Worse, it frequently happens that people do not even see that they need an excuse.  Against this backdrop, there is simply no reason at all to be optimistic about the survival of humanity.

On both sides of the political divide,  name-calling has become a common way of dismissing those who say what we do not like.  Calling someone liberal or conservative has become much more of a way of dismissing the person than attending to the individual’s arguments.  This is most unfortunate.  The truth is not conservative or liberal; and it is manifestly false that either conservatives have greater access to the truth than liberals or, conversely, liberals have greater access to the truth that conservatives.

We have used name-calling as a reason to stop attending the actual argument that a person gives—even when that person says what is unequivocally true.  Alas, it turns out that the truth can make us very uncomfortable precisely because it requires us to re-think our views.

For example, some feminists have argued that pornography contributes in a significant way to men raping women.  Many conservatives, as it turns out, like this view of pornography, thus resulting in a most unholy alliance between some feminists and some conservatives.  But guess what?  The best evidence suggests that it is the other way around, namely that watching pornography makes it less likely that a man will rape a woman.  Why?  Because pornography serves as a very successful release for sexual tension; and with that release in place, a man turns his attention to non-sexual matters.

Professor Tod Kendell produced this study: “Pornography, Rape, and the Internet”.  His actual study is neither conservative nor liberal, although there is a straightforward sense in which his conclusions favor a certain liberal view of freedom.

Recently, I noted that in general straight people who support gay rights get rather bent out of shape if someone mistakes them for being gay.  Although this truth is neither conservative nor liberal, it clearly speaks to the concern that conservatives have that we need to be careful about exactly what we are doing in publicly embracing the gay life style as on a par with the heterosexual life style.

In the future, it could very well turn out that straight people have no trouble at all in being mistaken for gay; and if that should come to pass, then certain conservative concerns will be undermined.

Sometimes the facts tell us that what we want is a very good thing; sometimes the facts tell us that what we want is a very bad thing.

The evolutionary facts tell us that phenotypical differences have no significant whatsoever in terms of human intelligence.  Alas, these evolutionary facts have not at all been a barrier to people privileging their ethnic group above others: not just whites above blacks (in some cases); but Arabs above Jews; blacks above whites; and Asians above whites.  And so on.

The evolutionary facts resoundingly support the ideal of human equality.  It is just plain absurd to refer to these facts as liberal rather than conservative ones.

Now, here is an interesting fact that is neither conservative nor liberal.  A single piece of behavior that does not follow the appropriate rules may be excusable, whereas as a pattern of that very same behavior may be most unacceptable.

Here is an example: A professor may very well be late for class once during a semester.  If, however, the professor is regularly late, this is downright unacceptable.  Of course, sometimes it does not matter whether we are talking about a single instance or a pattern.  Murder or rape would presumably be cases in point.  It is insult to argue: “It makes no sense to argue that a murderer should not be punished because the murderer only murdered on individual”.

I have been deemed by some readers of this blog to be a conservative.  I often characterize myself as being so conservative that I am radical.  My views are not ideologically driven as such.

For instance, what is unequivocally clear is that straight men want women who act like women rather than men.  Likewise, straight women want men who act like men rather than women.  So this tells me that the female-male divide is not just about anatomical differences—but about different ways of being-in-the-world for women and men.  In turn, these considerations are in keeping with the point that straight people do not like to be mistaken for being gay.

I am radical in the sense that I start with the facts and then work towards the theory.

I, for instance, do not hold that a person should always be kept alive.  It is manifestly clear that a life can no longer be worth living.  Of course, the fundamental issue is how to embrace this view without occasioning great abuse.  And to that challenge, I do not yet have a response.

When it comes to the family: I hold that we do better to underwrite the family then to introduce a practice that undermines it.  No matter what we do, there will be costs.  This means, then, that we must choose wisely which costs we should bear.  Thus, my remarks about Planned Parenthood are in keeping with the general view that we do better to maintain respect for the family than to undermine the family in a systematic way.  This means, alas, that in some cases things will go wrong.  If, however, we undermine respect for the family in a systematic way, then a lot more will go wrong.  There is nothing that we can that will guarantee that nothing whatsoever will go wrong.  I would surely opt for such a practice were that indeed a possibility.

One aspect of the problem of misplaced compassion, then, is to focus upon the single case while ignoring the general good of the practice.  This would be rather like saying that flying is unacceptable because sometimes there are fatal accidents.  There are times, to be sure, when the focus is properly the single individual rather than the general good of the practice.  This holds for severe prison sentence such as life in prison or capital punishment.

As far as I can see, though, with the family we must generally focus upon the idea of respecting it.  Otherwise, we undermine in a most profound and nefarious way the development of children.  That is not good for the children; that is not good for society.  It is an unexpurgated truth that in general no nation is better off, either as a whole or individually, when children have less respect rather than more respect for their parents.  And this is neither a liberal nor a conservative truth.

Here is a final thought.  Consider two sets of parents.  Set A gets furious over the fact that their under-aged teenage daughter became pregnant.  Yet these parents come through in the end.  Set B, by contrast, will only give their daughter money if she studies what they want her study and if she attends the college that they attended.  And so forth.  Set B-parents are in many respects the far worse parents.  Parents should not force their children to live their lives.

By contrast, moral outrage when a child has acted most irresponsibly in fact very much has a place.  Indeed, it sometimes turns out that one of the best signs that our parents care deeply about us is that they become enraged when we have acted in an utterly responsible way.  This is not a conservative truth.  This is not a liberal truth.  Unfortunately, though, many liberals wrongly suppose that the forgoing truth is a conservative one.  Not so, however.  Love at its best is susceptible to outrage when, in the face of everything that we have done to help them, those about whom we care most profoundly destroy their own lives.

In the words of Solomon: Unto everything there is a season.  There is indeed a time and a place for parental anger.  It is a mistake to overlook this truth because we are so busy worrying about the feelings of the child who is rightly the object of that anger.  To dismiss this line of thought on the grounds that it is conservative is to substitute ideology for reality.  And that is the damning of the American society whether it is conservatives or liberals who so behave.