As the years go by, the twentieth century is beginning to
recede in our collective memories. Yet
the turns we collectively made during that century are still making their
effects quite clearly felt every day. None are more daunting than the attacks cast
upon our moral traditions. From the effects
that the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche had to the rise of atheistic,
totalitarian regimes to secularization of our political discourse, we no longer
hold the Judeo-Christian tradition with the reverence we once ascribed to it. I am not passing judgement here over any of
these effects, events, or transitions, but I want to point out the gravity of
this turn. I would claim that for most
of us, when it comes to moral questions, we don’t go first to religious sources
to determine what we consider moral and what we consider immoral. Yes, some of us do, but the majority of us
take on a more practical view than a biblical one. When one asks, for example, should I pay my
employees a living wage or should I fluff off a legitimate demand of an
employer or should I support public policy that insures health care for all our
fellow citizens, these are questions that I see most people respond to from a self-interest
point of view. While for most, God might
not be dead, His attributed admonishments about responsibilities concerning the
fate of others have become just so much background noise.
I have in this blog argued that we, through most of our
national history, transformed from a more theistic foundation – a Puritanical
foundation – to a secular perspective.
The transformation was slow, but completed in the years after World War
II. It was in those years that the
natural rights construct became our prevalent view of government and
politics. Here, the language of liberty
took dominance. With that bias, the
focus became one promoting the notion that everyone was free to determine what
beliefs and values one was to hold.
Historically, there was a bit of irony involved. When one considers what all the twentieth
century had already offered up, one would think that certain moral commitments
should have taken hold. Let’s get a
sense of this situation; Jonathan Glover[1] writes:
The problems have come from events,
the twentieth-century history of large-scale cruelty and killing is only too familiar;
the mutual slaughter of the First World War, the terror-famine of the Ukraine,
the Gulag, Auschwitz, Dresden, the Burma Railway, the Hiroshima, Vietnam, the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, Rwanda, the collapse of Yugoslavia. These names will conjure up others. Because of this history, it is (or should be)
hard for thinking about ethics to carry on just as before.[2]
Has our rejection of religious based morality, to the degree
it has happened, been a reaction to this history of misery and destruction?
I don’t have any great insight. My only observation is that our civics curriculum
that has adopted a natural rights perspective to guide its content and led to an
abandonment of any systemic moral education cannot be anymore ill advised. We cannot go back to the Puritanical days; we
are too materialistic, too diverse. But
we can study moral questions. Unlike
Nietzsche, I don’t look at our Judeo-Christian tradition as a sign of weakness
or a lack of will; I see it as the height of practicality. I also see it as very much in sync with the
basic moral claims of all the major religious traditions. I saw an interesting film recently. Focus
is a film that illustrates how con artists work. The basic technique to steal your money is to
divert your attention. There is a series
of scenes in which a small army of pick- pockets and other con men and women
make hay during Super Bowl week at the site of the big game. What I took away was that you cannot beat
them by thinking all you need to do is be conscious of where your valuables
are. You need to avoid such places or
attend but put an empty wallet in your back pocket – perhaps with a note inside
saying, “not here.” Similarly, morality
is a way to avoid the great problems in life, especially in one’s dealings with
others. Moral behavior in our social
interactions tempers the motivations of others to do us harm. One might have something someone else wants
to take, but if you treat people right, at least you are providing some
discouragement toward others taking advantage of you. More positively, you can very well encourage
conditions of coordination and cooperation.
It can lead to our federating ourselves with others.
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