Or rather, our moral disorder lies outside of us because we inhabit morally disordered human communities. But let me start from a ways back…
Recently, I posted an article about some hormonal matters which work from our insides to shape our personality characteristics — The Resurrected Will Need to Be Flooded With Oxytocin and Vasopresin. By the end of that article, I was qualifying the insight to consider external matters, especially those involving communal matters, such as the way we educate our youth, even the general way we treat youth.
In fact, as Gerd Gigerenzer showed in his important book Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World, much of our knowledge is in the environments around us. In a sense, those environments do some of our thinking. I wrote a series of review articles to discuss some aspects of Gigerenzer’s findings and his insights into those findings. The interested reader can find them at:
What is true of knowledge in our general environments, human as well as the landscape, is true of moral knowledge in particular. This doesn’t mean our insides are of little importance. We need a highly developed human intelligence to respond properly to the knowledge contained in our environments. When we respond to the moral knowledge contained in our environments, we need that highly developed intelligence and also some specific personality traits such as the social traits correlated with flows of oxytocin and vasopresin. Still, we can only respond to what’s there to respond to, as Yogi Berra might have said.
We shape our own selves to respond to our actual human communities. There are those, natural-born explorers and culture-spanning merchants, who can somehow develop multiple groups of behaviors so that they can behave properly in London today and in Mumbai tomorrow. Those more flexible men and women are few and probably they would be few even if more of us had the opportunity to try and develop that flexibility.
Our moral habits are necessarily practiced responses to particular events in our environments, even if some are able to carry multiple sets of such habits. Few of us do much thinking about such responses so long as our environments meet our needs and some of our desires, so long as those environments are relatively stable, and so long as our moral habits are appropriate for those environments.
Once upon a time, we knew how to do business with the grocer down the street. We knew how to speak to our doctor and to our religious leaders. We knew how to treat a lawyer who seemed to have grown inordinately rich while handling the estates of wealthy widows. When we gave to local charities, we knew those who were distributing the funds and who were receiving those funds. We were able to assume our government was acting largely in the interests of the spectrum of citizens of various levels of wealth and political awareness, though it was partially under the control of shady political machines.
Were all of the items in the previous paragraph always true? No. Did we understand the imperfections of all men. Did we understand those particular vices to which the ambitious are prone? I think we did to some extent and we may have actually increased our problems with such ambitious men, and now — women, by being overly cynical and overly abusive in our language towards those anti-social leaders without doing something about their abuses of power. During the 1960s and later decades, it wasn’t so unusual for those anxious to conform to the role of well-behaved citizens obedient to their government (the new and true definition of patriotism) to speak in downright nasty terms about these men they let run amok in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. But they did nothing about those crimes.
I don’t accept the idea that the 1960s were the dacade when the breakdown in American moral structures began. I think it was more of a period when a lot of men and women and even children were forced to become a bit more honest that something in their communal environments had decayed. My observations, at least as reorganized in recent years, indicate that Americans in my parents’ generation (born after WWI) had already began to walk away from their responsibilities to the human communities, including extended families, which had provided some stable moral structure to American life. They said families were good but only accepted those obligations which pleased them and their idea of their family included only those family members who met some expectations.
This isn’t to say that this country was ever in truly good moral condition — see my discussions in My Ends are Mad and Now I’m Also Stupid, The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding, and As the Ruins Crumble… for a rather brutal assessment of the moral status of the American character.
In Moby Dick, Melville wrote of Americans as being in rebellion against God — we really don’t like all the constraints He has placed upon us. We feel we should be able to pick and choose which communal ties we’ll keep though we assume our children and others in their generation will live up to what we feel their duties are towards us.
I agree with Melville. Our laziness and self-centeredness is true to our natural tendencies but that’s the problem. Freed from the traditional moral structures which held in Europe in prior centuries, Americans proved to desire the materialistic rewards of good moral order but haven’t shown the moral responsibility necessary to maintain that moral order, or build new versions of it, in a New World. We proved ourselves to be somewhat primitive human animals without the proper attitudes to build a new civilization or even to retain what little of European civilization might have been brought to North America.
The men and women of our age aren’t evil. They haven’t been corrupted by Satan. Nearly all of them do have to live in morally disordered communities which give them, at best, mixed messages. Yet, we should realize our parents and their parents built the primitive and morally disordered communities we lived in when young and we continue their work…
We build without love or devotion and long for our vacations so we can go to Florida or some Caribbean island. And, yet, as individuals, we are partially excused by our sheep-like natures and the sad state of the communities we inhabit. There is no strict cause-and-effect relationship which convicts us of first-degree murder of our communities but we are certainly guilty of community-slaughter. And we are also our victims and the victims of our parents’ and grandparents’ moral irresponsibility.
I’m trying to develop concepts and words to better speak of these problems which aren’t the moral problems of pre-modern man, despite what some half-blind conservatives think. Nor is there anything which has happened in the growth of our material wealth and power which has brought with it any technical solutions to our problems of forming good communities and living good lives as some half-blind liberals or progressives believe.
The sheer growth in human population and the intermingling of those from radically different cultures have brought enough confusion and disorder to account for much of our situation. We have entered a New Age and we’re passing through a period where the answers will likely come from human experimentation in new ways of living and from the analyses of those who are a strange mixture of the radical and the reactionary. We need new answers but we need to restore some of the good characteristics of human communities which existed before television brought the entire globe into our living-room and so many human beings went out into that globe to do little more than dissipate whatever moral character they might have had as village-bound craftsmen and farm-bound mule-breeders.
I’m not really pessimistic — in the long term. In The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega Y Gasset told us the growth in prosperity and changes in attitude freed men from parochial lives but only tainted good had come of that release from restrictively local lives. The leaders of the West failed to even try hard at fulfilling their duties to teach the wisdom of the West to these masses or to help them to mature into morally well-ordered adults in this radically new historical situation. Few, if any, leaders rose from the masses themselves to try to develop the sorts of moral characters and minds which could bring about moral order in the new communities which were growing up willy-nilly.
God’s story moves forward. The Body of Christ is forming slowly by painful processes. Some legitimate organs, such as the American government, have decayed into cancers or parasitic organisms preying upon the greater body. The human race which is the mortal stuff of that Body is only reluctantly, and under great pressure, accepting the need to mature and to grow into something not yet seen. We will move forward along with God’s story. What choice have we?
I am pessimistic in the short time. We’ve shown no willingness to respond properly on our own to our new environments in this world of huge human populations and advanced technology. We’ll be forced to respond. We’ll be shaped by saws and chisels and files. It will be ugly and painful.