Some time ago, I offered to hold a talk entitled “The Eclipse of Morality” in one of the clubs in The Villages, and I was promptly informed that the word “morality” would not be welcomed by the group. I subsequently changed the title and held the talk as planned, but I was surprised that the word “morality” was offensive to so many. When I listen to the diction of my contemporaries, it seems to me that the word “morality” should be far down the list of offensive expressions. We have apparently developed a society in which sex, violence, corruption, torture etc. can be discussed in any context and yet a society in which morality is a taboo topic. So I will try to limit as much as possible my use of the word “morality” in this piece; I will speak rather about values, it being understood that these are (moral) values. Hopefully, bracketing out the adjective will appease those offended by the “m” word!
We seem to be living in a period in which the values of conservatives and the values of liberals are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile. Therefore in trying to think through this problem, I decided to catalogue the values of each group. Since my original title “The Eclipse of Morality” conjured up visions of William Bennett in the mind of my prospective audience, I turned to Mr. Bennett’s best-selling publication The Book of Virtues in search of conservative values. Therein, the former Secretary of Education relates numerous stories in which the following virtues are exemplified: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty and faith. Since these are supposed to be traditional values, I compared them with the most common list of classical virtues: justice, temperance, courage and wisdom. Unfortunately, this exercise proved troubling to me at several points. First of all, I was disturbed by Mr. Bennett’s conflation of (moral) values and religion. Traditionally, faith was considered to be a religious virtue, whereas justice, temperance, courage and wisdom were virtues that could be cultivated without faith. Even more disturbing, however, is the absence of the central virtue justice. Justice was not only the central ethical value of classical Greek philosophy, but it also played a pivotal role in the theology of the Middle Ages. In general, I have the impression that Mr. Bennett was less interested in interpreting traditional virtues than in providing a corrective to the current situation in America–in his words “a kind of antidote to some of the distortions of the age in which we now live”. Bearing in mind that he wrote this book for the benefit of young people and that it may have limited value in this context, I find it inadequate as an exposition of traditional values. In short, his attempt at expounding virtues is too reactionary and too narrow in scope to provide a fruitful basis for dialogue.
Turning to the liberals, I fully expected to find profound statements on the value, if not the virtue, of justice, but my search for values was no more rewarding among the liberals than among conservatives. To be sure, one often hears the phrase “social justice”, but oddly enough, there is not much talk about values–at least, not in recent decades. The old liberals like John Dewey wrote unashamedly about morality and moral values; one thinks, for instance, of his book Theory of the Moral Life (1908). But the 1960s changed the character of liberalism dramatically. The liberalism of John Stuart Mill in England and of John Dewey in the US was oriented from the outset toward the betterment of secular society, but it was not anti-religious and certainly not anti-moral. The liberal movement of the 1960s was truly revolutionary inasmuch as it received fundamental impulses from the neo-Marxist school of Frankfurt, Germany. As a result, religion and morality were effectively eliminated from the liberal mind. The classic document of this period was the “Port Huron Statement of the Students of a Democratic Society” (1962), and in this radical manifesto, the phrase “moral values” never occurs. In place of “moral values”, we find an emphasis on human potentialities that include self-cultivation and self-direction, and in place of a religious faith, we find a faith in the ability of human beings to create a better society. Following Marx, who himself would not even criticize capitalism on moral grounds, the students replaced religion and morality with psychology and sociology. In my opinion, there is much to be gained by seriously considering the vision of society that the liberals of the 1960s developed, but the vision of these liberals was unsustainable because they had no values, i.e. no (moral) values that would allow a prioritizing of goals. The history of the last 40 years has made it quite clear that liberals have been just as content promoting same-sex marriage as they would have been promoting a more equitable distribution of wealth, with no apparent realization that the suffering of poverty was the more urgent issue. Liberals have a vision of society, but no hierarchy of values to guide them.
In view of the fact that conservative values are too narrow and that liberal values are virtually non-existent, it is no wonder that most Americans are confused about the notions of right and wrong. The result has been catastrophic: We allow the media to determine our values, and we allow the Supreme Court to transform these values into civil rights.
Villager Jack Brush is a frequent contributor to Villages-News.com
