Hey Pax,
Thanks for the excellent reply and welcome to the forum.
Gosh, I hope I haven’t implied as much! In an article titled, Morality and the Churches, the British philosopher, A.C. Grayling, writes:
“…religious fundamentalists and fanatics incarcerate women, mutilate genitals, amputate hands, murder, bomb and terrorize in the name of their faith. It is a mistake to think that our own milk-and-water clerics would never conceive of doing likewise; it is not long in historical terms since Christian priests were burning people at the stake if they did not believe that wine turns to blood when a priest prays over it, and that the earth sits immovably at the universe’s centre, or – more to the present point – since they were whipping people and slitting their noses and ears for having sex outside marriage, or preaching that masturbation is worse than rape because at least the latter can result in pregnancy. To this day adulterers are stoned to death in certain Muslim countries; if the priests were still on top in the once-Christian world, who can say it would be different?”
Higher population densities simply force us to be ever more heedful of the implications of our behavior. For example, when I hike alone in the forest I’m free to walk where I please. When I walk across someone’s cow pasture I have to remember to close the gates behind me. When I walk down in the village I have to be careful not to tread across someone’s flower bed. But when I walk on a city street I must keep to the sidewalks, I have to obey the traffic lights, and I have to be careful not to bump into other pedestrians. The more people there are on the street the more careful I must be to accommodate them.
State laws typically represent only the most minimal of moral dictums. Good men live their lives so far above laws that they rarely need take heed of them.
I can’t think of a time when morality was other than of preeminent importance to humans.
Pax, I don’t understand what values we have to get back on-track? Which traditional moral values are under fire?
I’ve just finished reading, The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars, by Stephen O’Shea. This book describes the 13th century Crusades organized by Pope Innocent III against a Southern French Christian sect known as the Cathars (they called themselves, The Good Christians). Innocent’s (Jeeze, that’s rich) Crusaders placed city after city under siege, and when these cities fell their entire Christian population was often put to the sword; men, women, and children. In the city of Beziérs alone, all 20,000 inhabitants were put to death in a spree of rapine and murder.
I recently finished a book by Victor Davis Hanson titled, Carnage and Culture. Hanson begins with a narrative of the trek of ten thousand destitute Greek mercenaries (among them was Socrates’ former pupil, Xenophone) into Persia where they brought incredible carnage to the local population. They did it for money. Xenophone recorded the details of his adventure in his Anabasis. Hanson writes of the Greek mercenaries:
“They were dumbfounded by the Taochians, whose women and children jumped off the high cliffs of their village in a ritual mass suicide. They found the barbaric white-skinned Mossynoecians, who engaged in sexual intercourse openly in public, equally baffling. The Chalybians traveled with the heads of their slain opponents…”
Last year I read philosopher Jonathan Glover’s, Humanity; A Moral History of the 20th Century. It was filled with the dreadful details of Stalin’s Gulags, Hitler’s concentration camps, and Poi Pot’s Killing Fields.
Traditional values were almost uniformly awful. Every period in mankind’s recorded history is filled with similar narratives of man’s inhumanity to man. As far as I can tell, we treat each other better today than we have at any other time in our history. I don’t have to wear a sword at my waist, carry a gun across my arm, or keep a dagger in my boot. People nearly everywhere greet me with a smile and a kind word. I have, thus far, no complaints about my treatment at the hands of my fellow man. In relation to mankind’s horrific past violence I can only marvel at my good fortune to have been allowed to live a good and peaceful life.
This is a very good question Pax! I’ve considered a number of possible answers to this question over the years. A favorite answer in the past was prompted by Jean-Paul Sartre’s contention that since man is condemned to be free, the full responsibility of his actions rests alone upon his shoulders. In his Existentialism and Human Emotions, he soberly writes:
“We are alone with no excuses. Man must choose. Not to choose is also to choose…Man cannot find an omen in this world by which to orient himself, because a man will always interpret an omen to suit himself…There is a universality of man; but it is not given, it is perpetually being made. I build the universe in choosing myself.â€
Immanuel Kant calls upon our sense of duty. He asks us to appreciate that the actions of each individual combine to produce a society. Plato made a similar observation in Book Eight of his Republic:
â€Societies are not made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning scale one way or the other, determine the direction of the whole.â€
All right, I understand this much. Still I have to wonder why I shouldn’t simply let other men do the heavy lifting in creating a good society. Why not let all the other fools keep to “the straight and narrow,†while I go about exploiting their society for personal profit? When called upon to assist my neighbor at a barn-raising, why should I risk hurting my back lifting the timbers? No one could tell if I’m lifting my share of the load or if I’m actually resting on the load. As long as the wall goes up, what does it matter if I make a personal effort? Why not let the other chumps hurt their backs? A hawk among hawks starves, yet a hawk among doves will grow fat. Since most men are doves, wouldn’t I be a fool not to exploit their softness? Petty criminals and organized crime bosses alike, share this view.
While thinking of the analogy of the barn raising, I remembered that a friend told me that as a young woman she was made to study the violin. Her heart wasn’t in it though. She especially hated to practice. Unfortunately she belonged to an orchestra. A girl who sat next to her in this orchestra was in the same predicament. This girl taught my friend to lift her bow ever-so-slightly over the strings. As long as their bowing was visually convincing, since they didn’t make a sound the conductor / teacher couldn’t single them out for their poor performance. Since the overall sound of the orchestra was little diminished, what difference did it make that they were not contributing?
The thought of playing a musical instrument brought to mind a passage from another book I read titled, Reverence, by Paul Woodruff. Woodruff considers the virtue of reverence; a virtue he believes has been recently neglected. The passage from this book that comes to my mind is:
â€Why should I be reverent? If you have to ask, you are hopeless. You are like a cellist who begins to play the Bach suites, stops suddenly and asks, ‘Why should I play the right notes’?â€
Hmm…interesting. Is this a fitting analogy for one who asks, “Why should I be good� Woodruff remarks that one cannot step outside a practice that one is engaged in. One easily could play the wrong notes, but then one ceases to produce a Bach suite. Unlike my friend, we can’t go through our lives with our bow slightly lifted. As Sartre said, “Not to choose is to choose.†As long as man lives, he must choose his actions. If we play the correct notes we produce a thing of beauty. We produce a beautiful life. Should we choose to play the wrong notes, beyond the assault on the ears of others, we squander the pleasure we might have from creating a thing of beauty.
J.S. Bach once humorously said that organ playing, “…is nothing remarkable…, all one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.” Yet we’ve all heard the results of such music. Though technically correct, we often think such a performance is missing emotion. An ethical life might also be achieved by mechanically hitting the right notes at the right times. We may go though our lives never actually hitting the wrong notes, yet a life spent merely avoiding debt or prison is not one I consider particularly inspiring or beautiful. It isn’t enough that we merely abide by the law. It isn’t enough that we avoid doing harm to others. Benevolent men transcend the law and find ways to bring joy to the lives of others. Benevolent men lovingly hit the correct keys at the correct time; they play the notes with emotion, and they take joy from creating this beauty.
Michael