Moral Fragments

Can anyone tell me where to find the anti-life and anti-choice bumper stickers? I didn’t think so. Is it not true that any discussion of morality and public policy seems quickly to devolve into shrill assertions of disputed values? As a whole, the West’s political discussion of morality seems to consist of antagonistic individuals desperately clinging to fragments of a larger worldview, and engaged in a discourse that both aspires to rational universality, and flounders amid chaotic subjectivism.

The first sign of a splintered morality is a shift from dialogue to shouting matches. Indeed, many current political thinkers demonstrate this with their astonishing ability to talk past one another. The implicit dialogue between an op-ed by Anna Bernasek of the Times (arguing the necessity of broad equality of income to social justice), and a Wall Street Journal piece calling for tax cuts to ensure free wealth-creation is about at the level of grade school name-calling. The abortion debate has somehow pitted the sanctity of a woman’s body against a child’s right to live. Marriage, President Bush insists, is “a sacred institution that is critical to the health of our society,” to which Stephanie Coontz of the Times responds, “Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age.” Just war theorists join Clausewitz in accepting the death of the few to save the many, while Wendell Berry and his followers decry any action that knowingly takes a life, despite the costs.

Each of these paralyzed arguments shares a common trait: if one only accepts the initial premises, the conclusion follows logically. If bodily self-determination is the highest good, then abortion ought to be legalized. If equality of income yields the best kind of society, America ought to create a more progressive tax system. If there is no justification for willingly taking an innocent life, America ought to stay out of all wars. We have no problem teasing out our arguments; we just can’t seem to agree on the premises.

Politicians recognize this problem, and have sought a solution in a fulfillment of Kant’s dream of a rational morality. Thus, Barack Obama has called for a policies rooted in “universal, rather than religion-specific, values,” while Hillary Clinton insisted, “I don't think this [abortion] debate should be about ideology - it should be about facts, and evidence.” Denis Kucinich went so far as to argue, “By removing the trappings of religion from our public…institutions…we actually increase the freedom of everyone to freely and openly practice the beliefs of their choice.”

However, far from having found a few “first principles” by which to define some sort of common good, American politicians consistently voice uncertainty and confusion amid the chaotic demands of conflicting moral premises. John McCain trumpets the morality of democracy-building, while John Edwards calls poverty, “the great moral issue of our time.” Even Mike Huckabee, with his remarkably well-grounded emphasis on a consistent pro-life stance that does not merely “end at the birth canal,” could only describe executing the death penalty as the most difficult part of his job as governor. In the circus of American politics, these public figures pick one or two of many issues to stand upon, demand a rational discussion, free from the local prejudices of religion, and yet find themselves with no justification for their narrowly defined morality outside their own preferential assertions. Thus, the conversation devolves quickly into finger pointing and shouting, with seemingly no way to bridge the gap between competing premises.

Historically, most cultures have taken a very different approach to morality, creating systems that could possibly overcome some of the shortcomings of American rational-assertiveness. First, nearly every major worldview has viewed morality, not as a series of distinct precepts, which could be examined and debated in isolation, but as an integral whole. Jews have Torah, the Law; the Chinese have the Tao, the Way; Hindus have Rta, or Order; Christians have the way of Jesus, and his Greatest Command, which draws all others into itself. Second, each of these cultures has developed a praxis that provides a context in which moral action and discussion can take place. Plato remarks in Book 5 of the Republic that only men whose souls had been tempered by years of “music and gymnastic” could ever be fit to discern justice. Likewise, in Hebrew Psalms, it is the Law, not reason, which provides a lamp to man’s feet; a comprehensive morality tutors a flawed rationality. Christianity seeks to create a new society rooted in sacrificial love by ordering its followers around the Eucharist, a common, egalitarian meal, commemorating the sacrifice of Christ; likewise, Muslims act out their zealous pursuit of submission to God through their five daily prayer hours. Now, these moral systems may assume different premises at the outset, but they do so with the assumption that in order to engage the worldview, one must accept it as a whole. Even further, to grasp it fully, one must first order one’s life according to its praxis, and let that shape his understanding.

In America, men commonly seek to use their reason to construct a moral system from the ground up, and the resulting creation of whim, chance, and confusion is a shabby structure indeed, fit only for housing a few moral precepts, plucked from a larger traditional system either at random, or with sinister intent. It is as though the West, which clung for centuries to the Judeo-Hellenistic worldview, delicate and beautiful as stained glass with its complex and nuanced morals informed by a richly symbolic praxis, had suddenly let the treasure crash to the ground, and shatter into a thousand fragments; America is now picking up the pieces, but finding itself bloodied by the lone shards of its disjointed morals.