What Rational Morality Is Based On

Morality, politics, and decline (part 1)

A detail from "Mankind's Eternal Dilemma—The Choice Between Virtue And Vice," 1633, by Frans Francken the Younger. Oil on panel. Musuem of Fine Arts Boston. (Public Domain)

One of the most perplexing things in our Western society to many is how morality seems to have disappeared under the umbrella of politics. It seems, for example, to matter more whether one is a Democrat or a Republican than whether one is right or wrong. For that matter, being right or wrong has become synonymous with being either a Democrat or a Republican! We, in other words, have become tribal rather than rational.

However, as English moralist and essayist Samuel Johnson observed, “He who thinks rationally thinks morally.” To think tribally—my country, my party, my family, my ideas, right or wrong—is a perversion of reason. Indeed, Dante’s whole poem “The Divine Comedy” can be said to be about the perversion of reason (the intellect) that leads to hell, damnation, and the unending misery of so much of the human condition in this life as well as the next.

Morality Is No Longer Acceptable

Morality is not really a popular topic these days; it is perhaps considered too opaque, too controversial, and most importantly by far, too judgmental. Did I say “judgmental”? As author Theodore Dalrymple, also called the “Orwell of our time,“ observed: “When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as ‘nonjudgmental.’ For them the highest form of morality is amorality.” Not surprising, then, that New York Times writer David Brooks in his article ”If It Feels Right...” talks about interviews conducted across America where “two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question [about their moral lives] or described problems that are not moral at all.”

And it’s not just young people. The key aspect of the abolition of nonjudgmentalism is linguistic. Despite the many people’s almost daily experience of good and evil, we have had over 30 years now of a consistent effort by politicians, theologians, media outlets, and the rest, to cancel the words “good” and “evil” and replace them with an anodyne of words like “unacceptable.” Vile behaviors and desires are no longer evil; they are unacceptable.

This switch, of course, relegates morality from an absolute to a social norm. And as author and psychiatrist Norman Doidge in his Foreword to Jordan B Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life,” noted: “The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.”

Cultural commentator David Brooks explains further: “When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like ‘virtue,’ ‘character,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘vice’ altogether, that doesn’t make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language. … Furthermore, the concept of sin is necessary because it is radically true.”

Abolishing Evil

"Saint Michael and the Angels at War With the Devil," 1448, by Domenico Ghirlandaio. Tempera on panel. Detroit Institute of Arts. (Public Domain)

The problem with abolishing evil—or rather, attempting to pretend it isn’t there and that it can be redefined—is that it is evil itself doing so, and this practice generates further evil. Ptahhotep, a vizier writing over 4,000 years ago, noted that instead of trying to redefine evil, we needed to stop it, for “the act of stopping evil leads to the lasting establishment of virtue.”

Stopping evil, of course, presupposes that we know what it is. When morality is based on a transcendental reality—on spiritual illumination (Buddhism), the gods (the Hammurabi code), or God himself (The Ten Commandments), we can understand evil as an opposite to the transcendental intentions. What we see from these examples of codes or laws is a massive overlap in the areas of core morality: adultery, theft, false witness, murder—to take four obvious examples—which are condemned. What the actual specifics are (the context), and what the punishments and consequences may be, might vary, but the general direction is very clear.

Sadly, stopping evil is not what politicians and many today want. As Dalrymple says in “Our Culture, What’s Left of It,” “In the psychotherapeutic worldview ... there is no evil, only victimhood.”

Nobody anymore is responsible for their actions; everyone, potentially, is in need of therapy—problem solved! This idea can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the thinkers it spawned. Marx would be a classic example, since economic factors, according to him, produced social ills not actual, real people. Ironically, as an amusing sidebar, his wife (or perhaps his mother) was alleged to have said: “I wish Karl would spend a little less time talking about capital and a little more accumulating it.”

We could add Nietzsche and Freud to the list of thinkers, each explaining human nature away as owing to some other, simplistic factor. Change the economics, become the superman, understand your dreams, and utopia will be here any day!

Visiting Your Psychiatrist

Our culture has embraced a therapeutic model rather than one based on right and wrong. From the series of colored engravings, "The Physician as God, Angel, Man, and Devil," circa early 17th century, by Johann Gelle after Egbert van Panderen. (Wellcome Images/CC BY 4.0)

The absurdity of all this becomes manifest when one considers what Dalrymple also noted in commenting on one of the most famous funerals of the late 20th century: “So universally accepted has the pathological-therapeutic approach to life become that the apostolic heir to St. Augustine—that is to say, the present Archbishop of Canterbury—offered up thanks to God at the funeral service for Princess Diana’s vulnerability, as if an appointment with a psychiatrist were man’s highest possible moral and cultural aspiration.”

If Dalrymple’s comment was perceptive then, it is 10 times more so now, since proclaiming one’s vulnerability and/or fragile mental state seems to be the sine qua non of virtue, as any cursory examination of social media will reveal. See, for example, a major article on the BBC, “How LinkedIn Is Changing and Why Some Are Not Happy,” questioning why in the last five years a major site for business contacts, LinkedIn, has turned into a sob-fest for vulnerable hearts.

What Morality Is Based On

"Moses Descends From Mount Sinai With the Ten Commandments," 1662, by Ferdinand Bol. Oil on canvas. Royal Palace of Amsterdam. (Public Domain)

But what is, then, the virtue or morality that we wish, and should be standing up for? I have mentioned its necessarily transcendent source if it is to have authority. Keep in mind here that rationality begins after one has established the relevant principles that are nonrational: Reason itself cannot be proved by reason. We have to assume that reason is rational in the first place before we invoke it.

That said, reason has specific applications to four areas of life: not committing adultery, not stealing (theft), not lying (false witness), and not killing others (murder). A clue to what we might be standing for might be found in considering what these four crimes have in common. Quite obviously, each one of them injures other human beings, but how?

I think the answer to this—from the Western perspective—is that each of these activities circumscribes the freedom of another. In reverse order, murder takes away another’s freedom to live; false witness takes away freedom of access to truth; stealing takes away freedom of access to tangible and intangible possessions; and adultery takes away the freedom of trust and intimacy with the most important person in another’s life. In other words, the key moral principle—assumption, even—that we should be standing for is freedom, our individual freedoms and the respect we maintain for the freedom of others.

Writer and newspaper columnist A.N. Wilson in his book “Dante in Love” noted similarly that “the story of Christian theology—and it could be said, the whole story of Western thought—has been an everlasting battle between determinism and some effort at declaring a belief in our freedom to make moral choices. If we are no more than the sum of our DNA, or no more than what the materialist forces of history have made us, or no more than the product of our social environment, then the courts of law—let alone Hell—are monstrous engines of injustice; for how can someone be held to account for his behavior if it is all preordained?”

Freedom is what we are fighting for, and specifically, freedom of the will.

In part 2 of this article, we will dig down a little deeper into the notion of freedom and freedom of the will, and how it is currently imperiled.