After reading the criticism in the comments about the length, and worse, the bloated lack of focus in this piece, I’ve decided to take it down from the front page for now. It needs editing, as Arminius said in the comments below, and it also needs more structure.
I wrote it in a rush yesterday and posted as soon as I was finished with it. I should have been less eager to see what I’d been working on for most yesterday flash up on my (and your) computer screen. It’s almost always a bad idea to post your first draft of anything this lengthy, and though I’ve gotten away with it on occasion, it’s a bad habit to get into. Hopefully this weekend I’ll have more time to give this subject the attention it deserves.
To be clear, I greatly appreciated the constructive criticism in the comments. That’s what any writer should desire: careful readers, and well considered critiques of their work. Thank you.
For anyone who didn’t read this post before I removed it from the front page, and who is interested in seeing that to which the comments in this thread refer, I’ve posted it as a diary HERE, so you can see for yourself what all the fuss was about.
Steven D
At the risk of quoting B.F. Skinner, it’s important to realize that the question of morality in public discourse is deeply intertwined with people’s deepseated concepts of control.
On the surface, it would seem straightforward to distinguish the difference between the morality of the actions of government (actions like pre-emptive war and capital punishment) But the real question is not one of morality, but control.
But ultimately, fundamentalists fear free will. They do not want the burden of having to make their own decisions, and want the authorities who make their decisions to make yours, as well. So they are not satisfied with a government which considers the morality of government actions, but also want to have their authorities make your decisions in your bedroom and your doctor’s office.
They not only want to abandon their free will, but yours as well.
Well said. I had a guy try to lecture me how, right or wrong, I needed to support the President. I lectured him right back about Jefferson and our moral imperative to oppose a regime that was acting immorally. He saw that I wasn’t going to back down and changed the subject.
First
American exceptionalism is in large part driven by religous exceptionalism. Its no coincidence that the rise of the Southern Baptists and overt exceptionalism rose in synch. Imperialism and the church will fade away when we must pay for the sins that were committed in the name of God and country. Its already happening I think.
Kevin Philips wrote about British exceptionalism in the book American Theocracy. I believe we may be the Britain of this new century. A little bit of exceptionalist thought can be a good thing. Everyone needs to have some pride in their society. A sense of self worth, its pretty much universal. We have been raised on a whole lot of exceptionalism here and we are going to pay for that hubris.
Second
On morality and altruistic behavior. I don’t understand why its considered foolish or why its ridiculed. I think it goes against the gut instinct for survival and in times of greed and hubris its looked down on. No more time to write. Just some thoughts from a stupid man who doesn’t write well.
A very thoughtful essay.
I read something yesterday which taught me that there is nothing new about this. It is Hegel’s response to the Congress of Rastatt, a peace conference between the French and German empires held between December 1797 and April 1799.
(This is of course a very Machiavellian line of thought.)
I quoted that just to suggest that we cannot expect governments to act morally. They must be pressured to do that by the public. For that you need an educated, informed public and a well functioning public sphere (the place where political and social issues are debated, consisting of the citizenry, the mass media, universities, etc.).
I think the problem you are discussing is bigger than just the Bush administration. If you have a healthy democracy, public opinion will be able to pressure the government into a certain level of morality. But our country has been turning into an empire, and as Chalmers Johnson has argued, a country cannot remain both a republic and an empire for long. In a republic, the press will adopt the standards of the public, and apply them to the government. But in an empire, the press adopts the agenda of the government. And that is what has been happening, increasingly, since the Reagan administration. When the press adopts the standards and agendas of the government, there can be no morality in political discourse.
A-fucking-men. Well said.
Oh heavens, before I went into private law practice, I spent five years as a well-regarded editor at a major publication in my area of law. Steven, you are a brilliant and wise writer, and I can’t remember that I have ever disagreed with your political positions. But you need an editor. This is much too long. It would be much more effective if you would compress the same content into one-third the space.
Blaise Pascal once famously remarked in a letter: “I’m sorry I did not have the time to make this shorter.”
Instead of a Part Two, I suggest starting over.
I’d like to see a fine-cut final draft. It is an immensely important topic.
Yes, you’re probably right.
Focus.
This is a blog entry, not a published essay. I thought it was too long, too, and originally I was going to read just the first two sections, but then when I decided to post a comment, I thought that propriety required for me to read the whole thing, if only skimming.
Can’t readers perform an editing function themselves by skimming? Shouldn’t bloggers be able to assume that their readers have the reading skill of skimming?
No, I don’t think so. A bloated piece loses the reader’s interest very quickly, whether on the printed page or on a blog.
You’re probably right. But that amounts to saying that most people are not very skilled readers. Oh well. If we had a country of skilled readers, we wouldn’t have Bush.
My thought was that since blog entries have an ephemeral quality compared to published works, it is unfair to expect the blogger to put as much time into his writing as a writer who is intending to publish. But you’re right: eliminating serious bloat wouldn’t require all that much more time.
Skimming is not a skill, it’s a bad habit encouraged — even made necessary — by faulty writing.
(This is not a comment on Steven D’s diary, merely a response to the post to which it is directly connected.)
Great post, Steven.
I think one of the reasons politicians don’t raise the issue of morality is that none of them dares cast the first stone, so to speak. Too many of them would look like hypocrites.
The other reason is they are all terrified of going up against the “system” itself. Most just don’t have the balls, to be honest.
I find it highly significant that Halliburton is the common link between Iraq and Katrina. Halliburton is the poster child for why corporations need oversight.
Your basic premise is wrong.
You write:
“Certainly there are elements of collective agreement. Murder, violence, theft, deceit — these are absolute wrongs that we all agree upon, as do most societies and religious traditions. “
All empires…a case could be made that all successful societies of ANY sort…are based upon murder, violence, theft and deceit. They are vast, crminal enterprises. Nothing more and nothing less.
There are NO areas of collective agreement in matters of this sort. There are only areas of collective doublethink.
Murder? Violence? The screams of countless slaughtered animals reverberate through the slaughterhouses of our minds, as do the equally countless screams of history’s war dead.
Theft and deceit?
The United States of America’s very existence is based on the theft of a continent from its original settlers. Its rise to power? On the deceit that allowed the few to enslave the many through force of arms and later through the forces of myth and advertising.
Please.
Once one accepts your premise…that way lies madness.
Failure.
All that we can really do is to try to moderate the evil to the best of our abilities.
Moderate it and hope that our efforts are sufficient to leave enough room for life to continue to evolve upward in some small amount through each time period.
The only way that we can succeed in doing that is to understand and accept the essential “evil” that is implicit in the need for survival in a world that is red in tooth and claw. Maybe there are other, higher planes of existence, but if there are not many of us are privy to their secrets on any kind of day-to-day basis.
I suppose that I wish it were otherwise. I certainly used to wish it were so, but perhaps I am beginning to be able to accept the reality of things as they stand.
So it goes.
Fight on, and accept every day as a good day to die.
That is the best that I can come up with.
Peace.
It’s what’s for dinner.
AG
Dubya and his posse have reigned in this country with about as much legitimacy as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and just about as effectively. The parallels between Katrina and the Managua earthquake and their respective aftermaths will smack you on your forehead when one considers them. Dubya clearly favors a repressive regime to quell the reaction to the nepotism, corruption and incompetence. Where do we go from here?
This discussion of how morality fits in to political debate and conduct of policy is one that fascinates me and which I plan to write a lot about.
It is difficult to address, on so many levels, and this isn’t the place to sort out the issues. But maybe just to enumerate a few:
I think and think and think about this, and I can’t come up with any scenario where a society works if individuals aren’t committed to a certain morality. It has to be very broad and basic, but we have to get people on board for the keystones: tolerance, compassion, honesty. It might be a lot to ask, maybe unrealistic, but isn’t there an old saying about shooting for the stars and you might reach the moon?