The Good Life: The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World

The Good Life

The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World

Cheryl Mendelson

For Edward

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Moral Geography

Chapter 2: Democracy, the Moral Psychology, and the Moral Individual

Chapter 3: Premoral and Moral Culture

Chapter 4: Two Forms of Antimoralism

Chapter 5: Love and Money: The Contracting Role of the Family

Chapter 6: Moral Reform and Pseudomoralism

Chapter 7: Cool

Chapter 8: Vengeance and the Erosion of Law

Chapter 9: The Academy

Chapter 10: Science and Morality

I. The Tough-Minded Science of Morality

II. The Tender-Minded Science of Morality

III. The Marriage of Science and Philosophy

Afterword: Moral Disagreement and Moral Truth

Acknowledgments

Footnotes

About the Author

By the Same Author

Introduction

This is a book about the moral mentality, a distinctive mind-set that underlies key elements of Western culture and much of modern world culture. It concentrates on aspects of this mentality that, I believe, particularly need attention today and shows how they fit into a larger picture that I have drawn here only in outline. The subject could fill a much longer book, in fact whole shelves of books, but a short one works best to present the big picture that it strives for.

Its subject is a dauntingly difficult one. The very word moral has multiple ambiguities, and its several meanings open out into vast complexes of thought, feeling, and action. It can be legitimately approached from scores of different angles and levels, yet because it is highly charged, unfamiliar approaches often inspire fury, condescension, or offense. Morality interweaves reason, knowledge, instinct, intuition, and emotion in an intricate network of personal, historical, and cultural patterns. Books and essays about morality thus often seem guilty of overemphases and underemphases. The nature of moral concern itself acts as an obstacle to adequate descriptions of it outside those in novels and poems. Moral concern ordinarily functions as a dimension or a valence of thought, not as its focus. Thus any head-on approach to the subject tends to sound slightly false or off simply because it forces us to center attention on things that properly form part of the receding background of consciousness.

But perhaps the biggest problem for any contemporary writer about morality is that decades of contention about values have resulted in such a thorough politicization of the subject that the term itself suggests a variety of unpleasant political subtexts. How this has happened, and why it must be undone, is a central theme of this book. But given that the political Right has now falsely claimed morality as its turf, the reader might find it useful at the outset to know that I have always favored labor unions, strong regulation of business and finance, universal healthcare, abortion rights, sexual and racial equality, and gay rights, and that I oppose the death penalty and most military adventures; however, in matters of private and family life, some of my views lean in directions that tend, often misleadingly, to be labeled conservative.

This book is written for people who have the moral mentality, and it describes things they are already familiar with: how they themselves think, feel, and act; the increasingly strong antagonism to morality, or antimoralism, in our culture; the false moral pretensions of ideologues who are actually pseudomoral and antimoral. It is a book about the obvious addressed to the convinced. But when denials of the obvious are loud enough, a book like this has its place.

The book is not neutral. It presents a sketch of some of the things that morality is in both its personal and social dimensions, but it does so for moral purposes. Thus it offers a morally charged description of phenomena that historians, sociologists, biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, neurologists, and other experts, all in their own ways, attempt to describe factually and noncommittally. This book, that is, tries to isolate some characteristics, strengths, and vulnerabilities of moral thinking and acting that matter now morally.

The subject matter will raise in readers’ minds the questions of who on earth could be qualified to write such a book and why it got written. These are legitimate questions, and the only possible answers are not reassuring. As a work of moral observation, this book is necessarily an amateur work for the reason that there is no such thing as a moral expert—no holy men or women, no seers, no scientists, scholars, or philosophers who by virtue of their professions know the right answers. No academic training exists that produces wisdom or goodness in its students; the best moral judges are certified by no boards and pass no qualifying exams. Knowledge and intelligence are sometimes vital to good moral judgment, but if the question is moral, the boundaries of the answer are always going to be wide, fluid, and human, not narrow or technical. Morally speaking, once we are adults, we are rarely justified in setting aside the responsibility to judge for ourselves and relying instead on what some trained or blessed individual tells us is right. The people we rely on for advice when we are troubled and uncertain are merely other people like ourselves on whom circumstance, upbringing, moral effort, or experience may have bestowed insight—insight that they may or may not be able to put to use in their own lives. Moral judgment always addresses the question What should I do? but sometimes good judgment fails to lead to good action.

This is a work of moral reflection—an essay, not an empirical study—but it is not a book of moral advice except in an attenuated sense. To write it, I had to overcome a sense of my own limits, moral and otherwise, and I managed to do so only because wiser people than I persuaded me that many readers would find the ideas in it helpful and encouraging. Its themes have been a lifelong preoccupation, inspired by events that rendered its questions a matter of urgent interest and provided unusual personal and academic opportunities to grapple with them. I will give a nutshell account of these events here because moral reflection draws upon the whole person in ways that mathematics, physics, or carpentry do not, and readers are entitled to ask who is talking.

THE ROOTS OF this book extend back to three dislocations in my life, one in adolescence, another in my first professional career as an academic, and another in my second professional career as a lawyer. I spent my childhood on a small farm in the Appalachian southwest corner of Pennsylvania. The closest big town, Morgantown, West Virginia, was about thirty miles south. This was a world of hills, coal-mining towns, and farms, with an odd mixture of people, some of them early-twentieth-century immigrants who came to work the mines and some men like my father, descendants of the first settlers in the region, borderlanders, as historians call them now, from southern Scotland and northern Ireland and England who arrived in the 1760s. These people took part in some of the fiercest, cruelest fighting of the American Indian Wars and were hot-blooded Revolutionaries. When the Revolutionary War ended, they launched the Whiskey Rebellion. Later, they were eager participants in each of the nation’s wars. They were always wholehearted fighters, with contempt for Quakerish pacifism. Yet, like the Quakers, they had the special psychology that I call the moral mentality, with the special moral capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism.

Many people in my childhood world spent their lives in what amounted to a moral quest. This was not something they talked about or, I imagine, consciously thought of, and it rarely assumed any heroic form. Nonetheless, they attempted to shape their lives by strongly felt moral imperatives, even if they avoided churches and even if they were not models of sober respectability. Envy, drunkenness, lust, dishonesty, and general crankiness were often more visible than uprightness. Even so, their lives had a moral substrate that gave them a characteristic outlook and led them to regard wealth, fame, and power as illegitimate, though tempting, goals. Sometimes these attitudes flowed out of resentment, but mostly they emerged from a strong egalitarian instinct that their moral sensibility dictated.

This sensibility led them to turn up their noses at the cultural prizes depicted on television and to scorn the colleges and jobs and lives they saw there. Their young people were discouraged from donning gray flannel suits and climbing corporate career ladders. Knowledge and brains were respected, but most of all in people who had read and educated themselves. Except for a boy or two who went off to learn medicine or law, or a girl to learn some music, they preferred to keep their children home. Their teachers were trained in the local college or other small regional schools.

Old county families not uncommonly raised their boys to think of a job, any job, as a bad thing. Of course, a man was expected to work and support his family, but he should not have a boss if he could help it; he should be his own boss. All authorities—politicians, doctors, lawyers, and especially preachers—were to be mistrusted and should get no more respect or higher status than anyone else did. That’s just a man, my father used to say. He also taught his children that most preachers were crooked, among other reasons because they encouraged people to take stories in the Bible literally. He made a special point of making me understand that the biblical account of the rainbow as a sign of God’s promise not to flood us again was just a tale, though with a good moral, and he showed me what happened when light passed through a prism.

In the 1960s, the world that I grew up in succumbed to a variety of blows—mine closings, farm failures, emigration, and the homogenizing power of television—but it had been an anachronism long before then. It had lasted two centuries. At thirteen, I was just old enough to have been thoroughly enculturated before it crumbled. My siblings and I were mystified by the lives of the rich children we saw on television. Our games, houses, school, and play were nothing like theirs. I had gone to a church in whose yard my eighteenth-century ancestors were buried. I recited the same jump-rope rhymes as my great-grandmother, knitted with the same overhand motion, and sewed a gored skirt on her treadle machine. On television, grown men came to blows only in westerns and crime shows, but I knew that my father, with my uncles standing behind him, had punched a man for publicly insulting him—hard enough to knock him off his feet and leave him half-conscious. In my world, my parents, who recited poetry to each other and on winter nights read Pilgrim’s Progress and David Copperfield aloud to their children, were not unusual in having married at seventeen and having had their first four children before they were twenty-five. When we left the county, at thirteen, I, too, expected in four or five years to be married and a mother.

From that world and those expectations, I moved almost overnight to the high-tech suburban world of central and coastal Florida that was later described vividly by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. The shock was severe. I was in the same country and spoke the same language, but all the social signposts had been torn down. Florida in the sixties was undergoing a massive influx of newcomers. Cape Canaveral and NASA brought to the region astronauts, scientists, engineers, and air force and army personnel, and they in turn created a boom economy that drew huge numbers of distressed people looking for work, sun, beaches, and better lives. Florida became a society of strangers.

The thrill of the space program and the heated economy created an excitement that was more dark and desperate than hopeful and high-spirited. It was a rootless, lonely time and place. The high school students I was thrown in with were cool in a way that even television had not led me to expect. Misbehavior I had seen plenty of, but open commitment to it was something surprising. The egalitarian, antiauthoritarian attitudes I had absorbed at home were absent; money and status were openly worshipped and the poor viewed as inferior and misbehaving. On average, my classmates seemed to me to be rich; they took it for granted that they would go to college. I, of course, assumed that I would not, even though I did well in school. The outdated, demanding curriculum in our country school back home, it turned out, had given my siblings and me a good preparation. I won a scholarship and went to college after all, over my father’s objections.

A chasm began to open between me and my family after I graduated from the University of Florida, and I widened that chasm by going to graduate school at the University of Rochester. There I studied philosophy with an emphasis on ethics. The further down the academic road I went, the more incomprehensible my life seemed to my parents, who began to mourn the loss of their children along with their world. I, on the other hand, found a sort of kindred in the academy, where I met many people whose strong sense of moral vocation was familiar and comfortable. I did not connect my interest in moral philosophy or my attraction to the academy with this personal sense of comfort, but in retrospect I saw that they came from the same source.

Nonetheless, I could not think of the moral life or moral philosophy in the ways my colleagues did. Dissatisfied with the indifference of professional philosophy to the cultural and psychological determinants of moral thinking, in graduate school I began to read history, anthropology, psychology, and psychoanalytic theory. It seemed to me that, on the one hand, philosophers were alone in insisting on taking the moral life on its own terms, but that, on the other, this very respect confused their efforts to understand it. With my professors’ encouragement, I ignored these doubts and joined the philosophy department at Purdue University, hoping that independence would end my qualms. In fact, it increased them, and I soon had to admit that I had taken a misstep. Despite my degrees, I thought that I did not know what I needed to know, and I accused myself of doing a disservice to my students by teaching material that I regarded as mostly empty. I left the university, hoping to write and pursue independent study and someday to return.

With the idea in mind that law would supply an empirical approach to the moral life and the moral mind, while also making it possible for me to support myself while continuing my work, I entered Harvard Law School. Once again I found myself in a world that seemed skewed and opaque. I had expected a second dip into the academy, but this was different—and not a little disturbing. While studying law, I continued to write on academic moral philosophy and published in academic journals, but after I graduated, my philosophical writing stopped. I began practicing law, starting out at what was called a white shoe firm—that is, one founded and still, in the 1980s, dominated by Ivy League–educated WASP gentlemen, though Jews, Catholics, women, and blacks were beginning to appear among the partners. I chose the firm for its reputation as a generous supporter of pro bono work, for its tolerance for odd career paths, and for attracting lawyers who wrote novels, took sabbaticals to pursue other interests, and were upright and uncompromising.

Until that time, I had encountered only in novels the world of the Harvard and Yale clubs, Park Avenue, and country houses. But the firm’s older generation were welcoming and generous, despite the fact that I was in so many ways an unlikely addition to the firm. I was struck by their self-conscious and confident moral approach to their profession. They encouraged candid debates about professional ethics and took seriously their obligation to teach high standards to young lawyers. Even if I sometimes thought their ethical aspirations fell short, I admired their sharp sense of justice and their fluent and courageous response when someone outraged it. I began to think that I shared more common ground with these elders of the firm than with many lawyers my age and younger, whose narrower and at times more cynical ways of thinking about the practice of law I had already encountered in law school.

I now lived in Manhattan’s melting pot, and the first of its many subsocieties that I encountered, through my job, was its Upper East Side. These were the years of the hot Reagan economy, and this Manhattan world was increasingly dominated by newly rich people who openly rejoiced in their wealth and status, openly disdained those poorer and less successful than themselves, openly voiced what were to me outrageous claims of entitlement, and openly justified their privileges as simply what their personal superiority merited. These attitudes have frequently been described and skewered—more potently than I ever could. I mention them here merely because it was an extraordinary experience to encounter them in the flesh, and had I not done so, I would probably never have believed in my heart that such people really existed.

But Manhattan had many other worlds, and I eventually found my way to a number of them. Among the musicians, scholars, doctors, psychoanalysts, social workers, writers, teachers, and others I met there, many obviously shared the squarish moral mentality that I had seen in remote Appalachia, in the academy, and in sophisticated white-shoe law firms, even though none of these new friends came from any of those places. Indeed, they came from all over the country and all over the world. This mentality, so immediately recognizable and warmly familiar, transcended the ordinary social divides of class, religion, race, education, and nationality and created unexpected common ground. Individuals sometimes seemed to invent it for themselves, but cultures sometimes seemed to breed people up in it as effectively as it trained them in their native languages. It was cultivated by subgroups in all the world religions, though all those religions also seemed to harbor antimoral contingents.

I did not stick with the practice of law, which never allowed enough time for reading and writing. In the early 1990s, I worked out an accommodation with the academy and professional philosophy and taught occasional courses in philosophy and the philosophy of law at Columbia and Barnard. The rest of the time, I studied and wrote in ways that approached my subject from various tentative and oblique angles. Finally, in this book, for the first time since my law school days, I feel bold enough to address the subject directly—not in a scholarly work, though it will be obvious how deeply I am indebted to many scholarly thinkers. Instead this is something shorter, more polemical, and more direct.

THIS BOOK ENDORSES several views that are often mistakenly regarded as inconsistent. It claims that a system of value that is characteristically and historically Western, one that depends on a specific, typically Western psychology, is in a meaningful way a universal system of values despite its local origins. It also recognizes that these values and this psychology sometimes arise independently outside the West, in individuals, religious groups, and a variety of subsocieties. It defends morality yet deplores the politics and theories of today’s rightists, who have claimed the word for themselves, and regards their ideas and the kinds of religion that support those ideas as antimoral. Taken one by one, none of these views is unusual, but their combination has become uncommon. Together, I hope, they express a coherent moral framework, one that is, on the one hand, tolerant, respectful, and embracing and, on the other, free of the double-talk and concealed self-justifications of moral relativism.

The last chapters of this book look at some of the ways the academy has failed in its historic moral mission, but they address in any detail only the kinds of academic moral studies that popular media now disseminate to the general reading public. Today, media attention focuses no longer on the social sciences but on evolutionary science, not only on biology but also on the subdisciplines of neurology, psychology, and philosophy that explore the implications of evolutionary science.

Unfortunately, insofar as the book argues that the moral value system and the moral psychology¹ are in decline, with ominous consequences, it may seem to dovetail with the many varieties of nostalgia that are today so tempting. Moral nostalgia is a serious error, with serious consequences. For one thing, it is not true that people used to be better in the past than now or that our way of life was better in some lost world. Such ideas lead to futile, cruel, and destructive forms of conservatism that try to mend the present by constructing a fantasy version of the past—complete with home-abiding women, unregulated corporations, subservient minorities, and closeted gays. What is true is that there are reasons to think that earlier social and economic conditions in the United States may have supported a somewhat greater proportion of moral-minded individuals in the population and that these individuals often had far more social and political influence, relative to their numbers, than today.

The moral mind nonetheless continues to evolve and now understands many moral questions in better ways than anyone understood them before. Though today there may be a smaller percentage of people with a moral outlook, wielding ever less power and influence, in many ways they tend to surpass their predecessors—especially in merciful understanding and in the largeness and inclusiveness of their moral perspective. Meanwhile, like their predecessors, they are dogged, patient, kind, and driven by the kind of courage that springs from conviction and refuses to take immoral means toward moral ends. It is a great handicap to them that they so often fail to recognize one another and that, misled by the hostile attitudes toward the moral mentality that today are so common and that feed so much false theory and false moralizing, they often do not understand themselves.

THE MORAL MENTALITY went through a great shift in the twentieth century. In the first half to two thirds of that century, the dominant moral attitudes were those of people who were born before or during the world wars and fought those wars. The 1970s were a crucial period of transition when influence began to flow to their children and grandchildren, opening a deep generational divide, not only in moral thinking but in dress, taste in music and art, political ideas, and social demeanor. That transition is now mostly completed.

In matters of morality, generational division is less pronounced today than it has been in nearly a century. The painful conflicts in moral, social, and political opinions, and in taste—in books, music, film—that estranged the postwar children from their parents are now muted, and the jarring disparities in codes of conduct have diminished or disappeared entirely. People today divide not along generational lines but along ethnic, cultural, religious, and class lines. Some are so strongly united in these ways that they function almost as members of tribes, with quasi-tribal loyalties and suspicion of outsiders and their ideas. Most important, people today divide along the fault line that separates what I call premoral and moral mentalities, and that line cuts across all the others. On the premoral side of this line, antimoral fervor has developed that now fuels attacks on fundamental moral ideas and presents antimoral values as true and traditional, or sophisticated and advanced, or even scientifically valid.

The evolving moral outlook in the premillennium decades came under criticism not only from antimoralists but from the elders whose moral ideas it challenged. Some of them insisted that it rationalized passivity, that it selfishly withdrew from social obligations into private life and disregarded others’ needs. These criticisms occasionally hit the mark, but more often they missed. The new attitudes were not so much indifferent as realistic; the turn inward was a strong moral imperative. Toward the end of the twentieth century, people were called on to sort through the debris of the postwar past—to parse a host of dangerous ideologies, a dozen varieties of corrupted moralism and religion, and ever-increasing hostility to the moral mentality itself erupting from many different sources. At the same time, they