The Way
We Live Now
Morality and
freedom are related terms. It is impossible to conceive of a being
who lacks freedom but also wonders what is the right thing to
do. And what would moral freedom mean without competing moral
choices? A free being without a moral dimension would be a bizarre
beast. That is why the Christian tradition, as well as the classical
pagan thinkers and all genuine human civilizations, have exerted
a great deal of energy in trying to understand how to use these
two great human gifts.
Much hinges
on how we conceive of moral freedom. The ancients’ way was to
examine what ordinary people said about right and wrong. Plato
wrote about disputes among the Athenians, and Aristotle famously
investigated the meaning of everyday terms. Even St. Augustine
and St. Thomas Aquinas often began with commonplaces before moving
on to higher thinking. All these philosophers came to the conclusion
that freedom allows us to detect, but not to invent, the principles
of good behavior—and to choose whether to follow them.
Alan Wolfe
is not a philosopher but a sociologist who, although a non-Catholic,
directs Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American
Public Life. In his 1998 book One Nation, After All (Viking
Press), he purported to find a good deal of agreement among Americans
on values, except on the issue of homosexuality, where gays and
the majority of other Americans remained at loggerheads.
In his latest
book, Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice
(Norton, 2001), Wolfe digs deeper into the issue of what Americans
say they think is right and what we are to make of it. (Oddly,
the book’s cover and its title page have different subtitles,
the latter reflecting more accurately its contents: The Impossible
Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now.)
itap0 The
"impossible idea" of moral freedom, he argues, stems
from Arminianism, a Protestant theology that supplanted the stern
Calvinism of early America during the Second Great Awakening of
the 19th century. Arminians (and now, most Americans) believe
in God’s sovereignty but not in the inherent wickedness of human
beings (as do Calvinists). "Americans may be among the most
religious people in the world," Wolfe writes, "but they
are also among the least theological, and the theology they particularly
dislike is one that takes a dim view of human nature."
Wolfe came
to this conclusion after traveling to eight different parts of
the country, all chosen to allow him to interview people who would
provide a spectrum of views on morality: from the gay Castro district
in San Francisco to ethnic Fall River, Massachusetts; from traditional
communities in the South and Midwest to freewheeling Silicon Valley.
His interviewees all confirm a public mood these days that is
so nonjudgmental and so ad hoc in its morals that it is difficult
to say whether we Americans have any common principles other than
tolerance and niceness. Indeed, Paul Richard, a fisherman in Fall
River, sounds a common note: "I don’t think anybody is better
than anyone else. I really don’t."
The usual
objection to such sentiments, of course, is that they give you
no way to distinguish between Hitler and Mother Teresa. Though
Wolfe’s interviewees express ultra-toleration at one moment, they
often contradict themselves the next. Richard, for example, believes
in capital punishment for serious crimes, but he still does not
want to judge how most people choose to live.
That nonjudgmental
and self-contradictory stance plays out across many issues. Gays
aside, Americans believe in sexual fidelity—but not to the point
that it hampers personal growth. And we value loyalty, although
Wolfe notes the rise of "post-loyalists" who have had
bad experiences with politics and the marketplace. We waver between
the recognition that self-control is necessary (again, as long
as it does not hem in the self) and a belief that it’s OK to let
yourself go. And honesty is also a good thing, as long as you
don’t overdo it. Both Wolfe and his subjects tend to believe—mistakenly—that
the old moralities were rigid and unnuanced, and that the new
ones are flexible and responsive to modern complexities.
Wolfe devotes
an entire chapter of Moral Freedom to examining Americans’
beliefs about forgiveness, which, as he rightly points out, is
one of the central contributions of Christianity to moral discourse
but is now the "forgotten virtue." But forgiveness,
too, has been modified in recent years into a sort of therapeutic
practice in which holding on to hurts is considered damaging to
the self and therefore better abandoned—for reasons of self-interest,
not charity.
Wolfe specifically
pressed his respondents to answer questions about how they think
forgiveness relates to such issues as capital punishment. Curiously,
Wolfe, who was largely trained as a political scientist, fails
to give full weight to the difference between personal forgiveness
and political judgment. The family of one of Timothy McVeigh’s
victims, for instance, might choose to forgive him, but it would
be quite a different matter for a whole nation to short-circuit
the judicial process that protects the social order and let someone
like McVeigh escape all punishment.
Wolfe is familiar
with various earlier moral theories, from the classics to Christianity
to Kant and John Rawls. He tries to be fair in discussing the
ethical currents from earlier eras that still jostle one another
in the minds of modern Americans. But at the end of the day, he
appears to succumb to the characteristic sociological weakness
of mistaking what is for what ought to be. It is difficult not
to detect a note of enthusiasm in certain assertions of his such
as: "The old adage that America is a free country has, at
last, come true, for Americans have come to accept the relevance
of individual freedom, not only in their economic and political
life, but in their moral life as well."
Wolfe understands
that the price to be paid for this sort of freedom is the moral
chaos that we see around us daily, and he is troubled by it. At
one point, he cites approvingly Princeton University professor
Robert P. George’s statement that not taking others’ behavior
seriously may be a form of condescension. Wolfe excuses this live-and-let-live
attitude, however, as an attempt to negotiate between our principles
and our belief in liberty and equality. We may demand too much
moral freedom, he allows, but since institutions—of government,
church, and community—are no longer regarded as authorities but
simply as external limits on self-fulfillment, they do not answer
our current needs, which are somehow more complex than they were
in the past. So we do have a moral majority in America, Wolfe
concludes, but "it just happens to be one that wants to make
up its own mind."
Wolfe suggests,
with some trepidation, that this sorry development may be a logical
outgrowth of the economic freedom first posited by Adam Smith
and the political freedom inherent in modern democracy. But the
parallel does not really hold. Economics and politics have greatly
benefited from today’s enlargement of freedom. Morality, by its
very nature, does not seem to belong in the same category, since
we have freedom to discover what should bind us. It is certainly
true that many of our fellow citizens no longer want to accept
moral bonds. For them, true moral freedom—the willing acceptance
of moral limitations on action—may indeed be impossible.
But the no-holds-barred
version of moral freedom that Wolfe describes and weakly admires
is an experiment on which the American people seem determined
to embark. Judging by the results so far, this particular experiment
may present even more challenges to society than cloning or genetic
engineering.
Robert Royal is president of the
Faith and Reason Institute.
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