Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heaves above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
David Brooks in an essay this week in the Atlantic explains why he resists becoming a Democrat:
The final quality keeping me from fully casting my lot with Blue World is, to borrow from the title of the classic book by the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, its Culture of Narcissism. In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical.
According to this way of thinking, people are most likely to thrive and act wisely when they are formed by a moral and social order. In the absence of one, they are likely to act selfish and shortsighted. This is why conservatives spend a lot of time worrying about the cohesion of families, the health of the social order, and the coherence of the moral community; we need these primeval commitments and moral guardrails to help us lead good lives.
Ok–agreed, but the reason it's hard to take Brooks seriously is that he's a card carrying Reaganite Neoliberal, which contradicts his commitments to what he describes in these paragraphs. He wants his cake and to have it too.
This contradiction seems hard for a lot of people to understand, especially those Main Streeters who lean Republican. So I know I'm getting repetitive, but it bears repeating once again: conservatives cannot be taken seriously so long as they insist on wanting their moral order while at the same time having a political-economic system whose creative destructive energies are all about abolishing any such idea of moral order. The whole system is based on appetite, and disdains any constraints. The conditions for the possibility of such a moral social order desired by Brooks become more inhospitable with each passing decade precisely because of energies unconstrained by Neoliberal destruction of the Order that he celebrates.
Any healthy society–whether aboriginal or modern–needs constraints, i.e., to have societal norms and mores–and the taboos that are associated with them. Any healthy society needs a trellis on which the souls of its citizens can grow in virtue. That doesn't mean that everyone will be virtuous, but as I said in my last post, you need to have a standard by which to measure better and worse, and the order outlined by Brooks above is one that we all share by virtue of our Greco-Judean heritage. This is a trellis, which like an amputated limb, still has a phantom presence in our collective moral thinking, but as such has no real vitality. It haunts us rather than inspires us.
This is where Brooks's conservative critique has some bite: Noble ideas about freedom and liberation are easily degraded into a justification for the most vulgar pursuits of appetite and narcissism when there is no longer a virtue trellis that the culture broadly embraces as legitimate. Anything goes, and we're reduced to accept any utilitarian moral reasoning for doing the most vicious stuff.
So we need norms and taboos, but they must always revisable and open to improvement. But by what standard do we judge such improvement? Isn't this question at the heart of our current culture wars–One liberationist set of norms and taboos vs. another traditionalist set of them? But do either of them make any kind of satisfying, coherent sense? Do either of them understand what virtue is in its most eudaemonistic, i.e., living, growing, self-transcending sense? Of course not. The concept eudaemonia is not one that anyone, even the most educated among us, has any familiarity with anymore.
Virtue is not an end it itself, or should be seen simply as has having utility as a constraint mainly for the purpose of maintaining social order. This is the way most conservatives understand it. But virtue in its deepest sense is a means to an end, which is eudaemonia, which is to become Schiller's beautiful soul, or to become wise. The interior self-transcending dynamic at the heart of a eudaemonistic idea of ethics is missing from almost all mainstream contemporary moral thinking. Why? Well, I've been arguing that nothing is more antithetical to the dynamics that drive the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
Brooks quotes from Charles Taylor's 1992 Ethics of Authenticity in which Taylor is grappling with the questions concerning moral relativism, the culture of narcissism, especially as they were brought into focus by Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. He does so at a level of nuance and depth that Brooks seems to be missing. Taylor is trying to articulate in his ethics of authenticity a form of Neo-eudaemonism. I'm not sure Brooks gets this. So, If you'd like a well-thought through discussion of these questions that is congenial to the thrust of what I'm writing about on this blog, listen to Taylor's 1992 Massey Lectures entitled "The Malaises of Modernity":
These are lectures were originally broadcast on Canadian public radio and were designed to be accessible to the broad public. As such they provide a good entry point into Taylor's thinking. If you are among my former students, you are already familiar with these lectures, but they're worth listening to again. I encourage you to do so.
Taylor has always been interested in restoring a sense of a moral order. So have I been, and that's why Taylor is important for me because he goes about it in a way that embraces what Liberal modernity has gifted us while seeking a way to move through it to something better. That's what is his books, Sources of the Self and Ethics of Authenticity are about, and now his Cosmic Connections is all about. This is what my argument in the Cathedral lectures was all about. But this is not an order that can be imposed outside-in. It has to be 'born again', so to say, i.e., to emerge inside-out. Superficially this looks like moral relativism, but it's quite the opposite. It requires a moral maturity not easily achieved, and all the more difficult to do so in a society that neither understands nor values it, and very often energetically opposes it.
This birth, whether gradual or sudden, is the awakening of conscience. I spent so much time in the Cathedral lectures talking about Freud's superego because it so often–almost always?–is confused with conscience. Superego is simply the download of a culture's norms, mores, and taboos in the Oedipus Complex which then defines what is conventionally acceptable. Conscience is the interior capacity to transcend what is given to us by our acculturation and to critique in the society into which we're born what is wrong or unhealthful in it. Post-Nietzschean, or Deleuze/Guattarian, ideas about freedom as living beyond good and evil parody the idea of conscience/transcendence precisely because it conflates the moral order with the conventional social order that lives in us as superego. Self-transcendence becomes reduced to transgression for the sake of transgression.
Virtue is not about being a boy or girl scout who follows the given norms and conventions, but about the exercise of conscience, which is about getting oneself aligned with the deep moral order that always transcends the conventional moral or social order. Being conventionally virtuous means just following the norms in an outside-in way. Being truly virtuous requires that one has discovered the moral law within, and then freely choose to self-legislate in such a way that one's life conforms to it. Not easy because it's easier to delude oneself. And not possible if you don't believe that there is such a thing as a deep moral order.
The behavior of someone shaped by superego and and another shaped by conscience might often look similar, but there's a huge difference, a difference, btw, that's laid out in Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development–preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Robert Coles work with the moral development of children is also interesting in this respect. These correlate loosely with Schiller's savage, barbarian, and beautiful soul–and later Kierkegaard's aesthetic, ethical, and religious. I'd argue that Maslow's hierarchy is based on the same principle of moral development. All these moral schemes are in their different ways eudaemonistic. Jung's ideas about the process of individuation fit here as well. So eudaemonia has a phantom presence in society. But it's no longer taught in school, and it has no bite. In a society that has no shared sense of moral order, eudaemonia becomes just one among many consumer lifestyle choices, all of which have equal moral value.
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