Bah to All Theories of Moral Decline

David Brooks wants to know why Americans don't see Donald Trump as a moral monster totally unsuited to leadership. Ok, fine, good question. But Brooks' answer, given in this Atlantic essay, is a nonsensical evocation of the good old days that makes me gag.

Brooks has been reading Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher who blamed all our problems on the Englightenment:

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain. . . .

The result is a world in which nobody knows right from wrong:

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. 

I do not see how anyone who has spent even ten minutes thinking about history can believe this.

I grant that many past societies were more communitarian and less individualistic than ours. I grant that some of them gave people a firmer model of what it meant to be a good man or woman than our system does. But I submit there is zero evidence that people used to be more moral than we are, or that they held their leaders to a higher moral standard.  I submit that, in general, past people were more violent than we are, more cruel, and more disposed to ignore the moral faults of people in their own tribes than we are. I would argue that most past societies were morally ugly, and the creators of the Enlightenment were right to call for abandonment of traditional morals and a shift to more universal standards.

Most of the traditional moral codes I know about were founded on dividing the world into us and them. For us, some kind of respect might be mandated, but for them, nothing but hate. (See this discussion of the Iroquois for an example.) I would say that many of those firm models required people to act in ways that I find horrifically immoral. In particular, they required people to do violence in defense of their clans, their families, and their personal honor. 

Medieval Europe, the past period I know the best, was riven throughout its history by wars, feuds, riots, pogroms, massacres, and random drunken murders. I may not believe in a universal moral order, but I have reached the cusp of old age without ever doing violence to another man, something that would have been extremely difficult in many human worlds.

There are Iron Age cemeteries in Eastern Europe in which a majority of the people died by violence.

If you look into those societies that Brooks and MacIntyre admired for their moral foundations, you may find that ethical questions were actually much disputed among them. The most obvious example would again be medieval Europe, where many people had two quite separate moralities: a secular code of personal and family honor that esteemed worldly success and often enjoined violence, and a Christian ethic of renunciation and peace. Most people managed this division ok, but we keep meeting people who took Christianity too seriously and ended up renouncing their families. (E.g., St. Elizabeth of Hungary.) Nor was this a uniquely Christian problem; Buddhists also had a long-term problem with important nobles and even kings giving it up to join monasteries, and one theory about the Bhagavad Gita is that it was written to convince Hindu kings that it was morally ok to remain in the world and engage in violence when necessary.

Brooks' model also fails when it comes to describing modern people. If believing in a universal moral order makes us more moral, or more disposed to hold our leaders to a higher standard, than why does the Russian Orthodox Church support Vladimir Putin? 

Why do so many fundamentalist Christians support Donal Trump? Do you think they haven't noticed that he is corrupt?

Please.

Donald Trump is bad. I hate him. But he is not worse than thousands of rulers from the age of "shared moral order," from Genghis Khan to Louis XIV. He is not more corrupt than Julius Caesar or Henry VIII. Bah to this whole way of thinking about morality and history.

Brooks also seems to think that our moral issues make our politics more difficult:

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

To this I would say that many past societies had problems that went on for centuries without ever being solved. In Medieval Europe, these unsolvables included the relationship between central and local power, between local custom and universal (or Roman) law, between the church and the secular power. Shared moral frameworks did not solve these problems.

It is probably true that we have a wider range of problems than many past societies, because they took more things for granted. For example, slavery, or the subjugation of women. When Enlightenment thinkers started talking about universal rights, this opened up a whole range of questions that many societies had never debated before. But does Brooks think Abolitionists and feminists were wrong?

I submit that the Enlightenment is not the root of the problems with modern America. I say, on the contrary, that our problem is the much more ancient one of tribalism. Our problem is that we insist on dividing the world into us and them, hating them, and justifying the moral failings of the people on our side. What we need is not a return to some imaginary communitarian past, but more Enlightenment: more universal brotherhood, more universal rights, more tolerance, more Reason.

David Brooks may want to live in a village making constant war on the village over the hill, but I do not.