Traditional Morals

The Demise of Traditional Morals

Last week I introduced the idea that national or community moral values evolved by a trial and error process to be functional and to enable that society to function. I also put in my Christian bit that human nature was always at work corrupting everything but that as much as people would let him, God helped people make things better.

So the crunch is, as Hayek maintained: destroy its traditional morals and you destroy the society.

So let us examine my little bit of the West: the South Eastern part of Australia. What has been happening during my 67 years. In particular what has been the effect of some of the “-ism”s.

1. Feminism.

There was certainly inequality, but not on the scale today's feminists claim.

For instance my mother didn't work, but she didn't have to – my father even as a low tanking Air Force officer could support a family. Indeed middle class mothers not having to work was a cultural thing that had the good aspect of children getting lots of parent time. It is not accurate to portray it as “wicked” discrimination against women. Of course by the time the situation was changing, as it did in the '60's there were inevitable tensions between the old ways and the new which undoubtedly did include discrimination.

When my brother married – about 1966 – his wife was expected to resign her job. Just a few years later my sister became a junior partner in an established law firm – but some people did comment “how modern of them taking on a woman!”. On the other hand by the early 70's when my wife graduated as a doctor, nearly half her year were women.

I will hazard a guess that the rapid social changes in these decades were largely technology driven, and the redefinition of women's roles was more a by-product of that than feminists realise. Dare I say it, but this might even be an example of social mores evolving to adapt to a changed environment! But granted, in this evolving mileau some feminist activism may have been a necessity.

But there is a down side to modern militant feminism. They are even being denounced for it by their older sisters. It is the anti-men thing. We are all humans. That is the real dichotomy. To try to cast one gender as “bad” is pretty silly. Both contain people who are good, who are bad and who are in between.

“affirmative action” is still discrimination. Feminists say women were discriminated against in male dominated workplaces. Maybe, but to nothing like the extent that men are now discriminated against in female dominated workplaces! Girls may have been disadvantaged in the way schools operated. But not to the extent the boys are now disadvantaged in the new female-friendly curriculum and assessment models.

Family life: I really feel for young couples trying to raise a family with both parents having careers. We used to heap scorn on the Soviet workers trooping off to the factory and depositing their children in the factory child care centre. We've done worse: there is no childcare at the workplace, parents have to find their own, sometimes driving a marathon circuit to childcare, kindergarten, then workplace.

But the most seriously dysfunctional side to feminism has been its promotion of abortion. Think about it: in what way is creating a social acceptance, even an expectation for women to kill their babies a “good” outcome for women?

2. Pacifism

When I was at school, it was fresh in everyone's minds that but for the bravery of out troops we would all be slaves of the Japanese. In high school I could wear my cadet uniform safely on the train and indeed get get positive comments on my community service attitude. Nowadays the opposite is true. Whether it started because of Vietnam, or just concurrently with Vietnam I do not know. What I do know is that there has been a complete reversal of attitude in the media and a big slab of the society. Service men and women are now forbidden to wear uniform on public transport – for their own protection. A whole “violence is bad” ethic has crept in.

As I write the Catholic Church is convening a conference in Rome to debate whether their 1,600 year old doctrine of a “just war” should be scrapped.

The whole movement is understandable but terminally dysfunctional

Understandable because we see that war is terrible: yes it is.

Understandable because we see criminal violence as terrible: yes it is

We live in a world where there is evil as well as good. Warmongers like Hitler and Hirohito and all their henchmen were evil when they started their respective wars. No doubt about it! That evil had to be opposed. That evil had to be stopped. There was only one way to do it: force. This is what the Allied armies did, and the world was a better place for their heroism and sacrifice.

Until Jesus returns and the world ends there will arise evil people who can only be stopped by killing them. Sure in heaven “they will beat their swords into ploughshares … and study war no more” that will be wonderful. That will be heaven. Here and now we need to love peace but be fully prepared for war.

Similarly with police action. They swear to “serve and protect”. Sometimes to protect the innocent (or even their own lives) they have to kill killers. In traditional morals that necessity was recognised. In today's “new morals” a warped view of “human life” has crept in. “all killing is evil” is the new – socially dysfunctional theme. No, killing the innocent – that is evil. Killing the evildoer to prevent them killing the innocent – that is a virtue. The Biblical teaching is clear, and enshrined in our traditional morals in the West. If we turn that moral precept on its head there will be bad social consequences.

No toy guns: Boys particularly love toy weapons, wrestling and play fighting. In the new morals we want to ban toy weapons and play because “it leads to violence”. This is a simple but incredibly naive mistake. It all starts with the error “all violence is bad”. As discussed above that is wrong: Some violence is evil; some violence is a virtue. It depends when and how the violence is used.

Boys are “hard wired” to be able to protect their families, tribe, country. Yes it's in their genes. Yes it's their “testosterone charged nature”. Feminists should not sneer. They should be thankful that those qualities saved them from the Nazi and Imperial Japanese armies! It is not boys' ability for violence that is the problem; it is the perversion of it that is the problem! If you stop to think about it, a great number of evils are the perversion of something which is in itself good and/or vital.

Boys are by nature equipped to provide and protect. By “the sweat of their brow” and by violent often dangerous action. Just two observations on this:

a) Domestic violence: where instead of using their strength to protect those they should protect, they actually act out their aggression/frustration/or whatever by hurting those people. This is downright evil. It should be treated as a contemptible crime, a total betrayal of their natural obligations (I guess in that way it is for men what abortion is for women!)

b) If young men are geared to do dangerous physical feats to defend their own, in the absence of such threat they need socially acceptable dangerous physical feats to perform. Better they are allowed “extreme sports” and accept some casualties than have them endangering others “hooning” in cars or getting into drunken brawls outside nightclubs!

More nest time

How to Destroy a Civilisation

Saving the West : How to Destroy a Civilisation

Civilisations rise and fall, that is just history, but poignantly illustrated in Shelly's poem “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

How or why particular historic civilisations fell I do not know, but I believe I do know one thing which can prove fatal. Something which is a clear and present danger for Western civilisations as we know them.

To start at the beginning consider morals.

How do we get them? Naturally as a Christian I will want to introduce the notion at some point that God is not only the best source of moral understanding, not even just the living example of them but also in his (OK English pronouns fail to do justice to a Triune, supra-gender Divine Being!) own moral character the one immutable standard of morals. But hold that thought for a moment. Moral virtues are common to pretty much all humans.

Not convinced? OK Abram and Sarai: Abram thinks when he goes into ancient Egypt that they will kill him to take his beautiful wife so he passes her off as his sister. At the end of the story Pharaoh lambastes Abram for this because, as he complains, it might have led him to commit the sin of adultery with Sarai. So there were definitely some strong moral ideals alive there!

So again I ask: How do humans get moral values?

Genetics? Possible, though I will argue against it. Spiritual afterglow of being created in the image of God ? – OK I like this one but let's leave it to one side for the moment. As part of our training from infancy? … Yes third time lucky! (see my post: Manners & Morals Pt. 1  )

In that post one of the things I say is that our frontal lobes are so well developed at learning even the most complex social skills that our responses become so quick and “effortless” that they seem instinctive. So we might be tempted to think morals are instinctive – or genetically inherited. But by comparison with the similar brain function required for social etiquette – which differs widely both over the planet and through history – which also seems instinctive – we can say that morals, even though much more comparable over human existence are learned.

I don't want to labour the point but any one who has raised children should remember how by nature babies are totally self-centred. Consideration for others has to be taught!

Here I want to introduce Friedrich Hayek again. This time from his last book “the Fatal Conceit”. In the opening section he talks about the origin of morals. You may be pleased to hear that he agrees with me that it is learnt not genetic, although he tries to do so without referring to God )

If I can boil down what Hayek says without losing too much it is this:

1. Humans are social beings: Philosophers like Locke and Hobbes went back to some imagined “solitary” primitive state. Hayek says, “Rubbish – a solitary human was soon a dead human! We depended on groups.

2. Group survival necessitated rules of behaviour for its members. If you like the idea of moral rules evolving then groups with rules that worked prospered: groups with rules that didn't work vanished. So rules that were effective in promoting group survival survived. Additionally individuals were taught to obey rules which possibly ran against their personal enjoyment or even survival because they could have neither of these without the group surviving!

3. Growth from tribes to extended civilisation brought refinements. The life of a large civilisation needed more refined moral rules. Again Hayek says that by a sort of “survival of the fittest” traditional moral rules became well fitted to maintaining such a civilisation.

4. This evolutionary quality to morals is important in another way: they are bigger than human “reason”. Any person or group who imagine that they can sit down and think up a new better set are seriously deluded.

4. One of the standard initial phases of socialism is to destroy the traditional morals. Yes they intend to replace these rules with others (which they have thought up) – but the consequence is that society will be harmed. In the case of modern Western societies the moral rules which have “evolved” over the millennia have been strongly influenced by Christian ideals and are not just essential to our societies functioning as they do, but are also “good” morals.

Personally I want to bring in the added complexity to the picture of the benign influence God exerts where humans respond to him aiding the evolution of “good” moral rules on one hand but also our “sinful” human nature that is constantly at work corrupting things and leading to worse moral rules emerging.

So what do we observe looking at our own countries?

More next week.