Whatever Happened to Morality?

4,809 words

Whatever happened to morality? This is not a lament over declining moral standards, or dismay at a rise in immoral behavior. These things are certainly happening, but they are the registration and confirmation of an individual moral standard, usually of a nation, a gauge which changes between cultures, civilizations, and epochs. Nor is this a brief history of morality, as morality is itself a history, as described by Nietzsche’s treatment of the moral. But, although I might know the moral code of my culture (even if I don’t always follow it), does that mean I understand what morality is? We want to know what morality is in itself, which is not as easy as simply listing what is moral or immoral in any given manifestation of society. In other words, just as Kant looked for a metaphysical basis for morality, we must ask not what is moral or immoral, but what morality and immorality are. So, forget moral actions and, particularly, values. What is morality?

Morality has much in common with time as described by St. Augustine; “I understand time perfectly until someone asks me to explain it.” So too with morality. We know that we are moral people and moral agents, even if we act immorally. But defining morality—as opposed to simply listing what is moral and immoral—is elusive, like trying to place a finger on a drop of mercury. What can we say about it? Well, morality is a binary concept, and relies on two basic categories: good and bad. A moral judgment assesses the action, event, or even thought being judged, and allocates one of a binary set of values: moral or immoral, good or bad, approved or disapproved. There must be two values, and only two. There can be no tertium quid with morality, no grey area or fuzzy logic. A morality with only one value would make no sense except as a physical law. No one talks about gravity being “good” or “bad.”

The concepts “good” and “bad” are properly dialectical; they exist in opposition and each requires the other to situate itself in terms of value (for morality revolves around evaluation). And these concepts, the recto and verso of the same spinning coin, are not confined to the realm of the theoretical. Morality is intensely practical. It takes place in the real world and is at the heart of the law. A morally approved action is good and therefore legal, an action which is morally disapproved is bad and therefore often illegal, and certainly disapproved of. Is this a universal value whose values are universal? Is what is morally approved similarly sanctioned in Bonn, Bogota, and Bopal? We know it isn’t. That different cultures have differing moral codes has been highlighted recently with reference to the Muslim world and its increasing presence in the West, particularly in Europe but increasingly in the US. A woman taken in adultery in Paris—probably not a black swan event—is taken to court to be tried rather than taken to the market square to be stoned to death, as she might be in Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, or Somalia.

One notable absentee from the short set of binaries above is “good” and “evil.” The equation of “bad” with “evil” has caused more confusion than perhaps any other false equivalence in the history of philosophy, theological or otherwise. It is not really the evaluative aspect of morality which ought to detain us. It is more how morality has perhaps suffered a schism which went unnoticed. What if morality were not one thing but many things? Like parts. Parts you can remove, and even use elsewhere. But before that possibility, what of the universality of morality?

Morality qua morality and not as any specific moral code is a universal. There is no one sentient and sane who is not a moral creature and who does not inhabit a moral mental environment even in its privation in some extreme cases. So there is no need to explain morality, even to the beginner. And that’s because there are no beginners. If this were an essay about some specialist branch of philosophy—phenomenology, say, or nominalism—then a good deal of explanation and historical scene-setting would be required for the majority of readers. But morality is something of which we all partake, it is a genuine universal. But what of the particular? Individuality morality, today, is quite often a very solipsistic affair, far less tied to central guidance as once it was in more communal times. But even in extremes we see that our requirements for a metaphysical explanation are still being held. The nun and the serial-killer work to very different moral codes. But they both have one. By “moral code,” of course, I don’t mean a “high moral standard” or any other comparative calibration. I am not talking about the fabled “moral compass,” and more trying to look at the magnetic conditions that might allow such an object to function.

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Morality, as a subject matter, has the distinct advantage of being immune to context. A statement about chemistry or geography makes no sense taken outside of the context of the rest of the field. A statement about morality is one we can all process and analyze in isolation whether it is by Rousseau or appears in a newspaper article, because we recognize it as moral and pertaining to the sphere of morality. We are all being spoken to by moral discourse, and we can’t help but listen. But, as we examine morality, we will find it far from being a unitary concept. It has differing aspects and applications, and is certainly not simply a list of permitted and proscribed actions. Morality is cross-hatched with fault lines and internal schisms, one of which David Hume describes in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

Moral philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners… The one considers man chiefly as born for action… [the other] in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being.

This is the first major question concerning morality and, to phrase it in the language of Hume; is it the product of reason or the passions? Do we do the right thing because we are following a legally endorsed script which sets our moral parameters, or do we act as we do because our ancient heritage is working our strings?  Reason or the passions, Means rea or actus reus. The relationship between reason and morality was laid down in the Athenian square.

An early, major coming together of mind and morality is Socrates’ dictum; “No one does wrong willingly (or knowingly).” In the Meno, Socrates asks of his interlocutor:

Do you assume that there are people who desire bad things, and others who desire good things? Do you not think, my good man, that everyone desires good things?

Socrates takes up this apparent immutability of motive again in the Protagoras:

For Simonides was not so uneducated as to say that he praised whoever did nothing bad willingly, as if there were anyone who willingly did bad things. I am pretty sure that none of the wise men thinks that any human being errs willingly, or willingly does anything shameful or bad. They know well that all who do what is shameful or bad do so unwillingly.

If Socrates is to deny that anyone performs a bad action willingly or knowingly, he must dispose of the argument of weakness of will. The Greek word for this supposed moral lapse is akrasia; to act in such a way that the action performed is known in advance to be disadvantageous. This is the crux of the problem of akrasia: The believer in the akratic act holds that it is possible for a person to commit an immoral act knowing that they were making a wrong choice, but compelled to do so by a weakness of spirit. Socrates, opposing akrasia, holds that the wrongful act was a result of ignorance. This defense sets up, in a way, the whole history of morality and the law, the link between murder and manslaughter. It also gives a firm basis for our brief inquiry into the metaphysical possibilities of morality. And, however brief a sketch, any such inquiry into the metaphysical basis for morality we seek cannot avoid discussion of Nietzsche.

The title of Nietzsche’s penultimate book, The Genealogy of Morals, shows in its title the central support of his argument concerning morality, a subject to which he often returns. Morality is not of divine origin, nor is it immutable. Rather, it evolves, and in certain directions for certain crucial reasons. Nietzsche’s account of the evolution of morality in Human, All too Human also shows the shifting locus of the moral center of gravity over evolutionary time (Nietzsche was interested in Darwin without being a Darwinian).

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For the Nietzsche of Human, originally, an action was deemed good or bad dependent on its consequences. Next, “one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences.” This, writes Nietzsche, confuses cause and effect. The next stage is to endow the motives for the action with the moral onus “and regards the deeds themselves as morally ambiguous.” The final stage is to make the man from the motive, “and accords the predicate good or evil no longer to the individual motive but to the whole nature of a man out of whom the motive grows as the plant does from the soil.”

For Nietzsche, the social order structures language and gives it value. Thus, he writes, the same words used to describe the old aristocratic castes become the words that essentially mean “good.” The words denoting the lower classes similarly became the lexicon used to denote the undesirable or “bad.” Language thus becomes a vestibule for and a register of power.

All this leads Nietzsche to an inescapable conclusion, one which affects the sanctity of morality in the wake, or at the wake, of the death of God:

One has thereby attained to the knowledge that the history of the moral sensations is the history of an error, the error of accountability, which rests on the error of freedom of will.

Nietzsche’s belief is that we do not actually have free will, although it appears to us that we do. As for good and evil—which one of his most famous books would attempt to transcend—Nietzsche gives a simple history in the same book:

The concept good and evil has a twofold prehistory: firstly, in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital – is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful – is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad.

Free will is the cause of much error, and Nietzsche constantly reminds us that errors can be reified and become commandments. But the great man suffers the ignominies of this monumental category error, this animistic impulse. He it is whose nature is on trial, when he is simply obeying the dictates of nature. Once again from Human, All too Human:

We do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends us a thunderstorm and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral? Because in the latter case we assume a voluntarily commanding free-will, in the former necessity.

Necessity or determinism versus free will has quite a history, perhaps exemplified by the correspondence between Luther and Erasmus in the 16th century. Human, All too Human contains much of Nietzsche’s theory both of morality and free will (central, as we see, to morality), and particularly its psychical effects on the evolution of man as a moral being. Morality divides a man in himself, Nietzsche writes, as he is split between considerations of the altruistic versus the egotistical. Thus, he continues, “In morality man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.” Again, we see evidence of a conceptual separation, a schism, a parthenogenesis within morality.

Nietzsche also sees the folly of contemporary moral superiority concerning the events of history. In The Surprising Liberation, which I reviewed here at Counter Currents last week, Duncan Smith corrects this perspectival error to a nicety; “Retrospective morality is not carbon dating.” Nietzsche would agree. From Daybreak:

The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now Know better than any other age.

Historical revisionism in today’s academic world relies on retrospective morality, and the idea that the modern Left can judge across centuries needs debunking.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche makes claims about morality which are sensational given the time in which he was writing:

One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil – that they have the illusion of moral judgment beneath them. This demand follows from an insight first formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever.

In one fell swoop, Nietzsche has done away with the divinely sanctioned moral law, codified and sanctioned by God as it is. Moral judgment, indeed, mimics religious judgment in that “it believes in realities that do not exist.” Nietzsche here is using his own, personalized version of Ockham’s Razor. This is known as “choosing the simplest answer,” but this is to come at the principle from the wrong way around. What Ockham actually wrote (he never used the word “razor”) was Non sunt multiplicanda; “Do not multiply entities unnecessarily.” Nietzsche finds moral judgments to be “nonsense,” in the same way that A.J. Ayer would criticize metaphysics thirty years after Nietzsche in Language, Truth, and Logic. “Morality is sign-language” Nietzsche writes, “merely symptomatology.”

The Genealogy of Morals begins with an analysis which is fragmentary in his work, never thematized but always present; self-knowledge. I have called this self-knowledge “autognosis” and it is both deceptive, and intimately tied to morality, to the self as moral agent. It is easy to assume one knows oneself because no one is easier to sell positive reinforcement to than oneself. As Nietzsche writes, “’I have done this,’ says memory. ‘I have not done this,’ says pride. In the end, pride wins.” But self-knowledge is more than just a superficial acquaintance with the quirks of one’s own personality. It is compulsive and it is challenging:

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves; this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves – how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves?

How indeed. It is partly a fruitless quest, this inner odyssey. And it must be remembered that without access to our inner workings, how are we to make sense of anything like morality? If we can’t ultimately know ourselves, we are going to need an external moral code to guide us, a moral compass to replace the one we thought we had, but whose existence we can never prove other than as an ad hoc arrangement subject to change:

Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each one is the farthest away from himself’ – as far as ourselves are concerned we are not ‘knowers.’

Nietzsche clears the way for his primal question concerning morality by “separating theological from moral prejudices, and I gave up looking for a supernatural origin of evil.” The origin of good and evil may be elusive, but Nietzsche knows where to start looking:

Under what conditions did man invent for himself those judgments of values, ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’?

And Nietzsche is not simply content to seek out a fons et origo, an origin and a beginning for morality. He also charts its evolution, it progress or regress, its alterations and refinements and omissions. And there is one particular sub-section of morality he singles out as particularly deleterious:

I realized that the morality of pity which spread wider and wider, and whose grip infects even philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our modern European civilization.

Four thinkers high in Nietzsche’s esteem are cited as being united in the “contempt of pity”: Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant. We need a critique of morality, Nietzsche proclaims, not merely meek acceptance of its dictates. Morality comes to us clothed in piety, but is in fact an imposter and a fraud:

[M]orality as a mask, as a symptom, as a mask, as Tartuffism, as disease, as a misunderstanding; but also morality as a cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant, as a fetter, as a drug…

It is Nietzsche’s consideration of the moral law as a tabulation that leads to a type of mission statement regarding morality. It is the book of the law that sanctifies the law itself. The law book does not explain the utility of any given law, Nietzsche writes in The Antichrist, merely the details of its application. Nietzsche uses as an example a book he occasionally mentions throughout his work:

Such a law-book as that of Manu originates as does every good law-book: it summarizes the experience, policy and experimental morality of long centuries, it settles accounts, it creates nothing new.

Morality, at least in post-scriptive societies, is always and everywhere codified, documented, archived, and, above all, written down. Litera scripta manet; “That which is written down (or inscribed) will remain.” Moses’ tablets, the Talmud, the Bible, the Upanishads, the Koran, even Mao’s Little Red Book for a post-theological world.

The preservation of the law in written form is conservative. How could it be otherwise? The law is formed by accretion over long periods of time, then it is codified, frozen in time at the right moment. Nietzsche writes elsewhere concerning the fossilization of words once they have been written down. In the case of the law, this is a feature rather than a glitch. And Nietzsche sets up a great opposition within morality, one which we are becoming used to seeing:

What… is to be prevented above all is the continuation of experimenting, the perpetuation in infinitum of the fluid condition of values, tests, choices, criticism of values. A twofold wall is erected against this: firstly revelation, that is, the assertion that the reason for these laws is not of human origin, was not sought and found slowly and with many blunders, but, being of divine origin, is whole, perfect, without history, a gift, a miracle, merely communicated…

Note that contemporary Islam emphasizes the fallibility of man-made law as opposed to the immutability of Koranic edict. This arbitrational ur-script, in the case of the Koran, was communicated, communicated and written down, the word of God made literal, Allah’s amanuensis Mohammed watched over by Thoth, perhaps, the Ancient Egyptian god of writing.

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Nietzsche represents a moral turn which cannot be untaken. One cannot look around one’s own corner, he writes, with a perspectivism which applies as much to morality as to any other branch of ontology. The contention is that morality exists de facto but not de jure. De facto refers to fact and is contingent, de jure refers to the law, and is not. The former is not formally recognized, whereas the latter is enshrined. And this means that morality cannot be fixed, but is malleable. This, of course, makes it prey to powerful men, men who will seek to prevent another type of man from developing. Like mad scientists, they can be found experimenting in the lab or, today, Europe:

A first example, merely as an introduction. In all ages one has wanted to ‘improve’ men: this above all is what morality has meant. But one word can conceal the most divergent tendencies. Both the taming of the beast and the breeding of a certain species of man has been called ‘improvement’: only those zoological termini express realities… To call the taming of an animal an ‘improvement’ is in our ears almost a joke.

My point, using Nietzsche’s destabilizing of morality, is the malleability of the concept. It might be said that many other concepts have been made similarly elastic, some over time, some of more recent provenance. What we may be living through now is the result of a shift from what the Latin world called moralia to moralitas. This pair of alternative words for “morality” actually unpacked the original Greek, Ethikē, in which we recognize our own “Ethics.” In Latin, moralia means customs, traditions, mores and social interactions, whereas moralitas is personal and primarily religious. It is a refined morality we are left with, like a residue at the end of a chemical process. Plutarch’s Moralia, from the first and second centuries, is a compendium of insightful essays describing Roman and Greek life, not a moral tract. Morality tales are individual odysseys, and rely on social context only to make moral points. Moralitas is the morality of the spirit and not the market-square, to where it should return if it still can. Moralitas is the guilt-ridden, resentful man exemplified, for Nietzsche, by the Christian.

It seems to me that a key “territory” of moralia separated itself, or became itself. By the time of Francis Bacon, for example, in the 16th/17th centuries, a schism had occurred in the idea of morality. Bacon sub-titled his Essays on Council in such a way that polarized two elements of the original Latin amalgam of morals and civil behavior; Civil and Moral. There has been a secession. Morality is making off on her own, like a girl eloping in the night. In distinction to the Cardinal Virtues, and other more practical applications, morality developed into a spiritual sense of dread activated by what should have still been moralitas. This reflects Nietzsche’s close analysis of the Church and its morality as a “religion of pity.” Things are not so bad you have to atone to God for them, they are so bad and you have to atone to your community of fellows, and they are real, not an attribute Nietzsche grants to God. Where does all this leave us today, as moral agents wandering a labyrinthine online world in addition to the one in which morality grew for so long?

This brief examination of morality requires the suspension of one’s own moral judgement to be properly objective, and thus in all probability the social environment one was raised in. My own sense of what is right and wrong is that of any English conservative in his mid-sixties, one would imagine, with some contentious points dividing even the Right. I am in favor of the death penalty, for example, because I believe that some savagery in the justice system is essential as a deterrent to savages. Fire has to be fought with fire at some stage. That said, I would watch with glee as some street-rat ascended the 13 steps to the rope with the traditional 13 loops. I would prefer it if he were crying, or calling for his momma, or soiling his dignity pants. Is that a moral reason for being in favor of the death penalty, or just the weird add-on of a questionable personality? As for abortion, I am pro-life so long as that life is white. I am, however, staunchly pro-abortion in Africa, because the exponential population growth in the Dark Continent has turned its countries into failed slums, and now that failure and discontent is being shipped express to Europe in the shape of hundreds of thousands of angry black men. So, time for the United Nations to stop messing around and preaching, and start building abortion clinics. Why stop there? Sterilization after one child is perfectly feasible, and the population of these diseased countries can flatten out. Then perhaps Africans will be free to start inventing more useful things to add to their Wakandan gifts to history. Is that an immoral thought? Most of my countrymen, even the conservatives, would balk at forced sterilization. But it is a practical solution to a serious problem. My view is that this is precisely where morality is a tremendous handicap. Schopenhauer neatly sums up the problem in the First Aspect:

Rational action and virtuous action are two entirely different things.

Schopenhauer goes on to make, not a moral imperative in the style of Kant, but rather a moral caveat:

Pure morality, i.e., right action from moral grounds, is not to be expected; if this were not the case, it would itself be superfluous.

This was my point about the impossibility of a morality which has only one value rather than two radically opposed values. And the continuation of Schopenhauer’s paragraph has eerie echoes of the West’s current predicament:

Thus the state, which aims at well-being, is by no means directed against egoism, but only against the disadvantageous consequences which arise from the multiplicity of egoistic individuals, and reciprocally affect them all and disturb their well-being.

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s “gloomy genius” is assuming, quite naturally for a comfortably-off 19th-century scholar in Germany, that “the state… aims at well-being.” He could not have envisaged the modern British state, for example, which aims at well-being for third-world immigrants, cross-dressers, black actors, and Muslims, and is demonstrably doing the opposite with the white native population. And the British are still getting more than their fair share of “multiplicity of egoistic individuals [who] disturb their well-being.”

It is necessary to re-frame morality. The old, shared Western bedrock of Christian morality is no longer fit for purpose. It has been almost completely nullified by the arrival of a radically different moral system. It is still a system, even if it seems alien to our moral sensibilities to cheat, lie, steal, rape, and murder people. But, as noted, our moral system badly needs an upgrade, or perhaps a radical downgrade, a step back towards barbarism for the purposes of fighting back. Nietzsche’s brief comment on Islam, that it “at least assumes it is dealing with men” takes on a new light when the state of masculinity is reviewed across Europe today. What we are witnessing across Europe is, to paraphrase Samuel T. Huntington, a clash of moral civilizations. We are fighting a war of opposing versions of moralia but we are fighting it under the banner of moralitas, as if virtue were more important than pragmatics.

Morality is civic comportment, not a conscience-attended act of piety. In the West, on the whole, we are no longer answerable to God, but if we don’t pledge our allegiance to our communities, our white communities, then we will inexorably be answerable to the state. The moral agent concerns himself with the society of which he is both a part and an expression of the whole. The moral society should be composed of moral “monads” along the lines of the Leibnizian monad, atomized but working in concert.

So, a brief whistle-stop tour of morality. I have suggested that morality, outside of its existence as a value-laden set of judgments, is communal before it is individual. The utilitarian calculus of Bentham and Mill works perfectly well if the community is the object of the tally. A utilitarian individual whose calculus purely considers his own needs and wants can be a very dangerous thing. A large number of these individuals, and you have a serious problem, as Europe is slowly—and far too late, for demographic reasons—realizing. These malevolent nomads have the mindset of the hunter-gatherer rather than the members of a village.

It would seem that morality as we have been led to understand it is the product of a secession, a breaking away from the whole in the manner of a country gaining its independence. We traded—or had traded on our behalf—our sense of communitarian moral behavior, and what kind of deal we got can be seen without hardship online and, increasingly, in the streets. Whereas Moralia was a compound of civic virtue, social comportment, and personal agency, morality after the refinement of the Church left it purely a matter of conscience and divine appeasement. And that is where the problems are. The technological age, disseminated by technocracy, has amplified this concentration of one part of a communal coding now passing into obsolescence, the lost morality of moralia. Today, increasing numbers of young Westerners believe they are as important, and their desires as vital, as divine grace was to a Medieval monk. We can only hope that the moral pendulum will swing back from moralitas to moralia, from the values of the materialistic individual to the collective sensibility of the community. Perhaps then the white West might stand a chance of returning from the plains and come home to the village.