Can You Be Moral? (I)

There are two positions on being moral in our culture today, and both are wrong.

The Right say that without Judeo-Christian religion, one cannot be moral. The Left say that the whole matter is subjective and differs from individual to individual. Both sides have made a total mess of the whole matter and have left people either confused or resorting solely to feelings to determine morality.

Since I grew up in a Christian environment, I have a real sense of the Right on morality. In a word, it was and is DUTY, and the religion provides the duties. People get left out except when they run afoul of duties and become sinners. When I think back on what the moral training was and the attitude toward morality as I grew up, I experience nausea and dysphoria. My "I" was always in conflict with the imposed duties, and my "I" was castigated as Augustine put it, "bespotted and ulcerous, sordid and corrupt." In short, according to the religious principles, if I put me first, I was being "selfish," and that was always wrong. Even as a child, I could see all of the hypocritical dancing about by others at the duty-self boundary to satisfy their "I's."

In college, I began running into the morality of the Left. And, you know what? It also was "duty," but differed from that of the Right. The "I" was always castigated as selfish, and groups took the place that religious doctrine took among the Right. It was far less clear what the Left meant by morality other than group standards. The Left firmly "believed" that personal morality could be morality only for each person, without generalizations that could apply to many if not all people. To them, truth was subjective, thus morality was subjective. You have heard the following: What is true for you is not true for me. Likewise, you hear: What is right for you is not right for me.

Interestingly, both the Right and the Left positions completely abdicate themselves from the field of morality. To the Right, morality is intrinsic to religious doctrine, and humans must take it on without question. A really good example of this kind of thinking comes from Rush Limbaugh's "32 Undeniable Truths" list, which I believe can be found on his website.

To the Left, morality can have no personal standard. It may have a group standard, depending on what the group wants to do. The Law of Identity says that something that is, in every case, is something specific, with a specific identity. And, the inverse says, to be nothing in particular is not to be. I did not make that up; Mother Nature did. Since the morality of the Left is nothing in particular, it is nothing. It does not exist. The illusion of it existing comes out in its subjectivity.

So, for the Right, morality is intrinsic, imposed on people from outside their choice. For the Left, morality is subjective, which means feeling based.

What is missing is the concept of "objectivity." That same concept is missing all over the country. Journalists really have little idea about it. Politicians eschew it. Academicians deny it. Religious people at all levels misidentify their intrinsicism as objectivity.

What we have for national leaders, given the state of morality, is President George W. Bush, intrinsicist religionist from the Right, and Senator John Kerry, subjectivist liberal from the Left. No doubt of it. We have a moral vacuum.

As a result, people struggle on their own to internalize a morality the best they can, and they do not do a very good job of it. Nor could they be expected to. The very intellectual leaders who should be making it possible for them to internalize an appropriate morality left the building like Elvis but they long preceded Elvis.

We are left with some big questions, really rather fundamental in nature, and they are not getting answered. In many cases, they are not getting asked.