We Might Need God to be Less Awful People

I talk to people nearly every day who find our cultural moment simultaneously bewildering and terrifying. The crumbling of institutions and moral norms. The shattering of public trust (accelerated by, but not limited to the pandemic and its discontents). The rising cost of housing and the fear that children and grandchildren will never be able to attain something even approximating their own. The hyper-polarization and politicization of nearly everything. The “slobification” of society. Increasing rates of crime and poverty. And, of course, the endlessly analyzed and oft-discussed skyrocketing rates of addiction, anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. The overall picture is not a pretty one.

David Brooks has been thinking and writing about this not-very-pretty picture for at least the last decade. In my view, he is one of the more helpful cultural commentators of the moment if only because he retains a morally serious vision of human life that doesn’t locate the problems exclusively in the realm of politics and policies and systems and structures. He leaves room for—insists upon, even—antiquated notions like human responsibility and virtue, among other things. He doesn’t reduce everyone to victims or villains, and he doesn’t collapse every problem into an identity category.  Which is refreshing.

His recent piece in The Atlantic, “Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another,” is typically thoughtful, comprehensive, and well-reasoned. It is a plea for moral formation as a pressing need for a pluralistic (allegedly) liberal democracy like America. Once upon a time, America took virtue seriously, he says. But then, over time, this fell away. Brooks locates the pivotal moment just after WWII.

The crucial pivot happened just after World War II, as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century. One group, personified by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued that recent events had exposed the prevalence of human depravity and the dangers, in particular, of tribalism, nationalism, and collective pride. This group wanted to double down on moral formation, with a greater emphasis on humility.

Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority. The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.

I think it’s fairly obvious which of those two paths we’ve been headed down for the last seven decades or so. We have largely consigned moral formation to the “optional” category, and jumped 100% on the self-actualization train.

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in what Brooks calls “a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.” But it’s not as simple as a “you do you and I’ll do me” kind of ethic. What we have seen is a kind of transference of this moral inarticulateness and self-referentiality into the realm of politics. We humans can’t seem to exist without absolutes of some kind or another, much as we like to think we can. In the absence of morally robust religious or philosophical traditions (and in the cesspool for discourse that the internet creates), we simply take a kind of Manichaean moral refuge in the realm of politics. This is obviously the case in America. I would say that I see it here in Canada as well, if in perhaps a bit (but only a bit) less obnoxious form.

Brooks nails it when he says this:

Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.

Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

Well, yes and amen. I see this all the time, even, sadly, among many Christians.

What to do about all this? Well, here Brooks says some good and possibly useful things. He predictably points to things like Mr. Rogers and Ted Lasso as signs of hope for something like a recovery of virtue (or at least a wistful longing for it). He says we need to form “moral organizations,” offer “mandatory social skills courses,” encourage “intergenerational service,” demand more moral behaviour from our politicians, etc. These all sound a bit optimistic as far as implementation goes (wouldn’t you need to have a bit of the moral ground tilled, as it were, to even consider some of these things?), but I don’t doubt that leaning in these directions could be useful.

I was struck, however, by Brooks’ first recommendation. We need, he says, a “modern vision of how to build character.” The ancient visions were too gendered, too racist, too hierarchical, too religiously particular, too [insert bad thing here]. We need a modern vision. Ok, what would that look like? Brooks cites a book by Iris Murdoch called The Sovereignty of Good:

Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.

Well, that sounds great. But if, as Brooks has earlier argued, one of the defining problems of our modern moral moment is that our ethical vision has become inarticulate and self-referential, and if morality too often just collapses into personal preference, how would the paragraph above wriggle out of that particular quandary? Why, in other words, should we believe that virtue has value or that people ought to be treated considerately or that we should be just and loving? What if someone were just to say, “Well, that’s your moral vision, but it’s not mine. My moral vision is to burn all that nonsense to the ground. Might makes right. Fighting injustice is no place for the considerate. If you don’t want to fall in line, get out of the way.”

I suppose if that were the case, we would see something like what we in fact see right now. A bunch of warring tribalistic political factions (with endless cheerleaders online) who have largely kicked virtue to the curb and have assumed that all of life is a struggle to attain the power necessary to impose their vision on others.

As I’ve said, I admire David Brooks. He’s saying so many things that desperately need to be said. But I don’t think we actually need a “modern vision” of moral formation. We need to return to more ancient visions. We need something closer to the sovereignty of God than of good. Good can only be conceived of as anything like “sovereign” if God is underwriting it. Try as we might, human beings have never been much good at wringing “oughts” out of a godless “is.” Urgent though our moral language might (selectively) be, it all just eventually reduces to the language of preference without a transcendent vision to appeal to.

Image source.