when words hide their meaning

We rarely evaluate anything as morally right or morally wrong anymore. Those terms seem outdated. Many of us celebrate this cultural shift as it suggests freedom from oppressive social norms. But while we no longer resort to a vocabulary of right and wrong, our language can still speak with power and oppression.

From Edward Skidelsky, Regular Words that think for us:

Beyond inappropriate

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.

This linguistic shift is revealing. Improper and indecent express moral judgements, whereas inappropriate and unacceptable suggest breaches of some purely social or professional convention. Such “non-judgemental” forms of speech are tailored to a society wary of explicit moral language. As liberal pluralists, we seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals. What was once an offence against decency must be recast as something akin to a faux pas.

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

The point can be generalised. As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground. “Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are the catchwords of a moralism that dare not speak its name. They hide all measure of righteous fury behind the mask of bureaucratic neutrality. For the sake of our own humanity, we should strike them from our vocabulary.


We speak like enlightened relativists, circumscribing our judgments within the rhetoric of tolerance. In the end, we judge everything without believing in anything.


*This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s saying: A cynic is the one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Being cynical, I suspect his witty phrase applies not only to cynics, but to our consumer society as a whole. We know the price of everything (and how to shop for the best price), but of value, we know little.

obscenely rich

To be rich means... to live in more than one room... to own more than on pair of shoes... to have a choice of what to eat...

It’s humbling to be reminded of how obscenely rich we are.

the recovery of virtue

After many months of what appeared to be politics as usual, President Obama managed to give me hope again with his speech on Wednesday night. (And I can only hope that his rhetoric is matched with substance—integrity is after all often defined as coherence between the internal and external).

I was especially moved to hear him quote Ted Kennedy towards the end of his speech:

[Ted Kennedy] repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

…

That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
…

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter - that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.) noted back in 1985, the loss of the notion of civic virtue and warned of its potential consequences. Obama’s speech suggests that we recover the value of virtue and character in our national discourse. While the concept of virtue may not give us clear answers about the size and role of government in our technologically complex society, it can atleast be a guiding principle in how we frame our public debate about how this country should be governed.

From Habits of the Heart:

We spoke of the belief of Madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good. Without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and virtue, and probably end in authoritarian rule. Half a century later, this idea was reiterated in Tocqueville’s argument about the importance of mores – the “habits of the heart” – of Americans.

…
As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. As we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen”, the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. And with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group”, our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line. The citizen has been swallowed up by the economic man.

Yet this kind of economic liberalism is not ultimately liberating, for, as became quite clear with the final two visions of the public good described, when economics is the main model for our common life, we are more and more tempted to put ourselves in the hands of the manager and the expert. If society is shattered into as many special interests as there are individuals, then, as Tocqueville foresaw, there is only the schoolmaster state left to take care of us and keep us from one another’s throats.*


* I realize this quote may suggest that one-payer government-run healthcare system would be the perfect example of putting ourselves in the hands of the manager and expert and handing the disciplinary ruler over to the schoolmaster state (you know with the death panels and all). I am not inclined to read the passage in that way, especially not in the context of the book, but I will leave it up to you ponder.

can means justify the ends?

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”, we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.

~ Jacques Ellul

Thus all four of the persons whose voices we have heard assume that there is something arbitrary about the goals of a good life. For Brian Palmer, the goal of a good life is to achieve the priorities you have set for yourself. But how do you know that your present priorities are better than those of your past, or better than those of other people? Because you intuitively appreciate that they are right for you at the present time. For Joe Gorman, the goal of a good life is intimate involvement with the community and family into which he happens to have been born. But how do you know that in this complicated world, the inherited conventions of your community and your family are better and more important, and, therefore, more worthy of your allegiance, than those of other communities and families? In the end, you simply prefer to believe that they are better, atleast for you. For Margaret Oldham, the goal of a good life is liberation from precisely the kinds of conventions that Joe Gorman holds dear. But what do you aim for once you have been liberated? Simply what you yourself decide is best for you. For Wayne Bauer, the goal of a good life is participation in the political struggle to create a more just society. But where should political struggle lead us? TO a society in which all individuals, not just the wealthy, will have power over their own lives. But what are they going to do with that power? Whatever they individually choose to do, as long as they don’t hurt anybody.

The common difficulties these four very different people face in justifying the goals of a morally good life point to a characteristic problem of people in our culture. For most of us, it is easier to think about how to get what we want than to know what exactly we should want. Thus Brian, Joe, Margaret, and Wayne are each in his or her own way confused about how to define for themselves such things as the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice. Those difficulties are in an important way created by limitations in the common tradition moral discourse they- and we- share. The main purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding of the resources our tradition provides- and fails to provide- for enabling us to think about the kind of moral problems we are currently facing as Americans. We hope to make articulate the all-too-inarticulate search of those we have described in this chapter to find a moral language that will transcend their radical individualism.

~ Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart