A History and Background of Morality, part I

[This is a first half of a two-part essay.]

In Medieval times, formerly also known as the Age of Faith, religious and moral imperatives were so strong that the ruling class could be cowed into moral submission by the mere threat of excommunication from the Church. Today, in contrast, it is the bane of even the ostensibly religious to believe in God without loving him, and to love the Devil without believing in him. The purpose of this multi-part essay is to explore what morality is, and why it has collapsed today to the point where few people put anything above self.

There are only two binary assumptions that can be made concerning human evil:

1. The leftist position that people are basically good, and that when people act badly, it is because of their environment, specifically oppression. At least in their minds, this gives the left carte blanche to tinker with our institutions. Since this tinkering has never been successful, it is very common for a frustrated left to engage in wholesale destruction of culture, its societies and institutions. This is the basis for what liberals are doing to us, now commonly called cultural Marxism even if it really isn't Marxist at all.

2. The rightwing position that while we have good in us, the bad is far stronger; we are essentially depraved beings, and that our only hope lies in religion and other strong social institutions and leaders to keep us on the straight and narrow.

This essay assumes the latter position is correct. Here is my favorite passage from Kant's Toward a Universal History that sums up our problem perfectly:

Man is an animal who needs a master .. . he is still misled by his self-seeking animal inclinations into exempting himself from the law where he can. He thus requires a master to break his self-will and force him to obey a universal valid will under which every man can be free. But where is he to find such a master? Nowhere else but in the human species. 

But this animal will also be a man who needs a master . . . he will always misuse him freedom if he does not have anyone above him to apply force to him as the laws should require it. Ye the highest authority has to be just in itself and yet also a man. This is therefore the most difficult of all tasks; and a perfect solution is impossible. Nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of.

This is why we need strong morality, which begs the question of exactly what morality is. Real morality is defined as that set of socially recognized imperatives and taboos that mediate between our selfish natures necessary for survival, and our selfless natures necessary to be able to trust one another enough to establish cooperative societies, and ultimately civilization. Without this ability to trust one another, we live in the Darwinistic world of animals--what is commonly called survival of the fittest--in which there is only cutthroat competition. In the Darwinian world, groups can exist, but never true cooperative societies. The reason I think Christianity is objectively the finest moral system in existence is because of Christ's Second Commandment to love our neighbor as we do ourselves; it provides perfect balance even if its complete application has proved quixotic.

This is why belief in God, with God's will for us being carefully defined, is absolutely crucial. It matters not that such a Being's existence cannot be proven ontologically. God is the only way to deal with the "warped wood" from which humanity is made. This is why in a healthy society, our secular rulers can only be our penultimate rulers; a moral God must be our ultimate ruler. This is why secular societies are dying societies. Rather than being true societies, secular societies are mere collections of isolated, anomic individuals at war with one another in what is commonly called competition.

The reason Christ's Second Commandment has never been perfectly applied is because our selfish natures include our will to survive, and thus are as old as life itself. Without the will to survive, life would not exist. Selflessness is of much more recent evolutionary vintage.

Selflessness exists alongside selfishness because it is a superior evolutionary strategy. No doubt, as is the case with most of today's primates, early hominid groups originally had a system in which the alpha male, or males, exercised exclusive access to the group's females. What this meant was that all the other males were driven from the group, or if they remained in the group, they were resentful and alienated. They were as likely to turn on their own alpha males as they were on enemy hominid groups. Monogamy exists today because it is a vastly superior evolutionary strategy; it invests almost all males in the welfare of the group.

Monogamy poses problems that don't exist when alpha males controlled all females. Morality is absolutely necessary for successful monogamy. Females must be able to trust that their mates will spend much of their lives providing for and protecting them and their children. And if men are going to work hard and risk their lives protecting their families, they want to know their woman's children are their own. Both sexes have to be able to trust one another. So, morality is at least as old as monogamy. Monogamy represents morality at its most rudimentary.

An important corollary is that morality must be externally imposed and immutable to work; it is authoritarian and non-negotiable. Imagine for a moment what would happen if we were allowed to pick and choose which legal laws we obey, or at least bend the rules to suit our desires of the moment. Would not murderers decide that laws against homicide don't apply to them? Would not thieves decide that laws against theft don't apply to them? In fact, would it not be the case that being able to decide what laws apply to us would be the same as having no laws at all? The same applies to the moral law. Both must be applied externally, and be mandatory and non-negotiable to have any positive effect.

Another critical corollary is that because we need morality rather than want it, it must be seen as legitimate. This means the origins of the moral code must be seen as divinely inspired, or at least legitimated by time and custom. 

Paradoxically, because we need morality, no human can be known as being the author of a society's moral code. The human, or humans, who are allowed to author moral codes invariably do so in nobody's interests but their own.

Probably the most important study ever conducted in social psychology on how morality works were the Milgram experiments.

Technically, these experiments explored obedience patterns to authority figures, purportedly to show how the holocaust happened, though they have far wider applicability. Where morality comes in is that morality is that set of behaviors that are prized by society, and the avoidance of those behaviors condemned by a society (i.e., imperatives and taboos).

When we were younger, most of us had at least one experience in which we asked our mothers for permission to do something very dangerous and stupid.  Our horrified mothers said, "of course not!" To which we likely replied, "But Mom, all the other kids are doing it." To which Mom retorted, "If all the other kids were jumping off bridges, would you do it too?" If our leaders advocate doing something that is even stupid or suicidal, most people will join them; it's human nature. This is why it is so crucial to have good leaders; they set the moral tone for the rest of us.

One of the interesting things the Milgram Experiments showed is that there are always a small number of people who refuse to go along with the crowd when the crowd's behavior isn't moral or prudent, a few who obey without question, while most will grumble but go along. What this demonstrates is that moral acuity, along with intelligence, exists on a spectrum. Many of us on the dissident right, who are willing to brave our society's condemnation, and buck the Political Correctness that passes for morality, are of the highest moral caliber. This is the same crowd that refused to cooperate in the Milgram experiments.

Indeed, this is why it is necessary to have good leaders. Most people think poorly when they think at all, and on some level they know it, and hence let their leaders do their thinking for them. This is why moral leadership is so important. Bad leaders only lead us to disaster.

The only alternative to morality is totalitarian rule. As has been shown, proper internalization of morality comprises a sort of internal policeman that watches over our behavior. When we do wrong, at least those of us who are not moral cretins suffer from guilty consciences. The legal law is designed to control those who cannot or will not police their own behavior, the group that used to be called social deviants.

In part two, we will examine how morality has played out in Western civilization.

—By Matthew Dunnyveg