The Mess

Once upon a time, when my grandmother was born, man had not yet achieved powered flight.  By the time she died, ninety-odd years later, we had been to the moon and back, flown the space shuttle, and developed stealth bombers and fighters.  One lifetime.  When I tell this to my students, I don’t think that they get what I am really telling them - that the world at the end of their lives will be different in ways that are unimaginable now.  Change and obsolescence come so quickly now - think  pagers and PDAs - that I’m not sure that they see it in the same way that I do.  It is  simply a part of the environment, the air they breathe.
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Long, long, ago, back in the sixties and seventies when I was growing up, change was happening too.  I recall that older folks thought things were changing too quickly and not necessarily in good directions, but most of us youngin’s were OK with that.  New was good, though with us it had less to do with new “stuff” than what we were sure were new “attitudes” and “perspectives”.  And, to a large extent, I still tend to think those attitudes and much of what they produced were pretty cool .  Organic foods and ecological consciousness have held up pretty well.  Inclusion and empowerment of persons long considered inferior by our culture still seems like a good idea.   Apologies to everybody on this week’s “Hot 100", but Jimi, Janice, the Beatles, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green could kick your asses collectively or one at a time.  Just sayin’.  But I digress.

The real point is that change happens, and sometimes we see it, and sometimes we don’t.  Sometimes we expect it, and then don’t see it when it shows up looking differently than expected.

When I was young, nearly everyone I knew shared a belief in a God.  My family was Catholic then, and many still are today.  I had friends who were various flavors of Protestant, and friends who were Jewish.  I didn’t know anybody being raised Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu back then, but the America I grew up in was pretty darn white, too.  There was that one family I knew that didn’t go to church.  There were three boys, two of whom were good friends of mine.  I remember wondering and, at times, worrying about them.  But they were and are good people, and it is a matter of pure speculation how they might have been different had they been “churchgoers”.

I think I am likely from the last American generation to have that experience.  Of all of the changes that have taken place over my lifetime, the loss of a fundamental common understanding of morality may be the most significant.  We did things that were good, and we did things that were bad - no shock there.  People always have and people always will.  I knew, just knew, that everybody could tell the difference, and if somebody couldn’t, well, there was something pretty wrong with that person.  Not that they always DID the right thing, but that they could recognize it when they saw it.

We had been raised with a few common ideals - that there was right and wrong, that we had a responsibility to determine which was which, and that we would ultimately be accountable for our actions.  All of these ideas, at least back then, stemmed from a believe in an active and ethical God.  God liked some things, didn’t like others, there were reasons why they were good or bad, and there would be a final judgement and consequences for our actions and inaction.  If this God is not present, or if God is either not ethical or disinterested in our choices, then the system collapses.  If lying is not inherently bad, or stealing, or cruelty, then why would one not engage in them if one can calculate a better outcome?  If one does not believe that there is a final accounting, then even if the actions are bad, so what?

Herein lies a problem.  While a majority of people in the United States continue to profess a belief in a God, the nature of that God seems to have changed.  The popular God today seems more interested in outcomes (lower taxes, more green space) than relationships, and certainly is more respectful of our arguments as to why we are justified in our actions.  I recently read an article that places the blame for this in the exhalation of the individual that was a product of the 60s, and that may be right.  I am told by some smart people that a fully functional social morality can exist without a transcendent entity that is ethical and involved.  Perhaps this is true. I’ve not seen it, and if it does exist, I think it would take quite a bit of energy to construct.  I think many people want to see it, but I’ve seen no actual evidence of its existence.  An ethical unicorn.  I am not saying that an atheist cannot act ethically - I know they can.  I have seen it.  My concern is that while individuals can act ethically without a shared understanding of morality, a social system, with many individual decision makers who rely on each other to act in what we used to call an “honorable” way, is another thing entirely.  I tend to think that much of what is causing the incivility in society may be rooted in this phenomenon.

So there we are.  Our politics is probably not less polarized than it was in times past - I remember Nixon - but the idea that we OUGHT try to get along seems to be fading.  Yes, some people have always actively tried to work the system, to get as much for themselves while avoiding responsibility for people in need, but now there is virtually no shame in it.  We seem to no longer have a shared sense of what is correct, and a belief that the final judgement of our behavior and attitudes lies outside of ourselves.  We have substituted consistency for honor.  Perhaps this new attitude is correct.  Perhaps there is no right to be discerned and no incentive to do what is difficult without a personal payoff.  But that would be sad.  Pax.