On Religion, Morals and the Public Weal

The current bellicose, undemocratic, and corrupt presidential administration was put in power by the most religious movement in this country since the last fit of religiosity in the series of Great Awakenings to which this country has been subject. What are we to make of this?

These are the people who claim they are the moral majority. The discrepancy between this claim and the president and administration they put in power are in glaring contrast. Why so?

I believe that there is more to such a contrast than mere hypocrisy. What we are looking at is, I suggest, a reflection of the American’s self absorption. By self absorption I mean that the American value system is far more focused on the individual than on the society.

Notice that the so-called moral majority is concerned mainly with personal behaviors, although they do oppose some societal practices, e.g. teaching evolution. Their heavy emphasis and activism has been focused on abortion, same-sex marriage and other “misbehaviors” of private life. These are said to be personal sins and society must suppress them.

The result of this moral predisposition is to analyze and account for social issues in terms of individual responsibilities or individual failures. This approach fails to consider the complex relationships that a modern mass society generates and the consequences that flow from this fact. It also inhibits the ability to treat social and political arrangements as systems and therefore to look for systemic problems. Thus we know that there is a high correlation between crime and poverty and yet we address crime solely as an individual responsibility not as a consequence of a misdistribution of societal wealth.

For example, this intense focus on individual “responsibility” assumes that in a society of 300 million we can know of the personal failings of those in power as one might have in an early Puritan village. Additionally, when we try to compensate for this lack of knowledge of individuals by passing laws against proscribed behaviors we create far worse problems. Examples are the ten-year crime wave prohibition unleashed and the disastrous cost in lives and wealth of our ongoing war on drugs. These are direct consequences of the American proclivity to “personalize” social problems. That this is an old mistake is evidenced by Plato’s Republic in which knowledge is the primary human virtue. To make knowledge effective in society Plato advocates rule by a philosopher king, in other words a dictatorship of the wise. This proposal was made in the context of the world’s first constitutional democracy. What Americans have done is to substantially amplify this by applying it to a complex society of 300 million and substituting the values of an essentially tribal religion, Christianity, for Plato’s knowledge.

This failure to distinguish between social problems and moral issues is routinely employed by dictators and would be dictators. Note G. W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s reference to nations as evil. The leaders of a nation may in some sense be evil, although it is interesting that increasing amounts of “evil” are being reduced to psychological and genetic factors by science, but it is ludicrous to call a nation evil.

One of the most egregious manifestations of this disposition is found in the continuing refusal by Americans to see America as part of the world. We are a nation apart. For such a nation there is only one role in this highly integrated planet and that is to dominate the rest of the world. Until Americans firmly reject this posture they will have no peace and the level of human suffering and death will continue to escalate. The neocon criminals who sought to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world must be publicly and vigorously rejected to begin compensating for the harm we have done.

Bob Newhard