Restoring the Moral Compass
Social and Moral Restoration and The Need for an Authoritative Moral Framework
“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I shall begin by suggesting that, in light of the climate ‘strikes’ on the part of the world’s youth, that something is terribly amiss in the societies of the world. I shall declare myself hugely uncomfortable with such ‘strikes,’ and certainly with the pushing of children at the forefront of political campaigns. I hear the response back that children has been the instigators of this protest. This mobilization is remarkably well-organized. There are critics arguing that this is a youthwash and that this mobilization is part of a long-process of social engineering building blind allegiance in support of a political agenda. I wish to argue for a genuine sociality built upon the bedrock of moral autonomy. That has to be cultivated. The critics who claim that this generation of children are the most well-off, even privileged, in terms of health, wealth, and education have a point, but are missing the real point. They are judging the success of society by crude material quantity.
I would argue in the strongest of terms that in an age of social dislocation, economic instability, moral uncertainty, and ecological degradation, men and women of all persuasions are being called to measure up to the demands of politics and together develop the collective nerve and nous to navigate the troubled times that are upon us. I would also argue that successful political engagement is not merely a matter of will and character, but of restoring unity within social relations, and a shared moral language and culture. The problems that beset up cannot be resolved by an external policing and regulation alone or even mainly. The effectiveness of these things depend upon an internal self-policing and self-regulation in modes of conduct and character. In highlighting social divisions and problems of equality, I would also emphasize a moral confusion and uncertainty. In addition to the economic poverty that those concerned with social justice highlight, I would highlight a moral poverty. In the absence of a moral framework capable of uniting people around shared norms and values, a common language, society fractures into individuals pursuing their own goods. This results in a series of clashes without internal resolution, for the very reason that exchanges are conducted in terms of incommensurate values. On top of the facts of social division and inequality, these moral clashes over rival and competing goods turn violent. The political sphere is incapable of mediating conflict as it once did, precisely because the unity in extra-political society is lacking. Social division and breakdown is in large part a severing of individuals from bonds and connections with others. In the absence of a social identity grounded in relation to society, individuals look to recreate identity by joining gangs, which serve as surrogate families and communities, satisfying a need for belonging, solidarity, meaning, and purpose that is frustrated and denied in wider society.
I take a keen interest in Max Weber for the way that he appropriates the insights of both Marx and Nietzsche. Weber is acutely, even painfully, concerned with the social implications of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ by which is meant the dissolution of the overarching and authoritative moral framework. The same thing worried Emile Durkheim, whose concept of anomie pointed the normlessness that would afflict modern individualistic society. Weber knew well the problems that would follow the loss of ends. Individuals would lose their moral bearings and society would dissolve into a bleak existential angst.
‘Surely, politics is made with the head, but it is certainly not made with the head alone. In this the proponents of an ethic of ultimate ends are right.’
Weber, Politics as a Vocation, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology 127
The loss of a moral framework by which to orient society within, guiding individual choices and actions, ultimately blights all collective projects and forces resort to surrogate communities on the outside of a fractured society. Hence the tendency to a bureaucratic collectivism even authoritarianism as an attempt to address the problems of a divided society.
Since conservatism has been adept at appropriating the language of morality to buttress certain political positions, very many on the Left have tended to be shy, even hostile, to morality. This is a profound error that debilitates the collective projects of the Left, leaving only economic interests, instrumental and intellectual reason to motivate, inspire, obligate, and unite individuals in common endeavour. The absence of morality here is felt as a deficiency in will, enthusiasm, and motivation.
Through the recovery of the moral compass orienting individuals in society, I avoid the pitfalls of a liberal ontology that falsely separates the individual and the social. Emphasis on the one side of that dichotomy tends to advance moral arguments to individualise social problems and thereby rationalize the deep structural roots of these problems; emphasis on the other side tends to advance collective solutions to these problems whilst eliding the need for personal moral effort and individual responsibility. "When I was young," declared Rabbi Israel Salanter, "I wanted to change the world. I tried, but the world did not change. So I concentrated on changing my town, but my town did not change. Then I turned to my family, but my family did not change. Then I realized: first I must change myself." This is the voice of moral autonomy and authenticity. We have the power to ‘change the world’ for the better precisely because we have the capacity to change ourselves. This is not an either/or. There is no distinction between the social and the individual when it comes to moral agency. We have a calling to change both ourselves and the world as an imperative of the faith which sees humanity working in partnership with God in Creation. In the rabbinic phrase, human beings are "God’s partners in the work of creation.” I am trying to recall Jonathan Sacks citing an ancient rabbi who told a story of a people who had never had things so good in material terms, and yet were still complaining. Why, on Earth, could a people so materially satisfied be so unhappy? It takes a rabbi to discomfort the complacent by asking some unsettling questions.
The lesson is that there is such a thing as moral, indeed spiritual, health and that the moral and the social should be joined together. You cannot live without moral discourse without losing the capacity to move, motivate, and unite the members of society with respect to common endeavours. Any alternative vision of society must be a moral as well as a political and economic one, for reasons Terry Eagleton expresses well. We can make this point by reference to the modern tendency to reduce politics to the technical business of public administration and ‘evidence based’ policy, relegating morality to being merely a private affair. Noting the ancient intertwining of ethics and politics, Eagleton notes the effects of the divorce of these domains in the modern world: ‘This led to a lot of immoral boardrooms and politically oppressive bedrooms. Because politics had been redefined as purely calculative and pragmatic, it was now almost the opposite of the ethical.’ (Eagleton After Theory 2004: ch 6). Eagleton warns against the reduction of politics to technical, amoral terms:
‘The political left, however, cannot define the political in this purely technical way, since its brand of emancipatory politics inescapably involves questions of value. The problem for some traditional leftist thought was that the more you tried to firm up your political agenda, making it a scientific, materialist affair rather than an idle Utopian dream, the more you threatened to discredit the very values it aimed to realize. It seemed impossible to establish, say, the idea of justice on a scientific basis; so what exactly did you denounce capitalism, slavery or sexism in the name of? You cannot describe someone as oppressed unless you have some dim notion of what not being oppressed might look like, and why being oppressed is a bad idea in the first place. And this involves normative judgements, which then makes politics look uncomfortably like ethics.’
Eagleton 2003 ch 6
At this point, I argue that the environmental crisis that now threatens civilization with catastrophe derives not merely from the loss of the physical commons, but also from the loss of the political and the ethical commons. You cannot resolve the problems arising from the loss of the former without recovering politics and ethics and their interconnection:
‘Technology makes our bodies far more flexible and capacious, but in some ways much less responsive. It reorganizes our senses for swiftness and multiplicity rather than depth, persistence or intensity. Marx considered that by turning even our senses into commodities, capitalism had plundered us of our bodies. In his view, we would need a considerable political transformation in order to come to our senses.’
Eagleton 2003 ch 6
We need also a profound ethical transformation. It is this sense of politics and ethics that is not merely deficient in dominant environmentalist position, but utterly contradicted and perverted by scientism. Instead of a Green Republican, such an anti-politics and anti-ethics is preparation for entry into an austerian environmental regime regulating social and personal affairs. Throughout society, the many communal institutions which served as schools of socialization and moralization, such as the trade unions, the church, family and also informal societies, have declined and fallen away. The result is that there has been a loss of a moral framework above and a moral infrastructure below, with the result that the media by which individuals were socialised, moralized, and inspired to act have gone. Without those modes of internal self-regulation, commonality has to be imposed externally via legal and administrative force. The associational space of society has withered if not yet died, with the result that individuals have lost their bearings. This breeds the conditions of authoritarian imposition.
The view that neoliberalism is the source of all our ills is one that many support. George Monbiot, for instance, argued that ‘neoliberalism is the ideology at the root of all our problems.’
He writes: ‘Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?’ In answer to his question, the reason why the left has failed to come up with an alternative is in large part to a misdiagnosis of the problem in the first place. As in Monbiot’s misdiagnosis. In typical liberal intellectual fashion, Monbiot has made a system of ideas the root of socio-economic problems, instead of seeing ideology, as Marx did, as an expression of faulty socio-economic roots. The problems we face are not the result of a faulty theory. An ideology is right about the wrong system. The roots to the present crisis pre-date neoliberalism and go deeper than theory. Neoliberalism itself was a reaction against the failures of social democratic thinking and Keynesian policies to overcome the crisis tendencies of the capitalist system. The problems that Monbiot identifies are real, but their roots lie in the series of separations that constitute liberal capitalist modernity. The severance of people from the senses of belonging, identity, and meaning, from the commons, from their means of production and administration. It is there and not in a faulty theory that we ought to look for the source of social problems.
Separation is the key figure of liberal capitalist modernity, and the relentless promotion of neoliberal policies has served only to highlight and exacerbate the basic diremption of modern market society as a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism. The rising levels of inequality in conditions of crisis and austerity has only served to atomize society, unravel social bonds, and fragment communities even further. The increasing economic liberalisation pursued through the marketization and commercialisation of public business in areas such as health and education has been accompanied by a cultural and ethical liberalisation, accenting the right of individuals to choose the good and pursue happiness as they see fit. And why not, comes the question back. Isn’t this preferable to having some authority telling us what we should think or do and spend our time and money? To those who argue thus, I would simply say this: liberalism in economic, political, moral, and cultural forms has been the dominant philosophy of the modern age. Liberals in politics have a tendency to present themselves as plucky outsiders advancing the cause of emancipation against vested interests and dominant powers. This is an illusion which stems from reading liberalism’s emancipatory struggles of the past into the modern day, ignoring the fact that liberalism has won and is the dominant force. The problems of the world contested by liberals are generated by liberalism in both its economic and cultural and ethical wings. Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed is thus right to argue that the social and environmental ills that liberals contest are self-authored and that liberals should cease pretended they are radicals advancing emancipation from the margins, accept that their philosophy and practice are the causes of the problems of the world, and own responsibility for them. Based on a liberal ontology that falsely separates the individual and the social, the self-interest of the self-possessing being has been privileged and elevated above the warm, affective ties and bonds that are constitutive of identity, frustrating deeper social and moral needs. The moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual in liberal thought becomes the primacy of the self-possessing being prior to and autonomous of society. Such an individual exists nowhere other than in liberal thought. Human beings, as Aristotle argued, are social beings. In liberal thought, individuals are asocial, contracting into the society of others only to defend or promote self-interest, contracting out for the same reason. The inability of society to muster the collective will and wit to address and resolve social, economic, and environmental problems lies here and in the social relations that manifest such atomistic, egoistic thinking. On climate change, for instance, you will hear climate campaigners argue that climate action to preserve planetary boundaries is a moral imperative. In truth, given the moral condition of modernity, it isn’t. Environmentalists use the word ‘must’ a lot, presenting a list of the things that governments, politicians, and individuals ‘must’ do if catastrophic environmental damage is to be avoided. They have become so accustomed to an ethics as mere value judgements that they no longer understand what ethics is. They are using moral language without understanding its emptiness given the lack of referents. Society has still to understand the modern moral predicament as summed up by Nietzsche’s declaration of the ‘death of God.’ The death of God is the death of all overarching and authoritative moral frameworks. With God goes nature, and goes any collective social purpose. This, and capitalist social relations deaf to the health of nature and labour in its pursuit of exchange value, is the source of modern problems.
In failing to understand the material roots and systemic separations at the heart of capitalist modernity, liberal thinkers are forced to recoil from one abstraction, the discrete self-choosing individual, to another, the surrogate commonality and universality of the state and the state bureaucracy. Unable to achieve redress of the destructive consequences of self-interest at the level of real society, government and politicians have no other recourse but state action, thereby expanded the scope and reach of the state, something which entails a bureaucratic encroachment on society. The Aristotelian tradition I espouse sees politics as concerned with the good life, identifying the best regime for human beings as social beings. The liberal tradition rejects the Aristotelian view as inimical to individual liberty, claiming that it makes individuals the property of the state. Such a view is a misreading which is based entirely on the modern liberal dualism of state and civil society. Aristotle’s state is actually the polis as a comprehensive framework, the supreme community of all smaller communities. There is individual participation built into every level of that structure, certainly when one develops it – as I do - in terms of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, or Marx’s commune democracy. One can also develop the principle in terms of conservative thought, referring to the ‘little platoons’ of society in Edmund Burke or the intermediary associations of Alexis de Tocqueville. These bodies which populate the associational space of civil society are schools of socialization and moralization, community institutions which define and develop morality, embed solidarity, cultivate habits of the heart (Tocqueville), and create a social glue that keeps society together in response to the ordinary travails of life.
Ponder the lesson of this quote. I shall be developing its wider meaning throughout to check tendencies to authoritarianism through abstraction:
As long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.
Alexis de Tocqueville
That ‘family feeling’ is nurtured and expressed in the smaller schools and associations of community. Economic, cultural, and ethical liberalisation here have undermined these sources of unity. This builds on the initial disembedding and disconnection which has defined capitalism from the first, separating people from each other and from their political, ethical, and physical commons. The loss of unity and commonality in the material relations of the everyday lifeworld forces redress at the level of the state as ‘the illusory community,’ ‘the illusory general interest.’ These may sound like quotes from a conservative thinker or politician. They are quotes from Marx in The German Ideology. Long ago, Marx demonstrated the substitutionist logic of the state and how it comes to sever every common interest or purpose from society and appropriate them to its own ends. Or, more precisely, to ends in the service of the process of accumulation. The state, Marx argues, can create only the illusory community, appropriating communal concerns from society and opposing them back to society in the alien form of an abstract general interest. The state power - with 'an immense bureaucratic and military organisation, an ingenious and broadly based state machinery, and an army of half a million officials alongside the actual army, which numbers a further half million. This frightful parasitic body’ - originates in the series of separations and disconnections which take place in constituting bourgeois society.
Every common interest was immediately detached from society, opposed to it as a higher, general interest, torn away from the self-activity of the individual members of society and made a subject for governmental, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse, the communal property of a village community, or the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France.
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 1973:237/8
Marx thus criticises ‘the abstraction of the political state’ (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State) as a ‘modern product,’ the product of disembedding and disconnection. This abstract state is therefore a substitute community, appropriating society's own interests and forces to turn social power into political force. In the process of political alienation, the government of common affairs is severed from the self-activity of the individual members of society and embodied in the abstract sphere of the state and its officialdom. To achieve the genuine community of real individuals, Marx argues for the restoration of common purposes and powers to the individuals whose self-activity and self-organisation is constitutive of real sociability.
My point is that modern critics who point to the way that society has been atomized and fractured, as a result of extraneous economic pressures as well as the way that social purposes have been outsourced to the public sector, who really repeating a line of thought pioneered by Marx, but also by a whole range of thinkers who witness the early stages of de-socialisation and demoralization. Not only social purposes and interests, but morality itself no longer belong to individuals. All these things have been removed from society and externalised in extraneous bodies, to be administered and taught by professionals. Police replaces polis, as the social and moral void that opens up through separation comes to be filled by classes of all kinds, parenting, citizenship, rehabilitation etc. Everything that the informal schools of socialization and moralization once taught now has to be taught by experts. Instead of a habitus in which the virtues could be known, acquired, and exercised, society has lost its internal moral bearings, morality has dissolved into value judgements, and good behaviour has become a matter of education. In the process, morality becomes technique, a set of ‘skills’ to be taught and learned as rules and guidelines relayed downwards from the state, instead of a self-education that proceeds through the norms and values prevailing within society, to be mulled over collectively. The result of all these developments has been to undermine both social and moral autonomy, blocking the development of the solidaristic structures that not only bind society together but guide and orient the choices made by the individuals who compose that society.
In writing so extensively on Marx above was to make clear the extent to which the question of social dislocation is implicated in the experience of moral decay. The effects of both are debilitating and should form a critical part of any discussion of how to reconstitute the basis of a healthy and viable society. To make a general observation, the Left is strong on identifying the social and economic roots of contemporary crises and their resolution, but poor with respect to its moral roots. What is needed, and what I hope to have supplied in my own work, is a sustained analysis of the loss of an authoritative morality bound up with a consideration of the conditions of its recovery. Many on the Left may baulk at this argument, something which reveals the extent to which the liberal ethos has seeped into its marrow, corrupting the social identity and commitment. The irony is that in losing the sense of a true morality, the Left retreats into a shallow moralism which denounces individualism and ‘greed’ without understanding the need for a social and character formation that counters such things.
A socialist politics is neither coherent, cogent, nor viable unless sustained by a strong moral component, since it is this morality that orients direction and inspires, motivates, and obligates individuals in common endeavour. Without that, a collectivist politics is vulnerable to defection on the part of self-interested individuals. A politics of the common good is viable only if it possesses a coherent morality which transcends the view of morality as mere subjective choice and preference. The liberal view sees individuals as pre- and asocial beings, entering relations to others only to defend or advance self-interest. That self-interested individual can defect at any time. A socialist politics requires a stronger moral position than this. In A Home and a Resting Place, I develop Marx’s self-alienation in its original sense of a personal alienation from God. Overcoming such alienation requires a personal moral effort on the part of the individual. I therefore argue that the overcoming of personal and social alienation is one and the same process. Where these become separated, as in liberal thought and society, a collective project becomes abstract and morally hollow, losing the individual responsibility that gives anthropological content, whilst an individualistic position becomes similarly abstract, socially hollow, losing the collective responsibility that sustains a social empowerment. A personal moral effort is essential since it is only through individuals exercising their capacity for moral autonomy that society can be transformed for the better from within. Personal moral effort is the prerequisite for developing the social solidarity that unites individuals in common purpose and endeavour. The focus on supra-individual socio-economic forces requires collective mechanisms and media of social control is important but not exclusive. Socialism is charged with joining together what liberalism has rent asunder – the individual and the collective. The social and the individual, the communal and the personal, need to be reunited through a process of resocialization and remoralization. Human beings are not passive products of circumstances, their lives determined by impersonal economic and social forces. That is the fate of human beings conditions of alienation. But, as Marx, argued, human beings are also the producers of circumstances. This production occurs in a social context, but also moral. Human beings are moral agents with a will and a mind of their own. They exercise this moral autonomy in a social context in relation to other individuals. That context also needs to be considered as a supra-individual moral context. In contrast to the liberal view of individuals freely choosing the good as they see fit, a moral habitus sees individuals as using their autonomy to conform themselves to the good, as given not merely by society in time and place, but by ultimate reality.
Challenging and ultimately overcoming a socially structured division inequality requires a transformation of social relations that restores the bonds of social solidarity within communities of virtuous practice. That entails a strong notion of ‘the good’ that is binding on individuals, something beyond subjective choice. Such a notion is quite distinct from a liberalism which is agnostic on the question of an ultimate good, giving us instead a neutralised public framework (which conveniently correlates with key liberal institutions and values) in which individuals are free to choose the good according to preference. Those who consider that such a view entails an authoritarian imposition that is repressive of individuality, otherness, and difference need to ponder their position at length. The social, economic, and ecological problems that beset modern civilisation cannot be resolved by a morality that repudiates the notion of the good and an ultimate reality for individuals to conform themselves too. This applies to a socialist politics committed to the common good. Whilst those of a liberal persuasion will be inclined to consider this no great loss, especially given the association of notions of the common good with the Catholic Church, the extent to which it is a loss becomes apparent when we introduce the problem of climate change and the consistent failure on the part of ‘society’ to develop the collective will, nous, and nerve to address it. As Margaret Thatcher, on impeccably liberal premises, pointed out, ‘there is no such thing as society,’ there are only individuals choosing according to self-interest. Should ‘society’ remain premised on the figure of the self-choosing individual, then real individuals are entirely free not to join any collective project to address the environmental crisis, or any other supra-individual problem (economic crisis, inequality, division) or to bail out. That leaves environmentalists using the imperative voice without having the authoritative force to back it up. We live in an age when those concerned with climate change are continually telling governments, politicians, and people what they ‘must’ do. Such demands do not work, on account of the fact that society has lost its authoritative moral framework. My argument is that society sets about establishing the conditions of a genuine morality, infusing it through society whilst building it through the schools of socialization and solidarity, or we will be faced with resort to a prescriptive authoritarianism delivered through the abstract collectivities of the modern world. I therefore argue for the recovery of a genuine authoritative framework through the simultaneous restitution of social power and reclamation of the language of morality. This project of ethical and social restoration serves to reinvigorate the social institutions and solidaristic connections that enable individuals to acquire and exercise the virtues and thereby realize their own moral autonomy, thus transforming society for the better from within.
The painting is “The Challenge of the Catechism” by Avery Cardinal Dulles
The Catechism states that 'there is no true freedom except in the pursuit of that which is good and just.’