Slouching Towards Gomorrah (45 page)

James Q. Wilson argues in
The Moral Sense
that people have a natural moral sense that is in part biological and in part derives from family life and natural human sociability. He does not deny religion a role but does not discuss it. In
On Character
, however, he refers to “processes of habituation that even in the absence of religious commitment lead to temperance, fidelity, moderation, and the acceptance of personal responsibility.”
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The question is, of course, whether secular habituation can sustain itself over generations. I was inclined at one time to think that it could, that each generation would teach its children virtues that they in turn would pass to their offspring. We all know persons without religious belief who nevertheless display all the virtues we associate with religious teaching. That might seem to suggest that religion is unnecessary to morality, but the counter argument is that such people are living on the moral capital of prior religious generations. Since secular habituation is grounded only in tradition, that moral capital will be used up eventually, having nothing to replenish it, and we will see a culture such as the one we are entering.

This is not to dismiss Wilson’s persuasive showing that humans have a natural moral sense, but the evidence so far suggests rather strongly that the natural moral sense is not of itself adequate to provide the level of morality necessary to save a culture. Wilson himself suggests that conclusion: “Having thought about the matter for many years, I can find no complete explanation for the worldwide increase in crime rates that does not assign an important role to a profound cultural shift in the strength of either social
constraints or internal conscience or both, and I can find no complete explanation of that cultural shift that does not implicate to some important degree our convictions about the sources and importance of moral sentiments.”
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The natural sources of moral sentiments that he discusses are, presumably, what they always have been. Thus, something additional must be found that accounts not only for rising crime rates but for the more general cultural degeneration that is the subject of this book. I find it difficult to imagine what that something else might be, for America, other than the ebbing of religious faith.

There are, of course, countries with high ethical standards—low rates of divorce and illegitimacy, for example—that are not only not Christian but are not religious in any Western sense. Japan appears to be such a country. Japan, however, is also not a Western culture. Its religion, Shinto, features ancestor worship, which is a way of revering traditional virtues and thus enforcing morality. The homogeneity of the Japanese population also makes it possible, for the time being at least, to maintain morality through tradition.

Irving Kristol points out also that relatively small societies may be able to maintain morality by tradition, but once a society becomes large and complex, particularly if its population is heterogeneous, tradition cannot be adequate to the maintenance of morality and a healthy culture. It is also now obvious that reason alone cannot provide a morality. Moral reasoning, like all reasoning, requires a place to start; it requires major premises. Philosophy cannot provide major premises, though for a long time, since the Enlightenment perhaps, it was thought that reason could and ultimately would do so. The realization that it cannot has begun to sink in and has produced most unhappy results. “Secular rationalism,” as Kristol put it, “has been unable to produce a compelling, self-justifying moral code. Philosophy can analyze moral codes in interesting ways, but it cannot create them. And with this failure, the whole enterprise of secular humanism—the idea that man can define his humanity and shape the human future by reason and will alone—begins to lose its legitimacy. Over the past 30 years, all the major philosophical as well as cultural trends began to repudiate secular rationalism in favor of an intellectual and moral relativism and/or nihilism.”
⁹

The only other possibility is that men may learn from experience what behavior produces a satisfactory or good life. Reflection on experience can provide the major premises and the minor premises from which conclusions about morality follow. If one is to have a satisfactory life, it is better not to covet your neighbor’s wife. Not only are you less likely to be shot or sued, but if others follow the same rule, you can, with considerable confidence, take serious interest in raising your wife’s children. It is probably possible, in short, to reconstruct most of the Ten Commandments in this way. But to suppose that an entire society may be made moral in this fashion is merely laughable. We are not a community of over 250 million reflective men and women able to work out the conditions of contentedness and willing to sacrifice near-term pleasure for long-term benefits.

It thus appears, at least for society as a whole, that the major and perhaps only alternative to “intellectual and moral relativism and/or nihilism” is religious faith. That conclusion will make many Americans nervous or hostile. While most people claim to be religious, most are also not comfortable with those whose faith is strong enough to affect their public behavior. That can be seen in the reaction of many Americans to the appearance in the public square of religious conservatives. A letter to the editor, for example, proclaims, “The ‘ardor’ shown by many people of the religious right is often intolerance masquerading as principle. In seeking to impose its ideas about school prayer, abortion and a host of other issues on society at large, the religious right is pursuing a program of bigotry and demagoguery that is antithetical to the U.S.’s pluralistic heritage.”
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The fear of religion in the public arena is all too typical of Americans, and particularly the intellectual class, today. Religious conservatives cannot “impose” their ideas on society except by the usual democratic methods of trying to build majorities and passing legislation. In that they are no different from any other group of people with ideas of what morality requires. All legislation “imposes” a morality of one sort or another, and, therefore, on the reasoning offered, all law would seem to be antithetical to pluralism. The references to “bigotry” and “demagoguery” seem to mean little more than that the author would like to impose a very different set of values.

Today’s religious conservatives take Christianity and Judaism seriously, but that does not place them outside a very long moral tradition. C. S. Lewis: “The number of actions about whose ethical quality a Stoic, an Aristotelian, a Thomist, a Kantian, and a Utilitarian would agree is, after all very large.”
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And again: “A Christian who understands his own religion laughs when unbelievers expect to trouble him by the assertion that Jesus uttered no command which had not been anticipated by the Rabbis—few, indeed, which cannot be paralleled in classical, ancient Egyptian, Ninevite, Babylonian, or Chinese texts. We have long recognized that truth with rejoicing. Our faith is not pinned on a crank.”
¹²

Only religion can accomplish for a modern society what tradition, reason, and empirical observation cannot. Christianity and Judaism provide the major premises of moral reasoning by revelation and by the stories in the Bible. There is no need to attempt the impossible task of reasoning your way to first principles. Those principles are accepted as given by God.

For most people, only revealed religion can supply the premises from which the prescriptions of morality can be deduced. Religion tells us what the end of man should be and that information supplies the premises for moral reasoning and hence a basis for moral conduct. Philosophers cannot agree on the proper end of man and hence cannot supply the necessary premises. Religion is by its nature authoritative and final as to first principles. It must be so or it would be valueless. Those principles are given on a stone tablet, either literally or figuratively, and, so long as you believe the religion, there is simply no possibility of arguing with what is on the tablet.

Ortega y Gassett put the importance of authoritative religion very well:

Hence, among other things, the “politics of meaning.”

Religion supplies the major premises from which moral reasoning begins, but after that trouble may begin. The difficulty is not with the major premises religion provides but with the minor premises that must be provided by secular reasoning and secular disciplines. These are essential to discern what the major premises require for their fulfillment in a variety of worldly circumstances. The reasoning and discernment must be done by both clergy and laity. One reason for humility is that often the persons concerned will lack the essential knowledge and will leap to a conclusion that retards rather than advances the religious value in question. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, long ignored or misunderstood economics, with the result that it advanced such intellectual bloomers as the just wage doctrine, which, if it had been effective, would have inflicted the same harm—unemployment—as the minimum wage. But religious belief coupled with sound secular reasoning is of enormous benefit to a society.

In that case, it may be asked, why is Americas culture not thriving rather than degenerating? How could Lasch speak of the “gradual decay of religion”? We are, after all, regularly assured that Americans are the most religious people among the industrial democracies; 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, over half report they pray at least once a day, and more than 40 percent claim to have gone to church in any given week. Surely that demonstrates the continuation of the vibrant religious belief Tocqueville saw, and surely it refutes Lasch.

The truth is that, despite the statistics on churchgoing, etc., the United States is a very secular nation that, for the most part, does not take religion seriously. Not only may the statistics overstate the religious reality—people may be telling pollsters what they think makes a good impression—but statistics say nothing of the quality or depth of American religious belief. It is increasingly clear that very few people who claim a religion could truthfully say that it
informs their attitudes and significantly affects their behavior.
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The practices and beliefs of the Catholic laity offer a good test case because the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception, abortion, divorce and remarriage, and the infallibility of the pope on matters of faith and morals, are unusually clear. Yet it is also clear that many of the laity display the Tocqueville syndrome and “keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience.” A 1985
New York Times/CBS News
poll shows that 68 percent of Catholics favored the use of artificial birth control, and 73 percent thought Catholics should be allowed to divorce and remarry, and 79 percent believed you can disagree with the pope on these issues and still be a good Catholic. Catholics even have higher abortion rates than do Protestants and Jews.
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I have no figures on comparative divorce rates, but anyone with a large Catholic acquaintance has seen a large number of divorces. The Church has accommodated itself to this reality, the Zeitgeist, by granting annulments, even of long-standing marriages that have produced children. In short, Catholics’ obedience to their doctrines would seem to run at the same level as Protestants’ to theirs.

Conformity to the spirit of the times appears to characterize the clergy as well as the laity. In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical on birth control that, to state the matter gently, was thoroughly counter to the Zeitgeist and highly unpopular. The American bishops decided to give the position only verbal support and, according to James Hitchcock, a Catholic writer, thereby “made the fundamental strategic mistake which has been the undoing of liberal Protestantism. For over a century liberal Protestantism has steadily surrendered Christian positions deemed incredible by a particular historic age, the better to protect the core of the faith. But in each generation, more such surrenders are demanded, until there is finally nothing left, and surrender itself becomes the chief expectation which liberals must meet.”
¹⁶
The result, he says, has been the “steady erosion of every distinctively Catholic moral position.” That much seems clear, as the figures above about the disagreement of the laity with Church doctrine demonstrate.

What Frederick Lewis Allen noted of the 1920s was true for a long time previously and remains true today: religion is declining because those identified with it do not actually believe in it.
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It
seems impossible to say that a person believes in a religion when he rejects what the religion proclaims. It is difficult to say that a religion even exists if it keeps giving up its tenets to appease its members and critics. If belief, in some sense, can be said to be present, it is a weak and watery belief that is no match for parishioners’ personal, secular concerns.

The first question, then, is why belief evaporated, why the West has become so rapidly secularized. A number of factors might be cited, but underlying them and giving them force I would put the advance of egalitarianism and individualism together with the progress of technology that made lives easier. Those of us used to the soft, therapeutic religions of the present day forget how rigorous religion used to be, Protestant as well as Catholic. As life became easier and diversions more plentiful, men are less willing to accept the authority of their clergy and less willing to worship a demanding God, a God who dictates how one should live and puts a great many bodily and psychological pleasures off limits.