Morality only “progresses” as a phenomenon of gift, in which what is good and worth doing is seen as good and worth doing by a subsequent generation, which takes on the morality of their fathers and repeats it, as their own morality. But this means that progress in morality is never assured. It may not take.
I would like to diagnose a brand of conservatism—a mood shared by those on and offline alike. It consists in removing the center of the chest, clearing out the heart and lungs, and filling the resultant vacancy with a medium-sized oriental gong. This, one bares towards the World Gone Mad; toward the Wicked World which threatens all that is Good, True, and Beautiful with barbs of Moral Depravity. The barbs are shot—“men are becoming women!” “you can’t trust your neighbors any more!”—the missiles strike the gong, and the conservative resonates long and loud for all to hear. He is alarmed—hear him ring.
The trouble with ringing out in protest everytime a standard is dropped or a taboo breached is that it lends credence to a view of history which justifies most moral depravity.
Gawk at an idea with me, an idea so basic to our thought that its wackiness goes undetected: gawk upon moral progress. It is a creature of the Enlightenment. We could locate it as a written phenomenon in Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, but it would bore us all to tears. It is, to the spiritual realm, what technological progress is to material: the unjustified belief that things are getting better and better all the time. In this view, humanity makes moral gains; becomes better; and cements this progress into the shifting sands of time by erecting various fixed institutions, laws, and taboos—landmarks erected along a journey up and out of a distant, immoral past.
Within this view, immorality is always retrograde. It does not go wayward so much as backward; it does not depart from the narrow road so much as about-face and hightail it to the last stop. Because it moves the wrong way on an imaginary linear progression, it is best combated by loud alarms; warnings that we are losing the gains of morality; cries that, if the wicked do not stop dragging humanity backwards, all the progress of civilization will be lost.
“Shock” and “disbelief” are the chief markers of this mood; they are the notes sounded when the gong is struck. And the conservative who “can’t believe that young people are [name-your-depravity]” sums up the whole misery of moral progress: he tends to imagine a declining role for subjectivity—for thought, will, and active participation—in the business of being good.
A man who is being chaste; a man applying his thought and will and prayer to the great work of tilling and keeping the virtue of chastity; such a man may have all sorts of things to say when he hears of the latest sexual depravity popular on Pornhub. But he will hardly begin what he has to say with, “I can’t believe that…”
He can believe it. He can believe that man will fail to integrate their sexual natures with the fullness of who he is; he can believe that the sexual organs will be set to violence rather than love; he can believe all this, because chastity is his work, and he knows the vices it opposes and the passions it heals as a doctor know his diseases and the organs they afflict. For the virtuous man to have “shock” and “disbelief” in the presence of sin makes about as much sense as a soldier saying, in the presence of enemies: “I am shocked, shocked to find myself so rudely opposed.”
But for the man of moral progress, “shock” really is the thing. He views morality as a civilizational achievement and moral goodness as the product of centuries of accumulated labor. He is shocked by depravity as he would be shocked to feel a stone bridge shift under his step. He imagines morality as something built before him and not something in need of being built by him. He uses the moral world—he does not contribute to it.
The married man is not shocked to see a marriage crumble into mutual hostility. Saddened, but not stunned, for his work includes the day-to-day overcoming of hostility and the maintenance of peace. But for the man who views marriage as a historical institution, bequeathed to him by a thousand year march up and out of some primitive, polymorphous sexuality, a decline in marriage is understood as “civilizational decline,” and the rejection of marriage can only be met with same appalled shake of the head one might make after finding his nephew has rejected indoor plumbing.
Ringing with moral alarm might seem like righteousness, but “even the pagans do as much.” Left liberals, the typical objects of conservatives’ shock and horror, share in their enlightened view of moral progress. They are always desperate and sad to think that we might go “backwards” on such issues as abortion. Indeed, they more convincingly resonate with horror over infractions and the violation of taboos than social conservatives!
The difference is one of style. Conservatives believe that morality is always progressing and so, to be good, they must not turn back but must conserve their position as the recipients of the highest moral order yet achieved. Liberals believe that morality is always progressing and so, to be good, they must break old taboos and establish new ones—whipping the inevitable moral progress of history along at a faster rate. Both operate out of the same presumption of moral progress, and a spirit of technology and mechanism—which is to say, both operate out of a fear of virtue.
For it is the impulse of all theories of moral progress to fix all but the most current moral battle in stone; to view all up to the current controversies as having been decided and achieved. The greatest praise one can give a moral achievement, in this theory, is that it no longer bothers the brain, no longer needs to be thought or thought about, because it now belongs to the “natural course of things” in which one looks both ways, doesn’t litter, doesn’t fornicate with a first cousin, sees children as sexually proscribed, and so on. An achieved morality is one that operates, as closely as possible, as a machine operates: the laws promote it and a culture is established in which adherence to the norm is rewarded and a lack of adherence is punished. A child, with no other motivation than that of feeling pleasure and avoiding pain, can successfully flourish in such a society without thinking at all—his subjectivity is largely irrelevant.
Increasingly, “religion” can be understood as the lingering suspicion, quietly held within a world of brash, technological confidence, that after all we still have to figure out a way to be good from within.
People die. And when a generation dies, it obliterates, along with its earthly presence, whatever “progress” or “regress” it made in the moral way of things. And when a new generation is born, it is born without having made any progress at all. It is only by a literary conceit that Enlightenment historians imagine humanity as progressing. In fact, all human progress gets the chop every seventy-five years or so.
Morality only “progresses” as a phenomenon of gift, in which what is good and worth doing is seen as good and worth doing by a subsequent generation, which takes on the morality of their fathers and repeats it, as their own morality. But this means that progress in morality is never assured. It may not take.
Being “moral” as a passive reception of an accumulation of progress that one gets by simply living normally in the world does not take. And it does not take because it does not make its practitioners beautiful. There is nothing inspiring about it. The man who successfully avoids pain, punishment, and shame by adhering to the norms of his society has avoided discomfort. He does not, by his passivity towards the forward thrust of history, become any one’s hero. I am awed at the temperate man; I am not awed by the man who obeys the speed limit for fear of the cops. I want to be Saint Francis; I do not want to be some Enlightenment-brained prig who imagines his “society” triumphed over “immorality” before he was born. The former acts; the latter is the “result” of better men. The former is living; the latter may as well be dead.
The child loves her father and desires to be like him, but she cannot discern him in the mere happenstance of his having inherited a glut of “moral progress.” Rather, she knows her father precisely in his labor, in his virtue, in those glimpses of the person which are only ever given in his acts—his subjective application of his intellect and his will to reality. “Dad was never afraid to tell people what he thought” is something people say. “Dad was born into a society that respected the right to free speech” is not. The former remembers the person in his acts. The latter remembers the “moral progress” he inherited. The former inspires and guides our actions. The latter is stupid, absurd.
Moral progress only exists on the condition that no one believes in it, for the moment they do believe in it, they decrease in sanctity—being good from within—and the degree that they decrease in sanctity is the degree to which they are not a fruitful source of imitation by the living—for no one wants to be someone who is only what they are by an external force, even a force so noble as “history.” It is by not believing in moral progress that one achieves it, for when a man does not believe that he already has holiness, he must become holy, and when he becomes holy, he becomes a reasonable object of imitation. It is not enough that a law be obeyed, or taboo be kept safe from pollution, unless in the very acts of obeying and keeping, a man becomes perfect, powerful, beautiful—that is, a desirable source of imitation by others, and that before he gets the chop.
Republished with gracious permission from New Polity (August 2023).
