THE NEW MORALITY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

by
MERNE A. HARRIS, Ph. D.
(Dean, Vennard College)

That there is something unique about twentieth century man seems evident from the many attempts there have been to describe him. Writing in 1948, David Riesman was convinced that Americans had become outer-directed rather than inner-directed, ie., more concerned about what others thought about them than what they thought of themselves. The consequence, argued Riesman, was "a loosening sense of personal destiny." (1)

Walter Lippman reached the same conclusion in describing modern man 5 release from the inhibiting traditions of another age; a release which allowed him to drift without moral commitments but also without existential fulfillment. (2) But one of the most recent analyses of man 5 aimlessness may be the most perceptive. For, in blaming the amoral context which seems to characterize contemporary social life in America upon a lack of love, William Glasser identifies the root position of the new moralist. (3) Denied an intrinsic or extrinsic impulse to love, there is no discernible basis for "moral" behavior a loss which leads to a code of life which John Steinbeck described as the abandonment of "ethics, morals, codes of conduct, the stern rules which in the past we needed in order to survive" and which, he confesses, have never been violated without turning loose on society "a wild and terrible self-destructive binge." (4)

It is the judgment of many scholars, then, that modern man has indeed reached the relativistic position of the new morality: reactionary, liberated, self-centered-and dangerous in his social irresponsibility. But it has been a long journey.

For in describing man's destructive involvement in the new morality, scholars have succeeded only in pointing out the symptoms-the sickness is much more complex as is evidenced by the fact that no one really believes Steinbeck when he says that what we need is "a new set of rules." (5) Rather we believe Walter Lippman who says that "what is required is a new kind of man," (6) because something serious has happened to man on the way to his encounter with the new morality.

It really began with the so-called liberation of 18th Century serfs from their bondage to the soil-masters of Western and Central Europe. It was a Pyrrhic victory, however, since many of the serfs merely exchanged their bondage to the land and the feudal lord for the tyranny of the shop arid the factory-owner. It was a bondage no less real and fully as degrading to the human spirit in two important ways.

Prior to the deluge of wheels, pulleys, and engines which inundated England, and later much of the rest of the world, two centuries ago, a man's pride was his craft. Economic survival and community prestige depended almost exclusively upon his creative ingenuity and his careful craftsmanship. Industrialism pronounced a moratorium against all that, declaring that success is bigness-not goodness; a persuasion deleterious indeed to the human spirit.

Another consequence of industrialism was the pronounced anonymity of the capitalistic system. Gone were the intimate relationships that had once existed between distributor and producer, or between fellow-laborers. Now the distributor was an image-not an acquaintance, and one's fellow-worker an entity important chiefly as a part of a functioning unit. Or, as a 1965 report of United Evangelical Action on Social Concern put it, the laborer "is no longer working for men whom he knows, but for things and on things." The report concludes that "labor in industry develops an impersonal, dehumanizing stress of workers. The work would seem to deny him human dignity." (7)

Paul Johnson describes the situation in this way: "In our time we have been uprooted from our former homeland, adrift in a mobile and changing society. We are lonely in crowds who seem not to care, pushed to and fro by machines to serve and be served, until we too become mechanical and act like machines. We meet other strangers, but mostly by external contacts, passing by day or bouncing away as if we were rubber balls." (8)

Denied a direct identification with the results of his labor or the environment in which he worked, the worker sought another frame of social reference, and found it in the security of an organization of cogs-in-the-wheel against the mover of the wheel. Hence collective bargaining began to dominate the jargon of the laboring man in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "frightened", as John Steinbeck says, "into organization for self-defense." (9)

It was a bloody struggle. With a world clamoring for what they could produce and a flood-tide of immigrants desperate for work, capitalists were generally insensitive to demands for improved wages or safer conditions of labor. Gradually, however, the tide turned as groups like the Molly Maguires and the I. W. W.'s, leaders like Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis, or events like the Pullman Strike and the Haymarket Riot focused the nation's attention upon the plight of the newly-disenfranchised working man.

The point to be made, however, is that the victory was costly, for man was now negotiating not as an individual, but as one part of a large group. More than costly, the victory was abortive, for even the security of a group relationship faces serious challenge from a modern phenomenon, hydra-headed automation.

No longer does the workman cower at the tyranny of the ubiquitous but unseen owner-the union sees to that. But he does have to cringe before the merciless decrees of the computer, clattering out the ominous message of his non-essentiality. For this problem the organization has offered no useful answer. It has not because it cannot since, as James Cameron points out, "The complexities of modern, industrialized society no longer permit the individualism which characterized agrarian life in the United States before the Civil War." (10)

The consequence is, as Peter Vierech writes, "an orphan age" in which every individual is haunted by "a sense of desolation and incommunicable singularity" (11)-a sense intensified by warnings such as the one voiced by John Steinbeck that "we already have too many people and are in process of producing far too many." (12) The problem is what George Forell has termed "the death of man" in his conviction that the problem of our time is "the abolition of man as man, so deeply felt by the person who sees himself as a social security number on an I.B.M. card or a computer tape." (13)

I am of the conviction that any generation which has been deprived of its importance to society has suffered a decimation in self-importance as well, a circumstance which gives rise to two reactions which must be understood if we are to correctly interpret the moral code of modern man.

For one thing, the search for security continues, and in an attempt to discover something bigger than the economic system which has made him its captive, the worker will either turn to God or government. More will be said about modern man and his God later; now we must explore the nature of his relationship to government.

More than any other word, paternalism seems to best describe the prevailing relationship between the governing and the governed in twentieth century America. John Kennedy seems to have perceived this fact when, in his inaugural address, he pled with his countrymen to ask what they could do for their country rather than asking what their country could do for them. But it was a futile attempt to off-set the paternalistic trend of a quarter of a century in American social life which, in the ultimate analysis, leaves us responsible for little we do not care to assume and reveals a significant shift in social responsibility - a shift articulated by the cry of the creditor rather than that of the debtor; a shift symbolized by the grasping hand rather than the helping hand; a shift dramatized a dozen times daily in communities all over our nation where screams for help fall upon the deafened ears of the socially emancipated. It seems that John Steinbeck is right in contending that "the quality of responsibility has atrophied in modern Americans." (14) But this is no more than the prominent American Socialist, Norman Thomas, has been saying for a long time-that man will surrender anything to be economically secure. (15)

If it is true that modern man has found his haven in the largesse of the State, the implications are frightening to even the most casual student of twentieth century European history. One important conclusion derived from such a vivid object lesson is that security and obedience maintain a parallel relationship. Citizens must not only avoid offending the State in the interest of security, they are just as secure when doing everything not prohibited by the State. It is therefore possible for man to know material security while living in a state of moral anarchy. In fact, subservience to the State in the interests of security may ultimately demand a surrender of moral absolutes. The second attitude to derive from a reduced sense of self-importance (and this is related to the first one just discussed) is that man admits no obligation to the moral codes of non-governmental institutions within the society which has advertised his uselessness to itself. There is then but one court of moral adjudication-personal self-interest.

Under the aegis of traditional morality, this would have been a reasonably safe position for, to use Riesman's term, persons inner-directed are capable of surviving under the most amazing circumstances of moral challenge. But, due in large part to the ramifications of Sigmund Freud's war against the super-ego and ego, man has been liberated from any inner convictions which owe their existence to an external disciplinary source. Steinbeck describes the transition well: "I'm not going to preach about any good old days. By our standards of comfort they were pretty awful. What did they have then that we are losing or have lost? Well, for one thing they had rules-rules governing life, limb, and property, rules governing department, manners, conduct, and finally rules defining dishonesty, dishonor, misconduct and crime." (16)

But we have seen that the old rules are valid only under two considerations-the prolongation of security and the perpetuation of self-interest, two considerations not really separable the one from the other. And the demand for security does little to inspire a sense of volitional moral duty; rules are obeyed out of fear rather than love. And unredeemed self-interest has seldom ordered the highest good for the individual, so rules which contradict self-interest are held to be obsolete and therefore violate under the new regime. The ultimate end of a commitment to security and self-interest is a person with little sense of social responsibility or self-worth. William Glasser calls that kind of person inadequate because he leads a love-less life, (17) and a loveless life creates no motivation towards moral behavior. (18)

I am persuaded that lovelessness characterizes the interpersonal and intrapersonal social relationships of modern man. All he asks of others is security enough to survive, and he promises to keep only those rules necessary to get it. All he demands of himself is that which he himself approves. Thus his moral code consists of the demands of a domineering social order and the dictates of a depraved self, both of whom hold mortgages upon his spirit as well as his soul. Or as Glasser puts it: "Where standards and values are not stressed, the most that therapists can accomplish is to help patients become more comfortable in their irresponsibility." (19)

Paralleling those things which were assaulting the soul of man were those influences directed against his spirit, compelling him to modify the spiritual as well as the moral values of human. existence. For while society was experiencing the throes of the industrial revolution, it was reeling under the impact of the French philosophers-an intrepid group of 18th century pioneers who sought to light the road to human perfectability by extinguishing the Light of the world. It was a perfectability, however, which was dependent upon a drastic break with any traditions of the past which tended to paralyze humanity in its forward progress. No facet of the past was more crippling than religion, and no instrument of that facet was more restrictive than the Bible. God's Word, then, had to go, because there were other, more useful materials out of which to build the "heavenly city on earth."

Disenchanted with the credulity of God's Word, the philosophers were compelled to admit that they entertained non-traditional views about a God interested enough in the affairs of man to intervene therein. The Deists gave the apprehensions of the philosophers articulate expression in maintaining that God had set all things in motion, then had retreated to a position of non-intervention as He watched the movement of forces which derived their first cause from Him. Thus could American Transcendentalists espouse Emerson's doctrine of Self Reliance and herald the English poem "Invictus" which describes man as "the captain of my ship-the master of my fate."

So the notion of the "death of God" is not new, as George Forell so ably points out. It is but the culmination of a process operating from the 16th century onward-a process high-lighted by Copernicus' announcement that man no longer occupied the center of the cosmic state, a process emphasized by Darwin's studied attempt to reduce man to the level of the animals who were a part of his ancestry as well as environment, a process given substance by Freud's announcement that man was the helpless pawn of an unknowable and ungovernable subconscious, a process finally articulated by the romanticism of Frederich Nietzsche. (20) The result, opines Carl Henry, is that today "Men are doubting God more and enjoying life less." (21)

But all the while man was denying the existence of a personal God, his many failures accentuated the folly of that denial. For in describing the inequalities of American society, the depravations of the business community, and the corruption of American life as a whole, persons like Sinclair Lewis, (22) Frank Norris, (23) and Upton Sinclair (24) made it evident that man needed help in creating "the best of all possible worlds." And this is exactly the construction liberal theologians of the 1920's attached to the mission of Christ. To them He had come-not to relate man to the eternal absolutes of the heavenly kingdom, but to create, still under the dictates of a depraved nature, the Kingdom of God on earth. Hence the redemptive tenets of Christ's teachings were humanized in Frank Buckman's Moral Rearmament Crusade, secularized in Bruce Barton's image of Christ, or romanticized in Charles Sheldon's book, In His Steps. Reform-not redemption-was the battle cry of the century; a cry distinctly related to the conviction of the philosophers that there was nothing basically evil about man, David Hume's "noble savage," (25) but the evil was, as Rousseau had said, in the society in which man was compelled to live. (26) And, regrettably, the idea is not dead. Roderick Jellema insists that the modern view toward evil is that it is "a kind of social accident, and we can correct that." (27) The idea is, according to Carl Henry, germane to "influential secularist theologians, ecclesiastical turncoats who tailor their teachings to the empirical standards of natural man." (28) In doing so, they ignore the advice of Paul against substituting man's self judgment in opposition to that of God: "What fools they are to measure themselves by themselves, to find in themselves their own standard of comparison!" (II Cor. 10: 12, NEB).

The consequence of such a transition of moral responsibility is obvious: since man in innately good, he is bound by no extrinsic absolutes. Thus can it be true, as Gerald Parker, pastor of First Congregational Church in Manhasset, Long Island notes, the only acknowledged obscenity of our day is "thou shalt not." And in focusing the guilt on society for what man does, we are creating the very atmosphere of situational morality with which this paper began. Given an environment that is wrong, man's logical course is (1) to be as bad as society has made him, secure in the knowledge that the guilty cannot condemn, or (2) to contradict the decrees of an evil society, assured that all resistance against evil has been traditionally heralded as the good.

Without stopping to debate the interesting adjuncts of these premises, we can clearly see that it is going to take more than a new set of rules to effectively challenge the new morality. For rules come from Bibles, God, or society. The Bible is suspect, God is uninvolved and thus dead, society is the moral culprit of our day.

Something destructive has happened to man on his road to the new morality, so the reconstruction problem is at once clear and complex. First of all, man has to be restored to a position of importance-as a spiritual being if not as a social being. Accordingly, man again becomes essential-at least to God if to no one else-and his behavior assumes a significance transcending neurotic concern for security or self-interest.

It is thus re-established that man is morally responsible, with the onus upon him rather than his environment. And that will create a demand for absolutes by which to establish responsibility, a demand which must restore God as the author and arbiter of a universal moral code revealed in His inspired Word and communicated to needy humans by His Holy Spirit.

Documentations

1. David Riesman, The Lonely (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. xxvi.

2. Walter Lippman, Drift or Mastery (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1961) p.12.

3. William Glasser, Reality Therapy (New York, New York: Harper and Row, 1965).

4. John Steinbeck, "The Americans," Saturday Evening Post (239:l4, July 2, 1966), pp.46 and 44.

5. Ibid., p.47.

6. Walter Lippman, originally quoted in Billy Graham, World Aflame (Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1965), but cited in "Christianity Today," essay "The New Birth", p.1.

7. "Areas of Social Concern", United Evangelical Action, 1965, pp.5-6.

8. Paul E. Johnson, "Where We Are Now In Pastoral Care," Christian Advocate, September 23, 1965, p.7.

9. Steinbeck, op. cit, p.40.

10. James R. Cameron, "The Christian Perspective And the Teaching of Social Science," Journal of The Scientific Affiliation, June, 1966, p.49.

11. Geoffrey Brunn review of Peter Vierech, "The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero For Americans," in Saturday Review of Literature, January 5, 1957, p. 20.

12. Steinbeck. op. cit., p. 46.

13. George Forell, "A Meaningless Debate", The Iowa Alumni, Summer, 1966, p. 16.

14. Steinbeck, op. cit., p. 44.

15. Norman Thomas, As I See It.

16. Steinbeck, op. cit., p. 44.

17. Glasser, op. cit., p. 57.

18. Ibid., p. 10.

19. Ibid., p. 59.

20. George Forell, Loc. cit.

21. Carl Henry, Editorial, Christianity Today, September 2, 1966, p. 34.

22. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York, New York, Harcourt and Brace, 1950)

23. Frank Norris, The Pit, New York: (University Place, 1956).

24. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: The New American Society, n.d.).

25. Walter Dorn, Competition For An Empire (New York: Harper and Row, Torchbooks, 1940), p. 213.

26. Ibid., p. 34.

27. Roderick Jellema, Christianity Today, "Crisis on the Campus," September 2, 1966, p. 6.

28. Ibid., p. 34.

29. II Corinthians 10:12, New English Translation of the New Testament.

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