Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Superfluous (Chapter 2)
[Social life in the Grand Siecle] is the school of what is called honour, the universal master who shall be everywhere our guide. Three things we observe there, and find constantly mentioned: that our virtues should be touched with a certain nobleness, our morals with a certain freedom, our manners with a certain politeness. The virtues exhibited in this society are always less what one owes to others than what one owes to oneself; they are not so much a response to an appeal from our fellow-citizens as a mark of distinction between us and them.
-Montesquieu
It’s pretty normal for one generation to complain about the lack of manners and morals in the next. Kids these days just don’t have respect like they used to. I’ve seen some people, liberals mostly, brush this off as anywhere from outright falsehood to true but irrelevant. Really though, I think there is a lot to it, and it comes down to the fact that a sense of honor is becoming more and more rare in our society. This is due to a variety of reasons, starting with the no-rules generation of the 60s, where self-restraint became a Bad Thing, and snowballing from there as these people “grew up”, had kids, and began controlling the educational establishment. Now we’ve got lots of rules, but very few of them have something to do with doing the right thing.
Nock recognized this trend even back in his day. He uses an anecdote as an example, a news-worthy event in his day known as the Beecher-Tilton affair:
Everyone in those days subscribed tacitly to a pretty fairly uniform code of morals, but there was a snuffiness about the ostentatious pieties and moralities of those concerned in the Beecher-Tilton imbroglio which made it impossible to take their contentions or representations seriously. What people! one said at once. What a life! What a society! In its dullness, its fatuity, its simian inability to see when it was making itself ridiculous, was there ever anything on earth like it? My family clearly had little doubt, on the evidence offered, that the scandal rested on a sound basis of fact; that Beecher had been entertaining himself in dalliance with one at least, and perhaps more, of his female parishioners. But to arraign him for that, and then to get up a great pother about it, all on the sheer score of religion and morality (and afterward, yes, actually, on the score of legality, when Tilton haled Beecher into the civil courts on a charge of alienation) – this procedure would seem the acme of stilted burlesque.
A priest having an affair with his parishioners? Surely this is something worth getting worked up about.
But taking the priest to court?
Yet to regard a matter with humour and detachment is by no means the same as regarding it lightly. My parents would have been the last to regard any matter of adultery lightly… On the contrary, their view would naturally be, and I am sure was, much more serious than any which the affair brought to light. The eye of common sense would see simply that the courts of law, religion and morals were not courts of competent jurisdiction. Their sanctions were of debatable validity in the premises, and when as egregiously overpressed as they were in the case of Beecher, the effort to apply them became ridiculous. The court of undebatably competent jurisdiction would be the court of taste and manners. Whatever law, religion and morals may say or not say, the best reason and spirit of man resents adultery as in execrably bad taste, and from this decision there is no appeal. Moreover, the three incompetent courts could not take proper cognizance of the fact that Beecher and Tilton were intimate friends. The court of taste and manners could and would; and a properly enlightened social resentment would be accordingly enhanced, for all but the very lowest of bad manners exempts the wives of one’s friends.
Certainly, adultery is wrong by any standard of religion and morals. But, how do we judge the act? Do we declare it wrong because our religion says it is wrong? The legal issue is even more stark. In the Beecher-Tilton affair, Beecher was sued for this adultery, the charge being alienation. Today, virtually all laws against adultery have either been repealed or are completely ignored. Does that mean that adultery is now acceptable? I’ve heard many argue that the law defines right and wrong.
What Nock is noting here is the fact that behavioral codes, and judgment passed on the behavior of others, should come from a code of conduct based on honor and decency, not on an arbitrary and flexible standard such as law, religion, or morality. All of the latter change as prevailing behavior in a culture changes. Adultery is commonplace now, and we don’t really want to be throwing all of those people in jail, so we repeal or ignore the laws against it. Even church rules on adultery, divorce, and remarriage have adapted significantly to this new reality.
And yet, through all of this, adultery is still wrong. It is something that decent and honorable people do not do. We as a society should not be relying on laws against adultery, or a line in a holy book saying that adultery is wrong. We should be teaching our children about honor and decency, we should expect honorable and decent behavior of our fellow citizens, and we should use peer pressure and perhaps even social ostracism to encourage conformity.
In addition, law, religion, and morals are very specific, detailed things. It is impossible encode the proper response to any situation in life in any of these. Therefore, when taken as they are, they can only provide a guide as to how to react to specific situations. Honor and decency, however, provide a very general code of conduct, applicable to virtually every situation in which we may find ourselves. A person well-versed in such a code of conduct knows very well how to react in a given situation, even if sometimes that reaction is contradicted by law or religion.
Whether by one means or another, I was somehow prepared to see, as when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of legal, religious and ethical sanctions was monstrously over-extended. They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than the right reason would assign them. On the other hand, I saw that the area of conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was correspondingly attenuated. One could easily understand how this had come about. Law is the creature of politics, and the general course of politics, as among others Mr. Jefferson, Franklin and John Adams had clearly perceived, is always determined by an extremely low order of self-interest and self-aggrandisement.
…
The consequences was that the one set of sanctions atrophied, and the other set broke down; thus leaving human conduct bereft of any sanctions at all, save those of expediency. In other words, each person was left to do that which was right in his own eyes. What with Bentham on one side and the hierarchs of law, religion, and morals on the other, American society had got itself crosslifted into a practical doctrine of predatory and extremely odious nihilism.
Nock thought it was bad in his day. If only he could see us now, where legal codes have exploded with laws against faux-crimes (environmental law, I’m looking at you), things actually injurous to others have been removed from legal codes, and honor, fairness, and decency have all but disappeared from our popular culture. I’m dismayed at the number of otherwise decent people who have no respect for property rights, children who have to respect for anyone or anything, and the commonly heard “it’s only illegal if you get caught”.
Character is what you do when no one is watching.
As usual, Nock discusses the world as he sees it without prescribing any remedy. I don’t think there is a remedy. Society cannot and will not be fixed by the likes of Nock.
What I take away from this chapter is an exhortation to live up to a code of conduct far higher than that of most of my fellow man, and to teach my children to do the same. I don’t always succeed, but I always try. Analgous to “you can’t teach anyone anything they don’t already know”, I think it is also true that “you can’t change the character of anyone who won’t change their character themselves.”
It is up to us to go into the world and be the example of how society should be. It may not make a big difference, but it is our duty, and our code of honor will not let us do anything less.
Comments
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When I talk of honour and doing what is right, my girlfriend calls me her ‘traditional northern man’ (I live in the UK).
It seems to me that honour and respect are ignored in todays society, but they are still valuable attributes in any citizen. I think it will take a couple of generations for the mistakes of the 60s to be rectified.
I quite like the idea of people having more freedom (as expressed in the 60s) but that also includes the freedom to do the right thing. Many people forget that and assume that freedom refers to the more base activities of man and woman.
yabusame | 12/4/2008 04:59 AM CDT
