An Artist’s Window on Culture: Taking Our Moral Temperature

There is a major rot in the heart of American culture that I’ve worried about for some time but that’s rarely recognized. So it was with great appreciation that I read David Brooks’ wonderful article in the Atlantic, How America Got Mean. His point is that for most of our nation’s history there was a widespread focus on moral education, not just in churches but in many local groups and the society at large. There was (until the post-WWII period, he says) a cultural incentive to make people better individuals. That social movement was replaced with a self-focused cultural wave that makes for an increasingly narcissistic society.

This issue is not easy to identify, but for me is addressed most directly with the question: “What happens to a culture that suddenly abandons its traditional religious devotions?” Regardless of how you feel about religion, it does have a powerful effect on a culture. We can of course point to all the fundamentalist tragedies in history as evidence of the horrors of religion, but that ignores much of the reality, much like saying “politics is the cause of war”. We need more information. Much like the conservative/liberal scale in politics, religions always exhibit a parallel wide spread along a  scale from the dogmatic to the mystical. Only those who recognize this powerful difference can even make sense of religion’s effects on culture.

So it was with significant eye-rolling that I read a refutation of Brooks’ article by Thomas Zimmer that has some great criticisms but totally misses the point. He accuses Brooks of oversimplifying the moral critique by himself oversimplifying the conservative perspective: 

Much of the mainstream political discourse is shaped by nostalgia – and the Right understands that they can latch onto that, weaponize it, in order to make their political project of rolling back the social and political progress of the past century more attractive to people who probably don’t consider themselves conservatives, certainly not reactionaries.

I agree with his concept that misplaced nostalgia is often used as an excuse for regression by conservatives, but that’s not what’s going on here, a fact that only exposes the crudity of Zimmer’s moral awareness. He’s not alone. In fact few in general discourse exhibit the kind of delicacy to distinguish the differences in religious argument. 

Jumping on the oversimplification bandwagon, this is a complex topic that can’t be reduced to simple soundbites. I’ll simply say that one major reason why every society that we know of has formed its culture around a religious idea is that it provides a civilizing force to the otherwise pretty crude human character. Too often the powerbrokers of religion use their power for further debasement, but the core role of religion is to make people better. 

Brooks’ point is not that “moral education” can be used to justify such behaviour, as Zimmer says, but that a culture needs an uplifting force to create good citizens. I’d call that force “religion” (as polluted as that word’s become!), the idea that people should be nice to each other. Way oversimplified, but the basic characteristic of religion is that there’s a bigger meaning to life than one’s tiny needs and that following the golden rule opens a person to that meaning.

My point here is that religion (as it forms in the human heart, before colonization by the powers that would usurp it) urges people to be better. Failing that is there any other model from which “moral education” can spring? And without moral uplift, there is only one direction a culture will drift.