Morality

MORALITY

1968

                                                                                 

What is Morality?  A difficult question, for morality has many faces.  What morality is depends on who you are.  As you change morality changes. As a child, your morality is your parents.  Their moral code is your moral compass.  And when you enter school different directions are added to this moral compass.  These directions conflict.  Your mother dresses you in play clothes for school, knowing how easily a child gets tattered and dirty, but your teacher has a higher standard of dress.  Your sense of morality is no longer simple.

What is morality when conflicts arise?  In a home verses school conflict, your parents may communicate with your teacher and resolve the crisis.  Morality is worked out for the child and the child may feel it does not matter personally.  After all, it is all worked out by a higher authority.  But, also, when a child starts school, a relationship with other children begins.  The child makes friends and enemies.  Suppose some children ask you, as surely some will, to follow them to some exotic place such as a rail yard or an open quarry.  Chances are both parents and school have said stay away from such dangerous places.  You have been forbidden to go to these places and to go will disobey the moral code that was set up for you.  But your new friends want you to go, and to refuse may be an insult to them and lose you their very friendship.  They wait for your answer.  The taunt.  “Are you chicken,” they ask, and they flap their arms and cluck.  In this moment of decision, you could make friends or make enemies.

 We all prefer friends.  What will be your morality at such a moment?  What is to be your morality for the rest of your life?  For life is a series of such choices.  Should you join a major or minor political party?  Should you support a union strike or not?  Should you sell your house to a Negro or refuse?  Should you be a hawk or a dove about war?

Is there a common factor in all these moments of decision?  There is a constant in each situation faced in life.  Your parent’s gave you a list of “DOs and DON’Ts” to tell you how to behave.  Teachers gave you rules that told you how to learn.  Your peers told you what you must do to be their friend or enemy. Your decisions were made in relation to how other people would act toward your decision.  And each person’s decision is always in relation to other people’s lessons and rules.  Morality is not a “what”.  It is a “who”.  Who is morality?  

Everybody making their choice of behavior in relation to other people.  Morality is all human action, good, bad or indifferent.

(Note: Today I believe morality is a constant truth based on the Word of God and not relative to situations or to other people. The photograph was taken in the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia 2005.)

Nasty, Brutish and Short? Whoa!

1968

A human life is a swatch snipped from the fabric of eternity.  It begins with a shock for the born and pain for the bearer.  Life is given a harsh reception, slapped into life by a strange force.  After the comfort of a self-centered world it opens eyes to too bright light and in a vast space it can’t comprehend. From being satisfied automatically, it must fend for its comforts.  From this point on life is a challenge.  It must find a method of survival.

Human life finds itself in the cold world.  Not only must it begin a search for survival, but for the meaning of its survival.  As it grows, more and more is its survival in its own hands.  And like the doctor’s initial slap, it discovers most situations are hostile.

As human life learns more, the more it finds that living is coping with these hostile situations.  It can no longer expect to grow fat and warm without exerting an effort.  This is a brutal realization. Now it must make its own way against many unfriendly events and nasty circumstances.

It must be willing to fight to survive.  It must search out and face the truth.  It must accept the reality of the world.  It must understand that poverty and filth and violence and pain and loss exist in all their nastiness.  Or it will withdraw from the truth and construct its own world as a shell.  Still, there is a difference between surviving and living.  If it wants to live, it will seek the truth and struggle against the nastiness and not hide from trouble.  It will seek the how of life and not just the why. 

Whether it succeeds will depend on its quickness to learn. It must learn quickly, for its swatch in the fabric of time is short.  Time runs away from life.  In the end time always wins and the human dies.  Every human life ends in death.  This is one truth learned early.  It is not only the expected event; it is the certain event.  Death is the most brutish aspect of life.

Life knows in the end it must die, but if it cannot be sure if there is something beyond death, then that human life is nasty, brutish and short.  It is brutally born, squeezed, yanked and slapped to life.  It lives but a short time against the measuring stick of eternity, burning as a brief candle.  And it dies in nasty uncertainty.

Picture at top of post is of Thomas Hobbes. You can learn more about Hobbes by clicking on the title of this post.

Norman Podhoretz's Negro Problem

1968

Norman Podhoretz has noticed a racial problem in our society.  Subjectively examining this problem through his own growing-up experiences, he believes he has an answer.  His answer is miscegenation.  He believes the only answer is assimilation.  Otherwise racial disagreement is a hopeless situation.  This is a novel statement.  Most theories of bringing the races closer are through understanding, and miscegenation is vigorously denied as a goal.  This very fact is pointed out by Podhoretz in his essay, “My Negro Problem -- And Ours”.  And his use of that word, miscegenation, sticks in the mind after reading his essay.  It plays upon the emotions, whether the reader is pro or con.  It shocks.  It is because it is there to shock that it stays in the mind.  It even seems to be the theme of his essay.  But is it?

His essay breaks into halves.  The first half is devoted to events in the author’s childhood.  The other to his adult reasoning.  By telling several events from his childhood within a racially mixed neighborhood, he presents reasons why he could be excused for hating Negroes.  Then he tells us he doesn’t hate Negroes.  Or rather, that he makes a conscious effort not to hate them.  “I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes,” he says.  This is his true theme.  He speaks of fearing Negroes as an adult, but the fear is actually the fear of the child.  Again we have a split between childhood experience and adult reason, a conflict constant throughout the essay. 

He began with two ideas that puzzled him as a child.  He explains why the ideas bothered him, how they conflicted with what he saw with his own eyes.  Then he explains how he came to understand what was behind these ideas.  He became liberal with age.  But he is honest about his liberalization.  He admits it is influenced by his childhood prejudices.

Podhoretz’s essay speaks directly of a racial problem, but basically it is not concerned with race.  It is concerned with facing conflict as an adult.  It discusses the difficulty of reason to overcome emotion.  What Norman Podhoretz’s says is the adult must overcome the child. 

Norman Podhoretz essay, "My Negro Problem -- And Ours" was published in 1963. It was considered an important and influential take on racial relations in the 'sixties'. Perhaps to understand this short response of mine written in 1968, a person should first read Podhoretz's essay. You can do so by clicking on the title of this post. 

On “Verdict Guilty -- Now What?”

1968

Should the criminal be punished or treated?  Karl Menninger suggests that society approach the criminal in the same manner it would approach a sick person, claiming a criminal act is the symptom of illness.  The carrier of the illness should be brought to a specialist for diagnosis, but the result will be treatment, not punishment.  The aim of the specialist will be to return the criminal to society as a cured person.  The rehabilitation will be accomplished by bringing all the knowledge of all the behavioral sciences to bear.  As in the same manner that a sick person is removed from society until a cure is affected, the criminal will not be released until he is well.  Thus the public will be protected, the criminal rehabilitated and the existing wasteful punitive system eliminated.

It is the failure of the existing system of crime punishment that supports this idea.  Not only does the present system fail to return the criminal to society cured, it often returns him in worst shape than when he was imprisoned.  By ignoring crime as a disease, the present system allows the disease to grow malignant.  Then it allows the malignancy to grow because it only recognized the criminal as morally corrupt.  Recognizing crime as a disease will allow society to seek the basic germ infecting each criminal and control it.  Only by removing the stigma of crime, as we have removed the stigma of tuberculosis, can we overcome it.

This was a summary of Menninger's article, not an endorsement. Click on the post title for more on Menninger's "Verdict Guilty -- Now What?".

Education and Paul Goodman

1968

Today’s educational system is not concerned with educating, but with processing students into the organization society. It is not particularly interested in teaching a method of thinking; it is more concerned with image.  Paul Goodman points this out when he says that school systems are not in the control of students and teachers, but in the hands of administrators, and the school board members come from the establishment.  School boards are more interested in fund raising and public appearance that progressing the student to higher learning.  This is especially true with public school boards, whose members are generally elected to the body.  A person who must depend on public support to keep a position will not be overly willing to encourage experimental programs that may meet with public disapproval.  This situation leaves schools at the mercy of prejudice.  How can a program that denies long accepted public beliefs be introduced if it has to satisfy that very public?  How do you overcome ignorance if you give ignorance the final say?  Who can deny that the public clings to its ignorance?  With this as the prevailing state of society does real education matter?

Goodman finds much waste in the system.  He says it is foolish to believe every child deserves an education.  In this organization society, where technology is so advanced, many children would be better served learning a trade.  What reason is there teaching a child poetic writing f the child’s interest is completely aimed at being an auto mechanic?  Goodman can only think of one reason: to put the child in his place.  Goodman declares that secondary education is designed to break the spirit of the individual, not to actually teach anything.  As bad as this is itself, once the spirit is broken, forces are brought upon the child to attend college; and seldom is it pointed out there is an actual value to attending college.  No one tells the child to go and learn.  Instead, the child is shown charts indicating how much more money a college graduate earns than the non-college graduate.  Often it becomes a matter of having a paper to hang on the wall, not to have any real skill or knowledge.  Therefore, why should the student care what the teacher says?  The motto for the student is “get in and get out”.  If this sometimes requires cheating, it can be justified.  Who needs sociology to build a bridge or run an ad agency?  No wonder schools fall into the hands of administrators and not educators.  One must remember success in the organization society is measured in money-made, not knowledge acquired.

What would Goodman do about this?  He calls for a student revolution.  His hope is youth will see through the mediocrity of the organization society and its educational system.  The only way to effect real change would be student determination to found a new order.  Goodman encourages student control.  It is they who must have the interest to learn, and they must demand that learning.  He calls for breaking down the old system.  The only purpose of school should be education and you cannot educate anyone who doesn’t have an interest in learning.  Why even try?  Let these people fall out of line.  Goodman would measure a student only by the standard of his interest field.  If the student meets that standard, then what difference does it make how he got there?  This way only the interested arrives.  It is, Goodman says, the student’s ability to pursue his wants that should count, not the check-off requirements of administrators.  It may be concluded that Goodman’s hopes for our future rest on a revolution, and he is probably right.  (And we still wait for this revolution, and he is still right. -- Larry E. 1/1/2001,)  

I was into Goodman in the 'sixties and 'seventies, and read several of his books on education  at that time. To learn more about Paul Goodman, click on the title of this post.

Development and Function of the Super-Ego in the Individual

1968

Every individual displays aggression in early infancy.  This is an instinctual drive to satisfy the self or ego.  According to Freud, this aggression is the enemy of civilization.  To structure civilization, it is necessary to restrict this drive.  An external authority controls this drive during the individual’s early life in the form of parents, but as the individual grows older there appears an inner control.  Freud named this the super-ego.  We have come to refer to the super-ego as the conscience.  As a control over our self, the conscience is much stricter than the external authority.  Unlike the external authority, the super-ego does not forgive or forget the crimes of the individual.  Instead, it constantly seeks external punishment of the ego.

How has this strict, unyielding super-ego gained control of the self?  Freud gives two explanations for the acquisition of conscience.  In his first theory, Freud explains that the child has been frustrated in his attempt to satisfy some need of the self by the interference of the external authority and builds considerable aggression against this authority.  But the child cannot actually satisfy his revengeful feelings against the external object, so he turns aggression inward.  The ego divides to form the super-ego.  As the child grows, the super-ego replaces the external object and fulfills the individual’s wish for the continuance of its original relationship with the external authority. 

In Freud’s second theory, the super-ego is explained in primal terms.  Freud sees the primitive custom of the child killing the father to gain a life of his own as the explanation.  Although the primitive father was a terrible figure and the child kills him to satisfy his own aggression, the child still has feelings of love toward the father, and once he performs the murder has feeling of regret.  This regret become internalized and develops into the super-ego.  One easily sees a relationship between these two theories, and Freud admits they are really the same.

But theories aside, what is the direct consequence of developing the super-ego?  The consequence according to Freud is civilization.  But in gaining civilization, individual happiness was loss.  The individual cannot escape his super-ego.  Like Orwell’s Big Brother, it is always watching.

There is one oddity in a super-ego.  It is harder on the good man than on the bad man.  A man with a weak ego may aim his aggression at civilization, the external authority, and he will be punished by this authority for his action, which satisfies his conscience.  At the same time, this oddity prevents the man of strong super-ego from venting his frustration against civilization, and he will turn his anger inward and punish himself because his super-ego demands punishment for his aggression.  In a way, there can be no winning.  Natural aggression within the individual is the enemy of civilization and civilization is the enemy of the individual.  Since man seeks both, he can find no happiness.

PART III: -- HI LIT