Thursday, July 10, 2025
D+244/172/1289
1917 Emma Goldman was mprisoned for obstructing the draft
1971 National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) was founded by women Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Myrlie Evers-Williams, Gloria Steinem, et al.
In bed at 9, up at 4:30, again after hourly pit stops, a lot of hip pain, and normal shoulder pain. 60°, high of 75°, sunny
Meds, etc. One of my biggest problems now is remembering whether I took a pill or injected myself with a medication. This morning, I am wondering whether I injected myself with Kevzara on Tuesday. I probably did, but I can't be sure. Today, I didn't take my 'morning meds' until 1 p.m., which is becoming a habit. Will I remember my Trulicity injection tomorrow?
Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?
There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
. . .
Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary.
I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me.
. . . .
There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?
. . . .
There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?
. . . . .
Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don’t know why you’re living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come.
. . . .
So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”
I don't know that I actively dislike David Brooks, but I just can't warm up to the guy. He seems smug to me. I suppose he's at or near the top of the list of American 'public intellectuals,' though actually I don't have a clue who else is on that list. He seems to spend his life moving from one lofty conference (Aspen) to another (Davos), offering his opinion on this, that, and the other thing, usually at high levels of abstraction. He concludes this NY Times essay, for example, by telling us
Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.
What does that mean and, perhaps more importantly, how exactly do we (and who are the 'we' here?) go about doing this? Isn't this more than a little fuzzy-headed?
In any case, he caught my attention with this:
. . . I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism.
As it happened, he wrote this on the 60th anniversary of my arrival in Vietnam, and my perhaps incoherent reflection on that anniversary in yesterday's journal and on Facebook. It raises the question whether "the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism" began with America's invasion of Vietnam in 1965. What else was morally, politically, and socially relevant about that year?
There was tremendous racial tension in the U.S. that year. It was the year of "Bloody Sunday" at the Pettis Bridge in Selma, AL, and the march from Selma to Montgomery. It was the year of the Watts Insurrection, the assassination of Malcolm X, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the birth of the Republicans' Southern Strategy. It was the year of The Great Society and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. But none of those significant developments, I think, gave rise to "hyper-individualism and moral relativism." The Civil Rights Movement was a Mass Movement, starting with African-American groups but soon involving many non-Blacks. And it was grounded in large measure in Christian ideas of universal brotherhood and human dignity, grounded in God's Fatherhood of all people. Slavery, apartheid, segregation, and invidious racial discrimination were wrong - full stop. It didn't depend on one's individual view of the issues; there was nothing morally relativistic about it.
I suppose it's the Catholic-upbringing in me that gives great importance to the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II. It started in 1962 and ended in 1965. The Council made tremendous changes in traditional Catholic liturgical practices and teachings. The changes didn't alter the essentials of Catholic doctrine (at least, according to Church authorities and to most of 'the Faithful'), but they changed all kinds of practices and ways of thinking that were very important to many Catholics. Some Catholics accepted the changes; some rejected them; and others didn't know what to think.¹ I believe those changes DID give rise to individualism and moral relativism.
Then there was America's war on Vietnam. It's not thought of that way by most Americans, but I'm convinced that that is what it was. The Third Marine Division landing at Danang in March of 1965 was an invasion. The war was supported by most Americans (no surprise), but drew great opposition from the people most affected by it: young American men subject to conscription. Selective Service rules and practices were such that those most likely to be drafted and sent to Vietnam were poor people and minorities. When the rules were changed so that well-off, White, college students could be wrenched from their safe classrooms and sent to the jungles of Vietnam, all hell broke loose. Some sought and obtained conscientious objector status; others were denied. Some left the country for Canada or Sweden; others were unable or unwilling to do so. Patriotism said 'do your duty '; self-interest said avoid it however you could, for example, falsely claiming a 4-F exemption because of bone spurs on your foot. What was right and what was wrong about America's actions in Vietnam? Who was right and who was wrong? The hardhats (America, love it or leave it!) or the resisters (Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
For me, 1965 and the years that followed were painful and difficult. Raised as a traditional Irish Catholic, an altar boy who could recite most of the Mass in Latin, a Marine, and an early Vietnam veteran, it often seemed excruciating. I was pulled in very opposite directions: oppose the war but support the troops. Support traditional values and behaviors, but oppose an establishment that discriminated against and injured disfavored minorities and killed and injured Vietnamese people by the thousands. My most telling experience: in 1968, with my heart with the Blacks who fought against rampant police brutality and with demonstrators who urged the end of the war, I went to a 3rd Ward Democratic meeting intending to join the party at the end of the meeting. During the meeting, however, several motions were put before the members and were passed unanimously. I would have voted against every one of the motions and decided not to join the party, though I could hardly have been more anti-Republican. I felt politically and morally at home nowhere. Too traditional and conservative to be a hippie or a 'child of the 60s'; too anti-war and anti-establishment and "woke" to fit in with anti-liberal conservatives. I felt much as I did in Asia and when I returned to America: stronger in a strange land, both away and at home.
I should note that there were two 1960s. I came to adulthood in the late 50s and early 60s. Those years were truly just an extension of the 1950s and totally unlike what has come to be thought of as "the 60s," i.e., the years starting in 1965, with Watts, Selma, and Vietnam. My 60s(I) generation was still humming tunes by Patti Page and Johnny Mathis while the 60s(2) folks right behind us were grooving to Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. My cohort got drunk on beer, wine, and booze; those behind on experimenting with grass and acid. We were separated by only a couple of years in age, but we lived in two different worlds and, to some at least some extent, those worlds continued to be separate as we all moved through adulthood. Because of my time in the Marine Corps, my law school classmates were on average 3 or 4 years younger than I was, but in a very real sense, we were from different generations.
Having said all this, do I agree with Brooks that the decline of a shared morality and increase of hyper-individualism and moral relativism started around 1965? I need to think more about it.
¹ My friend Katie McManus, another Irish Catholic, told me this tale. She was at a party with other Catholics, and somehow the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven came up. One of the friends said it was unbelievable. Another pointed out that it was a dogma and belief was required of Church members, to which the sceptic replied: "Well, I may have to believe it, but I don't have to think about it."
And here is a favorite bit of humor about the confusions caused by the Vatican II changes. After the Council, masses in homes had a brief vogue. A young couple invited their hip parish priest to share dinner with them after a home mass. When the priest arrived, the hostess provided him with a loaf of raisin bread to serve as the Holy Eucharist. The priest was hip, but not sure that he was allowed to consecrate raisin bread. On the other hand, he didn't want to offend his hosts. When he came to the Consecration, he took the bread in his hands, raised it and his eyes toward Heaven, and said, "Take this and eat it, this is (whispering except for the raisins) my Body."
No comments:
Post a Comment