Good Sense

The Moral Sense
by James Q. Wilson
The Free Press

James Q. Wilson is a distinguished American public philosopher writing on crime, bureaucracy and many aspects of social behaviour.  His reminds one that, despite the corrupting effects of the audio-visual media and of university cliques almost at war with the sentiments of ordinary citizens, the United States can still produce writers of a spacious and commanding integrity.  The title of Wilson's latest book, The Moral Sense, is almost misleadingly modest.  He might have more appropriately adopted a Lockean title such as An Enquiry into Human Conduct.  Wilson has produced a very wise book, lucid in both argument and language and rich in well-digested reference and anecdote.

Alas, it is hard to do justice to an analysis which leaves so few elements of our moral and social behaviour unexamined, except to note that The Moral Sense achieves the rare fear of evading both undue Panglossian optimism and a Hobbesian pessimism.  It shows us that there is hope for the development of social decency, moral principle and some sense of warm social affinity in most people.  Both nature and social conditioning provide the moulds in which our plastic human clay is shaped, but the essence of that clay still defies our categories.  Wilson demonstrates that only the most damaged of men and women lack potential for a moral response.  While whole societies may periodically display psychopathic tendencies, as in the case of Nazi Germany or contemporary Yugoslavia, only a minority of individuals can be persuaded to behave amorally for more than short periods, and usually under strong outside pressure or inducement.  Wilson carefully considers the nature of these warping pressures and how far they can extend.

From a personal perspective I am convinced that tension between individual autonomy and the demands of social conformity can only be resolved by realising that the poorly-developed individual also comes to be a corruptible and unreliable citizen.  Only the sufficiently mature in judgment and moral sentiment can serve the family, institutions and the state in a sound and fairly consistent manner.  In either sharply-polarised or indolent social situations the mature citizen is forced to be a non-conformist whose aloofness is often condemned by the herd as unfriendly.  The vital distinction then to be made by society and peers is between the disruptive and criminally-alienated trouble-maker and he/she who has the courage to be solitary while working within "the system" to leaven the communal lump.  Usually lacking any strong moral sense, political messiahs are often in a hurry for a transforming upheaval.  The true redeemer has no illusions about the capacity of mass society for rapid change or high vision and works on a spiritual or psychological plane with the responsive few.  Otherwise the world would experience no difference between Jesus and Marx, Confucius and Pol Pot.

James Wilson tackles the typical relativist habit of trying to smudge over the whole concept of morality with that of "clarifying values".  From that point it is only a short distance toward believing that one system of social values is as good as another and the modern absence of commonly accepted transcendent absolutes allows us to justify any sort of behaviour which renders us socially approved.  In this the author quotes Adam Smith:  Man naturally desires not only to be loved but to be lovely.  How true.  Here lies a basis for both expedient immorality and a paradoxically ashamed return to morality.

SYMPATHY

Wilson also agrees in part with Smith that the ancient origin of most practical moral conduct is in sympathy, of imagining ourselves to be in the position of others.  When we sympathise we judge, reacting to the worthiness of other persons and their behaviour.  From this comes not only respect, but, more vitally, comparative self-respect, something which so many people in urban admass cultures never fully attain.  Self-respect, of course, has its roots in primary associations, in families and in close friendships.  From this rootedness in solid early affinities the child moves from the primitive tit-for-tat reactions of the playground to more careful judgments of human need and value.  Again, an erosion of primary sympathies and early kinship loyalties tends to preserve the tit-for-tat mode of morality into adult life.  Our prisons are full of morally primitive people who have known only how to menace others out of their lack of self-respect.

The author deals fairly but sceptically with the social Darwinist morality of necessity.  Darwinian explanations simply do not show why so many people behave altruistically in a manner contrary to their genetic programming or biological self-preservation.  Saving a grandmother who is elderly, disagreeable and long past child-bearing serves no genetic purpose whatsoever.  Moreover, adoptive parents frequently make as many sacrifices and show as much affection for children as do natural ones.  (Though it lately seems, amid the present vogue of single motherhood with serial male partners, that children are far more likely to be treated with moral indifference or even molested by step-fathers than by natural sires).  In this writer's view, the less modified by the social and moral customs of high civilisation (East as well as West), the more families are likely to revert to raw tribal imperatives with a moral indifference towards the higher responsibilities of individual nurture.  Morality becomes diluted by some real or conceived necessity.  The fashionable habit in the Christian churches of sanctifying the poor too often glosses over tribal harshness and exploitation of children as resources which linger in those traditional communities that unregulated procreation can produce.

Wilson moves to the other separate sinews of moral conduct, such as fairness, duty and self-control.  "Fairness", of course, brings us back to the tit-for-tat privileges and forfeitures which underpin our modern clamour for "rights".  Rights must be in balance with duties.

The recently fostered social guilt which prompts liberally-minded white Australians to bow to every demand for Aboriginal rights, overlooks the duty of even black Australians to obey the law and accommodate to the structures of the European culture which now strives to offer them restitution for past wrongs.  The recent bald assertion of an Aboriginal advocate that rights are intrinsic, they cannot be conferred, shows to what grotesque lengths the Jeffersonian assertion of 'inalienable rights' can now be taken.  Even Rousseau, the philosophical father of this fallacy, had to admit in The Social Contract, that all rights must stem from social consensus.

Without a primary acceptance of personal and social duties (by rulers as well as ruled), no meaningful judgment about rights can be made.  Civil duties thus have a deeper moral basis than civil rights, and also a longer history.  Rights are mainly contractual and various governments and legal systems interpret them according to different cultural norms.

The United Nations Declaration was created by the Western powers in a fit of democratic fervour, but only a few member states have ever given more than lip service to its observance.  Morality can only be demanded politically in limited situations, something which Mr Michael Lavarch and his Prime Minister appear not to have understood.  As Tacitus long ago wryly observed:

"The more corrupt the government, the greater the likely number of its laws".

THE FAMILY'S ROLE

Wilson's most important chapter relates to the role of the family and the moralities it both embodies and transmits to the wider community.  He makes an all too common sweeping judgment against Freud.  He is equally critical of the behaviourist amoralism of H.J. Eysenck that the conscience is merely a conditioned reflex.  Freud established the beneficial effect of studying infant pleasure-seeking (with or without sexual undertones) with remarkable accuracy for his time, and his notes on aggression in male children have since been amply confirmed.  Clinically, it has been repeatedly established that self-control can be a double-edged moral demand.  Too much control, as Carl Jung eloquently illustrated, and normal aggression can one day explode out of the nursery on to the battlefield.  Meanwhile, too little self-control produces the unresourceful, media-dazed youth of today, often repelled by its own lack of moral reference points while secretly craving for the reasonable ethical boundaries and ideals its baby-boomer parents never learned.

Wilson himself sagely recognises that dysfunctional families usually blunder along at one of two extremes or in the worst instances zig-zag wildly between the two.  He remarks:  "Though the human infant is a remarkably resilient creature, protected by redundant systems from many kinds of misfortune, it is vulnerable to the excesses of both rule-obsessed and laissez-faire parents".  How well supported this is by research, but how often disregarded by ideological zealots or amoral slobs at either extreme of the parenting spectrum.  Since the Greeks, we have admired moderation in theory, but so often flouted it in the most intimate of our personal transactions.  Fortunately, as the author's well-stocked references establish, most children do grow up adequately, provided that they are not forced to accept from their mentors, moral and social banalities which are quite grossly at odds with emotional and spiritual growth.

Finally, Wilson gives some space to gender and moral response.  It is true that men rend to construe moral conduct in terms of gestures, whereas women tend to embody this more in their basic attitudes.  As spouses, mothers and latterly as civil functionaries women so often Furnish the environment in which male moral activity can be advanced.  But each is an ethical agent to himself or herself and gender roles can widely vary or overlap.  In the Orient, businessmen often have a "feminine" sensibility in which the politesse of the encounter must receive equal recognition to the urgency of the transaction -- a useful trait which Australia's men might acquire.  Often the truer morality is not in winning, hut in worthily taking part.  Meanwhile this book provides a cornucopia of material for reflection and should be in the library of everyone involved in matters of public policy.