MORALS UP - FAITH DOWN
15th September 2001
The next issue, Number 64, will appear on 15th October 2001.
It is often said that we (particularly referring to the British but, implicitly, to other nations) are sinking into moral decline. The main thrust of this article is that, considering the last few hundred years of our history, the reverse is the case. We are, subject to some exceptions and to some ups and downs, enjoying a centuries-old upsurge in moral practice. Whether this heartening trend will continue is not clear but it would be rash to assume that it will not.
Apart from specific examples, a few general observations are worth making about our high standards of morality. Crimes - especially the more horrible crimes such as the murder of children - are deemed highly newsworthy; the papers are full of stories about the latest outrage and the radio and TV output is equally lurid.
There are two inferences to be drawn from the evident fact of the newsworthiness of atrocities against children (for example). One is that such events are rare enough to make them newsworthy. The number of child murders per year in the UK is very small. If such events were more common - say ten times as prevalent - then their news value would be far less and they would be accepted, like road accidents, as 'part of life'. The other inference is that people are evidently outraged by, for example, child murder and this sense of outrage, of itself, makes the events newsworthy. Who would bother to report child murders so prominently if they did not elicit a sense of outrage in so many people?
The huge news coverage and comment, related to such horrible crimes, is a measure of the rarity of such events and the general moral revulsion they elicit. If we were not so morally scrupulous, these horrible events would be much less rare and much more likely to be disregarded. Of course, even six child murders a year are six too many but if there were sixty, or six hundred, of them each year then they would not be news and we would tend not to care about them so much. You can't sell newspapers on moral outrage unless people are morally outraged by rather unusual instances of human wickedness. Our current moral standards are high - even though, naturally, most of us wish they were higher still.
During the last three or four centuries, the moral practices of such countries as the UK have risen remarkably in a number of quite well documented ways.
Our economy no longer depends upon chattel-slavery based upon the abduction of defenceless people (mostly West Africans) and their subsequent atrocious ill-treatment. Neither does our economy depend upon grossly cruel exploitation of children and women in factories subject to no enforced standards of health and safety. Our armed forces no longer depend upon abduction by the press gang and discipline being enforced by relentless flogging.
In family life, beating is no longer seen as a natural part of the upbringing of children and wife beating is no longer an acceptable norm. It is now acknowledged in law that there can be such a thing as marital rape. In the past the very idea was denied categorically on the grounds that, by the very fact of marriage, the bride gives life-long season ticket consent to being an obedient sex target.
We no longer rely upon beating as a primary teaching method in our schools. We no longer set up bigger boys as authorised beaters of smaller boys - although the practice of fagging, in British boarding schools, has only faded within living memory.
We no longer enforce religious conformity by violent means. We no longer have religious people routinely torturing and burning one another.
We no longer have hugely excessive punishments inflicted by law for minor offences - for many acts that would now be seen as non-offences.
Our perception of cruelty to animals has been the occasion for much moral advance. A little more than a century ago there was pious resistance to the formation of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals - on the grounds that animals have no souls, therefore feel no pain and so the question of cruelty to them simply does not arise. To imply, backhandedly, that animals might have souls, and might therefore experience pain, was seen as blasphemously to deny the uniqueness of Man in Creation. This notion of 'writing cruelty out of the script' of animal life was no mere theoretical matter. The appalling experiments on unanaesthetised dogs (carried out by William Harvey in the seventeenth century) that demonstrated the circulation of the blood ....... such experiments would be wholly illegal today. Even the most heartless of today's experimenters would shrink from nailing dogs to the bench and dissecting them live and conscious - having first dissected out the animals' vocal chords for the sake of quiet!
Etc., etc.
None of which is to say that we have been heaven-bent on moral uplift achieved by moral exhortation. Such exhortation is one of the perennial futilities of human life; it makes its practitioners feel good but it rarely does good. There has been very little mileage in such absolute notions as honesty is a moral imperative springing from the very fabric of the universe; there has, however, been a great deal of operational morality typified by precepts like honesty is the best policy.. Much of the moral advance of the last few centuries has been the concomitant of pursuing political expediency or enlightened self-interest on the part of powerful people.
It is simply a matter of fact that striking, and for many centuries unimagined, moral advance has happened at precisely the time that traditional religion has faded. This correlation does not prove that religion causes moral backwardness or that we can promote morality merely by suppressing religion. What the facts of history do seem to indicate very clearly is that the promoting of religion is not needed to achieve the strengthening of moral performance. If religious fervour were the key to morally acceptable living then I, for one, would have to decide between living in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland or on the West Bank of the Jordan! As things are, I would not choose to live in either of these places. Secular UK, with its amiable social-club-religion, is altogether more conducive to moral well-being. You don't need to be pious to behave badly - but it does help!
In recent centuries liberal believers have been prominent reformers in many ways and it seems that the same historical trend is behind both the liberalisation of religion and the liberalisation of society.
The difficulty for liberal believers is that religion depends, for its very being, on pre-contrived certainties while such alleged certainties are evidently instrumental in opposing the moral and social advance that all liberals - including religious liberals - hope for.
On the one hand, liberal religion is self-undermining; it rests upon believing less and less in more and more; it promotes liberal ideals in the world and it withers away in the process. On the other hand, the withering of traditional religion - in such places as the UK but notably not in the USA and most of the 'rogue states' - results from the increasing gap between its fixties and the changing realities of a world on the move. Judging by recent statements by leading clerics to the effect that Christianity now plays very little part in most people's lives ........ judging from such statements, the withering process is well advanced.
Religion offers no real grounds for hope. It is only the acknowledged uncertainties of secular liberalism that can save us; our humility is better than theirs!
HOME PAGE