This is additional fine print. If you were to line up all the fine print on the back of all the subway tickets in all the world, you'd obviously have had way too much time on your hands. This article goes out to all 17 million of you who switched off the presidential debates to watch Dark Angel. In retrospect, you are probably wiser than me.

Motes, planks¹, and other rhetorical flotsam

A Sounds like Cole Porter, Sir² production

If I had a dime for very time I've heard a public figure looking for attention babble something about the moral decay of our society, and the need to get back to traditional values, I'd have enough by now to start my own cable TV televangelism hour (I'm thinking I could go by the name Oral Hygiene, counsel young people on the use of mental floss. Ah, the possibilities...).

Yes, it's election time again. And man, everything old is new again. The moral decay bit is an old staple, as I'm sure anyone likely to read this knows. It comes to mind easily enough that the shill for the creationist side in the Scopes trial³ saw that particular forum as an opportunity to make a few speeches on the subject — a topic he also favoured in his campaigns for the presidency — so the tradition dates at least to the 1920s. But I'm betting if you read between the lines in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Beowulf saga, you'll find a few similar phrases in there too. Some rhetorical flourishes have a timeless, viral quality about them. They never quite seem to go out of style, living on through ages in ages, infecting new hosts as they go.

The contemporary angle to the "kids these days, I just dunno" lament still seems to lean toward the religious. If you're paying attention, just as in Bryan's day, many of the great thinkers who manage to wrap their intellectual coils around this concept still seem quite comfortable with the assumption that the problem is science, or materialism⁴, or something like that, and a lack of respect for and participation in traditional religion. The dime store philosophers among the current US presidential contenders⁵ are more vague on such questions, but do comment (oh so sagely) that if only people would just read the bible and pray every day (as they themselves most assuredly do), the world would be so much better.

I suppose you can see it coming that I do not consider this to be a good thing. Do let's begin, shall we?

What intrigued me first about this hoary diagnosis for the ills of our times is the unassuming attitude with which such speakers seem to invoke it. They seem to think this is just obvious, beyond question — all of 1) that we are in some kind of moral crisis, and (2) that a drift away from religion is at fault, and (3) that the cure is in returning to religion (usually their religion, naturally, though some are a little more sophisticated about this than others).

Think, for a moment, about just what wild guesses the second and third of these assumptions are — omitting for a moment, the also serious questions you could raise even about that first one (what consitutes a moral crisis, please, in quantitative terms — 1 murder per 100,000 citizens per year? Does the number of Wall Street bankers who are sleeping with their secretaries tip it over the edge? Or is the general feeling that you couldn't trust either of the frontrunners in the US elections this year anywhere near the family silver good enough to clinch it by itself? The point being that rhetorical pleas bringing in the latest colourful atrocity from the front pages don't really cut it in a country of hundreds of millions, unless you've got numbers to go with those anecdotes, Mr. Reagan).

To the point (or one of them). It's staggering, really, to me, that in a society shot through with rapid cultural change, that such thinkers pick this supposed cause in particular out of the mix. We could also of course posit as causes for such a phenomenon as this alleged moral meltdown such influences as (b) the radically widening wealth gap, (c) disintegration of other cultural forums, such as the traditional neighbourhood, (d) the profound alienation and disempowerment ordinary citizens feel vis a vis the political system in the wake of its having been effectively hijacked by those with enough money in their back pockets to by the entire congress and the executive branch outright, or hell, even (e) a complex of neurological ailments visited upon the general population by the largely unknown and untested side effects of recently created anthropogenic chemical compounds we effectively bathe in every day now (I consider this one pretty wacky, myself, but hey, I like a little variety). But no. Given all these fascinating options, our modern self-styled philosopher kings go after the church thing every time.

You can guess as to why this might be. But for my starting point for analysis, I looked at the reason I think the very word 'crisis' tends to trigger my urea radar in the first place.

What do I know of crises? Well for one thing, I know they're wonderful things for demagogues. A major reason public figures bring in the spectre of crisis is, if you ask me, that it helps get around people's basic capacity to sniff out profound leaps of logic. Tell the people the hole they're in is deep enough, and you can indeed short circuit some of their capacity for reflection, if their response has enough elements of panic and desperation in it.

In the extreme cases, that's how you convince someone your invocation of martial law and the suspension of civil liberties is justified. In the less extreme cases, it's just an easy way to get a little coverage, with little in the way of the consequences that usually accompany actually useful or substantive comments on matters you'd actually have real responsibility for and power over as a legislator. People and networks both just love a train wreck (even when you're telling them they're in it) for its drama, and moral crises have that kind of drama. So you wave your arms, spout your rhetoric, and you get 30 seconds on the six'o'clock news. If society is running as it usually is, nothing's going to come of it anyway, right?

I'm not so sure we can safely be so cavalier. My concern is mostly, in misdiagnosis, and in misprescription. With a side of irritation at the loaded quality of the terms these blowhards choose to use. Let's take them one at a time, shall we?

Misprescription/misdiagnosis. Let's assume we do have something of a problem in this society. Things are coming a bit unravelled, the populace really isn't happy.

Well, assuming this is valid, we do want to get right why that might be, mightn't we? Notice above that my not so randomly chosen potential causes b, c, and d, are actual trends in the world we know. I think it's arguable that if people really are getting a little lost in the jumble that is modern civilization, and losing some of their sense of what one does and does not do to their neighbours in a civil society, these may very well be contributing factors.

And are the brylcreemed twits who regularly bring in the ole' time religion bit selling these short by their pronouncements? I'd say yes, definitely. Because while someone rational with a head for the multiplicity of causes that are usually involved in anything studied by the social sciences can evenhandedly say that all of these may be factors, these guys' rhetorical construction is rarely so balanced. With these guys, it's more generally "this is the problem. I should know. I went to Bible college. And this is my wonderfully simple solution. You wretched immoral sinners, you."

What I think is also suggestive is that it's more often than not the conservative⁶ ideologues who make this move. Why is this interesting? Well, look at b, and d in particular again. Do you imagine there's any real interest in pursuing these in someone whose real backers are among the few benefactors of these trends?

Frankly, considering it all, I have to say I'm with Marx⁷ on this one. These guys aren't much for solutions that actually might require the moral and ethical courage that comes with addressing the real problems real people face. They'd rather market a little opium, to keep people a little calmer about the whole raw deal. And, frankly, I find that thoroughly disgusting. Which I think explains to me, after a little analysis, why I instinctively find those blighters so loathesome when I hear that sentence escape their flapping jaws.

Next, there's the little issue of the terminology. A "moral crisis". I must confess I shudder with faint revulsion merely typing it — just thinking of all the sermonizing smarm that just oozes out of the term makes the action uncomfortable. This term does not say clearly, and technically, that our civil society is apparently becoming a little less civil. This does not suggest there's a tacit set of collective values and boundaries that normally in de facto terms helps direct interpersonal relationships in society, and that those boundaries are getting both blurred and strained by the pace of cultural change. No. This term says I'm a proud member of a big, overfed, overpaid, arrogant sect of people who look down their cat-eyed church lady spectacles at the rest of the world, supremely confident I know what's best, and tsking with disappointment at the very turpitude of the unwashed masses surrounding me. This term says I want things to be simple and childlike, and for people to obey the rules set for them.

I have news for these people. I strongly suspect if society as a whole were to adopt the values they so desire, it would leave the world sicker than they found it⁸. It's a truism in some circles, but still bears repeating: simple obedience to the Sunday school teacher's iron edicts is not the stuff of which healthy civilizations are made. In the real world, we negotiate our rules, work it out in real time, adapting them as necessary as history marches on. Boundaries, reasonable restraints are a part of our collective social contract, but while a few of them may have validity that spans millenia, most do not survive that long without on-the-fly-editing for the simple reason that the world they seek to govern keeps changing the context.

And as long as I'm asking rhetorical questions — aren't there consequences to this kind of thinking that do palpably hurt society (beyond of course, to use a shameless secular cliche, the crippled minds of the multitude who actually swallow and live by this nonsense)? Is this seriously a question worth debating? I'd argue quite unabashedly that it is (not too surprisingly) in the absolutist mind most thoroughly conditioned by what looks a lot to me like the approach these wankers are suggesting that the most regressive irrationalities thrive. So it is the fundamentalists who to this day would deny the massive collective weight of the fossil record, of comparative morphology, and of comparative genetics, interleaved with consistent results from radioactive decay-based dating systems, tectonic geophysics, and astrophysics to insist that if a meandering set of writings originally codified by an itinerant desert tribe, then erroneously recopied, bastardized, and forthrightly revised with political programs in mind over thousands of years, that if these writings as interpreted by some idiot from Ohio with a grade five education indicate to them that their god created the earth to win a bet with a drinking buddy of his not more than six thousand years ago, well then the rest of us had just better get rid of all that biology, geophysics, nuclear chemistry and astrophysics and listen to them. Never mind the (sometimes rough, raw, even harsh) natural beauty an honest search for truth can bring to light, we'll take our comforting, changeless (and stultifyingly banal) myths and wishful thinking any day, thank you very much. Don't mess with our heads. Morality is absolute. And the Bible is inerrant.

And pigs could fly out of my butt any moment now. My point is, yes, this has social costs. It costs us in the clarity of our understanding and appreciation of the natural world that surrounds us, on profound levels. This, like so much of what matters most, is an incredibly difficult thing to quantify, but I find myself at a loss for words (and this is rare) trying to find even a decent description for the sense of loss I feel contemplating this merely at the level of aesthetics. That is to say, disregarding the practical costs levied when areas of knowledge and exploration are denied to developing minds under the purview of such dogmatic refusal to let people be people and learn for themselves, I think there's something really rather tragic about this. We have, collectively, as the human species, in the pursuit of science, discovered things about our world, and about life, that frankly, I find profound and beautiful, even if a little chillier to comprehend than the blandly reassuring anthropocentrism of the ancient myths. To think there are so many⁹ who will remain blinded to this beauty is beyond merely saddening.

Of course, there's a stretch here. At least some¹⁰ of the types who stress religious instruction for purposes of instilling a sense of respect for shared values that make society run more smoothly could argue this in itself does not have to lead to the stifling of human curiosity. I am not sure I can confidently grant them this middle position, however. There is something in the very suggestion that instilling morality (as opposed to a personal sense of membership in society, or a working sense of what the mass of people in their community generally consider ethical) in an individual is the way to go, that seems to me to be an approach more generally hostile to independent thought. Ultimately, I suspect, this comes from the underpinnings in much religious thought about the matter — that morality is something delivered to us, impressed upon us from without (by either an authoritative higher power, or by a priesthood claiming to act for one, depending on your persuasion). As opposed to the view that morality evolves out of society — it is built by humans, for humans, and it is to some degree individual integrity that constructs it, as much as the other way around (I once told one of my more theistic acquaintances that even if I were ever actually to bump into his god in person, I'd still have to tell said deity to leave me and my friends alone. Because I don't think people told how to act ever act so well as those who work out for themselves what works for them. It's a precis of a longer line of thought for what I'm really trying to say here, but it will have to do for now).

So, to close the circle — I brought in this topic with a reference to Bryan. I had my reasons. Remember, this was Bryan's line of attack. That the very teaching of evolution was one of the causes for what he saw as a rampant, cancerous immorality eating the nation alive.

I have now to respond to Bryan, and those who have inherited his work. Regardless of whether they reached their positions through something resembling intellectual honesty (I think this was slightly more likly in Bryan's day, and really rather unlikely in ours), I'm afraid they're terribly, dangerously wrong. I do think the pace of change in our society has something to do with what they're observing, and in a distant sense, a certain fracturing of the public interest in the traditional religions probably mirrors this, so they may have a limited excuse for making the connection. But I think they're mostly taking one of the symptoms and elevating it to the status of cause. And this, as noted above, is not without consequences. More to the point, I strongly suspect their prescription would do, and does do, more harm than good.

And getting back to that demagogue thing — regardless of what you might make of the actual sincerity about their religion, I'm entirely too sure what I make of the motivation of political chameleons like Gore and Dubya (and snake oil salesmen like the televangelists) when they try to wrap themselves in that damned "traditional morality" parchment in public discourse. So the next time I hear one of you lesser blowhards at a dinner party drag out that tired old line, I do believe I'm gonna throw my decadent glass of scotch all over your designer desert prophet robes.

It's not that you so richly deserve it as do they. It's just that I'm getting more than a little cranky about it all, and need someone to take it out on. Consider yourselves warned.

— 9 October, 2000 / AJM