The Illusion of Moral Decline

Or is it a reality?

Ecc 1:9  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

The other day I read a fascinating article on the ‘illusion of moral decline’:

Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline?

There is a point in this article that deserves a whole other article. Indeed, perhaps a series of articles. The author here proposes that people in the 2000’s who were born in the 1940’s will see a ‘moral decline’ because the 2000s are a lot less worried about what the 1940s saw as moral then they are about what the 2000s see as moral.

Indeed, the case is stronger than that. Much of what the 1940’s thought of as morality might well be seen as actively immoral in the 2000’s. Let’s look at some cases:

When Sodomy (male on male sexual activity) was made legal the conservatives moaned that it would lead to ‘gay marriage’. ‘Not so,’ the progressive said, ‘even we are against that!’

So, in other words, when Sodomy was made legal everyone (at least in public) thought that ‘gay marriage’ would be a bad thing. Ie an ‘immoral’ thing. Fast forward to today and the majority (at least in public) think that being against ‘gay marriage’ is an immoral thing! Even many conservatives.

Child murder is similar. Early advocates for the legalisation of child murder said that they wished for it to be ‘safe, legal, and rare’. But nowadays progressives bemoan anywhere that it is ‘rare’, and castigate anyone who speaks of regretting murdering their child.

This is not merely an interesting psychological phenomenon (allusion intended). It is a devastating indictment of the lack of moral reasoning and understanding.

A number of years ago (when I was in college, so a large number of years ago) I was friends with a professor. Not my professor, as I recall, although maybe I had had a class from him years earlier. He and I were talking one day, and he said he had decided to assign as a reading for one of his classes ‘The Abolition of Man’ by CS Lewis. He wished to introduce the issue of objective morality and have a discussion on it.

A while later we were talking again and I asked him how it went. He said he would never assign it again. He said that it wasn’t that his students disagreed with the idea of objective morality, it was that they didn’t  understand it! That after the entire discussion most students still had no clue what Lewis was talking about. How could there be anything objective about morality?

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. CS Lewis, the Abolition of Man

In order to speak of a decline in morality, there must be a morality to decline. An objective morality. Pretty much everyone in the world can speak of someone ‘taller’ and someone else ‘shorter’ than they are. When the person who is ‘taller’ becomes the person who is ‘shorter’ we must not therefore conclude that ‘height’ is subjective. And the situation is worse with a word like ‘better’ or ‘worse’ because there isn’t even single agreed objective standard that they are using to compare to.

Which doesn’t mean that morality doesn’t exist. It doesn’t even imply that morality isn’t something with a lot of moving parts. There are lots of things which have moving parts which nonetheless exist. Take health. One person may say, “I am healthier than you, I don’t get as many headaches.”, while the other says, “I am healthier than you, I don’t have Asthma.”. These sentences don’t invalidate the idea of ‘health’, it just means that we need to do a more difficult analysis, and that perhaps we cannot put ‘health’ on a sliding scale. Perhaps we cannot judge between headaches, which affect daily living, against Asthma, where attacks might be rare but potentially deadly. But we can still speak of health, and acknowledge that both headaches and Asthma are bad things

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
― C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

I believe that Jonathon Haidt’s work can shed light on this issue. When he revealed to the world that liberals only see two moral categories while conservatives see five it shows how significant the confusion over ‘moral decline’ is. It is perfectly possible for a society to experience a large decline in a given category, and have a huge swath of society be literally unable to see it.

Which, again, does not make it subjective. The existence of colour blind people do not mean that colours don’t exist.

So going back to the article, what would we actually have to do to measure ‘moral decline’ over time? We would, first, have to pick one description of morality. We would have to decide if what we believe now, in 2023, is ‘moral’, or if it was what we believed in 1950, or 1850, or even 1250 or 50 BC! Then we could examine history and see how people in 1250 did on our 50 BC scale, and see whether things ‘declined’ or not

.

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

But, then, no matter which of the ages that you picked, pretty much everyone will object. Which brings us to the Christian’s starting point: the Bible. One of the core ideas of the Bible is that it, and it alone, is the final resting place for all moral questions.

Psa 119:34  Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart

In order to speak of a ‘moral decline’ there must be something called ‘morality’. It must be a specific, objective, measurable attribute; which some people can do well, and other’s poorly. All societies are fallen, they are all steeped in sin, but some societies are less fallen, or less fallen in some areas, or more fallen in some areas. As Curtis Yarvin said on Triggernometry, it is all very well for us to ask ourselves what we think of Queen Elizabeth I. It is quite another thing to ask what she would think of us. I would go back a little further and ask what Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and Daniel would think of us… indeed what Christ and God the Father do think of us.

I love comments, especially intelligent comments that disagree. I am also very open to letter exchanges and the like. Lets get a conversation going.