Oh for the Middle Ages! When God was in Heaven and order reigned on earth; a vision of harmony encapsulated in the stones of dreamy cathedral spires and the shimmering domes of mosques. When prophets and saints walked the earth and believers followed these heroes of moral rectitude. When the ragged fringes of doubt could be readily trimmed by inquisitor/mullahs or crusader/jihadists. This is the dream from which modernity awoke.
But many haven’t! Indeed, it is beguiling enough to persuade increasing numbers to try to resurrect it in the face of social anomie. Both religious fundamentalists and political neo-cons (there is considerable overlap) share a vision of a more ordered, defined world in which everyone will know their place. If they differ it is in that whilst the former may believe this sincerely the latter have their doubts, but see no other viable alternative.
The ‘con’ in neo-cons is the willingness to blank out the reasons why (some of) humanity awoke from its dream of Medievalism and chose to reject its various Gothic reincarnations.
Underlying both is fear: fear of a moral vacuum, of existential emptiness, by which we condemn ourselves to live out our lives on the edges of despair as the tide of social disintegration and the Nietzschean deluge laps around us. Now everything fails us, from marriage to the railways – we don’t seem to be able to keep our trains on track, let alone our lives. So is it any wonder that younger generations become increasingly wayward? What they (we) clearly seem to need is definitive markings, tablets of stone or Koranic script for all to see.
Only we don’t. The hope of every moral revivalist is that admonition will do the trick. A word will be spoken and people will change. Only they won’t. Even those who claimed to have ‘awoken’ from the dream of Medievalism – ‘the enlightened ones’, such as John Locke, Kant and J.S. Mill – continued to believe in the power of clear ideas, the strength of moral argument and principle. It sounded convincing, but has been clearly ineffective. Reasoned rules, based on clear ideas, have seemingly not yet made the world a utopia; but then to utopians the adverb ‘yet’ is everything!
But all is not lost. To those of romantic disposition another vocabulary is available. It hinges on the word ‘sensitivity’: something felt in the veins of unremembered pleasure, in which, as the poet Wordsworth phrased it, ‘our affections gently lead us on.’ Could this be, ‘Love a Hoody’? No, but it is an essential beginning. It hinges on a crucial and neglected insight of the philosopher David Hume, that morality arises not from a ‘chain of argument and induction’ but from an ‘immediate feeling and finer internal sense.’ What could he mean? According to those who loosely call themselves ‘social intuitionists’, the decisive arena of moral judgement is within the hidden world of unconscious emotional intuitions. When people decide what to do, what is right or wrong for them, reasoning plays a minor role. Of course all have their reason ready after; but initially it is within the emotional inner depths that the decisions are taken – ‘for’ us, if not ‘by’ us, as when we intuitively ‘decide’ if we like someone at the first revealing glance. It is about how we are emotionally structured, or sensitised.
And herein lies the challenge. A psychopath or sadist does not enter upon his actions after embarking upon a chain of reasoning. They do so because of a failure of empathy – a failure to make any emotional linkage.
There is evidence of some degree of damage or abnormality of the brain in the psychopathic criminal, but these are extremes. What is normal is that our emotions are tutored by experience. Where there is no experience of affection, trust, security, support, none such are likely to be forthcoming, whatever the admonitions.
What is required is action. The action required is the creation of a context, an environment of affection, stability, care and respect. Traditionally different cultures have formulated how such things may be transmitted in a moral code. But the code is secondary. Humans are not ‘hardwired’ with one type of morality any more than they are for one language. As in learning a language, all people are born with the instinct for learning a grammar.
Which one is for parents to provide. But, whatever the words, what is now required is an essential grammar of affective sensitivity.
Required:A New Moral Sensitivity Dominic Kirkham argues that morality arises not from a ‘chain of argument and induction’ but from an ‘immediate feeling and finer internal sense.’ Reasoned rules,based on clear ideas,have seemingly not yet made the world a utopia.
In a multicultural society this is important to note, otherwise we will be arguing over the wrong things, the accidentals rather than essentials. Rather than life programmes or principles, morality first requires a lifestyle. Someone (usually parents) have got to make the first move to show affection and care and those things will be the base of the moral personality. And here it is necessary to use an old-fashioned, somewhat antiquated word: sacrifice. All ancient religious traditions made a big thing of sacrifice – but for the wrong reasons: to placate unpredictable deities. Our modern need is otherwise: to placate unpredictable offspring.
If we are not prepared to do this, then ‘Don’t blame the kids’. This is the mantra of woman of the year, Camilla Gelhidabatmansingh, founder of the Kid’s Company. This groundbreaking organisation works with some of the most disturbed offspring of our society. Its policy is simple: to put in place some of those emotional essentials that children have missed out on. (A second window of opportunity/hope appears in early adolescence when the brain reorganises itself for adult life and when it is particularly susceptible to – and in need of – affective support and stability.) Their absence will be a seriously disturbed brain and recalcitrant behaviour.
The alternative life programme is one of punitive restraint: costly and largely ineffective. Without the dual input of affective sensitivity and sacrifice into the matrix of our society then there is little real hope for the future.
We should resign ourselves to posting over it those words Dante placed over the entrance to Hell (in the time people believed in such a place): ‘Abandon hope all you that enter here.’ Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SoF and writes regularly for Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).