Through the Moral Maze

Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World

Robert Kane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315480039
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"On the ... issue of our pluralistic age -- whether we can continue to believe in absolute value -- Robert Kane has written the most helpful discussion I know. It is clear, cogent, and above all, convincing". -- Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions

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The Spirits of the Times

A TOWER OF BABEL

The ancient image of the Tower of Babel has been used by more than a few modern writers to describe the current state of discourse about ethics and values.¹ There is no one “spirit of the times,” but many—too many in fact—too many competing voices, philosophies, and religions, too many points of view on moral issues, too many interpretations of even our most sacred documents, our Bibles and Constitutions. Only the most unthinking persons can fail to be affected by this pluralism of points of view and not wonder, as a consequence, about the truth of their own beliefs. Such doubts are the subject matter of this book. Its theme is that we must begin to address old questions about ethics and values in new ways if our moral consciousness is to keep pace with the new intellectual landscape.

Among the consequences of the modern Tower of Babel is a pervasive temptation to embrace relativism, the view that there are no objective or “absolute” values that hold for all persons and all times. Judgments about the good and the right, it is said, can only be correct for some persons or societies or times, but not for all persons, societies, or times. In support of such a view, there are widespread doubts about the very possibility of making absolute or universal judgments that transcend our always limited points of view. New trends in the social sciences and humanities, some of them with popular names like “postmodernism” or “poststructuralism,” make much of the fact that all our views about the world are historically and culturally conditioned.² We always see things from a particular point of view (a “conceptual framework,” or “language game,” or “cultural tradition”). How can we therefore show that our point of view, or any other, is the right one and competing views wrong, when we must assume the basic presuppositions of some particular point of view to support our claims? How can we climb out of our historically and culturally limited perspectives to find an Archimedean point, an absolute standpoint above the particular and competing points of view?

This problem haunts the modern intellectual landscape. One sees variations of it everywhere in different fields of study, and everywhere it produces doubts among reflective persons about the possibility of justifying belief in objective intellectual, cultural, and moral standards. Many modern thinkers, to be sure, deplore the resulting drift toward relativism or skepticism, arguing that we need to restore belief in objective truth and value. But it is one thing to say this and another to show how it can be done. For the problem of finding an Archimedean point above the pluralism of competing points of view is a complex one, which thinkers have been wrestling with for centuries.

I no longer believe the older ways of solving this problem will work as they did for past generations, and we will see why in chapter 2. If we are not to drift into relativism, therefore, some new ways of thinking about the problem of value are needed. Alasdair MacIntyre is right, I think, to say that the current state of moral discourse is one of grave disrepair, but I am not entirely satisfied with his or any other contemporary suggestion for repair.³ Some fundamental possibilities, it seems to me, have been overlooked in all traditional and modern searches for absolute value. These possibilities will be explored in the chapters to follow. I have no illusions about the finality of what I have to say about these topics, but I hope my thoughts will stimulate others who understand that the problems of relativism cannot be wished away by simple nostrums and lamentations, without confronting the deep philosophical problems that lead to them.⁴

These themes are explored in the first four chapters of the book and then applied to current debates about public morality and social ethics (chapter 5); politics and democracy (chapter 6); religion (chapter 7); the environment, feminism, and multiculturalism (chapter 8); and moral education (chapter 9).

MORAL DISINTEGRATION WITHIN

The issues at stake are deeply philosophical, but they have practical implications. Many distinguished figures have raised the question of whether democratic and pluralistic societies can withstand the erosion of common beliefs about right and wrong that have traditionally sustained them. As the old ideological struggle of the Western democracies with communism has wound down, we are warned by noted exiles from the communist world, like Nobel laureates Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Czeslaw Milosz, that a new and more difficult struggle looms for the world’s advanced societies—a struggle against moral disintegration from within.⁵ The West may have won the world, they suggest, while losing its own soul.

Similar themes have been echoed in popular books by American writers of recent years, including the widely read Habits of the Heart by sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues, and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.⁶ These were surprising best-sellers, suggesting a loss of moral and spiritual direction in today’s America. Bloom is one of those who laments the rise of relativism. Widespread rejection of absolute values, he claims, has led to a pervasive indifference to what is really good or right, and not only in moral, religious, and political matters. In matters of higher culture as well—great literature, music, painting—he thinks relativism leads to an indifference that debases and impoverishes culture as well as erodes its moral foundations.

But Bloom is also one of those whose suggested solution goes little beyond simple nostrums and lamentations. He thinks a return to education by way of the Great Books of the Western intellectual tradition is the “only serious solution” to the problems created by relativism, skepticism, and nihilism (p. 344). To see the limits of this suggestion, one does not have to speak against reading the Great Books of Western culture, or for that matter the great works of non-Western cultures. They contain much wisdom that we ignore at our peril and they will play an important role in the chapters to follow. But, as reviewers of Bloom’s book, like Martha Nussbaum, have pointed out, reference to the Great Books is a two-edged sword.⁷ For they parade before us a series of conflicting philosophical and moral positions as the wisdom of the ages, which can lead to the same relativism and skepticism they are supposed to prevent—unless they are accompanied by adequate arguments to relieve contemporary doubts that lead to relativism and skepticism.

In the end, I think Milosz is closer to the truth than Bloom when he notes that if we are to overcome our present confusions about values, new ideas will also be necessary. If the modern Tower of Babel is to be overcome, we need to clothe our moral and spiritual aspirations in images as yet unborn. Without that, the Great Books of the past can seem like the Great Sphinx—a monument to human civilization that keeps its secrets to itself.

THE SPIRITUAL CENTER

The root of present problems about values, as I said, is the existence of a pluralism of points of views about the right way to live, with no evident ways of settling disagreements between them. The ancient Tower of Babel is a fitting image for this modern condition. But I now want to add three other images that will stay with us throughout the book because they help to describe important consequences of modern pluralism. These images are associated respectively with the ideas of (1) spiritual center, (2) moral innocence, and (3) an Axial Period of human history.

Mircea Eliade, the distinguished historian of religions, has said that what religions provided for their believers through the ages was a spiritual centering.⁸ Primitive peoples often identified a sacred mountain or some other place near their home as the center of the universe. The axis of the world went through that point and reached directly to the heavens. It was the spiritual center of their world and the place through which people found access to the divine.

One of the stories of modern civilization is a gradual undermining of this sense of spiritual centering. When Copernicus said that the earth was not at the center of the universe, European civilization was shocked. It was shocked even more when Giordano Bruno suggested that there were perhaps many other worlds or galaxies. So shocked, indeed, that Bruno—a less cautious man than Copernicus—was burned at the stake for bringing such bad news. This reaction was crude, but not unnatural. For the spatial center of the universe and our nearness to it had always been an image of the spiritual center and our nearness to it. The loss of one seemed a loss of the other.

But the physical center of the universe was only an image of the spiritual center for ancient peoples, and perhaps it was too crude an image. It is also possible to believe that, no matter where we are in the physical universe, we can find the spiritual center if we hold the right beliefs, those that are absolutely true, true for all persons at all times. Realizing this, primitive peoples also thought that their beliefs were the true beliefs and their gods the true gods, just as they thought that their mountain was the physical center of the universe.

But this approach to the spiritual center has also been challenged by modern civilization—in this case, not by scientific discoveries alone, but also by the existence of a Tower of Babel of conflicting beliefs. In a modern world full of diverse and conflicting religions, sects, cults, denominations, and spiritual movements, we can no longer afford to think about a spiritual center as the ancients did without considerable soul searching. Hans Ming points out that the greatest challenge for Christians in the twentieth century is coming to grips with the diversity of the world’s religions and religious points of view whose presence in the global community can no longer be ignored or lightly dismissed.⁹ The same challenge exists for all religious believers. It is the threatened loss of a spiritual center—the religious counterpart of the Tower of Babel and the spiritual counterpart of discovering many worlds or galaxies beyond our own. As Huston Smith has put it, using Nietzsche’s image, in the modern world we are summoned to become Cosmic Dancers, who may “have our own perspectives, but they can no longer be cast in the hard molds of oblivion to the rest.”¹⁰

LOSS OF MORAL INNOCENCE: PERELANDRA

A second important consequence of the encounter with a pluralism of points of view is that it takes away what might be called our moral innocence. How this occurs is nicely illustrated by a scene in C. S. Lewis’s fantasy novel Perelandra.¹¹ Lewis describes the journey of a man named Ransom to the planet Venus, called “Perelandra” in the novel, an idyllic world of islands floating on water and covered with exotic foliage (a veritable Eden, unlike the real Venus which is the image of hell). Ransom meets only one humanlike creature there, a green-skinned woman who tells him of her God, Maleldil, and his command that she search for a man of her own kind who also inhabits this world. Ransom and the woman talk until he complains that the floating islands are making his stomach queasy and suggests they move over to the fixed land. The woman is shocked by this suggestion and tells him that Maleldil has commanded that no one should set foot on the fixed land. This is the one thing she is forbidden to do. Ransom’s response troubles and confuses her, for he says that in his world, on earth, everyone lives on the fixed land and no one believes it is wrong. Is it possible, she wonders, that there are different meanings of right and wrong and that Maleldil commands one group of people to do one thing and others to live differently? In her confusion she is tempted to move to the fixed land: if others can do it, why can’t she?

As the conversation proceeds, Ransom suddenly realizes they are reenacting the story of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and he is playing the serpent, tempting Eve to do the one thing that God has commanded her not to do: eat of the fruit of the tree of “knowledge of good and evil.” In the biblical version, Eve eats of that fruit, Adam does so also, and as a consequence of knowing good and evil they are banished from the Garden. According to the traditional interpretation, this coming to “know good and evil” is coming to know sin through succumbing to temptation. But in Perelandra Lewis is suggesting another, modern interpretation of knowing good and evil. The new knowledge that tempts us to sin is the realization that there may be more than one right or wrong way of doing things, and that therefore our way may not be the only “right way.” It tempts us because it weakens commitment to our own beliefs. In the resulting confusion we say, like the woman, “if others can do it, why can’t we?”

Such a realization that other points of view may be right in their own ways brings an end to moral innocence—the secure feeling that the rights and wrongs learned in childhood are the only correct or true ones, unchallengeable and unambiguous. It hurls persons out of moral innocence into moral confusion, out of the Eden of childhood into the real world of conflict and ambiguity, tempting them to think that since rules are not absolutely unchallengeable or unambiguous, including their own, perhaps none is absolutely binding. One form this challenge takes is the realization that traditional moral commandments (“Thou shalt not kill, lie, steal …”) have exceptions in the real world; their absoluteness is questioned. But once exceptions are admitted (for example, in cases of self-defense or war), it becomes problematic where the line on exceptions is to be drawn (capital punishment? abortion? euthanasia?). Disagreements proliferate and the question asked by the woman of Perelandra returns: if others can do it, why can’t I?

Failing to grasp these possibilities is to live in moral innocence. To grasp them is to learn something about the complexities of good and evil, but it is learning that comes with a bitter taste. Having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in this conspicuously modern manner, we live, so to speak, “after the modern Fall.” Beliefs formerly held may survive, but they can no longer be looked upon with the same certainty and innocence. Some people have not crossed this divide, even in the modern world. But those who have crossed it cannot easily go back, any more than they can go back to believing that the earth is flat or situated at the center of the universe.

THE AXIAL PERIOD

These consequences of modern pluralism have suggested comparisons with past ages when older ideas were being challenged on a grand scale and new ones were born, periods such as the end of the Middle Ages in the West, or the much earlier Axial Period in human history—which introduces the third theme I want to discuss. The expression “Axial Period” was used by Karl Jaspers to describe the remarkable era between the years 600 and 300 B.C.E., during which a spiritual awakening took pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Spirits of the Times
• 2 The Ends Principle
• 3 The Human Quest
• 4 Objective Worth
• 5 Public and Private Morality
• 6 Democracy, Politics, and Ethics
• 7 Meaning and the Mosaic of Life: Religion
• 8 Environment, Gender, and Culture
• 9 Moral Education
• Appendix: Table of Contents with Section Headings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index