Ward Youth and a New Morality (1971)

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Youth and a New MoralityL E O R. W A R D

WHATEVERAULTS we may find with themoral way and the moral wisdom that havelong been operative in the Occident, wemust admit two points about them. First,i t took them a long time to reach theirpresent position, and they got there byendless hard knocks, having originated, asall moral ways and moral wisdoms do,from the general demand of nature tobe, and of men, as a part of nature,to be, and, as Augustine so simply said,fully to be. Mans being is good in Aris-totles sense of the good as the desirable,and the fullness of his being would bethe ideal and best thing of all. Second-ly, that Western way and presumed wis-dom, like any way and presumed wisdom,have always to be reexamined and to facecriticism from within and without, and to-day i t must especially criticize and be criti-cized when there is worry and flurry aboutthe new morality and, more important,when because of world conditions our wayand its possible wisdom must learn fromand with the Oriental way and moral wis-

dom, and, helped by God and man, mustbecome one with them.I would underline the demand of nature.Men are not free to have or simply not tohave a moral path of some sort and againto have or not to have beneath it some kindof wisdom rock. Any tribe anywhere andat any time will work out a moral patternand have at the bottomof this what Aqui-nas calls a ratio operis, a set of guidelines,a basic directive principle; when peoplesquare their conduct with this, they con-sider their acts and habits to be justified,and they assume that this principle is, likethe Lords judgments, justified in itself.They want and need solid rock. Did not thejurist, John Austin, say that all systems ofeven the civil law are bottomed in thecommon nature of man? In every age, itis necessary to presume or to prove that, inregard to morals, mans nature is the rockwhich he naturally seeks. St. Paul tells hisChristians to accept no other foundationthan Christ, and like it as we will, we can-not effectively run away from nature as the

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basis of moral theory and practice. Hitlersway was evil not because of the situa-tion, the time and place, the schoolsor theeconomy, or because of consensus andwhat people thought and did, but becauseit was destructive of man and not bottomedon the common old raggedy nature of man.Any high or low tribe, people or nationhas to have a moral system, some acts andhabits taken as good, some as evil. How dowe know this? Tribes, peoples, nations al-ways do have and live by a pattern or sys-tem of morals. They are universally foundto have patterns. That is why anthropolo-gists who are the most competent to speak,say that to have an ethical system of somekind or other is the given case and mayproperly be called a cultural universal:every culture has an ethical system andwithin this general pattern fall many sig-nificant items, e.g., to have some kind ofunderstanding about marriage and familymorals is a phenomenon discovered inevery tribe, so that to have an understand-ing in this matter is an ethical universalwithin the wider cultural and ethical uni-versal. Various universals such as that men-tioned regarding marriage, and there aremany of them, are so recurrent that theanthropologist, the late Clyde Kluckhohnof Harvard, said in a famous article thatthe common ethical universals seem to cor-respond to inevitabilities. He thought thisword committed him to less than if he haddeclared for a categorical imperative.Perhaps, but I am not so sure.

In setting out to pattern a new moralityyouths or older people would have a taskon their hands. They would have to recre-ate centuries of how men have thought andlived, and in saying this we do not preju-dice the question of whether they shouldor should not seek a new morality. Theywould have to take account of many com-pound factors-of the Grecian natural ele-ments, for instance, the Jewish and Chris-

tian elements and of various secular ele-ments, and also of ethical universals, cul-tural universals and panhuman universals(for example, every person needs humanassociates) and the possible answering ofall these universals to inevitabilities, andI for one would want youths and elders in-tent on anew morality to learn what I pre-sume could be learned from Chinesemor-ality summed up in the one word Tao andfrom Indian morality summed up in theword Rta. This would be quite a chore, aspeople used to say. But it is really wishedon us now, though not primarily by youngrebels or old reactionaries, but by the con-dition of man and of our own society, andby the necessity, arising from science andtechnology, for East and West to under-stand each other and begin to learn how allpeople can live together.It is possible that even avant gardeyouths and their teachers are scarcely con-scious of how big the undertaking wouldbe. But it is a hopeful sign when youths be-come aware that they are asked to live with-in patterned structures of the moral life,within patterns already set by tradition, byparents and church and state law and theheavy burden of going with the mores. USU-ally, youths are too immature and healthilyyoungish simply to ask, Why? Their re-action, at least in many cases, is likely tobe, We wont do it! That iswhat is nowmeant by protest, in one of its common-est forms. However, their becoming awareof patterns is remarkably in their favor,since not all youths and adults achieve thislevel; it is a good thing to become con-scious of social uneasiness and to bring itout into the open. Think how enslavedslaves are until, no matter with what humanor divinehelp, they can begin to hope forfreedom. Think how long laboring men,women and children were underlings in towto their betters until at last they refused-really not long ago-to be nobodies,

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and how the black peoples and postcoloni-als now refuse an underprivileged and de-spised condition, and how women mustfight against discrimination. No more ofthat for us!hor better or for worse, in a minority ofits college people youth is refusing a non-entity status and swearing that it will havesomething to say even about sacred pre-serves, about the right and wrong of its ownconduct, notably in its sexual life, about theincidence of freedom and constraint, andcertainly about curricula and the provender

of education. We emphasize for better orfor worse, because it might be that Wood-row Wilson and GeorgeF. Kenan, in spiteof their mustiness and solemnity, would bebetter policy-makers for education than therebels at Columbia and Berkeley. Whetheryouths will be likely to come up with a bet-ter world is a detail that few of them haveconsidered with care, and at times they failto notice obvious realities falling withintheir own manners and morals. For exam-ple, they are in effect told by professors andthe media to whom they should pay a bigstipend to entertain them and whom to se-cure as lecturers, and the styles of collegegirls dresses are dictated to them fromremote, authoritarian and impersonalsources. College students applaud some no-torious quacks, and I have seen no line ofpickets stopping lecturers who at best werefreaks, and no dead weight of girls bodiesdenying access to the mod peoples offices,not even in Paris. All the same, even ifyouths are sometimes bar!king up wrongand highly selective trees, it is good thatthey are barking. For it must be confessedthat old men even more than boys are of-ten passive and thereby lack perspectiveand miss half of what is going on aroundthem.

Youth is not the only youthful partici-pant in the moral order and in the generalsocial order. Manhimself is a novice, a sort

of maverick and greenhorn among livingthings-see how sure and deft the red antis-and at least relatively, Americans aremavericks and greenhorns among the na-tions; the Chinese and Indians and Jewsand Greeks and Arabs all achieved greatthings and learned about human living agesbefore our nation was born. When youthor a youthful nation rates age down on thisor that question, as no doubt it now andthen should, i t would be a part of its ownmoial wisdom to know that it could be indanger of suffering from immaturity.Moral ways, some of which we may sup-pose are only in part justified, grow up un-der pressures and sufferings, fears, manyerrors and sins, by way of heroic deeds andlives and creative visions so that at lastsomething good and defensible as well asviable comes to be. Then bits of this goodkeep changing, something brought in,something deleted, and only a careful studyof the long-time effects could confidentlysay whether the moral condition and its al-leged justifications are truly better nowthan those in vogue at earlier stages. Whocan prove that todays openness is betterthan Puritan prudery? There is snobberyand better-than-thouism in every genera-tion. A half century ago, the American es-sayist, Agnes Repplier, was unhappy aboutwhat she called the repeal of reticence.Who can prove that todays much greaterrepeal is undeniably a good thing?

Possibly some youths and some of theirgrandfathers do not know that as any tribeor nation, any youth or age group movesout of one set of approved values and in-stitutions, including a patterned way of life,it automatically moves into another. Itinches this wgy or that, perhaps only by atiny fraction, but it has to be somewhere:it cannot be nowhere at all. It cannot beoutside patterns, outside the world of goodand evil and of making choices which in-volve the familiar claim that X is good and

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Y evil. Moses said that the people had chos-en to walk in Gods ways. We cannot ex-amine whether his words truly expressedwhat the people choseor did. But we knowthat, like any people, they made choices,took steps this way and that and soon hada beaten path. This was then their de f uctoway, and naturally it was more or lesschanging and more or less changeless. Thatis what people do, beat a path, make a goodor bad or mediocre way. They would dothat, the words of Moses apart.There is no use supposing that Ameri-cans or moderns or youths form a world-wide exception and are not path-creatingand path-beating. It is sure to be the casethat some o us will abominate certain fea-tures of the old paths. Or we will not likehow the paths are expressed in what Bon-hoeffer called the rusty swords of outworncodes with their dos and donts.Stunned by credibility gaps in politics orreligion, we surmise and possibly in effectknow that some who profess the paths asgood and the best way to good are hypo-critical and merely say and do not do. Nev-ertheless the main point here is that goingout of one set of mores means plumping in-to another. And perhaps by this time in ourhistory, all collegians and some otheryouths and some older folks know that ev-ery tribe or people, even the most sophis-ticated, lives mainly by the mores, and thatthe mores do not always square with goodmorals.People do what they are expected to do.They do what people do, and though theycensor and are censored, they fall in line.Adults do that-they go along. And sodoesyouth, the individual quickly and uncon-sciously doing what the peer group says todo; in our time the media tell young andold what to think and do, and grandmoth-ers accept the authoritarian replies of ques-tion and answer programs more rapidlythan youths do. Hegemony through the dic-

tatorship of the mores is a mark of all cul-tures. That the moral and social worldshould thus obey is (we would argue) agood thing. And for two reasons: in themoral as well as in the physical world a boyor a man cannot at every step be thinkingof how to lift his foot and how to put itdown, and we are optimistic enough to sup-pose that a way workedou t over some gen-erations, a way that has helped people tosurvive and develop, is almost certain to be,by and large, a good way. What reallywould be the best way of all is a basic ques-tion we do not have occasion to examinehere. As we have already said, if a personor group begins to take notice, to sizethings up, to criticize and reevaluate valuesand norms of values, we may stand by fora moment and assume that the action is asign of life and that it could be a move to-ward civilized maturity.As people reject rusty swords, the givencodesor parts of them, it could be that theyare unconsciously reasserting some old fav-orites. This is because the forms or normsof the moral life are limited, and every oneof them and perhaps every possible combi-nation has been tried many times. In addi-tion to the mores, the hedonistic norm-what gives pleasure is good-has oftenbeen followed; the individualistic normalso has been common, and is evidently fol-lowed by many women obtaining abortions,although abortion promoters claim to go forslum clearance, quality people, and wom-ens liberation. The individualistic norm,rejecting laws and the legalistic, sets the in-dividual up as a law, asserts that the in-dividual is to follow his conscience and notbe bossed by any persons, institutions orimposed codes. I n the controversy over ar-tificial birth control, some have said to leteyery couple follow its ow n conscience, adifficult thing to do in the case, since themores and the media were having a gooddeal to saypro and con; some said the cou-

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ple should get a doctors advice, no doubtby way of invoking science as an authori-tarian norm: whatever is scientifically pos-sible is good to do. A man does follow hisown conscience, of course, although this isalways shaped up for him by all kinds ofodds and ends of worthy and unworthyforces, and a journalist was only a fractiongreener than his associates when he wrotethis three-word headline: BISHOPS EN-DORSE CONSCIENCE. He did not knowthat he should have added that this is some-thing that has always been done by bishopsand everyone else from the beginning of theworld. Another type of norm is the expedi-ency or Machiavellian rule, frankly statedby Machiavelli in The Prince, that whathelps me or my group to the end sought istherefore good, a rule correctly translatedas the end justifies the means; this norm,allied to the individualistic, is the rule fol-lowed by a boy or a man who tells a lie toget out of the difficulty; it has been fol-lowed by Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and alltotalitarianism and is honored in practiceby political parties and by many more orless morally good individual politicians andbusinessmen. On occasion we can refuse thekings edicts as Antigone did and appealwith her to some higher law and perhapssee this, as she did, as the expression of adivine law. We can go with biblical com-mands, with the Ten Commandments orwith Christs command to love God andman. Or, as people often unconsciously do,we can combine several types of norms,e.g., natural and Biblical and individualis-tic. But there is a limit, sooner or later wewill run out of space-thats about all thenorms there are.An expedient appealed to for a while byyouths and a few somewhat shallow adultswas to say that there are no norms, codesor laws; a professor in a school for socialthought said in Deweyan fashion that thereare no standing principles, but that faced

by a decision to be made, a person createsan ad hoc principle. The ideal of someyouths and some adults was to seek shelterunder the umbrella of a lawless conscienceor again of commitment to ones own iden-tity; a letter in the Aew York Times a fewyears ago said that women have the rightto any sex life they please because a womanhas to seek her identity. Love also got ahigh rating. Charged with nefarious evil-doing, Charles Manson said he had merelytold girls that in love there can be no evil.Love and the situation were asked bypersons in respectable positions to do dutyfor what had formerly been regarded as aneed for norms. In his lively and charm-ing Honest to Cod, Bishop Robinson saidthat love would find the way to good, thatit would point out the direction for rightaction and would home intuitively on theright object. An obvious objection is thatsometimes a man is ready to die out of lovefor his neighbors wife and the good bishopseems not to have heard of the axiom thatlove is blind.Meantime, youths and adults may findsome comfort in the fact that men of dis-tinction have been caught in moments ofimmaturity in regard to moral norms.Hobbes, a man of charm in many ways,said that once upon a time man lived inwhat Hobbes called a state of nature; noaction was either good or bad, there was nomerit or demerit, no justice or injustice un-til, everything going badly, the king tookover and pronounced what was good andwhat was evil, what was right or wrong,meritorious and what had no merit-thevery decisionssoperemptorily made by dic-tators. Descartes, perhaps the keenest mindof his century, was set back when, soldier-ing in a foreign country, he discovered thatthere were other ways and mores than theFrench ways and moresso familiar to him.Locke, a wise and admirably humble man,though not widely traveled, was innocent

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enough to say, in his voluminous treatiseon human understanding, that AmericanIndians did not possess the first principlesof right and wrong-in his opinion, it wasas if only Europeans, white and Christians,the wise men par excellence, could beblessed with basic moral wisdom. AndChateaubriand, trained as the darling disci-ple of Rousseau, got his sentimental wingsclipped when, soon after 1800he went u pstate in New York to see the Indians who,on his masters word, he had supposed todwell in a paradise without codes or laws.He soon found out a thingor two. The peo-ple not only had laws, but the visitor, run-ning from tree to tree and embracing oakand elm, learned that he had to obey rustyand outworn codes, sometimes an extremelyand distasteful thing to do.If wise men like Hobbes, Descartes andLocke could be narrow, uninformed andimmature-not half critical and circum-spect enough--on big moral issues, it ispossible that those possessed of no greatwisdom could be unaware of how difficulti t is to do a good job of evaluating themores. I t might even be more difficult toisolate the basic moral issues. Some maturi-ty is needed to see that the fundamentalproblems are few, such as what is the endfor man? It is even difficult to be surewhether, in a particular case, we are judg-ing, deciding and acting on a general prin-ciple rather than on personal taste and ourown values, and again to decide on whichtype of norm we are deciding, whether anesthetic norm, an ethical one, a theologicalone, or perhaps on grounds dictated bypolitical, religious or personal preference.That is to say, to find out what a moraltheory embodies and is all about-this isa considerable assignment and presupposesmaturity. It is hard to do depth thinkingin regard to something so much our veryselves as is our own daily moral way, andin regard to our presuppositions on morals.

Some of the factors in this area are difficultenough for professionals; for example,moral sentences, moral absolutes, moralrelativities. Yet most people find out howto live in terms of what constitutes themoral life.When Aristotle wrote his treatise on themean (Book I1 of the Nicomch,eanEthics), he was mature, and nothing toomuch, nothing too little was far from newto him. But it was not merely the matureAristotle who spoke; Grecian civilizationmature on this problem of human livingspoke through Aristotle, a civilizationwhich had well seasoned working ideas onthe mean in many fields. In La Moraleddristote Ren6 A . Gauthier said that forcenturies the idea of the just mean wasat home among the Greeks.

For a long time familiar to Greek po-etry, the idea of the just mean had byAristotles age invaded all the areas oflife and thought. We find it in effect ev-erywhere in the fifth century beforeChrist: in the young Ionian physicists,in Prodicus who introduced it into rhet-oric, in the Pythagoreans who intro-duced it into mathematics, above all inthe medical doctors, and it was frommedicine that it passed, by way of De-mocritus, into moral philosophy. Whenin his turn Aristotle appeals to the justmean, he is only conforming to cus-t0m.l

On the mean and generally on morals, Aris-totle would not have been muchof anybodyif he had not been far more than Aristotle.He was Greek, no upstart. We may say ofhim what Renan said of Turgenev: Beforehe was born he had lived for thousands ofyears; generations of ancestors lost in thesleepof centuries, came to life through hislife and utterance.Rent5 A. Gauthier, La Morale dAristote(Pari$ 19581, p. 64.

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Ward Youth and a New Morality (1971)

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