I just put the finishing touches on one post and I’m thinking about how can I explicate values, culture, etc. and then this pops up in my Facebook timeline. It was on my friend and colleague Russell Berger’s page, alongside some interesting comments. People started using words like morals, ethics, culture, and even moral/cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and so on…
Whenever the discussion turns to these matters, it’s usually quittin’ time for most people because, well – here comes that thar philosophy talk.
I found philosophy later in life, after undergraduate studies, and it really only began with law school. It wasn’t until my late thirties that I really dedicated some time to digging in on the subject and trying to understand what the BIG questions really were, what people had said in years, decades, centuries, and – yes, even – centuries past. In fact, I’ve found that the REALLY BIG questions haven’t changed much since Aristotle first wrote the Nichomachean Ethics – arguably one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written. Considering that he book-ended that with the Politics – and given the time in which he lived – I believe Aristotle has a compelling claim for the greatest philosopher to have ever lived (for you young kids, this will be abbreviated as GOAT – for you old folks who don’t read ESPN comments, this is “greatest of all time”).
Rather than try to explain terms like values and culture, or the difference between morals and ethics, using some kind of didactic method, and then from there proceeding on to a logical discussion of other definitions and ways to measure what I believe is our cultural – and consequently economic, fiscal, and political – decline, and then arguing that all of these various cultural metrics, whether it’s in the country’s total debt ($18 cool trillion right now, more than the entire annual GDP of the country), or average American personal debt load, or whether we use economic and/or personal freedom indices and rankings by independent organizations, whether it is the public and university education system, or results by money spent on it; or comparisons of U.S. high school children’s rankings as compared with other nations, or whatever you want to pick as a comprehensive list, I would then try to establish why I think we are a Nation in decline. And then after arguing for my selections and weightings….ZzzzzzZzzzzzzzz….
Exactly.
I thought about doing it in that rigorous a fashion. Taking some time to do a thorough takedown of the moral tenets underlying both Socialism and Progressivism and show wherever we find them in American life we eventually find suffering, inefficiency, corruption, and things generally shittier for poor people, all while they beat the populist rhetoric of the evil of the rich. (I mean, seriously, it’s as if no one actually reads Animal Farm any more. “Hey, kids! Here’s a hint: it’s not really about pigs and life on an actual working farm, okay?! It’s been considered great literature since it was written not because we all enjoy stories and songs – like Ol’ McDonald, E-I-E-I-O! – about fucking farms or petting zoos – (notwithstanding what a lot of children’s literature would lead you to believe).”
It’s important literature because Orwell knew exactly where socialism led. He’d watched what those philosophies could do, how insidious bad ideas and philosophies, no matter how “theoretically well-intentioned” their proponents claim they are, came to nearly engulf the planet in war and wipe out humanity.
We ignore the lessons of culturally significant literature like Animal Farm at our own peril. That could never happen here, political pundits yell at the studio cameras, while they pursue nationalization of the entire healthcare industry – and virtually every other fucking industry that government thinks it can. And the people – because of the loss of many other important cultural values, such as moral courage, civic duty/engagement, liberty, etc. – the people just mewl along while things apparently spin out of their control.
In any event, it struck me that trying to lay this argument out in times font would be tedious as hell. So I decided on the narrative form. It’s also how we learn and remember. I pleaned that from my study of the common law in law school. Ask any lawyer what Hadley v. Baxendale held and if they can’t think of the exact holding of the case – which took place in 1854, incidentally – most will be able to tell you something like, “it’s that case about the millright who had an axle break and he had to ship it to purchase another one or something” and “it was about liability for consequential damages when the shipper didn’t perform as promised.” I pulled that out of my ass and I haven’t looked at that case since 1997. It’s the story that’s important. That is, in fact, the whole purpose of writing down legal precedents and their justifications in the first place. In a sense, a judge – whether at trial or appellate level, but particularly at the appellate level – is doing in every case is making a ruling on the particular facts in front of her, and explaining for all the world to see and hear the exact reasoning and from what precedence the judge is drawing her conclusions, be it about the admission of evidence, the rule of consequential damages in a contract dispute, or the Constitutionality of the criminal statute when the State seeks to deprive one of its citizens of his Liberty. The principle upon which the decisions rests matters deeply.
So, rather than start with a dry recitation of what a moral is, and then what values are, and what culture is, and on and on, I’m going to try to tell a story, hopefully one that has resonance, but which also explains something important about American culture, it’s continued dissolution, and where that ends for us (not well at all) if we don’t make some deeply needed changes, while simultaneously having a serious discussion about what values we want to ensure undergird our entire structure as a Nation of various, disparate ethnic and religious groups, all with a hope of maintaining the maximum personal freedom that we can. It is, in short, time for a very adult conversation about where we are, how we got here, and what we need to do to fix the problems, be it of arrest and incarceration rates for minorities, defense spending as a function of GDP, foreign policy, term limits for Congress, a way to limit the effects of money on campaigns and public policy, and perhaps a simple return to the old-fashioned notion of self-reliance, something that was at the heart of the founding of this great Republic.
This is where I’ll place my stake in the ground. Next time I’ll start trying to explain what being a Marine helo pilot and officer, a Judge Advocate, a civilian attorney, as well as a few deployments to Afghanistan, and even being one of CrossFit Inc.’s lawyer, all taught me about these notions of culture, values, morals, and ethics – and why if we don’t start some of this education much earlier, we are dooming our nation to become Idiocracy.*
*I sincerely wish that the part about GatorAde were not just close enough to reality to make me genuinely frightened for what my grandchildren might live to see.