Are we living in a moral Stone Age?

In the late 1960s, a group of hippies living in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco decided that hygiene was a middle class hang-up that they could best do without. So, they decided to live without it. For example, baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon. The essayist and novelist Tom Wolfe was intrigued by these hippies who, he said "sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero."

Before long, the hippies' aversion to modern hygiene had consequences that were as unpleasant as they were unforeseen. Wolfe describes them: "At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot." The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them to seek help from the


local free clinics. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiments of modern hygiene. Wolfe refers to this as the “Great Relearning.”

The Great Relearning is what has to happen whenever earnest reformers extirpate too much. When, “starting from zero,” they jettison basic social practices and institutions, abandon common routines, defy common sense, reason, conventional wisdom--and, sometimes sanity itself.

We saw this with the most politically extreme experiments of our century: Marxism, Maoism, and fascism. Each movement had its share of zealots and social engineers who believed in “starting from zero.” They had faith in a new order and ruthlessly cast aside traditional arrangements. Among the unforeseen consequences were mass suffering and genocide.

Russians and Eastern Europeans are just beginning their own “Great Relearning.” They now realize, to their dismay, that starting from zero is a calamity and that the structural damage wrought by the political zealots has handicapped their societies for decades to come. They are also learning that it is far easier to tear apart a social fabric than it is to piece it together again.

America, too, has had its share of revolutionary developments--not so much political as moral. We are living through a great experiment in “moral deregulation,” an experiment who first principle seems to be: "Conventional morality is oppressive." What is right is what works for us. We question everything. We causally, even gleefully, throw out old-fashioned customs and practices. Oscar Wilde once said, "I can resist everything except temptation." Many in the Sixties generation made succumbing to temptation and license their philosophy of life.

We now jokingly call looters "non-traditional shoppers." Killers are described as “morally challenged”--again jokingly, but the truth behind the jokes is that moral deregulation is the order of the day. We poke fun at our own society for its lack of moral clarity. In our own way, we are as down and out as those poor hippies knocking at the door of the free clinic.
We need our own Great Relearning.

Here, I am going to propose a few ideas on how we might carry out this relearning. I am going to propose something that could be called “moral conservationism.” It is based on this premise:

We are born into a moral environment just as we are born into a natural environment. Just as there are basic environmental necessities, like clean air, safe food, fresh water, there are basic moral necessities. What is a society without civility, honesty, consideration, self-discipline? Without a population educated to be civil, considerate, and respectful of one another, what will we end up with? Not much. For as long as philosophers and theologians have written about ethics, they have stressed the moral basics. We live in a moral environment. We must respect and protect it. We must acquaint our children with it. We must make them aware it is precious and fragile.

I have suggestions for specific reforms. They are far from revolutionary, and indeed some are pretty obvious. They are “common sense,” but unfortunately, we live in an age when common sense is becoming increasingly hard to come by.

We must encourage and honor institutions that accept the responsibility of providing a classical moral education for their students. The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen an erosion of knowledge and a steady increase in moral relativism. This partly due to the diffidence of many teachers who are confused by all the talk about pluralism. Such teachers actually believe that it is wrong to “indoctrinate” our children in our own culture and moral tradition.

Of course, there are pressing moral issues around which there is no consensus; as a modern pluralistic society we are arguing about all sorts of things. This is understandable. Moral dilemmas arise in every generation.

But, long ago, we achieved consensus on many basic moral questions. Cheating, cowardice, and cruelty are wrong. As one pundit put it, "The Ten Commandments are not the Ten Highly Tentative Suggestions."

[For further information on the practical importance of teaching the Ten Commandments in society, see: Does American government need the Ten Commandments anymore? and Does character matter in political leaders?.]

Author: Christina Hoff Sommers, professor of philosophy at Clark University, and W. H. Brady Fellow at American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. This answer was excerpted from her October 1997 speech at the Shavano Institute for National Leadership. Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College.

Provided by: Eden Communications.

Photos provided by: Eden Communications. Copyrighted. All rights reserved.