The Amoral Society

How can one be moral in an amoral society?

The question plagues me. I don’t have the answer. Not yet.

But I’ve realized there’s another question implicit within it. Namely: to what degree can principles be compromised without betraying them? Is expediency – sacrificing values to the needs of the moment – ever justified? If one is to take action – to rebel through moral behaviour – at what point should the action begin, and to what degree should it be taken?

My context must be defined.

At other times, and in other places, the solution came more easily. When society isn’t just amoral, but starkly immoral, the stakes are raised to a point where drastic action is permissible. When times are desperate the moral individual must lie, cheat, steal – anything to keep the underground alive.

The immoral society is a simpler problem because it is founded upon exploitation. The exploited have their prosperity, freedom – even their lives – stolen for the benefit of the exploiters. It is theft; perpetrated by one group against another. In the immoral society the social contract has been sundered; when Prince John and his men seize the people’s riches unjustly, it is no crime for Robin Hood to use force and reclaim the treasure. By its very nature, the immoral society condones theft; ‘crime’ becomes nothing more than a marker of social status. A matter of where one stands.

Now to be sure, exploitation still exists today. The ongoing relevance of feminism and the fight for minority rights speak of this – but it is to a far lesser degree. Times are no longer drastic, and the measures must respond accordingly. While the challenges remain daunting, on the moral level, at least, the solutions are simple. By hook or crook, bring the exploiters down. If structural violence is a fact, then quotas are the proportional response.

But that’s not the question I’m asking. It’s something more subtle that bothers me. The world today is rational, pragmatic, and sensible – for every moral outrage, every bit of compulsion, for the continual sanding away of the individual – there is always a pat justification explaining the sense in it. Those who don’t agree are barbarians – certainly not fit to survive in a technologically advanced, interdependent society.

Take seat belt laws.

Seat belts save lives. This fact is so widely known that it doesn’t call for citation. It baffles the mind that anybody would choose to forgo their wearing – and yet, it seems to occurs frequently enough that enforcement is needed. It seems there are individuals out there who have no idea how to read statistics.

The government mandate put in place provides two distinct benefits – not only does it save the lives of people who, otherwise, wouldn’t have worn them, but it also, through the fines imposed, provides a source of public funds that doesn’t tax the rest of the good, intelligent, hard-working citizenry.

It makes so much sense – and yet it utterly baffles me. On the surface it makes perfect sense – it punishes fools, benefits model citizens, and leaves the world a safer, healthier, wealthier place… yet it raises the question – upon what principles is this law based?

What business is it, of anyone else, whether or not these idiots want to risk their own lives? The regulation won’t affect their driving skill (an idiot compelled is still an idiot), the safety of other passengers isn’t affected, nor is the safety of other drivers. As opposed to drunk driving, (which imperils both oneself and others) failing to wear a seatbelt endangers no one but the individual in question. It’s your life – you own it – who am I to force you to guard it wisely?

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett: taking away the bottle from a drunk lying in the gutter isn’t saving him – all you’re doing is taking away his freedom. Compelling citizens against recklessness behaviour might save their lives, but it turns them into nothing more than pampered slaves. While these laws might make perfect sense on paper, they undermine the very principles of freedom, autonomy, and responsibility.

* * *

The context of my question, then, is that of a Byzantine confusion divorced from objective values. If the context were different rebellion would be possible. In a society founded on evil principles the sane man can lie, cheat, and steal if that’s what’s needed. The ‘situational ethics’ of the eighties wholly apply in such a world, where lesser principles can be compromised for practicality’s sake. But we don’t live in a time of such stark contrast. We live in a world where, by gradual half-measures, freedom and autonomy are slowly eroding. Money is disconnected from means of production and consumerism is mistaken for capitalism. Humanity is being made into a race of sheep, by policies and regulations, all of which ‘make sense at the time.’ Our own good is being legislated for us, without that ephemeral quality ever being defined.

At some point the postmodernists won. We no longer live in a world of values, and absolutes. It is amoral in the strictest sense.

During the summer of 2002, Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter, heard the following from a senior Bush aid: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Opinions, non-absolutes, and expediency have taken over. Instead of a government based upon specific and transparent principles – from which are derived specific and transparent laws – we have a government based upon convenience. Practical solutions, derived within the milieu, with a scoffing denial of absolutes. We’re just too interdependent to believe in such things now. The post-modernists have won, and the sane are left to drift in a sea of meaninglessness. No action is possible; divorced from meaning it only makes the problem worse.

Not just worse, but absurd.

* * *

This is the sane man’s dilemma. Inaction provides tacit support of the system, while resistance results in absurdities, and escalating levels of government force. There seems to be no productive end.

Imagine resisting the seat belt laws – what would you do? Refuse to pay the ticket? Refuse to hand over your license? Saw through the boot on your car? Hide in your bunker and resist the State when it arrives with lethal force?

The sheer pointlessness such a death is outweighed only by the lack of dignity required to reach such a point.

To try and find a third option lying somewhere between these two is chimerical – half measures and expediency are exactly what the sane man is trying to combat! – they can’t be the solution.

Trying to fight it through the courts would be premised on the assumption that the government made an accounting error with their ethics; that a bringing things to light in a rational manner, based on explicit principles, would be able to put things back on course. But we don’t live in such a time – practicality is all that matters; principles, we’re told, were for a simpler age.

Tacit support – half measures to defeat half measures – or absurdities: none of these are acceptable. All the sane man can do is stare out at a world grounded on nothing – formless, and mutable – and vaguely wonder if he is the one who is crazy.

To act in absence of evidence is to court destruction. And in a postmodern world evidence is the last thing you’ll find.

So here I stand here, smoking in the cold, confused at what I see. I sip from my whiskey and I wait.