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Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:05 PM (GMT -6)

My very own ethics thread!!!
Written by Alan Wolfe.

From the dust cover of his book: (2001).
What is the difference between right and wrong? What does it mean to lead a good life? What is virtue and what is vice? What is forbidden and what is allowed? How binding is the marriage vow? What are your obligations to an employer? To your friends? To yourself? Is it always immoral to tell a lie?

Eminent social scientist and public intellectual Alan Wolfe asked Americans around the country such questions in order to determine how we really think about morality today. Focusing on the traditional virtues of loyalty, honesty, self-restraint, and forgiveness, Wolfe discovered that the virtues are alive and well in America, even though they no long resemble the ideals espoused by previous generation. Americans of all stripes-from the most radical to the most traditional-want to lead a good life, but in almost every case they are determined to decide for themselves what a good life means. Hard on the heels of political and economic freedom, Wolfe concludes, and exhilarating and unnerving new era of moral freedom has indeed arrived.

Wolfe, A. (2001). Moral Freedom.

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:07 PM (GMT -6)

page one of chapter three
Moral Freedom: the impossible idea that defines the way we live now. By Alan Wolfe

The search for virtue in a world of choice

III. Eat Dessert First

A life-and-death struggle

“Lou Anne Mobley is a homemaker who lives with her husband in a small ranch-style house near Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and khaki shorts for our interview, she nonetheless gives the impression of a person who carefully chooses what she wares. In fact everything about Mrs. Mobley suggest a passion for order. Her political views are quite conservative. She organizes her life around her husband, her children, and her church. In our interview, Mrs. Mobley insists on the importance of self-control and self-discipline. Giving into pleasure is not the way to lead a good life, she insists; as she puts her own moral maxim, “you give into pleasure, you become miserable.” (p. 63)

“Mrs. Mobley was not always so virtuous. By the time she was a senior in high school, she felt that there was something missing in her life. Whatever it was, she chose to fill the void with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Her college years were a desperate quest for some kind of bearing: flirting with New Age religion, thinking of herself as a Buddhist, then as a Muslim, meditating, hanging our with people who were into witchcraft. After college, Mrs. Mobley joined the military, hoping to find some direction, but that didn’t work either. She describes the military environment around San Antonio as one big party scene, and most of what she remembers from those years is sleeping around with lots of men, usually is a haze induced by alcohol and marijuana. She knew that she was destroying herself, but no one seemed to care” (p.64)

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:08 PM (GMT -6)

“Then she found herself among people who really did care. At first when some new friends began to talk about Jesus, she was skeptical: “Oh, I know. Jesus. Christmas. Easter. All that.” But they persisted, and she began to hear their message. One day, as they continued to pray for her, everything fell into place. “I just got down on my knee,” she tells the story, “and said, ‘God, if you really are there, I want you in my life. I know I’ve sinned and I’m asking you to change me.’” From then on, Mrs. Mobley was set on a new course. “The next morning I woke up and I felt something fresh and new. I felt like my mind had been washed clean and I began to read the Bible and it speaks of how the book of Jesus washes us from our sins.” It has been thirteen years since she was born again, and Mrs. Mobley continues to thank God every day. “Jesus Christ ahs transformed me,” she says. “He is pure love, he’s honest, he’s good, but he is righteous and he judges sin.” Now she offers help to others in the same way her friends once helped her. One of the reasons she wanted to meet with us was to get Jesus’ word out. “I hope this is recorded,” she said at the end of her interview. We assured her that it was.” (Wolfe, 2001,p. 64)

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:09 PM (GMT -6)

“Dayton’s Warren Wilson is a fifty-three-year old bachelor. He spent twenty-four years in the United States Air Force, many of them piloting transport planes, and retired as a colonel. Working as a substitute teacher (when the phone rings), he is trying to develop a career as an inspirational public speaker. In his speeches, Mr. Wilson talks a great deal about virtue and vice. He is often invited to high schools in the area, and when he speaks at them, he emphasized the importance of the area, and when he speaks at them, he emphasized the importance of extreme situations, such as war, in forming personal character. A fan of Steve Speilberg, Mr. Wilson believes that both Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan make it clear, even to young students, that adversity can bring out the best in people. That’s true of his own family, he tells them. His grandfather survived World War I and then even deadlier Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, only to witness three more wars in his lifetime. His parents, born in 1918 and 1920, led a more morally serious life than the generation that followed them because they too had “suffered the tragedies of the first half of this century.” Mr. Wilson is himself part of that latter generation. Compared with those who came before, he worries that his own life has been too easy. He was a mediocre student, not very happy doing his homework. When he was drafted to serve in Vietnam, he fought the process kicking and screaming.” (Wolfe, 2001,p. 64-65).

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:09 PM (GMT -6)

“Lou Anne Mobley was not saved by the military, but Warren Wilson was. He describes his Vietnam experience in ways similar to her religious conversion. “It turn my life around,” he tells us. “There’s nothing like loading a few coffins,” an experience he found himself confronting a number of times, and one that had an instantly sobering effect. Now when he looks at the generations younger than he is, he finds people expecting good things without doing the hard work necessary to make them possible. “The wonderful thing about democracy and capitalism,” he says, “is that it leads to the good life, as Aristotle would want us to have it. But the bad news is that we tend to lose focus on the virtues,” the most important of which he then proceeds to enumerate: “hard work, dedication, sacrifice.” Like Lou Anne Mobley, Warren Wilson is a conservative and a Republican, “in that order.” He believes that while most younger people are soft, not everyone need be. “You have to have the right family structure and a hard-ass mom, or an aunt that makes you hit the books, and you can make something of yourself.” (Wolfe, 2001,p. 65).

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:10 PM (GMT -6)

“The stories of Lou Anne Mobley and Warren Wilson would have sounded quite familiar to Americans who ideas about vice and virtue were formed in earlier periods of America life. Following the historian Peter N. Stearns, we can call those ideas Victorian, so closely were they associated with the self-help manuals, sermons, and popular literature of nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States. There was no agreement on the sources of good and virtuous lives a century ago, for Protestants spoke in different tones than Catholics and what made sense to rural America made little sense to the world of industry and large-scale organizations coming into being. Still, contemporary writers, perhaps with a touch of nostalgia, look back on that time and discover broad agreement over the principles by which people ought to live. Sounding very much like Warren Wilson, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has enumerated them: “Work, thrift, temperance, fidelity, self-reliance, self-discipline, cleanliness, godliness – these were the preeminent Victorian virtues, almost universally accepted as such even when they were violated in practice.” (Wolfe, 2001,P.66).

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:10 PM (GMT -6)

“Americans inherited their Victorianism from Great Britain, barely changing it along the way; as Himmelfarb puts it, “the Victorian ethos of the new country had much in common with that of the old.” Both versions held that human beings are by nature shortsighted and egoistic. Predisposed toward sin, especially the sin of pride, they will, if left to their own devices, choose self-indulgence over obligations to others. It is therefore never easy to be put on the straight and narrow path. The work was so hard – “To repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defense, in gentle submission, sometimes requires a struggle like life and death,” one nineteenth-century Southern matron wrote-that no one could do it by her efforts alone. That is why strong character required the existence of strong institutions. The commands of God, the duties of family life, the teaching of character in schools-these were necessary to point the way toward the right path, so that people would no be led down the wrong ones.” (p.66).

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:11 PM (GMT -6)

(omitted section)

.”…Victorian ideas about self-control have long been subject to ridicule. Yet they nonetheless possessed a coherence that made them attractive to people in search of a way of leading a meaningful life. One continues to see that coherence in the reflections of Lou Anne Mobley and Warren Wilson. No one can doubt the dramatic improvement in their lives that followed their willingness to give up short-term gratification for long-term reward. It is clear from talking with them that this willingness is itself dependent on the comprehensiveness of the Victorian theory of self-control. Those ideas offer a credible link between private conduct and public life. A sense that the larger world is out of control made it essential for both of them to assert control over themselves. Mrs. Mobley knows that there is little she can do to move the United States in the conservative direction she favors, but she also know that it is within her power to assume responsibility for the education of her children, which she tries to do by refusing to own a television set. At some point she will have to release her children to that larger world and all its temptations, but so long as they are young, she can protect their purity and give them a change to be the children they are. She feels that her faith in Jesus has empowered her, which it clearly has. Through their experiences with life, both she and Warren Wilson learned what the Victorians knew: strong institutions, whether rooted in the demands of faith or the commands of order, open possibilities as much as they close them” (Wolfe, 2001,p.67)

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:11 PM (GMT -6)

“Lou Anne Bovley and Warren Wilson think of themselves as exceptions in America. As they look at others around them…they see little of the self-discipline they have learned to practice in their own lives. In this, they would find themselves in full agreement with those social critics who believe that self-discipline is no longer a virtue in which Americans have much faith. Institutions once designed to instill respect for moral authority –schools, churches, marriage manuals-now preach permissiveness and self-indulgence, we are frequently told. Once we worried about the ill effects of alcohol; now we face the temptations of drugs too numerous to count. Consumerism is rampant, never more than during the holidays once considered sacred. A therapeutic mentality dominates all our institutions, even, in one recent account, governmental ones, and such a mentality puts a premium on feeling good over the sterner stuff of traditional morality. Take all the major institutions of American life, and add up the sum total of the moral messages they convey, and the result, these critics are convinced, will be the exact opposite of the maxim expressed by Lou Ann Mobley: seek pleasure, lest you be miserable.” (wolfe, 2001p.67-68)

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

Springs
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636

Posted 7/15/2002 6:12 PM (GMT -6)

(section omitted)
“Self-indulgence and self-restraint are oddly mixed together in the America mind, in ways that play havoc with Max Weber’s theory about the Protestant ethic. Capitalism, in Weber’s view, was dependent upon a type of personality associated with Protestant asceticism; the person who denies himself pleasure accumulates wealth for the purpose of plowing it back into investment. In more recent years, Daniel Bell, who has argued that capitalism requires self-restraint in order to produce its panoply of goods, but, then again, it also requires hedonism to encourage people to buy them. Bell called the resulting tensions the “cultural contradictions” of capitalism. Modern societies are torn between their sense that earlier Protestant notions of self-denial ought to be a relevant as ever and their attraction to more contemporary ideas of self-indulgence” (p.70).

“Americans from all walks of life find themselves living with those contradictions every day. Churches pray for the souls of their parishioners while setting up bingo tables. Schools teach character but inflate grades. Cigarettes are both a sin and a tax-generating industry. Education, presumably a good thing, is financed by gambling, presumable a bad thing. Sex causes disease and sells everything else. The social critic David Brooks has written that America’s upper class is Victorian and anti-Victorian simultaneously, affecting a bohemian lifestyle while practicing the bourgeois virtues of hard work and personal ambition. He is correct, even if what he says is true of most American, not only the successful among them. All the more reason, then, to find out how Americans try to obtain the benefits of self-discipline while achieving the rewards of self-indulgence at the same time.” (p.70-71).

Wolfe, A. (2001). Moral Freedom: the impossible idea that defines the way we live now.

...but I have called you friends... Jn 15:15

churchmouse522
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 163

Posted 7/16/2002 6:36 AM (GMT -6)

Cigarettes are a sin? Scripture reference please...

You are such a hard-worker Springs. Cool stuff. So what's your take?

Mouse

Iconoclast
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Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1227

Posted 7/21/2002 4:28 AM (GMT -6)

churchmouse

So what's your take?

Iconoclast

I am glad you asked me that.

To me this shows at a very high level the current state of the struggle that us humans are having in trying to live with the knowledge of good and evil.

The Victorian ethic is a partial "solution" to this "problem" that of course never overcomes the knowledge of good and evil and, in fact, exacerbates it in many ways.

In "Creation and Fall" Bonhoeffer shows that our primary confusion with good and evil is to believe that "good" = "pleasure" and "evil" = "pain".

This quite naturally leads us to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And our biology largely agrees with this, at first. The Victorian ethic in my opinion is a "first level" solution to this "problem". It is to basically deny that "good" = "pleasure" in the short term. Thus it introduces the idea of delayed gratification. Work first, play later. This is a very practical ethic for survival. We could even call it the "survival" ethic for compared to utter "lawlessness" and individual isolation it is a major step forward. Unfortunately, like all ethical systems it seeks to set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of "good" in the framework of control type norms, mores, and institutions. It justifies these control tactics by saying that people are inherently no good and require this type of strong control. Thus, it is appropriate and good for us who agree with this ethic to force it on those who don't. And we will do this by using unilateral control tactics. Fortunately this kind of strategy could not fully play out in the US due to our constitution.

This is a good thing. It forces us to come up with a deeper understanding of the nature of this "problem" and to find better, more effective "patterns" to deal with it - to help each other to live in a more life-affirming way.

quote:

“Self-indulgence and self-restraint are oddly mixed together in the America mind, in ways that play havoc with Max Weber’s theory about the Protestant ethic."

Yes. As we come to realize that our very notion that good = pleasure and evil = pain is fundamentally flawed at all levels (not just short-term, long-term) then from the Victorian point of view a more life-affirming pattern would appear to be Self-indulgence and self-restraint oddly mixed together.

It reminds me of Jesus observing that the Pharisees accuse John the Baptist of being an ascetic - too much self-restraint - and they accuse Jesus of being a drunkard - too much self-indulgence.

It also reminds me of the concept of Yin and Yang. That pleasure and pain are simply part of a whole and that to try to polarize them (which is what the knowledge of good and evil does) is to deny the whole. Bonhoeffer shows this by asking, what is the pleasure in pain? It is that the pain will end. And what is the pain in pleasure? It is that it too will end.

thanks,
Iconoclast

"The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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