The Moral Covenant, Chapter 10; Renewing the Covenant
Renewing the Covenant
In 1981 the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published a book entitled After Virtue. It was a startling work. As its subtitle stated, it was “a study in moral theory.” But it was quite unlike other studies in moral theory produced in the preceding decades. At Cambridge I had studied philosophy, or as it was then called “Moral Sciences.” What I learned there was that it was not the task of the philosopher to advocate any particular morality. Instead it was the philosopher’s role to analyse the language of morality, and the first thing we discovered was that moral language was misleading. Words like “good,” “right,” “duty” and “obligation” seemed to point to some objective reality. But in fact, it transpired, there were no objective moral truths. Morality was a matter of subjective choice, personal decision or private will. One Oxford philosopher, J. L. Mackie, wrote a book called Ethics and subtitled it “Inventing Right and Wrong.”
Moral philosophy in those days was breathtaking in its iconoclasm. The twin sources of our moral tradition – the Bible and ancient Greece – were summarily dismissed. The Bible rested on the supposedly erroneous notion that, morality could be commanded by God. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics depended on the unsustainable idea that human life had a purpose. Indeed all substantive moralities rested on the “naturalistic fallacy” of confusing “is” with “ought,” descriptions with prescriptions, or facts with values. In a mere twenty pages of his Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer dismissed the whole of ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics and religious belief as neither true nor false but meaningless. We were left wandering amid the ruins of the systems of the past, convinced that never again could we build ethical structures in the public domain. And over this ravaged scene hovered the ghost of Nietzsche who had warned: “How greatly we would like to exchange these [ancient religious] ideas for truths which would be just as healing, pacifying and beneficial…. But there are no such truths.”
The resigned agnosticism of linguistic analysis was suddenly disturbed by the appearance of MacIntyre’s work. Modern moral philosophy, he argued, was not a timeless set of propositions about the nature of moral language. It was instead a symptom of the breakdown of moral language at a particular time and place in the history of Western civilisation. What had happened in the vast economic and intellectual changes of the past two centuries was the collapse of a stable social order in which the individual found meaning in the context of a community and its traditions. Society had fragmented, and with it any coherent idea of morality. Moral judgements could no longer be justified – as they had been, for example, in the Greek city states – by reference to agreed standards which made sense in terms of the shared life of the polis. All that was left was private emotion masquerading as morality. But this was no mere fact about our situation. It was little short of catastrophic for the prospect of constructing any vision of a society built around virtue. “Modern politics,” wrote MacIntyre, “is civil war carried out by other means.”
After Virtue ended on an apocalyptic note unprecedented in the sober literature of British philosophy. Drawing a comparison between our age and the era in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages, MacIntyre wrote:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognising fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
This diagnosis by one of the foremost historians of ethics was alarming enough. But as the 1980s progressed, other voices from different disciplines shared in the general sense of foreboding. In 1985 Robert Bellah, one of the United States’ leading social theorists, co-authored an influential study, Habits of the Heart: Middle America Observed. He concluded that contemporary Americans, confined to the language of individualism, had lost the ability to make moral sense of their lives. He too was of the view that this had dangerous implications for the future of society. Our social ecology, he wrote, “is damaged not only by war, genocide, and political repression. It is also damaged by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone. It has been evident for some time that unless we begin to repair the damage to our social ecology, we will destroy ourselves long before natural ecological disaster has time to be realised.”
Nor were these isolated voices. In one discipline after another, leading academics began to question the fragmentation of culture, the collapse of the family, the ghettoisation of cities and the loss of a sense of continuity with the past. Taken together, these amounted to nothing less than a seismic shift in intellectual life. For what was being systematically called into question was a profound set of assumptions, usually associated with the Enlightenment, which had dominated academic orthodoxy for more than a century.
At the core of those assumptions was a lonely figure called the individual, disconnected from all binding ties of kinship, tradition or authority. There were no limits to what the individual could pass judgement on, nor constraints on what he or she could be. Guided only by abstract reason and personal subjective choice, the individual was free to chart any course he chose through a neutral world of facts that laid no claim upon him. Neither civic society nor the State was the embodiment of any particular collective aspiration. Instead the State was confined to arbitrating neutrally between competing claims. The individual had no larger loyalties beyond personal choice and provisional contracts. About this complex of suppositions, leading thinkers now raised a revolutionary possibility. Might this be a vision not of heaven but of hell?
As I read these and other works in the same vein I began to realise that I was hearing an altogether new configuration of attitudes, as important as those which two centuries ago laid the intellectual foundations of modernity. MacIntyre and those who followed him were not simply figures, to be found at most times, who lament change and look back with nostalgia at a golden age that never was. They were not suggesting that the Enlightenment, with its scepticism, individualism and traditionless rationality, was a mistake that should never have happened. Instead, they were arguing that it had run its course. It had freed energies which had produced the Industrial Revolution and the modern democratic state. But it had also set in motion processes which had eroded the beliefs, communities and institutions within which we found meaning and common purpose. We were richer and freer than our ancestors, but we were beginning to lose the framework in which wealth brought happiness, and freedom a promise of personal enlargement.
What I was beginning to hear was nothing less than a new voice of prophecy. Here was Jeremiah foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem or Ezekiel, the watchman, seeing the sword come against the city. Today’s prophets, I realised with some sadness, are often not religious leaders but a small group of academics, who, breaking free of disciplinary specialisation, have surveyed our age from the broadest of perspectives and brought back a report of imminent danger.
The hope of the Enlightenment was of open-ended progress. Its central metaphor was science. Through freedom, experimentation, reason and enquiry, we could achieve mastery not only over the natural world but also over humanity and our multiple strivings. However, as the twentieth century nears its close, we have discovered that science has brought as many problems as solutions. Used industrially it has eroded our environment. Used militarily it has given us an unprecedented capacity for destruction. Used politically it has created totalitarianisms. Allied to ancient hatreds it produced the Holocaust, the most controlled and systematic attempt at genocide ever undertaken. We have come to realise the presence of limits: to the indefinite expansion of economies, to the power of reason to control human passion and prejudice, and to the ability of governments and markets to solve social problems.
More importantly we have begun to recognise the importance of human relationships and the environment in which they take place. Enlightenment thought paid scant attention to the framework of personal relationships: to families and communities and to the rules, rituals and traditions that sustained them. These things were, after all, unscientific. Our communities and traditions are inescapably local and idiosyncratic. They are where we become people in particular, not humanity in the abstract. As a result they simply failed to register on the Enlightenment map, with its obsessive focus on what was universal and therefore rational. Whatever failed this test was dismissed as myth and prejudice, the subjective imposition of individual will. Thus began the disintegration of those institutions within which human beings have, since the birth of history, found meaning and identity through their relationships with others and membership in a community with its memories and hopes. Humanity in the abstract has proved to be too abstract to be human.
MacIntyre, Bellah and others have been signalling for some time that this process cannot continue without severe damage to society. What should be our response? First should be a principled rejection of despair. Just as the optimism of the Enlightenment proved to be exaggerated, so too will the pessimism of those who speak today of the “new dark ages.” At the heart of biblical faith is a series of images – Noah after the Flood, Job after his trials, Isaiah contemplating the destruction of Jerusalem – which testify to the unbroken human capacity to rebuild life after disaster. Our moral and religious beliefs have been damaged by two centuries of assault, but they are not beyond repair. They are never beyond repair. What made the prophets of the Bible eternal spokesmen of the human condition is that beyond every warning of catastrophe they discerned a distant horizon of hope. Jeremiah, in the midst of prophesying the defeat of Jerusalem, bought a field there as a gesture of his conviction that Jews would one day return; and they did return. In those who undertake to guide us through the wilderness, pessimism is an abdication of responsibility and we must reject it.
No less importantly, we must reject the absurd test the Enlightenment imposed on religious and moral beliefs, namely that only if they were universal could they be true. As anthropologists began to uncover the full diversity of human behaviour, philosophers drew the conclusion that since many of our deepest convictions about humanity were not universal, they must be false. This is a fallacy and deserves to be challenged.
Moralities are like languages. We are born into them and we must learn them if we are to communicate and have relationships with others. Like languages, moralities embody ancient and living social processes. We do not invent them by our individual choices. Instead, by learning them we take our part in a particular tradition which long preceded us and which will continue long after we are no longer here. Like language, morality testifies to the paradox that only by yielding to something which is not individual can we become individuals. There is nothing unique about a baby’s cry. There is something unique about Shakespeare’s sonnets. It takes a long apprenticeship in the rules of grammar and semantics before we express what we alone wish to say. Only by a similar apprenticeship in the rules and virtues of a moral tradition can we shape the life that we alone are called on to live. Like languages, moralities are not universal. But neither are they the product of private and personal choice. We can no more sustain relationships without shared rules of fidelity and trust than we can sustain communication without shared rules of grammar. And without a stable framework of relationships we are left confused, vulnerable and alone.
Ultimately, of course, moralities are more than languages. They make claims upon us. The key word in biblical ethics is brit, or “covenant.” In a covenant, parties come together to pledge themselves to a code of mutual loyalty and protection. Like a contract, a covenant is born in the recognition that no individual can achieve his or her ends in isolation. Because we are different, we each have strengths that others need, and weaknesses that others can remedy. Unlike a contract, however, a covenant is more than a narrow legal agreement bound by mutual interest. It involves a commitment to go beyond the letter of the law, and to sustain the relationship even at times when it seems to go against the interests of one of the parties. As Daniel Elazar puts it, “In its heart of hearts, a covenant is an agreement in which a higher moral force, traditionally God, is either a direct party to or guarantor of a particular relationship.”
The concept of covenant and the analogy with languages help us rescue morality from the false dichotomy between the universal and the individual. Enlightenment thought, caught in this contrast, could find little that was universal in morality and relegated the rest to individual choice. The result has been to rob of their legitimacy the great but particular traditions through which human beings came together to form enduring relationships. Lacking these bonds we have become isolated particles in independent orbit, and the central terms of modern moral discourse – autonomy and rights – have merely emphasised that isolation, seeing the individual rather than the collective enterprise as sacrosanct. The analogy with language reminds us that communication depends on rules that are not individually chosen. The idea of covenant reminds us that there are some rules whose claim upon us is stronger than short-term self-interest and involves a commitment to the institutions into which we were born and from which our identity derives.
The breakdown of morality – for it has been a breakdown, not simply a change – can be seen in retrospect as a natural response to the massive social, economic and political changes that have marked the past two centuries, leaving the human landscape transformed. For a time it seemed as if the most important thing was to liberate our energies from all but the most minimal constraints, and progress would ensue. Economic freedom would deliver economic growth. Intellectual freedom would produce scientific discovery. Moral freedom would permit what John Stuart Mill called “experiments of living,” from which would flow the same kind of advance so evident in industry and science.
But morality has turned out to be different. It is not one human enterprise among others. Instead it is the base which makes other enterprises possible and the vantage point from which they are judged. Without it all our other strivings are blind. Unless we are capable of making moral judgements, we have no way of deciding whether to pursue economic growth at the cost of unemployment, or industrial development at the price of harming our environment. So long as our dominant assumption was one of open-ended progress, these issues did not need to be faced in their full pathos. But we have now run up against limits of progress.
In retrospect the most important change to have happened in recent years has been the displacement of science by ecology as the central metaphor of our condition. We now know that the unfettered choices of individuals can have harmful as well as beneficial consequences, and that the uncontrolled pursuit of economic growth can damage the natural and social environment in which we live and move and have our being. We need morality as well as markets if private gain is not to turn into public loss.
Without shared codes of conduct there can be no stable human institutions. Without a willingness to forego personal advantage for the sake of larger ends, there can be no collaborative endeavour: no academic fellowship, no business partnership, no lasting families, no civic society. Morality is the institution which defines and makes sense of the limits by which our behaviour is bound. The more we become aware of the dangers of limitless freedom, the more we will search for moral rather than mere technical guidance. Moral codes, for so long seen as repressive barriers to individual fulfilment, will come to be recognised for what they always were: the language of relationship and the precondition of trust. When that happens we will begin to renew the covenant which turns competing strangers into the shared enterprise that we call society.
Faith In The Future
