Miles's blog

Maureen Dowd wrote an opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times which really hit home with me.  She wrote it in the context of the high-profile sexual assaults which have filled the media recently, but I think her point has greater import in a broader context.

Although written somewhat obtusely, Dowd wanted to spotlight our society’s moral breakdown in terms of character.  She quoted a professor who I thought really distilled the issue.

“Inundated by instantaneous information and gossip, do we simply know more about the seamy side? Do greater opportunities and higher stakes cause more instances of unethical behavior? Have our materialism, narcissism and cynicism about the institutions knitting society — schools, sports, religion, politics, banking — dulled our sense of right and wrong?

“Most Americans continue to think of their lives in moral terms; they want to live good lives,” said James Davison Hunter, a professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Death of Character.” “But they are more uncertain about what the nature of the good is. We know more, and as a consequence, we no longer trust the authority of traditional institutions who used to be carriers of moral ideals.

“We used to experience morality as imperatives. The consequences of not doing the right thing were not only social, but deeply emotional and psychological. We couldn’t bear to live with ourselves. Now we experience morality more as a choice that we can always change as circumstances call for it. We tend to personalize our ideals. And what you end up with is a nation of ethical free agents.

“We’ve moved from a culture of character to a culture of personality. The etymology of the word character is that it’s deeply etched, not changeable in all sorts of circumstances. We don’t want to think of ourselves as transgressive or bad, but we tend to personalize our understanding of the good.””

This relative morality troubles me.  So often people see justification for illegal behavior.  People today are willing to be dismissive, even contemptuous, of enforcement of the law if the lawbreaker offers some sort of sympathetic justification.  I am not talking about acts of necessity like self-defense, I mean actions which in a prior era would be held to be clearly wrong, but which modern society sees a somehow justified.  Violent protestors deem their actions acceptable responses to what they perceive to be the greater ills of a dysfunctional society. Assaults are defended on the ground that the victim had it coming.

The problem, of course, with a society of “ethical free agents” is that there are no rules.  Without an acceptance of the importance of following the law and general ethics, everyone is free to act as they see fit.  So many dog owners, for example, feel leash laws are wrong and unnecessary.  They believe their dog has the right to roam free, while they insist their beast would never hurt anyone.  Internally, they have justified their knowingly illegal actions. 

The scale, of course, does not stop there.  While you might like to let your dog run free, I might like not to have your dog running willy-nilly in the park.  But while you would never allow your dog to run completely without supervision, the next guy believes his dog should have the right to just run out the door and explore the neighborhood, and the guy behind him thinks his pit bull should be able to race around perhaps biting people. 

It would be comforting to believe there are limits to this kind of moral smorgasboard, but 30 years of prosecution experience has taught me there are none.  Each person certainly has places he or she will not go, but for some there is no boundary they will not cross.  And while we can hope that should those individuals be called to task for their transgression that the majority would condemn them, I am losing confidence in that.

As I have said before, there appears to be no shame in America, and I think in part that is because there is no consistent moral compass.  Michael Milken is feted by Major League Baseball for creating a prostate cancer fundraiser, while his 10-year prison sentence is ignored.  Martha Stewart went from prison right back to cable television.  Their crimes were of a type that reflected violations of government regulations, a prosecution that most people shrug their shoulders as. 

Professor Hunter is right, institutions have broken down.  Decades of media sensationalism and societal displeasure have led a majority of Americans to believe corporations, religious organizations, even civic groups are not to be trusted.  Vast numbers of Americans not only distrust their government, they actively decry it.  Millions of people want to occupy Wall Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, or even Main Street to show they are mad as hell and they won’t take it anymore.  They want to have their civil disobedience and eat it too.  Gandhi, Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi were willing to go to prison to support their acts of defiance, but today’s protestors seek to either raise defenses of justification or out and out jury nullification.  Blocking the Brooklyn Bridge is acceptable if banks foreclose too many delinquent mortgage holders, they claim. 

In an era of relative morality this strikes a chord with many people.  Unfortunately, this gives the rest of us little ability to enforce our counter beliefs.  I am not going to march to support the rights of banks to collect on mortgages from people who bought too big a house for too much money and filled it with too many gadgets.  Our modern media sees rebellion and resistance to institutions as laudable and acceptance of government power as weakness.

For law enforcement this kind of morality is problematic.  They are sworn (I almost put this in the first person.  Geez, old habits die hard.) to uphold the law as written, and while flexibility in its enforcement has always been part of the evaluation, application of how flexible was always the toughest part.  I fear if Dowd is correct, that is only going to get tougher.