A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations. We have replaced this and other religious visions with an unsystematic, uncritical and in fact unconscious perfectionism, which may have taken root among us while Stalinism still seemed full of promise, and to have been refreshed by the palmy days of National Socialism in Germany, by Castro and by Mao — the idea that society can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas. Societies have done exactly the same thing from motives they considered religious, of course. But people of advanced views believe they are beyond that kind of error, because they have not paused to worry about the provenance or history of these advanced views. Gross error survives every attempt at perfection, and flourishes. No Calvinist could be surprised. No reader of history could be surprised.
Disallowing factors of disruption and recalcitrance called by names like “sin,” what conclusion can be drawn? If human beings are wholly the products of societies, and societies are accessible to reform, what other recourse is there than to attempt to reform one and the other? The question seems pressing now that the community increasingly fails its individual members, and as it is more and more feared, abused, or abandoned by them.
I depend here on the general sense that we are suffering a radical moral decline which is destroying the fabric of society, seriously threatening our sense of safety as well as of mutual respect and shared interest. Such anxieties can be dangerous and irrational — perhaps they are in most cases. But the evidence is impressive that we are now looking at real decay, so I will accept the notion for the purposes of this discussion. I take on faith Tocqueville’s lapidary remark that we were great because we were good, when he knew us. Let us say, as history would encourage us to do, that one great difference between then and now is the sense of sin which then flourished, the belief that mortals are born in a state of sin, that no one is or is likely to be perfected. One implication of that belief is certainly that neither social engineering nor intellectual eugenics could produce a good society full of good people. Americans studied the example of biblical Israel, for whom God himself had legislated, and who sinned and strayed very much in the manner of people less favored. The teaching that surrounded the biblical history of Israel suggested that to do justice and love mercy made the community good, but never that the community could be so ordered as to create a population conditioned always to do justice and love mercy. The community never ceased to struggle against contrary impulses, which it did not induce in itself and from which it could not free itself. Christian individualism enforced the awareness that exactly the same impulses are always at work in one’s own soul.
The Stalinist vision is much more optimistic. It can propose a solution. Society is simply other people, useful or not, capable of contributing to the general good, or not. Creatures of society, they are also the reasons for the continuing failure and suffering of society. At the same time, since society is the only possible agent of its own transformation, the victim stands revealed as the enemy, the obstacle to reform, the problem to be eliminated. Freed of those it has maimed, it might at last be perfect. This is a great solipsism, a tautology, based on a model of human being-in-the-world which, curiously, has long seemed scientific to people because it is so extremely narrow and simple and has no basis in history or experience.
This social vision has also an attraction that Puritanism never had, Puritanism with its grand assertion and concession, In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all. It creates clear distinctions among people, and not only justifies the disparagement of others but positively requires it. Its adherents are overwhelmingly those who feel secure in their own reasonableness, worth, and goodness, and are filled with a generous zeal to establish their virtues through the whole of society, and with an inspiring hope that this transformation can be accomplished. It would seem to me unfair and extreme to liken our new zealots to Stalinists, if I did not do so with the understanding that the whole of the culture is very much influenced by these assumptions, and that in this as in other ways the zealots differ from the rest of us only as an epitome differs from a norm.
Optimists of any kind are rare among us now. Rather than entertaining visions, we think in terms of stopgaps and improvisations. A great many of us, in the face of recent experience, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills. It is not easy at this point for us to decide just what morality is or how to apply it to our circumstances. But we have priggishness at hand, up-to-date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and to those who taste its lash.
(Since I am already dependent on one, I will attempt a definition of authentic morality, based on common usage. When we say someone is moral, we mean that she is loyal in her life and behavior to an understanding of what is right and good, and will honor it even at considerable cost to herself. We would never say she was not moral because she did not urge or enforce her own standards on other people. Nor would we say she was more moral for attempting to impose her standards than she would be if she made no such attempt. Similarly, we say someone is immoral because she does not govern her behavior to answer to any standard of right or good. That being true of her, we would never say she was not immoral because she tried to enforce a standard of virtue on the people around her, nor even that she was less immoral for making such an attempt. Nor would we say someone was moral because her society had in one way or another so restricted her behavior that she could not, in its terms, do anything wrong.)
Though etymologically “morality” means something like social custom, as we use it it means the desire to govern oneself, expressed as behavior. People who attempt this fail, and learn in the course of failing that to act well, even to know what it is to act well, is a great struggle and a mystery. Rather than trying to reform others, moral people seem to me especially eager to offer pardon in the hope of receiving pardon, to forego judgment in the hope of escaping judgment.