Without shared moral values, how can we call Putin evil?
If the collective pulpit has lost its reach, what will transmit a shared morality from which we can venture judgments about good and evil?
Vladimir Putin is an evil man. But in an American society that is rapidly losing shared moral standards, how do we know that?
A moral judgment of the Russian president seems to cry out from the facts of his war of choice against Ukraine. Massacres of civilians, kidnapping of children and rapes of women, missile attacks on power plants, hospitals, schools and other facilities intended to ramp up the suffering of innocents — these war crimes and others are so fundamental to Russian war fighting that they must be countenanced if not ordered by Mr. Putin himself. Any fair observer must conclude that Mr. Putin is, simply put, a monster.
Similar judgments can be reached against the other dictators who join Mr. Putin in a quartet of tyrants that the United States must consider its greatest foreign threats as we stumble into 2023: Chinese President Xi Jinping, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
But again: In an increasingly secular age, where can we ground the moral consciousness that supports the value judgment “evil?” More and more Americans find appeals to Judeo-Christian teaching unpersuasive.
As recently as 40 years ago, a majority of Americans likely had some grounding in the Baltimore Catechism, the Westminster Confession or one of many cousin creeds that shaped moral judgments of many Catholics and Protestants. Christian doctrine no longer indoctrinates nearly as large a segment of the country. The number of Americans exposed to a weekly sermon is plummeting. Only 31% of Americans go to church, synagogue or mosque every week or almost every week, Gallup reported this month; the same poll reported that 58% seldom or never go to church.
If the collective pulpit has lost its reach, what will transmit a shared morality from which we can venture judgments about good and evil? As social media and streaming platforms continue to divide us into self-chosen niches, even as ubiquitous a series of texts as the Harry Potter canon will reach only a minority of us.
In his most recent book, “Leadership,” the elderly sage Henry Kissinger concludes with a deeply pessimistic assessment of the “age of image” in which we live. “Reading a complex book carefully and engaging with it critically,” Mr. Kissinger writes, “has become as counter-cultural as an act as memorizing an epic poem in the earlier, print-based age.” We have, Mr. Kissinger concludes, given up complex thinking in exchange for learning via omnipresent “images.” But can images alone guide our moral judgments?
Among the complex books we should be reading is one published some 30 years ago — the effort of a great American public intellectual to establish by reason, and informed by science, whether humans possess an innate “moral sense” that does not depend on religious claims.
James Q. Wilson’s “The Moral Sense” demanded a response from high culture. Christopher Lehmann- Haupt, then- senior daily book reviewer for the New York Times, declared the book to be a “provocative meditation.” Indeed, a flood of thinking about American morals, prompted by Mr. Wilson’s work, led journalist Nina Easton to muse tongue-in-cheek about the “retro-cons” — conservatives in search of lost standards — who they were, where they worked and what they read and wrote.
Mr. Wilson’s book is almost entirely forgotten now, and with it the retrocons. That ship of common thinking about right and wrong has sailed — and might have sunk. It is at least lost.
What’s left? Netflix, HBO, Hulu or Prime Video? Can we salvage a shared morality from the melange of messages that form contemporary culture: Twitter and TikTok; “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones” and “Yellowstone”; the Marvel Universe and the “Star Wars” galaxies? Perhaps we will return to the ancient mode of living by epics and sagas: not just “Lord of the Rings” and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” but their pagan relatives like “Wheel of Time,” “Malazan Book of the Fallen” or “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” The common moral
DNA of a culture must come from somewhere.
Even the lawgivers and law enforcers of today’s imagination exist outside the moral compass. Consider Jack Bauer of “24,” Amazon’s Jack Ryan, authors Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon, Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath or C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett. They do what must be done, but the moral standards that determine the “must” are never explicit — much less argued or explained.
The words remain with us, “right and wrong.” But the momentum is running powerfully against them. In another 30 years, what will be left to allow Americans to call the monsters by their right names?