A More Nuanced National Discussion of Morals?

As an anthropologist, I follow in the line of those who attempt to tease out the individual from social context, understand social context through person-centered ethnography, find the moral code that helps to regulate behavior and emotional expression, and in general, learn the interconnections of culture and personality.  Two recent articles in Salon.com fall into that investigation, and I'm presenting excerpts here without much commentary.

This kind of valorization of autonomy, and the radical individualism that follows from it, misses the fact that it is precisely our enmeshments that make us who we are and give our lives meaning. We are all part of many different systems, economic, environmental, familial, etc., and it is our shifting presence in those systems that makes us visible, that allows us to be known. America may have been built on an ideology that values personal freedom over any and all connections, but that is exactly the ideology that leads us to free-market capitalism, neoliberalism, global domination, and winner-takes-all social Darwinism. In the name of “personal” liberty, corporations (which are now considered “persons”) are granted constitutional power that gives them license to perpetuate economic inequality, and has produced the dominant 1 percent. The greater good, whether it’s configured in the frame of the “commons,” the environment, the proletariat, or the biomass, is losing ground. (Many of us, obviously, think it’s time for a different reality.)

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/01/when_a_cage_means_freedom/

It was an uphill battle. For too long in America the subject of morality has been collapsed into sexual morality. For most of Western history, morality had richer content. Morality meant proper conduct regarding wealth, just as one example. In the Old Testament, people were taught to leave some of their harvest behind in the fields as charity. The Greek virtues included the virtue of “temperance,” “liberality” and “magnificence” – all counseling moderation in the relationship to money and physical pleasure. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant asked his followers to imagine they were living in a world in which everyone behaved as they did. The English utilitarians, horrified by the inequalities of the first Industrial Revolution, suggested that the millionaire’s millionth dollar did not mean as much to him as the same dollar meant to a poor man.

But as inequality rose, moral debates about economic justice fell until only sex was left as a subject for moral conversation. Worse, in response to the sexual revolution of the ’60s, moral sex was defined by a snapshot of the 19th century Protestant, monogamous, heterosexual, reproductive family. Same-sex sex was the definition of the immoral. Except for those uppity women wanting to abort their “babies,” it dominated the field. With the arrival of religious activists into U.S. politics in the ’70s, this religiously defined sexual morality was promoted as a proper subject for politics.

 http://www.salon.com/2011/12/30/the_year_gay_rights_arrived/singleton/

A moral society means more than sexual mores, but for Americans, it's hard to see past that.  I've been feeling energized by the Occupy movement.  For the past 3 years, I've discussed income inequality in my classes, feeling as though nothing was being learned by the students, but probably, the quiet response was due to challenging thoughts, not resistance.  Developing a collective view of society and our neighbors seems to me to be the work of the coming decades.