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| Buckley |
Bill Buckley used to say, “The problem with bad manners is that they sometimes lead to murder.”
If Buckley was speaking, as he often did, from a sort of
transcendent skepticism, attractive in people with good manners, he
never-the-less said the truth. Many murderers, most people reading these lines
will have noticed, lack a certain social grace.
They are unacquainted with Kant or other enlightened pre-20th
century moral philosophers. The postmoderns, addicted to group-think, usually end
up finding Nietzsche less wearing on their frayed nerves.
Kant, modern philosophers tell us,
is a deontologist. For Kant, “morality is not defined by the consequences of
our actions, our emotions, or an external factor. Morality is defined by duties
and one’s action is moral if it is an act motivated by duty.” The moral law
proceeds from “the good will” directed to a good end.
Kant summed up his moral law this way: “I am never to act
otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a
universal law.”
Duty, by the way, lies at the opposite pole of
self-indulgence.
The postmodern age is no friend of duty or, for that matter,
of ethics, which is centered in the concept of duty. One has a religious duty
to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” People arrange a prison-breakout
of such duties by eschewing religion altogether or by becoming what Jacques
Maritain calls “practical atheists.”
Politicians, when they are lustily practicing their art, are
mostly concerned with their own power positions or, worse, their unending
campaigns for reelection. And power, rule by force, has little to do with the
moral law, Kant, or ethics. Most murderers have gotten into in the habit of
re-defining the moral law as a code of infinitely adjustable personal behavior.
Joseph Stalin, a postmodern-father-figure-mass-murderer, used
to say, “One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.” He subdued
Ukraine in 1932-33 by inaugurating a famine he and his henchmen caused that
resulted in the death by starvation of upwards of 5-10 million Ukrainians. If
Vladimir Putin’s offensive war on Ukraine is to teach us anything at all, it
may be that a reanimated post-Stalin Stalinism is by nature un-Kantian
precisely because it elevates naked force above ethics.
My own mother and all the males in my extended family, were
Kantians. The iron law of the household was: If you strayed from your moral
duty – you were given to understand, often and at great length, what that was
-- you would very soon face “a higher power,” once he arrived home from work.
Both work and moral probity were, for the males and females in my extended
family, moral duties like, on a much smaller scale, taking out the garbage, or
cleaning your room, or being kind to older people, while being patient with younger
people.
Kant’s “good will” is related directly to good manners. Or,
if the reader prefers, it flows from good manners in precisely the way the ongoing
creation proceeds from the liberating creative idea of the God of Jesus, Moses
and Abraham: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.”
And the Word was Good.
For the past half century here in the United States, we have
witnessed an anarchic attack on the foundations of Western culture to which we
owe our moral duty. On an ever broadening scale, we owe a moral duty first to
ourselves, then to our fathers and mothers, then to our extended family, then
to our neighbors, then to our towns, then to our state, then -- up the line and
as far away as Oz -- to our nation. All these institutions have come under a
sustained attack by moral anarchists for whom duty is an ethical fiction.
Duties imply obligations and a moral accounting. To put it
in other words, conscience is a duty director. The postmodern era,
which shrinks at any idea of an outward moral obligation, pretty much in the
way the Devil shrivels to dust when aspersed with Holy Water, is no friend to
conscience or a correcting guilt.
We have banished guilt and the pangs of conscience, and that
is why bad manners lead so effortlessly to the murder of virtue, to the murder
of the Good, and to the murders of fatherless, 14-year-old African American
urban gangsters by other 14-year-old urban gangsters.
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