This is What a Moral Breakdown in a Society Looks Like

At first, it really did seem to me like liberation.

The America of the 1950s had some narrow-minded tendencies, and was so uptight that it oppressed some of the human energies at the heart of our being. So straight and narrow that it felt liberating to broaden the path, so that Ozzie and Harriet didn’t have to sleep in separate twin beds.

The way certain words were forbidden seemed like another weapon of denial, as if we were supposed to pretend that we didn’t have bodies with their natural functions.

I still believe that much of what happened was genuine liberation.

But looking at America today, I find myself wondering whether something else was happening along with that liberation. Whether, as we freed ourselves from restraints that deserved to be challenged, we were also losing something that every decent and viable society needs.

For a society cannot function well without a moral order. And what we’re witnessing in America today looks increasingly like what happens when such an order breaks down.

There is a progression to be charted from Victorian times, when even a woman’s ankles were supposed to be hidden, through a society where swimsuits could clearly reveal the shape of a woman’s body, to a world where the public space contains virtually every conceivable sight of the human body. Much of that change seems to me a genuine liberation. But it raises a question I don’t know how to answer: At what point is it liberation, and is there a point where it becomes breakdown?

There’s no problem with America functioning well with a looser morality around sex, particularly if the new morality can be made consistent with a healthy family structure in which the next generation can grow up receiving the love, security, and guidance that children need.

But if a society’s moral order is breaking down, we should expect to see signs of that breakdown not only in matters of sexuality, but throughout the culture—including in the stories through which a society conveys to its members what kinds of conduct are unacceptable, what kinds are acceptable, and what kinds of people are worthy of admiration.

An interesting recent op-ed in the New York Times, by Stephen Marche, identifies three series that were major television events of their era—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos—as helping to explain the disturbing America that confronts us today. His argument is that these programs did more than entertain us: they anticipated some of the troubling features of the society that has emerged.

One of them is Mad Men, which portrays a world in which advertising turns values and feelings—even the yearning for authenticity—into commodities. Marche sees in this a prophecy of an America in which virtually everything becomes transactional, with the pursuit of advantage increasingly displacing other values.

Another is Breaking Bad, in which a seemingly decent working man, struggling with the injustices of his situation, becomes an unscrupulous capitalist empire-builder. We are drawn into identifying with a man who increasingly throws moral rules out the window in his pursuit of wealth, power, and revenge against a world he feels has treated him unfairly.

Then there’s The Sopranos, which Marche sees as anticipating a culture increasingly governed by self-interest, grievance, and gangsterism. Here the central figure is himself a gangster, yet the audience is invited to identify with him, to sympathize with his grievances and take satisfaction in his victories, even as he behaves in ways that should repel us.

Marche’s point is that these programs anticipated something important about the America that was coming. I would go further. Such stories don’t merely reflect or anticipate a society’s moral condition. They can help create it.

When people identify with characters in a drama, they imaginatively participate in those characters’ experiences. They rehearse ways of being in the world—what to resent, what to desire, what to admire, what kinds of conduct to regard as justified. And when the characters with whom we identify repeatedly violate moral boundaries, those boundaries can lose some of their authority in our own minds.

A society’s stories are among the ways it teaches its members what kinds of people to become. And stories that invite us to identify with the unscrupulous can help make unscrupulousness more acceptable.

Another example, from a Batman movie I saw some years ago, makes the point even more strikingly. In one scene, Batman holds a man by his feet over a six-story drop, threatening to let him fall unless he divulges some information.

What makes this conduct of Batman’s more striking than that of our meth-making protagonist in Breaking Bad or the gangster we identify with in The Sopranos, despite their moral transgressions, is that Batman is a HERO.

In a movie from the 1950s, the hero would NEVER have resorted to that kind of torture. That was the sort of thing the Gestapo did. It was the villain’s way of getting information, not the hero’s. (Batman’s situation was not nearly so extreme as to present a genuine ethical dilemma—like the hypothetical case of torturing someone to prevent a nuclear bomb from destroying Manhattan.)

The hero is supposed to represent the forces of good. Yet here we see him employing methods that an earlier generation would have associated with the forces of evil.

When conduct once reserved for villains becomes acceptable behavior for our heroes, it is a sign that something fundamental in a society’s moral order has eroded.

I was part of that movement toward liberation. I had much more reverence for the “natural man” (or natural person, in today’s better language), and liberation worked pretty well for me. I became less constricted, and gradually became better at being who I am. I was no hippie, but I was part of the tribe.

I never stopped having some basic moral values at the center of my worldview, and I kept working to find where the lines should be drawn. But I observed that some in my “tribe” who had thrown off the social chains of excessively uptight “moral” restrictions were relinquishing one morality without seeing any need to come up with another.

And therein lay a danger that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: A society can benefit from freeing people from unnecessary moral restraints. But it cannot thrive if people lose their sense of the importance of the moral dimension—if there is an erosion of the idea that what’s right is better than what’s wrong, that the Good must prevail over the Evil.

It looks as though, when it comes to the moral order of a society, everything is connected. When people cease to feel responsible for seeing that goodness is rewarded and wrongdoing condemned, the door opens for “brokenness” to become acceptable in a whole variety of domains—from personal life to institutional behavior to the political arena.

And over time, as a society’s moral order gives way to forces of greed, opportunism, and gangsterism, the consequences can extend all the way to the loss of a people’s hallowed democracy.

It turns out that America’s founders were right in their belief that democracy depends on there being an adequate moral order among the people. Political corruption and political lying must be so offensive to the citizenry that someone who is blatantly corrupt and dishonest cannot gain their acceptance as a leader. The electorate must have moral standards that it insists its leaders meet.

One revealing moment came in 2016, when the Access Hollywood recording emerged, showing Donald Trump boasting about his treatment of women. What he said, and the attitude toward women it revealed, would once have been regarded as automatically disqualifying in the conservative and Christian world.

Which is why so many prominent Republican figures initially rushed to condemn him. They evidently believed that, in doing so, they were just positioning themselves in line with the moral values of their conservative supporters.

But they soon discovered that most of those supporters were unwilling to abandon Trump. They insisted that their party continue to support him as its candidate for President. The Republican leaders learned that the moral expectations of their electorate were not what they had supposed.

It would be hard to find clearer evidence that something in the moral culture of Conservative America has changed than when politicians, whose expertise is knowing what their voters will reward or punish, discover that the moral standards that had long governed those people’s politics no longer dictate what they require of their leaders.

And what kind of leader were those voters willing to accept? One with much in common with the amoral figures in those TV shows.

A man who openly treated the presidency as an instrument for his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement. Who seemed untroubled by questions of right and wrong. Who exercised power like a mob boss—seeking to use the machinery of justice against political enemies while pardoning allies guilty of crimes committed on his behalf.

At no previous time in American history would such a man have been accepted as President. Yet in our time, even after the evidence of his misconduct had accumulated over years, tens of millions of Americans were willing to entrust him once again with the powers of the presidency.

If previous generations of Americans would have rejected such a man on moral grounds, while Americans today have elected him President, we are compelled to conclude that the moral commitments of the American people, as a collectivity, have seriously eroded.

To understand what such an erosion means, we need to consider the place that the moral dimension occupies in people’s experience of the world.

We human beings experience the world in many dimensions. We see things as beautiful or ugly, pleasurable or painful, desirable or undesirable. And we also have the capacity to experience things in moral terms—as right or wrong, good or evil, as things that should or should not be done.

But how prominently the moral dimension figures in people’s perceptions and priorities can differ not only between individuals and between societies, but also between one period and another in the life of the same society.

At the individual level, some people are sociopaths who operate essentially without a conscience. For them, considerations of right and wrong scarcely enter into the picture. The world is experienced largely in terms of how to get what one wants, and how to overcome whatever stands in the way.

At the societal level, the moral character of a society reflects how prominently the moral dimension figures in the perceptions, feelings, and priorities of its people, taken collectively.  And as a collectivity, the people can become more moral or more sociopathic over time.

And it matters, because the essential meanings of Good and Evil are all about mattering. Morality, when it is a sensible morality, is not just about abstract ideas, or arbitrary judgments about what people should and shouldn’t do. The Good is what makes the human world better—more whole, more conducive to human beings living fulfilling lives. Evil is what works in the opposite direction, making the world more broken and people’s lives more miserable.

So, it matters, when a society suffers the kind of moral breakdown that makes it possible for an election to put power into the blatantly wrong hands.

So now we see how there’s a price to be paid by a people of a democratic society that has lost too much of their collective commitment to the moral dimension. With moral values and understanding attenuated in a critical mass of an electorate, it becomes possible for power to be handed to someone who doesn’t hide his sociopathy, nor what many in the psychiatric field have called his malignant narcissism. (Malignant signifying the hatred and cruelty that feed human suffering, and narcissism denoting the utter self-centeredness that means that power will serve the people badly.)

As a result of an electoral choice made contrary to what the Moral Dimension clearly dictated, the American people are suffering from higher prices precipitated by the illegal tariffs, imposed in the narcissistic belief that he knows more about economics that the economic profession. The nation is suffering from the dismantling of beneficial international relationships that took generations to nurture. The malignancy of the narcissism has created mutual distrust and hostility to divide the American people, along lines racial and political. And his continual disregard and violations of the law and the Constitution undermine the structures that have been the foundations of liberty and justice in the American Republic.

The wages of sin is death,” it says in the Bible. And as a result of the “sin” of downgrading the distinction between Good and Evil, much of what has been best about America is under the threat of death.