In 399 BCE, Socrates was put to death on charges of corrupting the morals of the Athenian youth. In reality, he was sentenced to death because he had spent his life analyzing the public morals of his city and establishing ethical standards that were inconvenient to its ruling class. Centuries later, Thomas More was executed similarly refusing to bend to the wishes of Henry III. In human history such has been the fate of secular and religious people of courage who have dared to challenge the public morals of their times.
The tradition of being concerned with the moral implications of human actions used to be part of the inquiry into philosophical and scientific subjects until the advent of modern times when science and professions were confined within their respective intellectual and technical silos. In his Politics Aristotle was not merely interested in the art of politics but also in its end purpose from the standpoint of the good of the polis (state). Similarly, as I have written before, Adam Smith was not only concerned about the workings of the market economy. He was equally concerned with its ethics. It seems to me, that as we have progressed from the industrial revolution to the beginnings of the AI revolution, our concern with their implication on public morals and the meaning of the human condition has gradually diminished.
That does not mean that we don’t have intellectuals and scientists as well as business, spiritual and secular voices that strive to call attention to the ethical dimension of human activity, private and public. I am not sure though they are heard over the din of those who prioritize unfettered economic and technological pursuits. One of these voices that drew our attention to the importance of public morals has walked off the stage with a final opinion piece in the New York Times. I am referring to David Brooks. His readers have not always agreed with everything he has written. We cannot, however, ignore his deep concern about the decline of moral values and the erosion of our attention to what makes societies to thrive. His message was that humanism matters. In essays he wrote in The Atlantic and the Times, Brooks tried to raise our awareness about developments and conditions that eroded our bonds and ethical standards. His list of concerns was long. The settling of a nihilistic attitude that erased distinctions between the worthy and the banal; the erosion of human bonds and the anomie of loneliness; the prevalence of might over virtue; the hyper-individualism and the privatization of morality at the expense of social responsibilities; the erosion of trust to others and to institutions; the risk of prioritizing technology over preservation of our humanness. Finally, he did not fail to call out our segregated lives as an obstacle to building the social and ethical capital that would check the emergence of divergent value systems across Americans from different socio-economic classes.
The solutions to theses problems for Brooks is often a return to the fold of religious and civic communities where common norms are taught and reinforced through teachings, rituals or other practices that keep people within the boundaries of a shared ethos. The problem with this approach is that neither religious nor civic institutions are thriving in our days. American Christianity has been either beset by scandals, or it has devolved into churches with overt political agendas that divide more than they unite the Christian flock. Polarization is so pervasive that even Popes have difficulty to be heard. As for civic associations, as many sociologists have pointed out, their numbers and popularity have declined over the last fifty years. The decline in the influence and strength of institutions that can provide moral leadership is not unrelated, in my opinion, to the choices we have made in how we have organized our society from an economic, social, and technological standpoint. Searching for answers, I am more inclined to place the epicenter of the moral crisis we face at our economic policies and developments of the past forty years.
The radical shift toward economic priorities, in my opinion, came as classical conservativism and liberalism started to lose sight of their fundamental principles and of the common good. Both conservatives and liberals started to prioritize economic success over social coherence. Economic freedom, economic efficiency, and maximization of profits became the buzz words, succinctly epitomized by the catch phrase “Greed is good.” Conservatives failed to see the implications of this new mantra for the financial security of working-class people and the social fabric of communities. That is, they failed to see how a laisser-faire economy would throw people in the whirl winds of an unchecked economic system and how this would undermine the traditional manners and values classical conservatism espoused. On their part, encouraged by the productivity gains brought about by the digital revolution, liberals came to believe that technological advances would result in a shared prosperity, which unfortunately never came. By adopting a more expansive approach to individual autonomy, liberals also failed to see the excesses that could engender a clash of conservative and liberal moral values.
The failure of both conservative and liberal policies to create a shared prosperity gave way to the growth of unprecedented wealth in the hands of the few, thus creating inequality in incomes and wealth not seen even during the Gilded Age over a century ago. It is well established that extreme economic inequality along with a sense that rewards are not fairly earned or distributed hardens the public sentiment, and fuels cynicism and resentment. As more people fall behind in material wellness ethical standards and behavior decline. The biggest test as to how we would handle economic malfeasance and accountability came in the crisis of 2007-2008, and we failed it. While millions of ordinary people lost their homes and savings, top executives of the financial system, who were primarily responsible for this financial collapse, walked away unscathed. Thus, it became apparent that wealth and influence had eventually created two different Americas. One in which privileged people would be subjected to lenient ethical and legal standards and another whose members would bear the full weight of the law. The Epstein case is the culmination of this differential approach to justice.
It was not only the concentration of wealth and lack of accountability that damaged the sense of a shared experience. Members of the wealthy elites became notoriously ostentatious in the display of their financial wherewithal. It was inevitable that the egregious abandonment of moderation by the wealthy would eventually drip down to the rest of the society. Meanwhile the rapid growth of wants – many driven by technological innovations – and the proliferation of products and services that satisfied these wants would raise the level of deprivation among people of modest means. If quality of life is primarily measured by material satisfaction, excess will naturally follow. Whereas in past times, going into debt was looked down, personal borrowing became the road to living beyond one’s class and beyond one’s means. No wonder that the average debt per American household currently stands at $105,056 and total household debt is at an all-time high. However, heavy debt comes with delinquencies and bankruptcies that put further strain on personal morals.
As economic freedom in terms of how much a person can buy and enjoy widened spectacularly for a privileged minority of the populace it shrunk for the majority. I would argue that this contributed its own part to the growth of what Francis Fukuyama and other political and social writers have called the sovereignty of the self. When people cannot enjoy economic and material freedom they try to find it elsewhere in their lives. Expanding or throwing down the boundaries of moral restraint is one way to expand one’s freedom. Disregarding social norms and conventions and the rules set by technocratic experts is how the self can expand its freedom. Thus, attitudes toward marriage and childbearing became more negative, respect for the rules set by experts and authority figures declined, and decorum in how we talk, how we dress and how we behave in public were degraded under the influence of movies, TV shows, and entertainment outlets. Even political speech full of vulgarity and dehumanizing content became acceptable.
As these developments were taking hold in American society, another unfortunate thing was taking place in the educational system. That was the retreat from the prior emphasis and teaching of humanities in favor of professional specializations. Education that makes money became more important than education the builds characters. This shift was also a byproduct of two economic realities. One was that college degrees became a prerequisite for better-paying jobs. The other was the growing cost of a college education. The retreat of humanities in the education of the youth meant the retreat of humanism in the collective consciousness. But the less we understand what is at the core of our species and what defines humanness, the less wisely we can defend both.
Science and technology do not only by themselves teach or give us a guide how to live good lives. For that we need a deeper understanding of humanism. Socrates used to teach that “An unexamined life is not worth living.” If he were present now, he may have added “An unexamined society is not worth having.”
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