The modern moral sense.

The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, by Thomas Fleming, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 270 pp.

EVER SINCE DESCARTES bequeathed to the Western tradition the delusion that if only we follow the correct method or set of principles we will be able to abolish error and evil, numerous ideologies have proclaimed new, imaginary realities that replace actual existence with unreal intellectual abstractions. Thomas Fleming, who besides being the editor of Chronicles is also a classics scholar, is particularly well-equipped to make the case for countering the reigning liberal ideology's "deadly abstractions" in ethics by returning to the Western tradition's roots in ancient Greek, Roman, Christian, and Jewish moral reflection. His well-argued thesis, that "rational, universal, objective ethics, culminating in the doctrine of international rights, represents a more profound threat to the human future even than the environmental havoc ... that is also the residue of Western liberalism," aims to reawaken awareness of the value of the ancient tradition that understood moral questions on the basis of "something real" rather than the unreal, humanly withering "vision of objective reason in pursuit of universal peace."

In contrast to the destructive modern claim that our first duty is to mankind, Fleming's argument is essentially that the classical tradition was right in its claim that there is a hierarchy of loyalties that must begin with every person's relationships with those who are closest to him and only on that ground can expand in a series of widening circles to include, ultimately, persons who are more remote. As St. Augustine said, "Since one cannot help everyone, one has to be concerned with those who by reason of place, time, or circumstances, are by some chance more tightly bound to you." Accordingly, Fleming finds the classical example of Agamemnon "a genuinely tragic figure" because his choice of subordinating his family obligations to a higher, that is, less concrete duty betrayed profound ethical flaws. A man who can kill his own child for any reason at all "is well on the way to becoming the monster who will destroy an entire people and profane their temples." (But one cannot help wondering what Fleming would make of the case of Abraham who promptly set out to obey God's enigmatic command to sacrifice his only son. Was God asking Abraham to prove that he was really a monster?)

This critique of the impersonal abstractions of modern ethics and ideologies is certainly not new, as Fleming recognizes. Gerhart Niemeyer, for example, succinctly explained the futility of seeking the moral good through imaginary abstractions in Between Nothingness and Paradise (1971):

  This individual existence is, in a sense, an ineffability. To wish for
  the good is not serious if it relates not to the particular and
  ineffable existence in time and place, but rather to some abstract
  being, a phantasm of no particular existence.... The entire excellence
  of doing and wishing what is good is, then, embedded in the here and
  now, the thusness of substances for whose existence there is no
  accounting. Behind the truth of right decisions in contingent matters
  there is always a concrete existence at the point where given
  historical contingents cross and meet.

Without this concrete here and now we have what Fleming aptly calls "the poison of sentimental universalism," which is the "moral equivalent of the Black Death" because of its destructive consequences for concrete human beings. Opposing the modern preference for rational abstractions, the rejection of tradition and experience, and the illusory expectation that evil can be eliminated--"lofty" principles that he finds almost always harmful when applied to matters that concern close human relationships with family and friends--Fleming critiques the secular religion of humanity that has supplanted Christianity's role in the culture as indifferent to and even possessing "contempt for everyday life," and it seems to follow that this is a symptom of an ideological contempt for actual human beings as selfish, ignoble, and unenlightened.

Hence the modern liberal predilection, which Fleming analyzes at length, for trying to improve human beings by telling us that we are moral failures unless we are possessed of a compassion, a philanthropy, and a sense of obligation and "citizenship" that are lofty, abstract, humanitarian, and global. On the whole Fleming makes an excellent case that modern culture has distorted human nature by rejecting tradition and subsidiarity, by attempting to put global awareness far ahead of any local loyalties and identities, by rejecting the concrete loyalty-based patriotism in favor of abstract ideological nationalism, by multiplying endlessly the number of rights possessed by non-existent discrete "individuals," thereby denying the inescapable communal nature of human life, and by manipulating people's emotions and consciences to induce them to feel more compassion and responsibility for the poor in distant countries than for their own neighbors.

A truly moral society, on this line of reasoning, must be socialist, for only a socialist state can give each individual the necessary unselfishness and universal consciousness, although this is a consciousness that runs contrary to human nature. (As Augustine observed, a child would prefer the destruction of the world to the death of his pet sparrow.) The complement of this view is the modern emphasis on the atomist "individual" possessed of a phalanx of rights. While Fleming does not reject individualism outright he does rightly see it, when carried to modern extremes, as the source of alienation and the undermining of the kind of community that is essential for each person's psychological and spiritual maturity. He believes that rights are not abstractions but are concrete out growths of a specific cultural history and that we possess rights or exercise

duties not as individuals "but as parents and neighbors and citizens." It is not the Kantian Categorical Imperative that awakens us to the world but love, and our humanity grows not out of a philosophical theory but out of our committed relationships with the other particular human beings with whom we live.

Contrary to the modern contempt for casuistry and probabilism Fleming sees them as necessary tools for teasing apart the often considerable moral complexities and conflicting loyalties and responsibilities that actually occur in the lives of human beings. He cites the eighteenth-century moral theologian St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, who, having concluded that the austere Jansenist moral standards were far too rigorous for ordinary human beings, worked out moral cases in his Theologia Moralis "from the basis of probability, always making allowances for human frailty. The result of his method is a mature and humane approach to moral problems that has never been equaled." As Fleming notes, morality is possessed of what Plutarch called "a quality of the irrational" and "ordinary people seem to need a nontechnical casuistry that accords the real problems of everyday life the serious attention they deserve."

While there is much to admire in Fleming's often incisive critical analysis of these and other aspects of the modern moral sense, there are some questions I would raise about his argument. Since he is not a relativist, he must believe that the morally good life does, at least to some extent, involve following universal principles, but his emphasis on minding one's own business and focusing on concrete duties sometimes obscures the larger picture. For example, even though he considers abortion morally wrong he seems to have little sympathy for "right-to-life activists" whom he considers not very different from "liberal do-gooders." In his view "conservative Christians who wear themselves out trying to prevent nonbelieving women from aborting their unborn children" are simply examples of "conservative do-gooding" that he considers modern polypragmosyne ("busy-bodiness").

One hypothetical case he discusses concerns a young mother who is home-schooling her children when an abortion clinic opens in her neighborhood. She is in a quandary, not knowing whether it is better for the cause of life to stay with her children or to attend the protests against the clinic. Fleming clearly implies that since her first responsibility is to her children she should not attend demonstrations but should, apparently, allow nonbelieving women to abort their pregnancies in peace. However, protests against abortion are not aiming at an ideal world in which evil is abolished, but simply a better world in which the absolute prohibition of taking innocent human life is better observed, and he is presenting a false dichotomy, as though political activism or withdrawal into her private affairs were the woman's only options. There are certainly other things that she could do that would not involve neglecting her children, such as contributing money to or volunteering a couple of hours a week at a crisis pregnancy center. Furthermore, Fleming speaks as though the legalization of killing the unborn for any reason at all is not to some extent everyone's business. Active resistance to the legalized killing of the innocent is not the equivalent of busybody campaigns to interfere with other people's preferences regarding smoking and eating but is part of a struggle to define the moral grounding of the whole society.

Not surprisingly, Fleming prefers the concrete situations of literature to the abstract theories of philosophy for serious ethical reflection, with more novelists and playwrights seriously discussed in this book than philosophers. But his statement that "There is more humanity in Sophocles than in Plato, a profounder morality in Trollope than in Adam Smith" suggests that Plato's theory of the just, utopian polis in his Republic has blinded Fleming to the depths of his analysis of the human soul in its search for divine reality. Also, Fleming states that for Christians "the requirements of justice--however exacting and grave--must take second place to the obligation to perform works of charity." But how can a Christian give money to charity without first paying his or her just debts? How can charity flourish on a ground of injustice?

Another area where I think Fleming oversimplifies is foreign policy and interventions in other countries. Although his criticisms of military actions, such as the bombing of Belgrade, that cause significant civilian casualties are certainly substantive, he seems dismissive of the arguments that the West should intervene at all to prevent civil wars in distant places like Rwanda and Kosovo, for example, rather than putting its own local needs first. One does not have to believe that the United States is the world's policeman to think that when mass slaughter and genocide could be prevented or limited by timely intervention at relatively little cost to ourselves it is not morally wrong to do something to save the lives of our fellow human beings. That this might entail the deaths of civilians in those countries is not automatically an argument against all interventions, for there are many considerations that must be factored into foreign policy decisions. While Fleming does stop short of advocating a complete withdrawal from everything outside one's own local concerns, he clearly thinks the world would be a better place if we all tended to our own knitting.

And perhaps it would be, in a different world and at a different time. Fleming is very critical of conservatives who think in terms of individual rights and prefer that the United States have an active involvement in the world, considering them a species of liberals rather than true conservatives. But conservatives generally focus on the fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property rather than the greatly expanded list espoused by liberals. Are such fundamental rights really "hard to justify in principle" as he suggests? Also, as Aristotle said, morality depends on specific circumstances, and the specific circumstances of the world in the twenty-first century are considerably different from what they used to be. Most of the countries of the world are too closely interconnected by alliances, trade, immigration, finances, multinational corporations, and international organizations for it to be possible for the United States, still the most powerful country in the world, to just mind its own business. The tradition must be brought to bear on the concrete circumstances that we have now, not the circumstances of a century ago.

But, those criticisms aside, Fleming has written a very erudite, provocative, and engaging book that celebrates and preserves a sense, grounded in the Western tradition, of the inescapable difficulty and essential goodness of being human.

MICHAEL D. HENRY is Professor of Philosophy at St. John's University in New York City and editor of the Library of Conservative Thought published by Transaction Publishers.