What makes people good?

We can't make people good,' but we can, as a society, create conditions that will help them to be better-or the reverse.

A LOT of people, probably most, would like most people to be good, or at least better. I assume this entirely from persistent hearsay, because although pollsters have asked people if they are happy, no pollster, at least to my knowledge, has asked:

Would you like mankind to be better?

Very much better? Perfect?

What would be your response to more goodness? Dismay? Modest approval? Passionate enthusiasm?

We lack this information mainly because calls for more evil and larger legions of unashamed malefactors are so infrequent. Nobody demands a more robust and invigorating tilt in favor of evil or feels it would be so much nicer if people were nastier. Presumably that is why, when George Bush called for a kinder, gentler country, no enterprising columnist nailed him for misjudging public sentiment. Everyone stays on board the coalition against sin.

That must mean there is the largest possible market for any proposal to make people good. Yet one observes with tremulous astonishment that the market is virtually empty. Clearly we have an insatiable, universal demand for a good, perhaps indeed for the good. And yet no proposal presents itself. I for one find it extremely difficult to imagine a TV advertisement for NATIONAL REVIEW that would intone, "Do you suffer from greed, malice, pride, concupiscence, and all uncharitableness? In yourself? In others? Read NATIONAL REVIEW for a modest proposal."

But why not? What is it about goodness that there are virtually no proposals for its augmentation? The answer lies in two false ideas. One is that virtue is a "natural good" snuffed out by any attempt at assiduous cultivation. For example, if investigation showed people would be better were they sufficiently frightened of what happened when they were bad, a policy based on that finding would only "damage the goods." They wouldn't be as good as when they just came naturally.

Where Are the Relativists?

THE OTHER false idea condemning virtue to founder unassisted is the supposed disagreement about what is good. People say we have entered an era of moral anarchy and warring moral preferences. Yet the evidence of sociology and common sense is quite the contrary. According to the International Values Survey, we are mostly agreed about good and bad. Setting aside the unabated practice of false witness etc., etc., the belief in goodness is well nigh uniform. People are, it seems, adamantly opposed to lying, stealing, cheating, coveting, killing, and dishonoring their parents. The same goes for the moral details. Just imagine responses to the following questions: Grinding the faces of the poor, the widowed, and the fatherless is reprehensible/admirable. Drinking and driving is irresponsible/responsible. Causing a little child to stumble is perverse/life-enhancing. Poking a sharp shard in another person's eye is revolting/entertaining.

Of course, there are dilemmas about how to reconcile acknowledged goods. Peace and justice for example. And selective indignation ensures that we exculpate some groups and excoriate others. But a consistent moral relativist is hard to find. People are unwilling to evaluate each and every way of life from imperialism to societies sanctioning female infanticide as part of the charming and morally indifferent variety of culture. You can't get very far with an argument based on alternative life-stances when it comes to infibulation. Indeed, in liberal company, where tolerance and moral relativism are supposed to be the order of the day, you are continually confronted by a noble rage about the delinquent condition of the world. Here is little else but moral passion for purity: pure jokes, pure speech, pure earth, sky, and sea, pure food and pure bodies, even undiluted equality.

What Good Does It Do?

IN THE other hand liberals do entertain certain notions which divert attention from "what makes people good" and even render suspect proposals for the encouragement of virtue. According to one notion, goodness is primarily inhibited by social structures, and will be naturally exhibited when these are reformed or overturned. Goodness, so to speak, is a dependent variable, and politically doesn't "do much good." Nowadays this half-truth may be on its way out, especially after the Eastern European regimes have so convincingly illustrated the state organization of lies and mistrust, and their people have had to look elsewhere, even to churches, for the independent generation of virtue. Vaclav Havel, after prolonged suffering under a regime of organized and principled lying, has even dared to espouse truthfulness as central to his political program. But the implications of this restoration of virtue for moral education in the West are slow to sink in. Besides, how exactly do you encourage truthfulness if it neither comes naturally nor is generated by the abolition of bourgeois society?

The other notion blocking proposals to help make people good is a secular version of Christianity. It takes off in a thoroughly amiable fashion from an attempt to reverse the balance of denunciation in favor of the victims of history and society. As a result you are not "saved" and justified" by a Victim, as in orthodox Christianity, but by being yourself a victim. Victimage opens up an unlimited credit line absolving you of all responsibility for the past and for the future. Indeed, in some versions this theology holds that the only responsible and guilty people are the rulers of the present American empire or the descendants of the British ex-empire. It follows that you can express a moral opinion only provided you first certify your status as a qualified victim or bow before all approved victims in silent humility.

This is very serious, because it encourages liberal moral education to turn away from the demanding disciplines of virtue to the seductively easy acquisition of nice attitudes, especially attitudes toward victimage. After all, the vast majority of humankind has a claim to victimage and so to non-responsibility and the unlimited credit line. This status is especially useful if we are about to set up as oppressors on our own account. The history (and misleading name) of Liberia is a terrible warning. As for the consequences for whatever it is that "makes people good," these are pretty clear. We can face down the requirements of virtue by citing our status as victims and telling our hard-luck story. Even Saddam Hussein tried it.

But supposing we repudiate the moral license granted by this credit line, and also know perfectly well that goodness doesn't come naturally or even in any straightforward way by social rearrangements, how do we devise a modest proposal for its modest encouragement? Modest, of course, it has to be, since we must never go beyond the marginal improvement of the "average sensual man." Sanctity and heroism must be left to heaven. To help make people good, or (better) to help them to "make good," is first of all to diminish any gross advantages accruing to greed and malice. That requires, as a necessary though far from sufficient condition, the firm exercise of authority and the deployment of fear-that is, sanctions. No civil or civilized society significantly larger than Tristan da Cunha can exist without the exercise of authority, meaning a graduated distribution of executive power.

In one sense this is too obvious to mention, but it is necessary to do so because the obvious is strictly unmentionable according to the contemporary Index of Prohibited Concepts and Words. Even if everyone in civilized society knows that civilized society depends on authority and sanctions, civilized society does not allow this to be said. This is a serious restriction (and a patent misuse of authority and sanctions) because it encourages social science to avoid serious analyses of taboo areas, and because what is not allowed to be said often hamstrings what has to be done, or ensures that what is done comes too little and too late.

The underlying problem is the high-minded feeling that these necessary conditions for people to "make good" are not good enough. Put it another way: since authority has in the past been an engine to promote every kind of oppression, it is somehow impolite to notice that it is also an unavoidable requirement for the promotion of goodness. The goods of liberty and equality, for instance, are specifically dependent on the exercise of authority, and indeed the proponents of equality demand deployments of authority and fear far beyond what is proposed here. The logical extension of their aims is Hoxha's Albania, where even clothing was equalized and made "uniform" by fiat. What T propose is only a limited but secure exercise of authority in home, school, and society, to ensure an open social space for the disposition to good and a more restricted space for the disposition to ill.

This is the minimum costing of whatever it is that makes people good. If you think that you can get it more cheaply, and so preserve your access to nice words, nice concepts, and appealing stances, reality will exact an even higher price.

A Home for Virtue

THE CASE for authority and sanctions is a case for the enforcement of rules. Goodness is more achievable where good habits rest on good order and clear expectations. Chaos is an enemy of the practice of virtue, and confusion a breeding ground of cumulative evil. That does not imply that we should, as Hilaire Belloc satirically put it,

Hold tight to nurse

For fear of something worse. But the "peaceable commerce" of human beings one with another does depend on degree," that is on graduated authority. Otherwise we are all prey to appetite," the "universal wolf." Only God can allow Satan to "go up and down upon the earth" wreaking what havoc he or she will. Only God can advance innocently toward evil to pay the cost of good directly in His own person. To imitate the innocent divine victim cannot be a matter of social policy, though it remains open to individual heroism at a particular exemplary moment. Indeed that exemplary moment is the most moving of all human demonstrations of the good, but it is not in the cognizance or remit of Caesar or society.

Anyone will recognize the menace of "appetite" and disorder who has had a child cruelly exposed in a playground where authority refuses to pre-empt the issue of bad behavior. Once accord to ill will a freedom properly accorded to good will, and good will begins to pass out of currency. It is not that people can or should be forced to be good, but that authority has to provide an opportunity for the good. Otherwise the decent are damaged and reduced to doubtful defensive strategies, while the indecent are confirmed in their indecency.

Virtue, then, is a reinforced practice, within the self and society. A good school is inevitably also a "school of goodness," recognized by the steady contented murmur of children doing what has become habitual and accepted without demur. Goodness flourishes where spaces and times are marked out for the regular practice of habitual, fraternal, and inoffensive activity. Only when this has been achieved can authority retire into the background to allow what is securely established to run on its own momentum. This is so obvious that it could only be ignored where people are afraid of fear, and authority unnerved by the label "authoritarian." Of course authority can also be inimical to the good, and this is above all the case where government is arbitrary. Arbitrary government often neglects moral language and allows good and bad to be displaced by deviance and conformity or adjustment and maladjustment. "Maladjustment" looks non-judgmental, even coolly scientific, but it is a tool of naked and improper power. Once judgments are medical rather than moral it happens either that "pathological" is employed as a covert and sneaky form of moral disapproval, or that the human being is treated as an object. The most deadly aspect of psychological techniques for securing control is their evacuation of moral lang-uage, because once moral language goes out of common currency there is no ground for complaint. Dismiss justice as meaningless and there is no court of appeal.

I once attended a group called together by the British Secretary of State for Home Affairs to consider "what makes people good," though it wasn't phrased quite like that. A psychologist put up a proposal more designed (I thought) to make people perform than to enable them to be better. It made them good in a way that really did destroy the value and meaning of goodness. The psychologist remarked that the nervous system varied from person to person in its responsiveness to conditioning. Some people responded to a little, while others required a lot, before they would exhibit the required "behaviors." (A degradation of language usually accompanies the degradation of people.) The trick therefore was to test the variable response to conditioning at an early age and make sure those with poor responses received an adequate dose. I think the Home Secretary politely regretted certain problems of implementation and the cost of employing an adequate army of trained conditioners. He also implied the whole idea was morally objectionable.

Fostering Guilt

AT THE HEART of moral language is guilt, and guilt is to be firmly encouraged in any humane Amoral psychology. Guilt does not mean a kind of brooding disablement but simply a recognition that our actions have consequences, and could have been otherwise and better. People cannot "make good" unless they have been encouraged to recognize they are guilty. Guilt is moral truthfulness about the self, undeterred by excuses, especially the kind of excuse made available by popular psychology. To espouse guilt is to reject reliance on mechanistic talk of need and instinct in favor of recollection, evaluation, and scrutiny. It is also to reject the projection of blame elsewhere, on society or parents or circumstance. Of course, there are circumstances and there are needs to be taken into account, but "making good" depends on the recognition of fault and the possession of moral being. It follows that the cure for guilt is not an explanation enabling the self to excuse actions in terms of a blind machine jerking and manipulating, but by confession and absolution (or telling and being released). Of course you have to be very careful whom you tell because confession invites blackmail. As for absolution it may come from the self, by inner compassionate pardon, but it comes best from authoritative pronouncement "speaking for" the impaired and fractured good. This means that people need first to be told they are free and then they have to be set free. Or rather we need to be addressed as free beings existing in a necessary and utterly familiar entanglement, from which we can in principle be released. This address restores the person and the moral universe simultaneously.

The best way to convey a world adequately stocked with good and evil is a story. People cast and recast themselves as they follow narratives and fables. I have now to admit that you can have too much of a good thing. As a child I browsed without proper restraint in my mother's Edwardian Sunday School prizes and came out sprayed with morality from head to foot. Even today when I read Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot or Jane Austen I recall that relentless spray and start like a guilty thing. Moral tone can be just too high, precise, sensitive, and persistent to allow "l'homme moyen sensuel" to get out from under. The same is true of The Pilgrim's Progress. Life can be too obviously framed between the rival powers of Vanity Fair and the Delectable Mountains, and the journey altogether too purposefully located "between this world and the next." But too exclusive a diet of Pilgrim's Progress is not today a frequent problem.

Threat and Promise FOR THOSE of tender years the best stories about and the good are secretive and insinuating. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis create landscapes of threat and promise full of winding journeys and circuitous paths. The mountains and islands, human and animal figures, are alive with luminous attraction or repulsive menace and also include unstable human-like compounds that have "good in them." Once these imaginative worlds are implanted it doesn't matter so much what philosophy children eventually come to espouse, because the point of reference stays secure in the original garden of the soul. The wounding of Aslan is never forgotten. This is where the moral sympathies retain their primitive power and influence. Of course these are first approximations, initial intimations of a kind of firm world found also in Dickens. But it is from this necessary and beneficent ground that ambiguity can take off and amusement and irony become possible.

The big problem for "making good" in the contemporary world lies with finding moral examples for emulation. There may well be a hunger for heroes, but all candidates for moral emulation seem disqualified in one way or another. This is odd since in all the really serious activities, like baseball, rock music, or war, people achieve excellence by identifying with the finest practitioners. In the past emulation was clearly part of the pursuit of the good. Virtue was furthered by the imitation of the morally attractive.

So what has happened now? Perhaps the idea of the good woman and the good man has splintered into myriad fragments, leaving a row of empty plinths where once the examples stood. Certainly the historical figures filling my mother's Sunday School prizes are now either unknown, like David Livingstone and Mary Slessor, or debunked. Of course many of them were heroes of empire or missionary enterprise, though not less heroic for that. The change has occurred in my own lifetime since I have never asked my own children to emulate the examples set up for me by books and teachers and parents. There is now a pervasive fear of falsely idealizing past heroes or creating a fixed national (and nationalistic) pantheon.

We are so afraid of dismissive and knowing gestures and ironic insinuation that we do not admit anyone is admirable or steadfast and generous. The very words make us recoil defensively, and we even feel relief when another noble being is "deconstructed" and diminished. The finest words in the language, like prudence and probity, are reserved for liturgies or obituaries.

This backing away from the exemplary may prove a costly cowardice, because worth and integrity are embodied in people more than they are conveyed in ideas; and any good society needs publicly to recognize goodness. Everyday citizens don't find their way forward by stumbling around in a state of pure directionlessness. It should be possible openly to acknowledge integrity and speak of people doing at least some good things, whatever dubieties investigative journalism may later uncover. Of course, in a way people like Martin Luther King and Andrei Sakharov are there, in place, but mainly because the media maintain a spotlight on the heroic victim under trial or threat. Sheer goodness on its own has a poor press, and it is revealingly difficult to think of names. Irina Ratushinskaya, imprisoned by the KGB for writing poems, is one of the most luminously admirable people I have ever encountered. But, unhappily, she too is a victim. It so happens that Prince Charles is a good man, marked by nothing more and nothing less than persistent decent concern and desire to discover his duty. But I'm not sure I can propose him. Admiration for good examples of the species should not really be that difficult. It is an important element in "what makes people good."

Schools of Goodness

THE AUTHOR of such a piece as this had better write a concluding unethical postscript. He is the "average sensual man" referred to earlier in the script and has no claims either to goodness or to victimage. But speaking now for that "average sensual man" it seems necessary to admix the rigors of ethics with the relaxations of entertainment and play.

One way to do this is by reading novels and stories about venial sin and moral micro-climates. E. F. Benson's novels about the rivalry of Miss Mapp and Lucia are accounts of fads, foibles, and falibilities which provide the right mix of entertainment and warning. Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is another marvelous entertainment which also introduces a moral microclimate. The reader is adopted by the unformed childlike view of Mole as he is introduced to the ways of the world by the wise and knowledgeable Ratty. On the one side Mole encounters the immediate terror of the spiteful weasels and on the other the awesome authority of Badger. At the center of the action is the whirligig charisma of Toad the Trickster. This mixture of threat and awe, wise induction and irrational but somehow fascinating disorder, just about summarizes the human condition.

Apart from such entertainments some other thing is needed. For me it is music. For other people it may be dancing or arranging flowers or enticing shapes out of the grain of wood or simply ordering and reordering a room until it is pleasurable to the eye. Encouraging growth, observing orders, responding to or making graceful motion, delighting in power or delicate lines, juxtaposing masses and colors, are all kinds of well being. If people are to "make good" they also need well being. In any "school of goodness" there needs to be plenty of room for making and listening, watching and playing.