Musings Of An Indie WriterMonday, March 15, 2010
Moral Clarity: A Bonus Rumination
Fran here. I know Monday is supposed to be an off-day for me and the Curmudgeon, but when a conception literally refuses to let me sleep, what am I supposed to do?
I dreamed last night. It's not a frequent occurrence; at least, I don't often remember my dreams. But this one was a corker. It concerned a massive burglary, an attempt to snatch some priceless bauble from a heavily guarded museum -- and I was the mastermind and chief executor of the plot.
Those who know me will understand why that upset me. Those who don't will have to take it on faith for the moment.
The facet of the unconscious that produces dreams has been commented on by many, but no one can claim to understand it exhaustively. Remember the prediction-is-knowledge rule: If a "dreams expert" can predict neither what a test subject is going to dream nor what some specific dream will cause him to do when conscious, he has no knowledge worthy of the name. When a dream such as the one mentioned above afflicts someone morally straitlaced, such an "expert" is utterly confounded. He can talk about "repressed urges" all he likes, but demonstrating their reality is beyond him.
Of course, dreams don't arrive with an attached backstory. Perhaps the bauble I was trying to steal was rightfully mine; there's no way to tell. At any rate, the act of breaking and entering for the purpose of theft is difficult to justify. At least, it's more problematic than applying to the proper court for a writ of replevin. I think I'd have tried that first.
Just now, the C.S.O. and I are revisiting (and greatly enjoying) season 1 of F/X's blockbuster series Sons of Anarchy. If you haven't yet treated yourself to this remarkable dramatic production, you have no idea what you're missing, and no idea how morally profound television can be. The DVDs for season 1 are already available; season 2 should be coming onto the market quite soon.
Sons of Anarchy concerns an inland California small town named Charming, which is effectively ruled by a motorcycle gang: the Sons of Anarchy, Redwood Originals chapter. The principal protagonist, Jackson ("Jax") Teller, is the vice-president of the chapter, despite being one of its youngest members. His late father, John Teller, was co-founder of the club; his stepfather Clay Morrow is its current president.
The club, which goes colloquially by the moniker "Sam Crow" ("Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Originals"), subsists on the profits from gun-running between the IRA and certain other outlaw California groups. That trade puts it into direct conflict with other forces, including another motorcycle gang, the Mayans. An undeclared war has been in progress between the two for some time. There are frequent clashes and occasional deaths.
As in most situations where an outlaw gang has attained the effective rule of a city, Sam Crow has a sub rosa alliance with elements of the regional police, including Charming's chief of police Wayne Unser. Not all the police are in on the deal; Deputy Chief Hale, a very straight arrow, is particularly unhappy about it. Yet there is this: Sam Crow is phenomenally effective at keeping violence and lawlessness out of Charming. Its methods are crude, even brutal, but they're more effective than anything one might see from the "official" police.
The key dramatic thread that animates the series is the halting evolution Jax Teller undergoes toward moral clarity. Like his stepfather Clay, he starts from a single principle: Protect the club and its prerogatives. This is a version of the attitude Tom Kratman calls "amoral familism" in his novel A Desert Called Peace. Unlike Clay, his experiences, including the birth of his son, his concern for a dear friend, and a threat to his lifelong love Tara, cause him to reflect on the insufficiency of that principle.
Yet Jax is reluctant to cross-cut his loyalty to Sam Crow. He repeatedly violates the law -- any law you might care to name -- for the sake of the club and its members. Only slowly, with the passage of much time and several grisly events, does his readiness to submerge his embryonic moral principles in Sam Crow's supremacy undergo any significant modification. When that process's effects on the club become perceptible, Clay goes from being a semi-affectionate stepfather to an enraged and vengeful potentate.
But no one ever said moral clarity would come at no cost.
The moral code of the Christian Enlightenment has undergone a number of alterations in recent decades. It was at first unusually strict about just about everything, to the point of being more prescriptive than proscriptive. We've loosened up on several fronts, the most visible ones being sex and entertainment, with mixed consequences. On the one hand, the Grundies and Bowdlers of yesteryear have lost their power to intimidate us, a good thing in my estimation. On the other, such alterations "on the margin" have been used to attack the rest of the code, including aspects of it that are vital to the conduct of a peaceful and acceptably orderly civilization. Those attacks aren't always beaten back with sufficient finality.
Consider as a test case the old notion that the law should always be applied without regard for personal considerations -- the "justice is blind" rule. We've departed from that standard in more ways than I can count. The enabling mechanisms are prosecutorial and judicial discretion: ideas from which the Founders would have recoiled in horror. In consequence, the typical murderer spends less time behind bars than the typical tax evader. The usual rationale for going lightly on the murderer is his age: today, most homicides are committed by the very young, and "we wouldn't want to sentence a child to life behind bars." Yet no one could argue that such "mercy" shown to the murderous young makes law-abiding Americans any safer.
Consider alternately the "reparations" movement, which has received a baffling degree of respect both from various members of Congress and from a significant portion of the American citizenry. Racialist agitators are attempting to use whites' sensitivity to pre-Civil War slavery as a club with which to bludgeon us into paying societal Danegeld to contemporary Negroes. Mind you, no American Negro has been kept in bondage for 144 years. More, slavery persists in the Islamic states, a practice about which we hear nary a whisper from Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. But what's critical about this campaign is its target: the pocketbooks of contemporary American whites, the overwhelming majority of whom aren't even distantly related to any historical slaveholder. The old rule that restitution can only be sought from the proximate cause of one's suffering is of no interest to the racialists.
There's no way to reach such outrageous positions by rational argument. Indeed, no rational arguments are advanced for them. Yet the ancient principles of right and justice, rooted in human nature itself and most concisely expressed by the Ten Commandments of Mount Sinai, are being set aside in service to bizarrely inverted notions of "compassion" and "guilt."
My juxtapositions might seem strange. What, after all, could a drama about a motorcycle gang have to do with the ongoing assault on America's founding principles? Well, perhaps this is what comes of a too-vividly-remembered dream. I can't imagine condoning, much less designing and executing, a theft such as the one I dreamed of masterminding. Yet I find myself accepting, and often applauding, Sam Crow's ultraviolent fictional exertions in defense of the peace of Charming and, not coincidentally, its position as the supreme arbiter of what will be permitted there. And this very same moral thinker holds tightly to the old rules as our Founders knew and expressed them: that no one is above the law; that justice must be completely impersonal and objective; and that no man, organization, or government can be allowed unlimited, unchecked power or authority.
Is this clarity or the reverse?
My hope is that my reactions to the events in Sons of Anarchy are an appreciation of what comes from discarding principles. American law and justice have failed signally in many ways. Some of those failures stem from legislative overreach; others from a hypertrophied "compassion" and inappropriate "mercy" toward the guilty. But a society needs the predictability that comes from reliable laws and reliable law enforcement. Without a stable foundation of that sort, no man can arrange his affairs or plot his course with the slightest degree of confidence. In consequence, when "official" law and justice fail us, unofficial mechanisms will emerge to take their place. We're not guaranteed to like the results.
That was the lesson of the "vigilance committees" of the nineteenth century West.
Clarity of any sort comes from understanding the fundamental principles that undergird one's field of study. Without unifying principles, a system of "justice" is nothing but a collection of arbitrary rules, against which others might counterpoise a set of contradictory and equally arbitrary rules. How does one decide between them? Why is the American scheme of incarceration for theft superior to the Arabian one of amputating the offender's hand? Why is the American response of divorce with alimony to an adultery superior to the Arabian one of stoning the adulterers to death? What bedrock principles, dictated by our nature as thinking beings, support a verdict for one system over the other?
Today, "law" is running riot, arrogating ever larger sectors of human enterprise and experience while performing ever less well at its core function of protecting individuals from force and fraud. If there was ever a time when we needed broad, trustworthy principles more desperately, it's not springing to my mind at the moment.
Thoughts?
