A fascinating but frustrating post by Lance Schaubert at Red Letter Christians points us toward a fascinating but frustrating G.K. Chesterton essay I hadn’t read before, his short 1929 piece “On American Morals.”
Chesterton’s essay is awkward in places because his subject is the blinkered moralism of “American Culture, in the decay of Puritanism,” yet it offers numerous examples of the ways his own morality was similarly blinkered.*
The main target of his wrath in this essay is Prohibition — a “curious thing now part of the American Constitution” — and the kind of moralism that led to it. But he goes after it from an angle, mainly by discussing cigars. Chesterton is both amused and appalled that Americans seem to view cigar-smoking as a moral question — as a vice or a sin. He begins by tackling an article from Harper’s** lamenting the lack of objective morals in kids these days. The article was titled, “Wanted: A Substitute for Righteousness”:
By righteousness she means, of course, the narrow New England taboos; but she does not know it. For the inference she draws is that we should recognize frankly that “the standard abstract right and wrong is moribund.” This statement will seem less insane if we consider, somewhat curiously, what the standard abstract right and wrong seems to mean — at least in her section of the States. It is a glimpse of an incredible world.
She takes the case of a young man brought up “in a home where there was an attempt to make dogmatic cleavage of right and wrong.” And what was the dogmatic cleavage? Ah, what indeed! His elders told him that some things were right and some wrong; and for some time he accepted this strange assertion. But when he leaves home he finds that, “apparently perfectly nice people do the things he has been taught to think evil.” Then follows a revelation. “The flowerlike girl he envelops in a mist of romantic idealization smokes like an imp from the lower regions and pets like a movie vamp. The chum his heart yearns towards cultivates a hip-flask, etc.” And this is what the writer calls a dogmatic cleavage between right and wrong!
The standard of abstract right and wrong apparently is this. That a girl by smoking a cigarette makes herself one of the company of the fiends of hell. That such an action is much the same as that of a sexual vampire. That a young man who continues to drink fermented liquor must necessarily be “evil” and must deny the very existence of any difference between right and wrong. That is the “standard of abstract right and wrong” that is apparently taught in the American home. And it is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that it is not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all. That is exactly what it is not. That is the very last thing any clear-headed person would call it. It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials. To have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to make certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute. We need not be very surprised if the young man repudiates these meaningless vetoes as soon as he can; but if he thinks he is repudiating morality, he must be almost as muddle-headed as his father.
From here, Chesterton’s personal defensiveness in reaction to this “queer taboo about tobacco” starts to take over his essay a bit. These moralistic Americans have outlawed his drink and now he worries they’ll be after his cigars next and that will not stand.
“Nobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar,” he writes, getting back to the point.
Yes, today we know things about the health effects of tobacco that no one knew in 1929, but the people Chesterton was complaining about weren’t condemning cigars as unhealthy or condemning cigar-smokers for supporting a deadly industry. Nor were they making an ascetic argument — a la Judas or Peter Singer — suggesting that the money Chesterton spent on cigars could better have been spent aiding the needy.
Their argument, or rather their assertion, was simply that cigar-smoking was somehow intrinsically evil. Chesterton’s response was that anyone who says such a thing has lost any clue as to what “evil” actually means. Americans, he feared, had lost any ability to think about how or why something was either good or evil, and that we had substituted, instead, an arbitrary list of Dos and Don’ts that were nothing more than the “particular cut and dried customs of a particular tribe.”
Here in 2014, that arbitrary list isn’t identical to what it was back in 1929, but Chesterton’s critique remains valid. Such a list is:
Not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all. … It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials.
Schaubert’s RLC piece recognizes the truth of that, citing Chesterton’s essay and encouraging everyone to read it. Yet he doesn’t quite seem able to surrender the habit of making such lists. He wants them to be less arbitrary, less chaotically sentimental and accidental. He seems to think that by making such lists painstakingly biblical — based on a more precise exegesis of more precise texts — we will be able to refine our lists of taboos into a viable substitute for a clearer “notion of what is meant by right and wrong.”
The specific subject in Schaubert’s piece is alcohol. (Yes, that’s still very much a thing for many white evangelicals.) I think, though, that it also provides an excellent example, by analogy, of what I’ve argued here about the utter lack of a coherent sex ethic among evangelicals. Bring up the subject of sex and morality and white evangelicals will begin loudly harrumphing about the need for “objective” morality and for “biblical” morality and for “objective, biblical” morality.
But by “morality,” they mean only a narrow list of tribal taboos, though they don’t know it. They can’t provide any real moral guidance, only “a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial.” They say that “traditional biblical morality” and “traditional biblical marriage” are the objective standard for sexual ethics, but that is not a standard; it is not objective; and it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong.
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* See, for example, his droll tangent musing about whether or not America’s warped moralism might be a “barbaric” inheritance from the “savage” Native Americans. That makes it difficult to know what exactly to make of this Sobchakian quip shortly thereafter:
Something of the the difference and the difficulty may be seen by comparing the old Ku Klux Klan with the new Klu Klux Klan. The old secret society may have been justified or not; but it had a definite object: it was directed against somebody.
That recalls the great line from The Big Lebowski: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” I think that “may have been justified or not” bit from Chesterton is meant to be acidly ironic in its understatement — intended to be heard as the Coen brothers intended their “at least it’s an ethos” line to be heard, rather than in ignorant earnest, the way John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, seems to think of it. That line in Chesterton’s essay comes right after he mocks the Scopes trial for being a forum in which a bunch of racists were claiming to be the arbiters of morality:
The men of Tennessee are supposed to be very anxious to draw the line between men and monkeys. They are also supposed by some to be rather too anxious to draw the line between black men and white men. …
Chesterton wasn’t so much a white/black racist as he was a “civilized”/”savage” racist.
** The writer, Avis D. Carlson, continued writing for another 60 years, and if you read the .pdf paper at that link, you’ll find she was — or became — a more complicated and interesting figure than Chesterton’s take on this one moralistic article of hers would suggest.
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