{"id":21235,"date":"2014-02-27T17:55:56","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T22:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=21235"},"modified":"2014-02-27T17:55:56","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T22:55:56","slug":"on-american-morals-sometimes-a-cigar-is-just-a-cigar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/02\/27\/on-american-morals-sometimes-a-cigar-is-just-a-cigar\/","title":{"rendered":"‘On American Morals’: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A fascinating but frustrating post by Lance Schaubert<\/a> at Red Letter Christians points us toward a fascinating but frustrating G.K. Chesterton essay I hadn\u2019t read before, his short 1929 piece \u201cOn American Morals<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chesterton\u2019s essay is awkward in places because his subject is the blinkered moralism of\u00a0\u201cAmerican Culture, in the decay of Puritanism,\u201d yet it offers numerous examples of the ways his own morality was similarly blinkered.*<\/p>\n

The main target of his wrath in this essay is Prohibition \u2014 a \u201ccurious thing now part of the American Constitution\u201d \u2014 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 \u2014 as a vice or a sin. He begins by tackling an article from Harper\u2019s<\/em>** lamenting the lack of objective morals in kids these days. The article was titled, \u201cWanted: A Substitute for Righteousness\u201d:<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe standard abstract right and wrong is moribund.\u201d This statement will seem less insane if we consider, somewhat curiously, what the standard abstract right and wrong seems to mean \u2014 at least in her section of the States. It is a glimpse of an incredible world.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>She takes the case of a young man brought up \u201cin a home where there was an attempt to make dogmatic cleavage of right and wrong.\u201d 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, \u201capparently perfectly nice people do the things he has been taught to think evil.\u201d Then follows a revelation. \u201cThe 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.\u201d And this is what the writer calls a dogmatic cleavage between right and wrong!<\/p>\n

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 \u201cevil\u201d and must deny the very existence of any difference between right and wrong. That is the \u201cstandard of abstract right and wrong\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From here, Chesterton\u2019s personal defensiveness in reaction to this \u201cqueer taboo about tobacco\u201d starts to take over his essay a bit. These moralistic Americans have outlawed his drink and now he worries they\u2019ll be after his cigars next and that will not stand<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar,\u201d he writes, getting back to the point.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t condemning cigars as unhealthy or condemning cigar-smokers for supporting a deadly industry. Nor were they making an ascetic argument \u2014 a la<\/em> Judas or Peter Singer \u2014 suggesting that the money Chesterton spent on cigars could better have been spent aiding the needy.<\/p>\n

Their argument, or rather their assertion, was simply that cigar-smoking was somehow intrinsically evil. Chesterton\u2019s response was that anyone who says such a thing has lost any clue as to what \u201cevil\u201d 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\u2019ts that were nothing more than the \u201cparticular cut and dried customs of a particular tribe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here in 2014, that arbitrary list isn\u2019t identical to what it was back in 1929, but Chesterton\u2019s critique remains valid. Such a list is:<\/p>\n

Not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all. \u2026\u00a0It 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Schaubert\u2019s RLC piece<\/a> recognizes the truth of that, citing Chesterton\u2019s essay and encouraging everyone to read it. Yet he doesn\u2019t 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<\/em> \u2014 based on a more precise exegesis of more precise texts \u2014 we will be able to refine our lists of taboos into a viable substitute for a clearer \u201cnotion of what is meant by right and wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The specific subject in Schaubert\u2019s piece is alcohol. (Yes, that\u2019s still very much a thing for many white evangelicals.) I think, though, that it also provides an excellent example, by analogy, of what I\u2019ve 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 \u201cobjective\u201d morality and for \u201cbiblical\u201d morality and for \u201cobjective, biblical\u201d morality.<\/p>\n

But by \u201cmorality,\u201d they mean only a narrow list of tribal taboos, though they don\u2019t know it. They can\u2019t provide any real moral guidance, only \u201ca chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial.\u201d They say that \u201ctraditional biblical morality\u201d and \u201ctraditional biblical marriage\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n

* See, for example, his droll tangent musing about whether or not America\u2019s warped moralism might be a \u201cbarbaric\u201d inheritance from the \u201csavage\u201d Native Americans. That makes it difficult to know what exactly to make of this Sobchakian quip shortly thereafter:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That recalls the great line from The Big Lebowski:<\/em> \u201cI mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it\u2019s an ethos.\u201d\u00a0I think<\/em> that \u201cmay have been justified or not\u201d bit from Chesterton is meant to be acidly ironic in its understatement \u2014 intended to be heard as the Coen brothers intended their \u201cat least it\u2019s an ethos\u201d line to be heard, rather than in ignorant earnest, the way John Goodman\u2019s character, Walter Sobchak, seems to think of it. That line in Chesterton\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

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. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chesterton wasn\u2019t \u00a0so much a white\/black racist as he was a \u201ccivilized\u201d\/\u201dsavage\u201d racist.<\/p>\n

** The writer,\u00a0Avis D. Carlson<\/a>, continued writing\u00a0for another 60 years, <\/em>and if you read the .pdf paper at that link, you\u2019ll find she was \u2014 or became \u2014 a more complicated and interesting figure than Chesterton\u2019s take on this one moralistic article of hers would suggest.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n'On American Morals': Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"'On American Morals': Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar","description":"\"It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}