Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Knowing Morality

Knowing Morality

Didion thinks that knowing morality is impossible.

It’s hard to know if she means “ethics.” – most do.

I have posted extensively about this in the past. Here too. And here.

The philosophical connection gives me pause though.

I mean, a strong society that has no means to differentiate between “good” and “evil” exists on the edge of function, without even knowing it.

The long and short of it is that you simply can’t live the day-to-day of your life in this manner. Laws, institutions, and all interactions are in the same boat.

If there is no line, well then, that’s just your opinion – and anything is permissible.

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Wagon Train Morality

Wagon Train Morality

Wagon train morality here is referring to the duty we offer to each other in a crisis, but this hints at something larger.

See, I think that we owe this duty in ethical terms.

But if you reject this idea of ethics, I mean, who cares about morals anyway?

That’s just your opinion. Right?

But we are also human in, the physiological sense, that desperation, and pain, and hunger can actually turn off the rational parts of our brain.

In a larger passage, Didion speaks about the Donner Party here.

You can read about it in the link above, if you want your stomach to turn like that.

If we have been taught to keep our promises—if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough—we stay with the body, or have bad dreams. I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, “wagon-train morality.” In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children: my own childhood was illuminated by graphic litanies of the grief awaiting those who failed in their loyalties to each other.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell