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Why fake morality is the best kind

By Michael Gard - posted Tuesday, 20 March 2007


It’s not easy being an urban, liberal, leftist, greenie these days. Granted, in the eyes of some we have a lot to answer for: welfare dependency, the scourge of politically correct language, defeat in Vietnam and world music just to get the ball rolling. But take it from me; things have never been quite this crook.

Scott Stephens (‘The fake morality of Al Gore’s convenient lie’, On Line Opinion, February 20, 2007) shows just how tough it has become to look at ourselves in the morning mirror by lampooning our sudden interest in all things environmental. Stephens reckons that we’re really only worried about our house prices and that going green is just a way of making ourselves feel better while we consume like never before and plan the next holiday. Self interest, he says, equals fake morality.

So here’s the score. Not only is my godless leftist life nothing more than an entrée to something much less pleasant in the hereafter, I don’t even deserve the consolation of a few self-serving self-deceptions in the prosaic present. Now that’s bleak.

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This raises the tricky question of what a real, as opposed to fake, morality would look, and - perhaps more to the point - feel like. How would I know if my moral convictions were real and not simply confected? In fact, come to think of it, in what sense is the environmental future of the planet a moral issue anyway?

If I may indulge in a little philosophical hyperbole, the search for an authentic morality may actually be the biggest question there is, both for individuals and nations. At the very least, it is a particularly pertinent question because of the way high-profile thinking Christians are currently marching away from morality.

Take the former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, author of Godless Morality, and Australia’s John Carroll, author of the recently published The Existential Jesus: both argue that the church’s folly is to see its primary roll as moral arbiter for the rest of us. If my reading of both of them is correct, neither would have any truck with Stephens’ implication that God is a necessary - or even particularly useful - part of one’s moral universe.

If truth be known, none of this is news to atheists. We have always known that it is possible to construct a moral framework without God. After all, God doesn’t exist and yet morals do. Simple.

Climate change, like gods, monsters and morals, are human creations. This is a problem for people like Scott Stephens because it means the moral war that we must fight for the environment becomes an even battle between man-made entities: Christian law, economic prosperity, corporate power, political expediency, urban fashion? Without a super-natural imprimatur, there is simply no way of picking a moral winner. No one can claim the moral high ground since there is no high ground to claim.

What this all adds up to is the realisation that important moral questions are no longer, and probably never were, actually moral questions at all. Rather, the existence of God or the seriousness of global warming are, I think, questions of belief, not differences between right and wrong.

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This is an utterly crucial distinction. So much of the debate that goes on in our world revolves around accusations of bad faith. Climate change sceptics dismiss “trendy”, “shallow” urban environmentalists, while “real” greenies (presumably identifiable from their lack of dress sense) assume sceptics to be on the payroll of corporations or just in denial. In the realm of moral debate, society’s greatest enemy are “liars” and “fakes”.

This is a serious problem because the most interesting and damaging mistakes in life are usually made by people who honestly believe they are telling the truth, not by Charlatans and con-men. And this is also why the legion critics of postmodernism have all missed the point - it is truth, not lies, which poses the greater threat. What the world needs is less moral conviction and fewer people who “know” that their own exquisite altruism and self-sacrifice will save us all.

The thing which Scott Stephens forgets is that depth of conviction has little if anything much in common with clarity of vision. There is no particular reason why my economic self interest is a less reliable moral compass than the next person’s religious or humanistic fervour.

After all, if the argument is that economic self interest has no capacity for factoring in the welfare of imperilled Pacific nations, then it is a naïve argument. Economics, like religion, is easily flexible enough to construct new and expedient arguments to suit changing circumstances. It’s the destination that matters, not the journey.

At the very least, it behoves those who dislike my environmental motives to understand the arguments which drive the world we live in. Practicing capitalists from Adam Smith to Paul Keating tell us that unsentimental self interest produces the best outcomes. It is not enough for Scott Stephens to complain about the leadership of self interest because that is precisely what is meant to be happening. You might as well sneer at the unpleasant “self interest” of football teams who try to accumulate more points than their opposition. That’s the point of the exercise.

Whether or not my moral convictions are real or fake is simply beside the point. The job of moralists is to prove why self interest leads to poorer outcomes than any other set of instructions. It would certainly not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of unnecessary human suffering borne of heart felt moral and altruistic conviction.

It may objected that deciding what is “true” is no more straight forward an exercise than working out what is “right”. This is undoubtedly the case and another reason why postmodernists and moral relativists have always been a step ahead of Dawkins-style rationalists and religious believers alike. In fact, for people like Dawkins, scholarly truth and moral rectitude are actually one and the same.

What hyper-rationalists and Christians both over look is that we have always lived in a world where power rules. It is power - the power of history, money and language - that determines the things we believe and it is power which forms our sense of right and wrong. And it is earthly, human power, not truth or goodness, which will decide the future of the planet and, for that matter, organised religion.

Some will see this as a pessimistic message. It isn’t. The trouble with truth and moral goodness is that they both gesture towards other worlds, worlds which are pure and untouched by human hands. They both distort and obscure reality. For those of us stuck on terra firma, better to remember that our destiny is in our own hands but particularly in the hands of the powerful.

Arguing about truth and right will get us nowhere. What matters is what people can be made to believe, a game we can all participate in.

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About the Author

Michael Gard is a senior lecturer in dance, physical and health education at Charles Sturt University's Bathurst campus. He is the author of two books, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology (with Jan Wright) and Men Who Dance: Aesthetics, Athletics and the Art of Masculinity.

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The fake morality of Al Gore’s convenient lie - On Line Opinion

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