The fact that such parents favour paternalism in their own homes does not mean that they have cast all their ethical doubts aside. They would argue that it is eminently reasonable to be unsure about certain large issues — whether foetuses should ever be aborted beyond twenty-four weeks, for example — while remaining supremely confident about many smaller ones, such as whether it is right to hit one’s younger brother in the face or to squirt apple juice across the bedroom ceiling.
To lend concrete form to their pronouncements, parents are often moved to draw up star charts, complex domestic political settlements (usually to be found fastened to the sides of fridges or the doors of larders) which set forth in exhaustive detail the specific behaviours they expect from, and will reward in, their children.
Noting the considerable behavioural improvements these charts tend to produce (along with the paradoxical satisfaction that children appear to derive from having their more disorderly impulses monitored and curtailed), libertarian adults may be tempted to suggest, with a modest laugh at such a palpably absurd idea, that they themselves might benefit from having a star chart pinned to the wall to keep track of their own eccentricities.
5.
If the idea of an adult star chart seems odd but not wholly without merit, it is because we are aware, in our more mature moments, of the scale of our imperfections and the depths of our childishness. There is so much that we would like to do but never end up doing and so many ways of behaving that we subscribe to in our hearts but ignore in our day-to-day lives. However, in a world obsessed with freedom, there are few voices left that ever dare to exhort us to act well.
Even the most theoretically libertarian of parents tend to acknowledge the point of star charts when dealing with four-year-olds. (illustration credit 3.2)
The exhortations we would need are typically not very complex: forgive others, be slow to anger, dare to imagine things from another’s point of view, set your dramas in perspective … We are holding to an unhelpfully sophisticated view of ourselves if we think that we are always above hearing well-placed, blunt and simply structured reminders about kindness. There is greater wisdom in accepting that we are in most situations rather simple entities in want of much the same kind, firm, basic guidance as is naturally offered to children and domestic animals.
The true risks to our chances of flourishing are different from those conceived of by libertarians. A lack of freedom is no longer, in most developed societies, the problem. Our downfall lies in our inability to make the most of the freedom that our ancestors painfully secured for us over three centuries. We have grown sick from being left to do as we please without sufficient wisdom to exploit our liberty. It is not primarily the case that we find ourselves at the mercy of paternalistic authorities whose claims we resent and want to be free of. The danger runs in an opposite direction: we face temptations which we revile in those interludes when we can attain a sufficient distance from them, but which we lack any encouragement to resist, much to our eventual self-disgust and disappointment. The mature sides of us watch in despair as the infantile aspects of us trample upon our more elevated principles and ignore what we most fervently revere. Our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves.
An occasional paternalistic reminder to behave well does not have to constitute an infringement of our ‘liberty’ as this term should properly be understood. Real freedom does not mean being left wholly to one’s own devices; it should be compatible with being harnessed and guided.
Modern marriages are a test case of the problems created by an absence of a moral atmosphere. We start off with the best of intentions and a maximal degree of communal support. All eyes are upon us: family, friends and employees of the state appear to be fully invested in our mutual happiness and good behaviour. But soon enough we find ourselves alone with our wedding gifts and our conflicted natures, and because we are weak-willed creatures, the compact we so lately but so sincerely entered into begins to erode. Heady romantic longings are fragile materials with which to construct a relationship. We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive.
We may try to persuade the friends who visit us on the weekend to stay a little longer because their regard and their affection remind us of the high expectations the world once had of us. But in our souls, we know we are suffering because there is no one there to nudge us to reform our ways and make an effort. Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities. However sinister the idea of such surveillance may at first seem, it can in truth be reassuring to live as though someone else were continually watching and hoping for the best from us. It is gratifying to feel that our conduct is not simply our own business; it makes the momentous effort of acting nicely seem a little easier.
6.
Libertarians may concede that we would theoretically benefit from guidance, but they still complain that it would be impossible to deliver it, for the simple reason that at heart no one any longer knows what is good and bad. And we don’t know, as it is often pointed out in a seductive and dramatic aphorism, because God is dead.
Much of modern moral thought has been transfixed by the idea that a collapse in belief must have irreparably damaged our capacity to build a convincing ethical framework for ourselves. But this argument, while apparently atheistic in nature, owes a strange, unwarranted debt to a religious mindset — for only if we truly believed at some level that God had once existed, and that the foundations of morality were therefore in their essence supernatural, would the recognition of his present non-existence have any power to shake our moral principles.
However, if we assume from the start that we of course made God up, then the argument rapidly breaks down into a tautology — for why would we bother to feel burdened by ethical doubt if we knew that the many rules ascribed to supernatural beings were actually only the work of our all-too-human ancestors?
It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms. Injunctions to be sympathetic or patient stemmed from an awareness that these were the qualities which could draw societies back from fragmentation and self-destruction. So vital were these rules to our survival that for thousands of years we did not dare to admit that we ourselves had formulated them, lest this expose them to critical scrutiny and irreverent handling. We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.
But if we can now own up to spiritualizing our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves — that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) — who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.