WEREN'T WE STANDING ON SOMETHING?:

Can Lost Morality be Restored in Modern Societies? (Gertrude Himmelfarb, Nov/Dec 1995, The American Enterprise Online)

[V]ictorian England went through an Industrial Revolution even more consequential than our current post- industrial tumult—because it involved not just economic and technological transformation, but also an urban revolution, a political revolution, and a social revolution, having the potential to subvert authority, tradition, religion, and morality. Yet the Victorians bore these upheavals without experiencing any moral crisis.

Indeed, the Victorians came out of their modernizing revolution with an accession of morality. An illegitimacy ratio of 7 percent in 1845 fell to 4 percent by the end of the century; in East London, the poorest part of the city, it was even lower. Crime, drunkenness, violence, illiteracy, and vagrancy all declined. The underclass, known to the early Victorians as the “ragged and dangerous classes,” virtually disappeared by the end of the century.

These improvements in the Victorian period contrast dramatically with the deterioration during our own time. In the past three decades alone, illegitimacy and crime in England have increased six fold. The American figures are remarkably similar. Which makes one wonder: What did the Victorians know that we don’t?

In 1839, at a time of social unrest, Thomas Carlyle urged his countrymen to pay less attention to the material standards of the people and more to their “disposition”—the beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and habits that inclined them either to a “wholesome composure, frugality, and prosperity,” or to an “acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin.” By the end of the century it was evident that most citizens, even in the poorest classes, had chosen the first path.

Victorian England was shaped not only by the industrial revolution that had started half a century before, but also by a moral reformation launched even earlier. This reformation began in the middle of the eighteenth century with the Wesleyan religious revival, and was reinforced a generation later by Evangelicalism. Wesleyanism was remarkable in several respects. From the beginning, it was as much a movement for moral as for religious reform—as much an ethic as a creed. The ethic had two aspects: the individualistic Puritan ethic of work, thrift, temperance, self-reliance, and self-discipline; and a social ethic of good works and charity. The Wesleyans established societies for the care of abandoned children, destitute governesses, shipwrecked sailors, and penitent prostitutes. They founded schools, hospitals, and orphanages. They led the agitations for prison reform, child labor laws, factory and sanitary regulations, and the abolition of the slave trade. And they did all of this as a religious obligation.

The other remarkable aspect of this religious-cum-moral revival was the fact that it affected all classes of England. After Wesley’s death in 1791, the movement split, with the Methodists leaving the Church of England to form their own dissenting sects, and the Evangelicals remaining within the Church. The Methodists appealed primarily to the working and lower middle classes, the Evangelicals to the middle and upper classes. But whatever their social and theological differences, they shared a common ethic that transcended class lines. (And political lines as well; it was as much the ethic of Chartists and socialists as of liberals and conservatives.)

In the course of the nineteenth century, the religious impulse became attenuated somewhat, especially among the educated. But the moral fervor remained; indeed it intensified, as if to compensate for the loss of religious zeal. The secular ethic expressed itself in George Eliot’s famous dictum: God is “inconceivable,” immortality “unbelievable,” but duty nonetheless “peremptory and absolute.”

It was this ethic—born of religion, and retaining, even in its secularized form, all the authority and passion of religion—that preserved the moral character of England in a period of intense economic and social change. And not only the moral character of the people but also the social habits and institutions that comprise what we now call “civil society”: the family, neighborhoods, churches, self-help groups, local authorities, and a myriad of voluntary societies and philanthropies.

Elie Halévy, the great French historian of Victorian England, wrote seven volumes to account for “the miracle of modern England”—the fact that England was spared the bloody political revolutions that convulsed the continent. Underlying England’s political miracle, however, was something deeper: the miracle of social and moral regeneration.

Morality is not yet a problem,” wrote Nietzsche in 1888. But it would become a problem, he predicted, when the people discovered that without religion there is no morality. The “English flatheads” (his sobriquet for liberals like George Eliot and John Stuart Mill) thought it possible to get rid of the Christian God while retaining Christian morality. They did not realize that “when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”

A century later, morality definitely is a problem, perhaps the most serious problem of modernity. And foremost among the reasons for this is Nietzsche’s own explanation: the death of God and morality. In retrospect, one might say that Victorian England was living off the moral capital of religion, and that post-Victorian England, well into the twentieth century, was living off the capital of a secularized morality. Perhaps what we are now witnessing is the moral bankruptcy that comes with the depletion of both the religious and the quasi-religious capital.

This raises a critical question: Is there any prospect of remoralizing a society once it has fallen into moral decadence?

And, if there is any, how far does the society have to fall first?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 28, 2005 12:00 AM