David Matthews 2 is a freelance writer in Alpharetta, Georgia. He is also the host of a weekly audio rant which you can hear at the main page.

Target: Moralism
Part 18: A World Without Moralism
– by David Matthews 2

One of the more sobering songs of the late John Lennon was the song "Imagine", where he asks the listener to imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t have all of the needless drama and quarrels and we all loved each other. He doesn’t really paint the picture, he actually asks us to do that ourselves. He asks us to IMAGINE what the world would be like without these things.

I’m not big on utopian visions. I try to live in the real world, full of people with their own wants, needs, biases, and delusions.

And let’s face it, WE ALL have some utopian delusion of how the world SHOULD be. We all have them. Every one of us, myself included. That’s where we get our sense of justice and fairness. It’s the guide by which we measure the real world and determine what needs to be fixed.

A utopian vision is also what drives the dysfunction of moralists. They have a vision of how things OUGHT to be, and anything that takes away from that vision is considered by them to be a PERSONAL threat. That’s why they’re passionate about certain issues. They actually consider anything that takes away from their vision of how things ought to be as a PERSONAL attack, because it actually threatens THEIR world!

But what about a utopian vision of a world WITHOUT moralism? We certainly have more than our fair share of moralistic visions. How about one that doesn’t have moralism in it?

Well, quite simply, you wouldn’t recognize such a world.

Let’s get brutally honest here, just about every facet of human society has been corrupted and influenced by moralism in some fashion. Europe and North America were influenced by the spread of Christianity, just as the Middle East was influenced by the spread of Islam. For the right reasons, such influences have helped to enhance music, literature, architecture, the arts… they have helped to better humanity. But for the wrong reasons, their influences have also been the wanton destroyers of these same things.

So if we remove the bad influences of moralism in the world, unfortunately we gotta remove the good as well. Trying to envision what this world would be without moralism completely would really be envisioning a completely different world, with a completely different history.

How different, you ask? Well picture this: what if Jesus was never crucified? Without the destructive influences of moralism, the Sanhedrin wouldn’t have felt threatened by the popular teachings of this carpenter’s son, so they wouldn’t have moved to eliminate him. In fact, without moralism, their actions wouldn’t have earned the criticism of people like Jesus and John the Baptist. So there goes Christianity as we know it. And without the moralistic zealotry of the hypocrite Saul, he never would have become the pseudo-apostle Paul, and therefore he wouldn’t have been pushing to impose that new religion all over the world. Christianity would have been simply a popular sect of Judaism.

Now think about how much would be changed by the elimination of moralism in just that one period of history! No Christianity! No Roman Catholic Church. No Holy Roman Empire. No Crusades. No witch hunts. No inquisitions. No anti-Semitic persecutions. On the other hand, there also wouldn’t have been any Christmas celebrations, either in the traditional sense or as we know it today. No Santa Claus. No Easter bunny for that matter. The artwork of people like Michelangelo would have been fundamentally different. The architecture of important buildings would have been fundamentally changed. Songs would have been different. Stories would have been different. The self-righteousness of rulers both large and small would have been diminished. Their causes would not have been as just without moralism.

THAT is how pervasive moralism is in human society.

But let’s imagine what life would be like if we simply turned off moralism tomorrow. Let’s suppose that you wake up tomorrow and all of the influences of moralism were suddenly gone. Some cosmic being comes down in the dead of night with a cosmic blue pencil and eliminates all influences of moralism in our society. What would happen?

Well for starters, you’d notice some unusual changes in your neighborhood. Without moralism, you wouldn’t have as many of the zoning laws and neighborhood covenants limiting you and your neighbors to some bland cookie-cutter existence. You’d see some creative minds at work… as well as a few eighty-foot flagpoles… hedges trimmed in the form of phallic symbols… and a couple of really bright-colored houses. Would property value go down? Maybe. But it would be up to the homeowner if they would want to continue to live there.

Sure there would be some zoning laws in place, but the limitations would be for health and safety reasons, not for aesthetics or to suit some moralist’s demented delusions of how THEIR world should be! If the eighty-foot flagpole posed a risk to a neighbor’s house, then it could be a zoning issue. Otherwise, buck up and enjoy seeing the oversized underwear being flown in lieu of Old Glory.

Without moralism, you’d see a lot less government. Think about the number of times that governments at all levels wasted time, effort, and taxpayer dollars to impose moralist rules on us. Even if they don’t succeed in doing it, the wasted effort is pretty much nothing more than a distraction designed to appease moralist special interest groups. This is time and taxpayer money that can be better spent on more important matters.

Think about how much money goes into paying for things like the War on Drugs and the FCC. Sure there would be chaos at first… people in prison for drug offenses would be released, crackdowns on drugs would come to an end, but the emphasis would be on treatment, not prohibition. You’d see a different attitude when it comes to drugs… as well as a few other things.

Prostitution? Porn? As long as it was for and by consenting adults done in private, the government would have no business doing anything about it. Some people would fear a proliferation of strip clubs, but if prostitution itself was legalized and treated like any other kind of business, then strip clubs themselves would lose their allure. Why tease the clientele with empty dreams when you can legally give them exactly what they’re looking for in the first place?

The limitations on what would be shown or heard on TV and radio would be gone. The only real limitations would be to prevent slander and libel. Does that mean that all of the TV stations would be nothing but wanton hedonistic porn channels? Absolutely not! But having 500 channels wouldn’t mean that 450 of them would be censored into mindless pabulum simply to conform to the demented censors and self-appointed "moral guardians". It means reality shows can BE reality shows. It means gritty reality-based shows can SHOW reality instead of hiding it behind mosaic blurs and censored bleeps. There would still be plenty of programming for various social demographics, including stuff for children. But the rest of the programs wouldn’t have to be reduced to the LEVEL of children.

And guess what? Without the shock value, things like Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl boob flash would be meaningless.

That’s something else that would change if all moralism ended tomorrow. Shock radio hosts like Howard Stern would quickly be out of a job. Rather than be shocked, the listeners would eventually be bored to death by these entertainers. Listen to a play-by-play of couples having sex? Why? You could watch it on the TV, or better still, you could go down the street to the nearby brothel and pay for it in person.

Yes, the shock value would go away, as what was once taboo would be treated as commonplace.

And guess what? Your nightly news would be somewhat different as well. No more "special reports" about what your neighbors do. The routine "sweeps week" gambit of how easy it is to get laid, how "raunchy" teenagers can get, and how "easy" it is to get drugs would go away.

But… you’re probably asking "what about the children", right?

Well the elimination of moralism would put the onus of keeping an eye on the children where it always belonged in the first place: with the parents!

For centuries, moralists have invented and imposed this perverse belief of theirs that EVERYONE is responsible for raising little Johnny Dimple and little Suzy Purebred. EVERYONE: you, me, the person down the street, the people across town… it doesn’t matter. If you’re a part of "society" then moralists foisted this burden on you as well. That has always been their justification to impose their will on society, even in the days of Socrates. It was always about "the children".

In many ways, moralism has actually HINDERED parental responsibility. It prevented the development of tools that parents could use to better carry out their roles and it gave parents the excuse to NOT be responsible, knowing full well that eventually "the government" would pick up the slack. That’s where the concept of "parens patriae" (or "parents’ father") came from.

Ending moralism puts the burden back onto the parents. It reminds them that they have a responsibility to fulfill and it eliminates the excuses they have of not doing it.

Now think about this for a moment: how much empty drama is going on in the world today because of some facet of moralism? Think about the drama going on in the world because some Muslim cleric was "offended" by a cartoon or a movie. Think about the wasted breath and wasted effort and wasted energy that goes into "avenging" this "offended" person and you have to wonder if they really were "offended" in the first place or if they’re just playing these people to distract them from other more important matters.

I’ll tell you what... if all moralism miraculously ended tomorrow, then there would be a lot of industrial executives and government officials that would have some SERIOUS explaining to do. Let’s think about this for a moment. Where are all of these blind followers from? They’re not from rich, affluent areas, are they? The masses that are led blindly to rages and riots aren’t financially well off. But the people who instigate and agitate them are. I’ll let you connect the rest of the dots.

But you’ll notice that a world without moralism is also not a utopian world. There are no "happy endings" with the end of moralism. Quite the opposite: you hear about more troubles, more worries, more things to be concerned about, and more things that need to be done.

This is why moralism is always too good to be true. It offers an empty promise of better times and a guilt-free convenience for people. Why be responsible when you can have others held responsible instead? That was the recent offer made by Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He said quite plainly that parents COULD be responsible and use the current parental tools to keep their children from seeing things that they find offensive, but he then asked out loud "why should they have to?"

People like Chairman Martin continually sell this dubious idea that there can be a bright and sunny tomorrow as long as we allow moralism to creep into our lives. The problem, though, is that it is nothing more than a bill of goods. The issue that moralism pretends to resolve never really gets resolved. It just hangs over our heads like the proverbial Sword of Damocles, ready to be wielded again when the moralists demand even more from us.

The truth of the matter is that putting an end to moralism puts to an end the illusions and diversions used to prevent us from DEALING with the real problems in society. And while we cannot remove the influences of moralism in the past, we can work to remove the past contributions that have been destructive.

Ending moralism does not have a utopian end. It simply removes the false promises and lets us deal with reality. Only then we can solve the real problems and work to create that utopian future that we so love to imagine.