(W)righting Our Own Rules

“Conventionality is not morality.” - Charlotte Brontë

Making one’s bed is not normally a moral action. Nor is tying one’s shoe, riding the subway, or walking from one block to the next. These daily actions do not gather enough social momentum to be considered ethically meaningful.

However, in relation to their surroundings, these actions have great potential to create moral consequences. Smiling at someone, or calling a friend, may put you into a state of mind that later influences one of your more serious decisions. The boundary between the routine and the moral becomes unclear. Meaning sometimes departs from our known ways of living, and we must make our way on individual ethical paths. It is in ambiguous situations such as these that Charlotte Bronte’s assertion that conventionality is not morality has its truth.

In this entry, I will discuss the ways our society forms its moral perceptions of itself. In particular, I hope to reach some conclusion about whether our social hierarchies reflect our moral ideals, how individual ethical choices meet up with collective understandings of correct behavior.

Do we, as Americans, make decisions based on independent observation or on perceived social norms? Also, which is right?

Two cultural institutions seem to me to have more influence over moral points of view than most others: religion and art. Religion gives explicit ethical guidelines for living, while art suggests mores of meaning through the way it represents natural and social environments.

Unlike a piece of moral philosophy or an opinion article in the newspaper, art does not speak authoritatively. It creates a perceptual, rather than cognitive, understanding. It is ethical in that it puts forth a specific view of social worlds, but does not outline how to interact with those worlds.

Religion, although more straightforwardly moral in nature, also fails at times to provide moral guidance. The process of living resembles a moving piece of art more closely than it does the formality of religion. We perceive events and people in a more chaotic format than theological arguments can explain. Religion is good at creating guidelines for behavior, but is often too rigid to be helpful at the moment when a moral decision arises.

What, then, is the place of art in religious life, and vice versa? Do these forms of cultural convention complement each other in helping us towards ethical self-definition, or are they both empty ways of coping with the paradox between believing and living?

One possibility is that both art and religion’ usefulness lies in their ability to fulfill the ambitions of a culture’s socially dominant groups, that hose in power perpetuate artistic representations and religious dictates that support their dominance. This form of convention, as Charlotte Bronte might point out, eliminates the voice of popular experience in moral meaning making.

Another possibility is that our societal modes of being follow popular points of view. Our system of democracy is meant to include the public in its decision-making process. However, as political conservatives point out, popular opinion is often too scattered to be a vehicle for progress. Each person perceives public events in a slightly different way. Everyone has an opinion based on his/her conventional experience, and no group convention ever takes shape.

Perhaps we, as Americans, don’t form ethical standpoints through dictated or practical conventions. Social privilege - and its absence - does seem to me intimately connected to the development of artistic and religious moral agendas. Yet America was founded largely upon the ideals of class mobility and individual choice. Our ideals may have carried us together for this long because each group in our society insists on defying its own conventions.

The next time you go to tie your shoe, think about the conventions that your action supports. No matter what class you’re in, in America, only you can say for sure whether your shoe is tied right.