By now you have probably heard about the New York Times wedding announcement featuring two people who met while married to others, left their respective spouses to be together, and in a long piece in the Times declared their love for each other, presented their story, and neglected to mention the names of the spurned spouses or to wonder about the effects of their behavior on the children involved.
Now, her ex-husband has some comments:
Vow-row former husband incensed
The Grey Lady's got him seeing red.
A media exec is seething over the nightmare created when his TV-reporter ex-wife and her new "soul mate" aired the former couple's dirty laundry in the wedding pages of The New York Times.
Bob Ennis -- whose ex-wife, former WNBC/Channel 4 reporter Carol Anne Riddell, gushed to the Times about how she longed for her new husband while she was still married -- slammed the write-up as a "choreographed, self-serving piece of revisionist history" that will hurt both couples' children.
"You could easily try to brush this off as . . . a self-serving act by a couple of narcissistic people," Ennis fumed to a Forbes reporter "except for the fact that there are lots of children involved."
The whole tawdry mess could easily be dismissed as a pair of Narcissists converting their shameful behavior into affirmative pride, or yet another in the interminable series of examples of the amorality of post-modern, technological capitalism, or one more in a long chain of left wing assaults on conventional morality, but there is something going on here that deserves deeper reflection.
Our modern (a)morality repeatedly attempts to eradicate guilt and convert shame into pride. Conventional morality might have once depicted the abuse of woman as shameful. Ghetto rappers have turned such shameful behavior into a source of pride. Now, young, needy women can be sexually degraded and abused for pleasure and glory; it sells lots of mp3's (née records or cd's).
The Last Psychiatrist, with a wonderfully felicitous turn of phrase, describes the psychodynamics involved in the "wedding announcement" and the recent Columbia incest story:
Infidelity And Other Taboos, Media Style
But what you need to get out of these stories is how this generation and forwards will deal with guilt: externalizing it, converting it to shame, and then taking solace in the pockets of support that inevitably arise. Everyone is famous to 15 people, and that's just enough people to help you sleep at night.
It is, in effect, crowdsourcing the superego, and when that expression catches on remember where you first heard it. Then remember why you heard it. And then don't do it.
In the developmental hierarchy, guilt is a more mature and nuanced emotional response to a internalized failure than is shame. Shame is the feeling one experiences when one is publicly seen to have failed at adult behavior. It is a global feeling and refers to the self; in other words, when I am ashamed and humiliated, I feel that I am bad. In contrast, guilt is the feeling we have when we have failed to meet our own expectations; rather than feeling that I am bad, the feeling is that I have done something wrong. Both emotions are crucial for the support of civilized behavior but, broadly speaking, Judeo-Christian cultures rely on Guilt (an individual's internal motivational system) rather than Shame (a society based, external motivational system) to maintain moral and ethical behavior.
In The Morality of the Übermensch and especially in the comments, there was an excellent discussion of the place of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which we are the heirs, in establishing our morality, even for those who have explicitly abandoned the concept of a Deity. Atheists who behave morally do so as the products of a moral system based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. The alternative, depending on reason alone to establish a moral system, crowdsourcing the superego, is inherently unstable. Richard Landes wrote about the immense moral lacuna at the core of Atheist morality:
Jeff Jacoby asks a particularly pertinent question in his latest op-ed, Created by God to be good,” on Atheist “humanism” (as embodied in the American Humanist Society) and its hostility to biblical (or quranic) morality.
It brings to mind the argument made by Kwame Appiah’s book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen: that moral revolutions do not so much occur as a result of people who do the “right thing” for the “right reason” (practitioners of Kant’s categorical imperative), as they do because there’s a fundamental shift in the peer-group’s view of what’s moral: slavery, dueling, foot binding all go out when the dominant attitude disapproved of such behavior. If you duel to the death and win (as did Aaron Burr), and it’s a career-ender because your peers take you as a hot-headed fool, dueling will not last long.
...
Humanists are, in fact,free riders. They come along after centuries of hard work in prime divider societies where the zero-sum dominating imperative ruled social and political relations. In those long and painful years, some people, driven to by a sense of divine authority, systematically, and at great personal cost (sometimes one’s very life) pursued the generous impulses of positive-sum interactions. Now that we’re raised in a civil society, where we’re trained from childhood to cooperate, to eschew violence, to seek the positive-sum interaction, such behavior comes much more easily.
The Society can put up billboards reading: “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”
But in a world where it’s “rule or be ruled,” where the nice guy is a sucker who’ll predictably get the short end of the stick, where alpha males use violence with impunity to dominate others, “for goodness’ sake” doesn’t cut much ice. Indeed, it’s quite risible.
For in a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and evil. There is no way to prove that even murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees “Thou shalt not murder.” It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone.
Indeed, in a tribal honor-shame culture, you’re not a man until you’ve killed another man, and although the honorable thing to do is to kill him in a fair fight, there are some tribes where, short of killing another man from the neighboring (and therefore rival/enemy) tribe, killing one of their women is required. Spartans had a whole season where they killed helots (the serfs, former free Greeks of the Pelopponesian peninsula) wherever they met them.
In a world in which morality, the Superego writ large, is crowdsourced, and the elites who determine morality (for example, the New York Times style section) are increasingly out of touch or explicitly hostile to their heritage, morality becomes completely inverted.
When morality becomes whatever the crowd (whether of elites or your niche crowd in NAMBLA) decides it is. As long as Atheist Morality is grounded (even if in non-obvious ways) to an Absolute, a Moral society as we have come to understand such terms, can exist; when the connection to the Absolute is completely severed, no morality can long stand against our desires.
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