2. The End of the Common Good?

Common Morality

Having been born in England at the end of World War II, I am one of the people, referred to by MacIntyre in the last chapter, for whom values promoting the common good make sense. I am, that is, according to 1981’s academic consensus, irrational. Placed in this context, denigrating and disparaging my values in order to undermine their broader credibility, would have been productive and good. The wider outcome, however, has been, the destruction, within a single generation, of the entire culture built upon those values.

For present purposes, the values of common morality, that seek to build the common good, and that underlie our common humanity, are taken to include kindness, care, moderation, fairness, honesty, trustworthiness, patience, generosity, forgiveness, non-greediness, sexual fidelity, compassion, non-violence and altruism.

Each of these operates in the “Now”, in the present moment. They are values we neither weigh up nor justify. They are values we simply act upon in the belief that, in contributing to the communal good, we know that that goodness will come back, also, to benefit us. Everyone gains.

In querying these values, the rational ethicists of the 1970s and 1980s asked two questions – what rational justification is there for belief in the common good, to which they answered ‘none’, and where could belief in the moral values seeking to build such goodness have come from? Perceiving them to exert significant power over the human mind, the answer they offered was religion.

Effectively, they portrayed the common good as a manipulative ploy utilised by religious elites to gain public acquiescence to their power by devious means.

For myself, being raised in a Christian family, this, perhaps predictably, was not how I saw it. For me, the life of Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was a practical example of acting for the common good. It inspired – it did not set rules. It exhibited the values of all humanity, not just of Christians. It provided values to be aspired to, rather than obeyed.

This, from my now agnostic perspective, still seems to be true.

Common Morality across History

For me, as I observed the spreading and escalating scale of atrocity following 9/11, it seemed that common morality, as my morality, had finally been dispatched to the dustbin of history, by those who wielded power.

The question this raised for me was, if common morality was an invention of powerful modern religions, what were human communities like before the advent of religions able to assert such power, before, say, 3,000 years ago?

This is a valid question. Before seeking answers to it, it can be useful, first, to recognise common morality’s importance in more recent times.

250 years ago Adam Smith, better known as the author of The Wealth of Nations and father of modern economics, sought rational justification for many of common morality’s values in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. One paragraph is particularly pertinent:

“Without this sacred regard to general rules [of common morality], there is no man (sic) whose conduct can be much depended upon. It is this which constitutes the most essential difference between a man (sic) of principle and honour and a worthless fellow….. But if without regard to these general rules, even the duties of politeness, which are so easily observed, and which one can scarce have any serious motive to violate, would yet be so frequently violated, what would become of the duties of justice, of truth, of chastity, of fidelity, which it is often so difficult to observe, and which there may be so many strong motives to violate? But upon tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind (sic) were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.”1

In Smith’s view common morality was still the mainstay on which the major warfaring nation of Great Britain, just 250 years ago, depended. Also, and significantly for today’s world, he prophesied that human society would crumble into nothing should those values be ignored.

This was the view from a couple of centuries ago. What about the far more distant past?

In ancient Egypt, pyramid and coffin texts described the lives of significant people who died. As writing’s capacity increased, those texts, after 4,400 years ago, rather than emphasising these people’s achievements, describe how generous, forgiving and kind these people were. Within the texts the values of common morality shine through.2

As such, and persistently repeated in many such texts, they seem to reflect the prevalent culture and the values to which all Egyptians of that time seem to have aspired.

These texts take us back close to the origins of writing able to portray narrative meaning. Going back beyond that is not impossible, but, utilising the insights of archaeology, it does take some digging! In doing so it is able to go back millions of years, but only regarding behaviours that leave a physical trace.

Morality and Peace

One behaviour that does leave such a trace is violence. Its absence, when assessed carefully, can be associated with non-violence and peace.

Taking this precaution into account, it observes the extreme rarity of warfare anywhere in the world prior to 8,000 years ago. Subsequently, and suddenly, in northern Levant, across large numbers of archaeological excavations, it then observes the effects of warfare’s sudden eruption.3

This event followed 4,000 years of predominantly peaceful agricultural settlement. The physical evidence attests, consequently, to a transition from a state of prevalent peace within these communities, to a state of persistent war.

These issues will be discussed in greater detail in a future chapter where they will be placed within archaeology’s more extended and extensive context. Two particular conclusions from it are, however, relevant here.

One is that violence between individuals, although infrequent, is not uncommon across thousands, and hundreds of thousands of years. The other is that, before 8,000 years ago, inter-communal violence tantamount to war, although not entirely absent between bands of people, was rare in the extreme. This is highly suggestive of a prevalent culture of peace in those earlier times.

Interestingly the same behaviours are observed in mobile forager bands of the more recent past. This research shows that when emotionally-generated interpersonal violence, and violence that was perpetrated by slave traders, settlers, farmers and modern economic interests are taken into account, these communities, between themselves, were pervasively peaceful as well.4

In the context of common morality, non-violence is just one value in its list of values. Their role combined, is to secure constructive relationships within and between communities. In doing so each of these values supports the others. Placed in this light it is certainly debatable whether non-violence could exist in the absence of the other values.

This brings me to one last piece of the jigsaw. This research reveals that within recent mobile forager and more settled hunter gatherer bands, an “egalitarian ethos” prevailed. The ethos included generosity, honesty, integrity, fairness, modesty, patience, moderation, self-control, cooperativeness and inclusivity, all indicative of common morality’s values and, as the research regarding mobile foragers shows, all associated with peace.5

Recorded at a time when conflict and violence was common in the rest of the world, this suggests a persistence of such values from the past, rather than their recent evolution.

These various facets of evidence, taken together, point to a high likelihood of common morality, and its values, being very ancient indeed. This suggests they could have played a key part in supporting humanity’s existence, and the welfare of its communities, over much, if not all, human history. If this is true, we should be recognising that this dynamic is no more.

Neoliberalism’s Influence

In the 1960s and 1970s the Cold War was escalating. The UK was suffering from poor economic performance, inflation, industrial disputes, power cuts and social unrest, with similar issues occurring in the U.S.. There was real fear, on both sides of the Atlantic, that communism was winning.

The answer devised was hyper-capitalism in the form of neoliberalism. It required the hyping of competitive individualism, and the dismantling of cultures irreconcilable with it. Particularly targeted were those founded upon the common good.

To promote these ideas a broad selection of academic insight was recruited. At their core were those of sociobiology. It portrayed the genetic “fitness” of selfish individualism as unquestionable scientific truth, this being a “truth” that MacIntyre, as a moral philosopher writing in 1981, could not counter.

Its strong academic support was a primary reason why neoliberalism was able to carry the day, and why cultures founded on the common good, without similar arguments to protect them, could be discredited and overwhelmed.

The sting in the tail is that by 2007, sociobiology’s “unquestionable truth” was equally emphatically rejected.6 By this time, however, the credibility of cultures founded upon the common good had collapsed and could not be restored. It is for this reason that the selfish individualism of neoliberalism, although now academically discredited, continues to march on.

Is this the answer?

The narrative that is outlined here can seem a reasonable explanation for what has recently happened. It identifies the high likelihood of common morality’s existence deep in the past, in Smith’s and MacIntyre’s writings it identifies its continuance into the present, and it identifies why its influence is now badly failing.

What it hasn’t done is find solutions. For this we will need to answer MacIntyre’s conundrum – how, in a world that was competitive and violent, was common morality able to come into being. This, MacIntyre conceived, must have occurred in human communities of the past that have now disappeared. It is these communities that the next chapter seeks to find, and to understand.