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Vasile Datcu - thinker, writer, Romania

From guilt to right – the decadence of the fundamentals of the morals

Along the time, in tackling the problem of the fundamentals of the moral conduct, of the nature of good and evil, of the origins and evolution of the semantic content, all those preoccupied with this subject have always tried to solve the problem from a historical point of view, all of them agreeing that the moral conduct has an evolution overlapping that of the society. They also agree that it is the resultant of some older or newer trends and that it is cumulative and integrative. This approach pointed out the manner of building the moral norms throughout the time, their crystallization out of the multitude of the daily habits and their limits as well, best reflected in the impossibility of defining the absolute moral precepts.

We have no doubt either that the historical point of view enlightens adequately the problems of the moral or that the truth rendered evident in this way would be the only possible one. So we have decided just to change perspective when approaching the problem mentioned above and, without totally abandoning the common vision, to emphasize the organic point of view, to see to what extent we can have access to new rigors, which, correlated with the old ones, could make easier the totally justifiable access to mastering the whole truth.

Supposing that human society is a live organism, the first revealed evidence is that it must admit the equivalent of a genetic code, responsible for both its good functioning and its conservation, but also for the adaptation of the social body to the major outside challenges. This code cannot be anything else but the moral conduct as a whole, with its definitions, norms – either oral or written – customs, traditions, in fact the laws themselves.

From this point of view the old problems of the moral conduct change their hierarchies, now the good and the evil becoming a good and a evil of the social body, which not always coincide with the individual right and wrong; moreover, in most cases they are in open conflict, the social good being perceived as a profound individual wrong and vice versa.  We can even quote from Schopenhauer, who says: “Ask an individual to make a choice between his own disappearance or the disappearance of the whole world. No need to say which way the balance will turn”. We notice that the interaction of two live beings operates here, two distinct codes, two sets of different instructions. They are beings in ontological interdependence but with totally different metaphysics, because the social organism definitely lacks the metaphysic, whereas this is fundamental to the human being.

We must underline, that in this paper we will not totally abandon the historical perspective – it will be impossible however – but we will only differently emphasize, changing accent from history to the organicity of the human society.

Beginning with the dawn of civilization, the character of the norms regulating the relations within the social body was perceived as preponderantly transcendental. Gods were not only the source of all the norms, but tireless, they were also watching their putting into practice in all the details of the social life. Based on the sentiment of fear, the moral perceived, sprung out of this state of things, was a guarantee of the homogeneity and acceptable functioning of the social organism, fundamentally indifferent to the anonymous individual destinies.

Let us remember that the first known code of laws, the Hammurabi's Code, contained in its essence the imperative: “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” . So we can easily imagine the catastrophe drawn over a group of people when a certain individual had a deviation in his or her behavior, blamable even if an accidental one. Interesting to notice that even the semantics of the words “Hamm”: meaning family and God as well and “rabi”: meaning large, was a guarantee of the transcendental origin of the norms. The fear of consequences thus ensured the acceptance, on an individual's level, of all the norms of functioning of the social organism either oral and written codes or religious beliefs. In the situations where the social institutions could not or had not the necessary extent to watch over the movement of all their members, this duty was transferred to the gods, who took over the role of a divine exemplarily - punishing police, always and in all cultures.

Yet history records an “anomaly”: Akhenaton, the Pharaoh who created a unique God who (for the first and last time throughout the centuries) had a unique characteristic as well: he was eminently good and forgiving. What happened then is well known: the whole social body was shaken, the priests' caste, institutions, social classes and people themselves were thrown into uneasiness, uncertainty, confusion and violence, forcing the disappearance of the innovating Pharaoh and the abandonment of the new Akhenaton, a temple – town worshipping that unique God. After that, the social organism returned to its old matrix of functioning.

The first "mutation" of the moral code was recorded by the human society between 1000 - 700 B.C., when the foundations of a new culture were laid by a small but homogeneous and dynamic community of shepherds living in the deep valleys and the pastures of Canaan. They transferred the cause of their so many misfortunes and violence from a divine will to themselves. Let us invoke here the incantations of those common people (not priests!) of the Hebrew people. They were playing their existence at the confluence of two great bellicose empires and for a long time were ceaselessly caught in a kind of violent and merciless game, between an Egyptian plunder and a Babylonian enslavement. Under those circumstances they got to tirelessly repeat to all those daring to listen to them: “It is only you that are guilty for your misfortunes. God is punishing you for your sins”. From here to the original sin decreed by the Old Testament as a stigma and individual predestination, it was just a question of wording and editing.

Thus transferring their lived experiences from orality to the written text, the communities of shepherds in the Canaan Valley laid the foundations of the culture of guilt. Through the New Testament the moral valences of this new culture spread and went deeply into the social body of all the peoples of the Mediterranean region. In the social organism the culture of guilt will consolidate Fear that already – noticed adjuvant of an exceptional value, both ordering and regulating. Because this God is jealous and deeply unforgiving.

Anyway, the human society would not have existed if this sentiment of maximum educational efficiency had not existed: because a diffuse sentiment of fear inoculated into the mass of the society's members makes easier for anyone to assume the behavioral norms. But the culture of guilt produced an innovation: it made a person feel guilty in advance, before daring the initiation of an act considered to be a blamable one. So, guilty both ab initio and in abstracto, an individual had just to humbly subordinate himself or herself to the laws, as an insignificant reward for a long acceptance of his or her ego by the social body as a whole. Up to the modern times, this code will have proved both its efficiency and the elasticity of the adaptation to the existential conditions imposed by time. The essence of those moral rules born out of the culture of guilt was represented in the Moses' Tables of the Law, those Ten Commandments that have remained practically unchanged for almost 2500 years.

Towards the end of the XVII-the century and the beginning of the XVIII-the century, a crisis began to be felt within the communities circumscribed to the European space. A crisis of the conscience, detectable even at the level of the most enlightened minds in the beginning; it became generalized through contamination, at the level of all the social institutions. A century - old gearing was put to work and a legitimate question rose: "What need, however, could motivate the social organism to make the moral code tend to 'mutations' "? Of course, they need to adapt itself to the new environmental conditions, to their challenges and aggressions. These do not depend on time or space – parameters to which collectivities are relatively immune, but they depend on the effective number of members to be integrated and harmonized.

The population from the space mentioned above had already grown about ten times as compared to the period of the debut of the culture of Guilt. Having to handle too large a number of individuals, this type of culture born in and destined to small homogeneous communities proved then to be totally helpless. Within very large societies guilt dissipates enormously, abstracting itself to becoming an element outside the immediate horizon of the individual, who is thus determined to finally look for a new basis of the agreement between him or her and society.

In De inure belli et pacis (1425) Hugo Grotius, the initiator of the natural law prepared the ground for the finishing stroke to be given to the old foundation of the morals. It will be given by John Locke through the secularization of the law and the definitive breach between morals and religion. (He invents, in the second essay from Two Treatises of Government, (1490), the legitimacy of the right to riot, an absolute novelty, strange for that time). A profound crisis will penetrate through that breach into the structure of the social body. That crisis will quickly cover all the institutions of the society, starting with church and ending with all the worldly circles.

 From here to the French Revolution the road was straight and well paved: the social organism inserted a new "mutation" of the moral code: the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the National Assembly of France in 1789, announced to the world the definitive break with the old culture and the debut of a new culture. This change was to thoroughly shake all that seemed to be eternal, provoking disasters to the social, as an earthquake does to nature. The result was that some institutions completely disappeared – the enlightened absolutism while others appeared on the firmament – the representative assemblies. Such a devastating event was it, for both individuals and society as well, that its echo have not ceased to be heard even to this day and age.

But the morals based on right, although solving the adaptation of the social body to the numerical pressure of the subjects, contained in itself the germ of decadence: the morals based on guilt had ascendancy over an individual whereas the morals based on right raised his or her position on the same ontological level as the society's; a society that had dominated him or her since the beginning, to that day. From this new privileged position, corroborated with the resentment accumulated for ages as well, the individual couldn't help infringing on the autonomy of the social organism, in an attempt to subordinate it. Hence all the totalitarian horrors of the last century, the obvious expression of the decadence of the new foundation of the morals.

Based on right, the contemporary society exhausted quickly its internal resources of handling individuals, so that after less than 200 years from that change, the social body's crisis generalized. It is not just a sector crisis, as in isolated situations, when the body must be adapted to accidental challenges; it is not one of the finances, economics, commerce and religious institutions, but also a crisis of the whole. And the most complex sector affected by this crisis seems to be that of the population, as the resultant representative for all the other ones.

The planet has got to be overpopulated with a number of people unsustainable by the known resources. Many personalities of the contemporary world declare themselves to be worried about the dimensions of the phenomenon. They advance  all kind of solutions: Thomas Ferguson - the State Department for the Population, propose  famine and diseases; Henry Kissinger propose world government;  the Initiative for the United Nations Charter ECO92 EARTH propose  any means;  Prince Philip, the Queen Elisabeth’s husband propose  killing viruses, etc. But nobody remarks that the essential attribute of the crisis is not only the amount of too many individuals, but the fact that there are too many individuals essentially useless to the social body. They are not only the disabled ones, but also the numberless cohort of the state bureaucrats, who are not just simple parasites, but paralysis the sound functioning of the social organism. This kind of society, born in such a way as a natural consequence of the culture of right, has to choose between refreshing itself and perishing.

Now we are inevitably on the road leading to a new culture, able to impose a new moral code to the social organism. It can be given the name of the "culture of responsibility", in which every right must be Complimentarily sustained and validated by a responsibility, because the right in itself, emptied by the adjacent responsibility, is one without legitimate. It can be validated as right only accompanied by a responsibility assuring and guaranteeing measure, responsibility equal in substance, but opposite as a behavioral vector. To generate an effect over the social body  attached to this culture, the new norm code must be transferred to the basic cell of the society, which is not "family" any more, as we have always considered, but any limited group with common interests of any kind: economic, religious, cultural, political, etc.

From this point of view, the steps made by Professor Igor Kondrashin are remarkable. He proposes a Universal Declaration of Man’s Responsibilities able to open the road of a new culture for the human society. Only this new "mutation" will be implemented neither simply nor without surprises. Sufficient for us to watch the live organisms in nature and we shall easily notice that there the genetic mutations have always occurred violently, with dramatic consequences over the individuals. Things are not easier when turning to the human society: both the culture of guilt and the culture of right have appeared as a result of long violence.

It is necessary for the human society to save itself, turning from right to responsibility. This means ensuring and imposing to all its subjects’ behaviors to the benefit of the whole. But we are afraid that this will be possible only through most serious social convulsions. It would be wonderful if this was an unrealistic prediction, but we have no arguments to nourish such vain hopes, because nobody can win when fighting against nature.

For the moment, we don’t precise if all that we have discussed above will mean wars, revolutions, killing viruses or nuclear accidents. We only believe that, without all these, the change we suggest here, the change imperatively necessary to our time will be improbable, if not impossible.