Whither Our Duty-Free Morality

When the young emperor Caligula had recovered from a seemingly near-death paralyzing illness (status epilepticus ?) he summoned a man who was among those who had publicly offered their own lives to the gods to spare the young (then very popular) emperor.

The fellow assumed he would be honored and rewarded for his gesture. Instead, Caligula was angry that this fellow had not ended his life. It was as if he did not really want his emperor to live and even risked divine wrath upon the emperor himself for breaching his bargain with the gods. An assisted suicide ensued. And it became clear to all that Caligula was indeed [redacted] crazy.

I was reminded of that story reviewing the collected tweets of Katherine Maher, a cookie-cutter white liberal who decries her own whiteness, cis-privilege, her inherited guilt for sins against minorities, Native Americans, LGBTQ+ folx, and her harm to the planet itself. It makes one ask why all benefits thus immorally obtained qua white perfidy should not be surrendered. Having made such confessions, how can one in good conscience keep tenure, a large income, nice digs, and a prestige job? Isn't there some moral authority that requires consistency with moral expression?

The beauty of the white liberal moral universe is that there are no gods, an emperor nor any substantive personal moral obligations. The ultimate authority is the opinion of the people who also recite the narrative. A semblance of affirmation, salvation, forgiveness, justification, and sanctity are available through mere membership in the collective, membership obtained by mere recitation of the narrative. There are no moral obligations or duties other than expressing the same set of sensibilities and opinions which only create duties for those outside the elect. The narrative uses words and phrases that sound vaguely moral but really impose no personal duties or inconveniences as do the tenets of conventional religions that have an actual deity and more substantive behavioral criteria.

One can fly often, drive often, air condition a large personal space, entertain only white friends, contribute not a dime to any charity, vote for zoning laws that keep poor people and windmills out of the neighborhood, build a 401(k) using irredeemably inequitable and corrupt late-stage capitalism and yet still claim to be a morally superior person just by keeping up with the patois of the enlightened and regurgitating the narrative in its most current form.

But the white liberal guilt Kabuki has defining blind spots. Liberalism went to war with the "faith & family" ethos that sustained black Americans under de jure and lingering de facto segregation. Liberals created anomie within large urban reservations for the new underclass they created. Liberals pulled up the drawbridge and closed escape routes by gutting public education & standards and crippling law enforcement, all steps intended to enforce dependence and sustain chaos. Oddly enough, white liberal guilt does not apply to the consequences of specifically white liberal policies and ideological products that have led to disaster because (a) white liberal intentions are always pure and (b) the plight of the black underclass is really the fault of lower-middle-class whites who refuse to shed their whiteness. Even Caligula could see that is completely nuts.

But the preservation of this fictitious cognitive bubble requires vicious, ad hominem, gutfighting attacks on the unenlightened precisely because of the inherent fragility of the narrative. In this world, the kid who noticed the emperor's nudity would have been banned from X/Twitter and Facebook, attacked at school and his parents made unemployed.

Something born of narcissism, intellectual laziness, and a puerile non serviam that people used to outgrow in adulthood is now a large-scale utterly ridiculous cult that empties its members and makes an enemy of discourse and truth, science, the lessons of history, and the realities of human nature. It sometimes feels like America is a coach hitched to a vast team of lemmings running in lockstep, inexorably headed for the cliff.