Who Needs Morals?

Cambridge student Richard Jones, with the help of Mike Teece and Katherine Kirkham, offers some tips from the receiving end.

Moral values are the object of much distrust and thorny debate. But most people would admit that they are in some way important. Even the Youth of Today (henceforth referred to by the acronym YOT) would tend to agree, though our idea of morality may differ from that of our parents.

Oscar Wilde asserted: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.” H.G.Wells wrote: “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” These two gems highlight the one quality most commonly associated with the notion of morality since time immemorial: hypocrisy. Very rarely, it seems, do you see one without the other? Of course, we all know that this is not what true morality should be. True morality is extremely simple: “Love thy neighbour as thyself. Or, in more modern parlance, it's all about respect (man).”

The next question is, do children need to have morality passed on to them? Are human beings, and particularly YOT members, fundamentally bad, in need of the Stern Corrective Discipline of a classic education.

Or, conversely, are human beings inherently wonderful, angelic beings, corrupted only by the evils of social conditioning and bad parenting?

The answer's somewhere in between: human beings are both good and evil. A moral education should strive to bring out the good and 'redirect' the evil. (One can't use the word repress these days.)

Who should impart moral education? In the past, in our society, the Church played a leading role. This is no longer the case for the vast majority of people, so the burden is concentrated on parents and teachers. Teachers have enough on their plates already, and are often fearful of offending minority sensibilities, so the poor old parents bear the brunt. How should they approach this terrible responsibility?

Unfortunately, a Stern Moral Upbringing often has the reverse effect of the one intended. Rules, when imposed, become attractive chiefly for their potential for being broken.

Frustratingly – or amusingly – a liberal, laissez-faire approach to moral upbringing sometimes produces rebellion of a different kind. One antipodean

friend of mine, child of vaguely pink, baby-booming parents writes: “Why in my teens did I become a fanatical convert to Catholicism of the most sex-fearing, heretic-burning, old-fashioned kind? Surely this was a rather desperate contrived attempt to free myself from the almost weightless yoke of my parents’ comfortable, boomer morality?” It would seem parents can’t win.

Or can they? experience is that moral values are more successfully imparted by example than dictat. It's been Far be it from me to provide any universal nostrums, but my said a million times, but the most important thing for a parent to do is to love their child. Love produces a response of love. And love, after all, lies in the basis of all morality.

Elders and betters should stand if not back, then at least aside, to allow the YOT to develop their own standards as a product of their own experience. These make far more sense, and are much more readily adhered to, than arbitrary injunctions from on high. To a certain extent experimentation, stupidity, even immorality are part and parcel of the age-old process of growing up. Within reason, of course.

And anyway, who says that passing on moral values is an exclusively top-down traffic? The YOT may have more to teach their 'elders and betters' than the latter would like to admit. And not just about computer games and rave culture. In many respects we outshine previous generations on moral issues – viz our concern for the environment, the gradual but steady erosion of racial, sexual and class prejudices, and our rejection of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness.

Nonetheless, we’re not that bad really (mostly), and if passing on moral values became an issue for all the family, then we might get rid of a lot of the antagonism and angst involved.

Richard Jones. For a Change. 2001.