Conservative Morality is Not Moral or Ethical (Book Notes: The Cheating Culture)
In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, David Callahan argues that just the opposite may in fact be the case:
It’s now more obvious than ever that being moral in narrow conservative terms is no protection from sinning in other ways. Take someone like Bernard Ebbers. As head of WorldCom, Ebbers was known as one of the most religious CEOs in the high-tech sector. He invoked God regularly in speeches and press interviews, and started each board meeting with a prayer. He was a deacon at his Baptist church, where he also led a weekly bible study class. According to those who took the class, he was remarkably fluent in scripture. If someone missed the class, Ebbers would be on the phone to see if they were okay.
And yet, Ebbers presided over the largest fraud in U.S. history, a fraud that wrought massive financial pain on present and future retirees across America. After the revelations of this crime, a tearful Ebbers told his congregation: “More than anything else, I hope this doesn’t jeopardize my witness for Jesus Christ.”
It sounds as though Ebbers was more concerned with whether public knowledge of his crimes would harm his ability to evangelize his religion than he was with whether his crimes caused actual financial harm to his employees. What a great guy, huh? He may have been a poster boy for traditional sexual and Christian morality, but that didn’t stop him from helping defraud those around him.
Or look at John Rigas, who headed Adelphia Communications, one of the largest cable television companies in the United States. The son of Greek immigrants, Rigas was a regular church goer guided by social conservatism. He raised his four children in a small town in upstate New York with a strict set of traditional values. His sons went to work with their father after graduating from the nation’s best colleges and they, too, became pillars of the upstate community where Adelphia was headquartered. The sons, like the father, were social conservatives. No porn channels were alIowed on Adelphia’s cable system.
A very different morality guided the Rigases in business. By the time investigators caught on, the Rigases had appropriated hundred of milions of shareholder funds for their personal use through various shady loans and frauds. Prosecutors accused father and sons of “systematically looting” Adelphia...
Pornography is bad, so they were pillars of their community in part for not allowing porn on their cable channels. Fraud and embezzlement aren’t so bad, though, so looting their own company and defrauding others was consistent with their conservative, religious morality.
Philip Anschutz is yet another business leader who publicly embraced religion and “family values” ‘ while indulging in greed and financial chicanery at the office. A billionaire who is the largest owner of movie screens in America, Anschutz is a religious man who has crusaded against homosexual rights and the medical use of marijuana. He has bankrolled a variety of Christian conservatives and invested in prayer radio.
Yet as the founder and chairman of Qwest Communications, a telecommunications firm, Anschutz ranks among the most corrupt insiders of the late 1990s. He sold nearly $2 billion of Qwest stock as it plunged in value from $63 a share to $3. As these sales took place, many in a secretive fashion, Qwest was encouraging its employees to hold on to their own stock and to build their retirement plans around 401(k)s heavy with Qwest shares. Anschutz was later investigated by Eliot Spitzer’s office and eventually agreed to give up $4.4 million in illegal gains from his shady business dealings without admitting any wrongdoing.
Homosexuality and drugs are bad, so he’s a good person for campaigning against them; deceiving his own employees in a manner designed to help him retain his massive wealth isn’t so bad so he felt he could do that while consistently upholding his conservative, religious morality.
Do you notice a pattern in these stories? There is one, if you look closely. In each case, what these men opposed and what their morality opposed involved private, consensual behavior which only harmed those involved (if anyone at all) — outsiders and innocent bystanders wouldn’t be significantly affected. The crimes which these men committed and which their conservative, religious morality either did not prevent or did not oppose involved public behavior which did significantly harm others — and for the sake of personal, private gain.
This suggests very strongly that the conservative, religious morality that men like these favor may be seriously deficient when it comes to considering how actions impact others. If we look at the causes that animate the Christian Right the most, what do we find? Causes like gay marriage, homosexuality, contraception, stem-cell research, evolution, sex education, and others don’t involve things that genuinely harm others. Abortion can at least be argued in good faith as something that causes harm, but the conservative religious position on this is not obviously and unambiguously one that prevents harm to others.
Let’s take a look at the causes which the Christian Right supports in a positive manner, opposing liberals and liberal Christians: invading and occupying Iraq, cutting back on welfare for the poor, cutting back on scientific research, ignoring evidence that global warming is happening, allowing the government to arrest without warrants and torture suspects, opposing the use of condoms in anti-AIDS programs, and so forth. In all of these cases, the harm caused to others is undeniable and unambiguous. Often, this harm is excused in the name of adhering to a narrow sexual morality designed to preserve some sort of spiritual purity — regardless of what happens physically.
So when the Christian Right talks about “values,” we have to keep firmly in mind exactly what sorts of “values” they have in mind: the value of denying full political and social equality to gays, but not the value of being a responsible company owner who treats employees well; the value of denying people access to marijuana for medical reasons or access to accurate sexual medical information, but not the value of telling employees the truth about the financial health of the company; the value of never having an illicit sexual liaison with someone other than one’s spouse, but not the value of telling the truth about foreign policy, not the value of not arresting people without warrants, and not the value of not torturing suspects.
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Comments
Perhaps only individuals have ethics/morals, when it comes down to it. Groups can be/are amoral, or at least the values espoused by the whole might not be held in equal value to what its members hold. This seems especially true of religions and political groups, IMO. Only individuals can be criminals, at least in terms of sentencing and determining guilt. We can fine a company, but we can’t send it to jail.
And of course what is good for the geese could be mortal sin to the gander. Joe Conservative doesn’t see homosexuality as a private matter, but as a “sin against god”. And of course that makes it Joe’s business. Because if he tolerated Adam and Steve, well gosh, he might as well be in bed WITH them! (illustrative, sarcastic)
My solution: put white and blue collar criminals in the same prisons. That will teach them to steal BILLIONS from their customers. Treat embezzlers like the common thieves they are. After stories about businessmen’s marriages to their gang banger cellmates get out, things would change.
Moral inconsistency isn’t unique to conservatives, but they have the most glaring examples. They have more abortions and divorces than their more liberal counterparts.
Try telling a fundamentalist that their beliefs are ‘just beliefs’ and not facts. They won’t hear it. Somewhere on the net is a fundamentalist saying the about liberals.
What’s ironic is that this complaint against hypocrisy–which largely is what we are talking about here, since even conservatives are opposed to fraud, financial chicanery and unnecessary wars, at least in theory–is perhaps the most frequently made point by the main character of the gospels. Be not like them, he says, who make a big of show of being religious, but who in reality are like whitewashed tombs filled with dead man’s bones. Be not like them who strain for gnats but swallow camels whole. Ebbers better hope that atheists are right and that Christianity is really, beneath all the professions of faith, just a fairy tale.
While I do lament the hypocrisy highlighted by the astute observer he has used isolated incidents to indict a whole ideology and persons who believe in it!
I am a conservative but do not try to impose my beliefs on anyone. Unfortunately, many of my peers are not like that. We tend to be irrational and only view the world through our glasses. But many liberals do the same as well. Maybe we should find as Horace put it, “The middle way,” and be more tolerant and understanding of one another, instead of pointing fingers and lashing out.