COMMENTARY: A one sentence moral guide

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.) UNDATED _ It is hard to miss our moral crisis. The pollsters and the public relations people advertise it […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ It is hard to miss our moral crisis. The pollsters and the public relations people advertise it every day.


We don’t care, they inform us, about low sexual morality in high places. We are not upset about the Jesse James-style of fund raising prevalent among politicians. We may not even worry about treason, unjustified prosecutions, or perjury.

We are portrayed as becalmed far out at sea and we long ago tossed our moral compass overboard. No wonder we don’t know in which direction to go.

How, if we are that way, did we get that way? Has the advertising/public relations complex constructed a great stage set on which, as in the movie”Truman,”they produce a superficial version of national life. On this fantasy island roam actors programmed to give pollsters the answers they want.

These results are reported back to us spectators in the real world as if they were our own feelings.”We’ve never been polled”or”I don’t feel that way,”ordinary people complain.

In the true world of daily existence, average people are faced with moral dilemmas every day. Their common thread is truth.

At work: Is the truth of me in what I make or sell?

At home: Is the truth of me in my faithfulness to my spouse?

At play: Is the truth of my abilities in my performance?

You can use the word cheat to describe our failure in any of these areas.

So the advertising/public relations complex _ far more dangerous than the military/industrial complex against which President Eisenhower warned _ tells us that cheating is OK, too, because winning is all that counts.


Ordinary people are numbed by the pervasive nerve gas emitted from this morally indifferent complex every day. They need a guide to help them to differentiate themselves from the almost overwhelming false or altered imagery in which they find themselves.

Here is a simple moral survival kit by which to test the contemporary moral substitutes for phoniness. It is a one sentence way of identifying the forked-tongue syndrome in moral dialogue. Ask yourself:”Is this alleged noble slogan a complete sentence or not?” Let us illustrate the incomplete moralism of the day by the incomplete sentences in which they are phrased. For three statements heard many times each day in America only seem to say something when their lack of objects betrays their lack of objectivity.

They are: the”freedom to choose,”the”right to know,”and the consequent”desire to move on.” These sentences are left to hang in the air as if they had moral meaning without supplying the object that would really define its rightness or wrongness for us.

The”freedom to choose”is unfinished if we do not ask what is being chosen. The accent is on freedom but the morality comes from what is chosen. No wonder they leave it out so that you need not think of what you are choosing in, say, a partial-birth abortion.

The”right to know”should be governed by an object: Know what? If you’re never specific, you never come to grips with the morality that rests in the object. Right is a powerful and distracting word. Does this right really exist or is it one of the greatest public relations slogans ever devised?

Let us”put this behind us,”we are often told, and”move on.”Nobody ever asks where. When politicians use this noble sounding phrase they really want to change the subject, keep you from looking hard at what they’ve done, and escape without being investigated. Move on has no definite object because it just means out of here, out of this morally dubious mess I am in.


This test is absolutely guaranteed to deflate the false world with which we are surrounded and allow us to find common-sense morality once again.

DEA END KENNEDY

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