Contest Over the Moral Code of the West Emerges as a Foundational Question on the Road to a New Politics

There were many issues on the table in the 2024 election. The most fundamental one, though, was the contest between the moral code of the West and its chief rival. Nothing is more central to Western civilization than the idea that moral requirements must be universalizable. That is the idea that a moral rule doesn’t count as such unless it applies in the same way to everyone in the same circumstances. The alternative is tribalism. That’s the idea that there’s one code for Tribe A and another for Tribe B. Tribalism is how virtually everyone has thought about moral duties throughout history. Universal moral principles are the great exception. When Jeremy Bentham said that, in ethics, “everyone counts as one and no one counts as more than one,” that felt like a revolutionary principle. So did Immanuel Kant’s principle of universalizability, under which an act is morally acceptable only if it can be made into a universal law.Those were foundational principles in the Enlightenment, but they had merely plagiarized on what had been said 1,800 years before. Universal moral principles arose from the West’s religious traditions, from a thick sense of duties to strangers in Judaism and Christianity’s universalism.“For in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,” Saint Paul writes in the Epistle to the Galatians, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.”Since then that’s defined the Western idea of morality. No one would claim that Christianity has always lived up to its moral code. The lapses were frequent and terrible. The lapses, though, could be identified by reference to its principles. When Christians persecuted non-Christians, they had betrayed their own code. Within tribalism, no evil had been done. The relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition and universalizability is evidenced by the fact that the latter arose in the West. Yet the scientist would want something more. He’d want a control group, and a finding that people who didn’t take the drug came down with the disease.So he’d want evidence that a post-Christian society would abandon universal moral codes. That is just what has happened in elements within the Democratic Party. Once a party rooted in religious faith, the Democrats now embrace tribalism.The turning point came in the 2015 CNN Democratic presidential debate when the candidates were asked to choose between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.” One might have thought that only a racist would judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character.Have we come that far from the Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech? Yet of the Democratic candidates only Jim Webb said that all lives matter, and he left the Democratic Party not long afterwards. Since then, the left has defined good and evil tribally, in terms of victims versus victimizers.If one were on the wrong side, nothing was owed him. One might be a struggling male in a feminized society, but as he was the enemy that didn’t matter. One might be dying from what Angus Deaton called the diseases of despair, of unemployment and loneliness, but that was unworthy of notice if you were white.In the 2024 election, voters recognized that leading voices in the Democratic party had abandoned universalizability and the goal of the common good, in favor of the identity politics of tribalism. Tribe A mattered, not Tribe B. Seen in that light, their hostility to religion is perfectly understandable.The tribalist recognizes his great enemy, and says “get thee behind me.” The West’s Judeo-Christian tradition is thus the source of our moral intuitions. Its rival, tribalism, doesn’t even count as a moral theory. For moral non-believers, that might make religious belief seem attractive.It won’t make believers out of them, however. That requires something more — the belief, say, that God revealed himself at Sinai or that 2,000 years ago a child was born at Bethlehem and that He has made all the difference.

Contest Over the Moral Code of the West Emerges as a Foundational Question on the Road to a New Politics

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