"The Degeneracy of Manners and Morals"

The warlike "Us vs. Them" mentality that is now endemic to American political culture has yielded a lot of ugly fruits.

Because the U.S. government is apparently addicted to war, I often ponder a profound and eloquent reflection written by James Madison, author of the U.S. Constitution.

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

—James Madison, Political Observations, Apr. 20, 1795 in: Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, p. 491 (1865)

Partisanship in the United States is at least as old as the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr that resulted in Hamilton’s death in 1804. Partisan rivalry reached a fevered and ugly pitch in 1856, when Preston Brooks, Representative of South Carolina, beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner almost to death with a cane on the floor of the Senate.

However, since 2001, a war mentality has placed us in a state of hyper-vigilance and readiness to be angry and aggressive. This has engendered a steady “degeneracy of manners and morals” in the United States.

We see it whenever we watch news shows in which people who are supposed to be educated and civilized adults scream at the top of their lungs at other and use the most intemperate and ugly language in the entire English lexicon.

Screaming at each other on The View

We see it in the frequent acts of violence perpetrated on streets, in subways, and even in schools.

Man about to murder woman on train.

We see it in the general lack of modesty and restraint in the way people carry themselves and speak in public.

We see it in U.S. Congressmen signing bombs to be shipped to Ukraine and used on young Russian soldiers who will be missed by their parents, wives, and friends when they are blown to smithereens by American munitions.

U.S. Senator Bob Casey et al. signing shells for killing Russians.

We see it in U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw telling a British reporter, “If I ever meet him [Tucker Carlson] I’ll fuckin’ kill him,” adding “No seriously, I would kill him.”

Such “degeneracy of manners and of morals” is often blamed on the waning influence of Christianity in American public life, but I suspect that this is only one contributing factor.

The war mentality that germinated in 2001 fell on very fertile ground in the United States due to cultural and societal influences that had already been in play since the 1960s.

Nowadays when we hear the expression “good breeding,” we think of it as quaint, outmoded, effete, and even pretentious. Through a steady diet of popular culture and especially Hollywood films, we have been conditioned to believe that “authentic self-expression” is the admirable trait.

A man of “authentic emotions” is one who expresses his indignation, his anger, and even his rage. The classical Greek and Christian virtues of prudence and temperance have been supplanted by the vulgar notion that it is virtuous to give free rein to one’s emotions, no matter how intemperate they are.

In my lifetime, the cultural milestone that expressed the triumph of authentic degeneracy was the 1994 cinema release of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Because the film was so stylish, with such sparkling dialogue, it enabled us to take gleeful delight in murder, torture, debasement, drug overdose, and sodomy-rape. We laughed out loud when one of the characters (played by John Travolta) accidentally blows the head off of a young black boy in a car, splattering his brains all over the interior.

I wrote a negative review of the film in the British Salisbury Review, and all of my friends thought I was a hopeless square for doing so. Maybe I was. However, as callow and awkward as I was, I believe that my perception was correct. In the undeniably brilliant work of cinema, I perceived the beginning of the end of American manners and morals. Thirty-one years later, I see little evidence that my perception was wrong.