7 - A Moral Order

Summary

BRITAIN LIVES TODAY, WE ARE TOLD BY SOCIOLOGISTS, AMIDST 'a jumble of ethical precepts, now bereft of their significance… within a wasteland littered with the debris of broken convictions'. For a world where the ideal is one of personal accumulation, the good of the individual is set in opposition to the good of the community, as witness the consequences of our dominant idols, the motor car and the television set; and the good of the community goes increasingly to the wall. No matter what lip service to the general weal may continue to be paid in Sunday observances or other ritual proclamations, we become communities without any visible means of moral support. Every orthodoxy notwithstanding, we are confronted with an ever more urgent need to find a new morality, a new means of humanising man in society, a new civilisation: or else shake ourselves finally to pieces. So widely accepted are such thoughts that they must sound banal here. They will be excused, perhaps, for the contrast which they offer with the materially simple but morally not defenceless societies we are considering now. With them the situation was evidently different

Here, of course, I am speaking mainly of those ‘stateless tribes’ who have seemed most ‘primitive’, most ‘helpless’, to observers from outside. Their characteristic ethos was consciously restrictive because it had to be so. It drew its power from a struggle for the mastery of nature formed and then enclosed by the precedents of experience. The result might be technological poverty, material backwardness, a failure to enlarge. These were its negative aspects. But it was not poverty in certain other ways, notably moral and artistic. On the contrary, the very strenuousness of their experience seems often to have given these societies an inner tension and creativeness which emerged in artistic triumphs that were morally inspired. It was as though the awareness of limits on the possible, or rather on the permissible, flowered in a sense of controlled freedom expressed most visibly by their dancing and their experiments in sculptural form: a controlled freedom which we, abandoning a community morality, may find difficult to conceive today.

This is not to say that these societies lacked a dynamism of change or failed to respond to it.