Yin and Yang, Sleaze and Moralizing

By LANCE MORROW

A study released in October reported that Americans have less sex than everyone thought they did. In 1994 they were probably too busy moralizing.

More exactly, they may have been too caught up in the uniquely double- jointed exercise of 1) worrying about the deterioration of American morals, and 2) savoring every lurid manifestation of the decadence. Americans, in other words, found themselves torn between enjoying filthy pleasures guaranteed by the First Amendment and wistfully admiring the Singapore caning. By such almost unconscious dialectics, the people worked at sifting out the rules for a society paganized by sheer information and searching for a moral grid. Where are the morals to discipline the freedom that permits the sleaze in an inside-out culture of exposure? Moral processing is now the chief American art form and preoccupation.

This was the year when Puritanism (the oldest ghostly American mind-body reflex) went into business with advanced post-Modernist integrated id-sleaze. That was it: the American superego officially merged, at last, with the American id. Or anyway the two were fighting it out like cats in a gunnysack.

To see a small dramatization of the merger, look at the best movie of 1994 (some critics say): Pulp Fiction, wherein professional killers engage in 1) savagely flippant violence, and 2) boyishly earnest moralism. A torrent of casual, brutal obscenity flows through discussions marked by a strange, scholastic nicety.

The metaphysical catfight engaged moral extremes that put William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues on the best-seller list for the entire 52 weeks, while the world watched a regular Ring cycle of gaudy, televised, weirder- than-fiction unvirtue. The Nicole Brown Simpson murder was merely the most riveting segment.

The dialectic is disorienting. On the one hand, the present time seems dramatically immoral, one of the sleazier, stupider, more violent periods of American history. On the other hand -- or perhaps merely as a result -- Americans have become the world's most relentless moralizers, engaged in moral improvisation and soul-searching with a focused anguish not seen since the days of St. Anthony and the desert monks.

The most intimate dimension of privacy, even the most disreputable (the more shameful the better, in fact), goes public. The significance of the phenomenon (the messiest personal or aberrational details of lives blown up to big- screen public dimensions) cannot be overstated. When people speak of the negativity of the time, this is what they mean -- the disassembly (usually electronic) of proportions and expectations: the energy released by a world turned inside out. The change may be an improvement. Sometimes it merely works like a slow-motion nuclear device dropped into the social order.

Almost every major story brought forth some enormity or disclosed new possibilities of the depraved -- the macro-unthinkable (Rwanda, for example); or the micro-unthinkable (Susan Smith and her murdered children). What is human nature? What is one's duty in the face of evil? Or simply, how low are we going to sink? The conscience wanders around Bluebeard's Castle as if channel surfing and finds an inexhaustible number of doors opening upon secret horrors to be appalled by. Click. The global intimacy of television news raises the Wilsonian question in a new way: What is the geographical range of our moral responsibility? I have a moral responsibility to help someone being assaulted on my downtown bus. Do I have the same obligation to people in Sarajevo?

In 1994 some scientists proposed that every healthy brain has a moral center located in the frontal lobes at the top of the brain. The scientists theorized that if this headquarters of right and wrong is damaged, the person goes morally haywire.

So 1) the news suggests that guns, drugs, television, moral relativism, welfare, violence, sheer viciousness, careerism, testosterone, greed, hedonism, selfishness, loss of community, isolation and loneliness, too much wealth, too much poverty, racism, the victim's mentality, the death of shame, the dismantling of expectations, or other forces have moronized the culture and obliterated the moral center of the American brain.

But 2) the increasingly passionate moralism of Americans suggests the moral faculty has never been healthier. (Or maybe passionate moralism is itself a disorder of the brain?)

Or is it possible that moralizing in the late 20th century has become just another variety of entertainment -- even a decadent kind of symbiosis in which finger waggers and sleazers have gone into partnership with one another: the moralizing becomes the inevitable chorus to the trashiness, and the sleaze is indispensable to the moralizing. Yin and yang.

Nineteen ninety-four was a mere beginning. Wait until you see 1995, when moral processing will evolve into the full-scale American pre-millennium culture war, leading toward the election of 1996. The new American civil war over culture and morals will continue for four years after '96, under the Gore-Powell Administration, and reach a climax in the year 2000, when the baby-boom generation will start to be eligible, thank God, for early retirement. Things will calm down after that.