David Amrock

It’s a problem for the American critic that morality and ethics are an American taboo. Morality is conceived of mostly as a tool of admonishment, to be wielded by the likes of the preacher, while ethics is conceived of as the domain of business regulation, stifling the necessary day-to-day work that keeps the society running. Morality and ethics thus belong to an ordained class of antagonists, whose case is poorly made and unconvincing to the people they mean to speak to. For those of us outside such an ordained class, to speak of morality and ethics in an everyday context comes off as puritanical.

These conceptions of morality and ethics stand in stark contrast to what the words ought to properly represent: not an intrusion on the day’s work, but the thought which ought to motivate that work in the first place; not the purview of the few but of everyone; not a taboo but an open pursuit.

Morality and ethics represent, at bottom, the capacity of people to stop and think about what we’re doing and what ought to be done. Societies tend to impose limits on this capacity, and the American limits include short-term responsibilities and socially imposed risks – chief among them matters of money and employment. Thus we as Americans don’t operate without morality; indeed there are assumptions that quite forcefully drive much of American life, and these would have to be called moral assumptions. What’s crucial is that morality is not up for discussion, so that assumptions remain assumptions – even, or especially, when they run contrary to people’s individual moral instincts.

Hence the usual role of criticism, both professional and otherwise: less moral inquiry than moral regulation. The question American criticism seeks to answer is “is this thing, or this person, good or bad,” where good and bad refer generally to the satisfaction of expectations. It’s important that morality itself is not invoked: rather, the moral perspective of the critic is taken for granted. Criticism thus appears an act of evaluation, often undertaken as if by checklist. (It may be worth noting that the word criticism shares a root with criterion.)

Thus the professional critic – including the art critic, the film critic, and crucially the political critic or pundit – is supposed to operate within the moral parameters of the profession. (I don’t mean to say that all critics do operate within the same parameters, only that there’s a dominant mindset about how critics should operate.)

The moral order critics are ultimately meant to contribute to doesn’t have to be monolithic. In many respects, it could even be ad hoc – after all, the enforcement of moral order is really the enforcement of the position and sensibilities of the individuals doing the enforcing. But in any event, the moral order is the driving force behind criticism: an assumption that things ought to be a certain way, in lieu of any curiosity about how things ought to be.

The objects of criticism in American society thus include restaurants, but not hunger; tactics, but not war; the occasional crooked authority figure, but not the nature of the authority itself. However superficial and tentative social consensus may be, to look outside the bounds of it is thought, if not cause for censure, probably not worthy of attention.

And we can easily see, those of us who live within American culture, how radical critiques of our society are quickly deemed excessive in their hopefulness, impractical in their want, often emotionally resonant but paradoxically irreconcilable with reality. American culture sympathizes with critique, but sympathizes better with silence. The moral folly of the social order, say the wise, is just a fact of life.

It’s fair – in fact, it’s crucial – to say that there can be no such thing as a perfectly just society. It doesn’t follow that people living in a society have no responsibility to improve it. On the contrary, everyone must recognize the need for moral improvement: not just self-improvement, and not just improvement for our own immediate purposes, but for society at large.

Particularly in a time of stubborn political polarization, but really all the time, people should be criticizing their society. This doesn’t mean people should, in the manner of some moralists, rejoice in umbrage and sanctimony. Nor does it mean merely enforcing existing rules. This means people should ask what they want out of life, ask what a person should want, and ask what can be done – even if what can be done seems to be little. This means not just asking whether things comply with moral assumptions, but asking whether those assumptions are valid – in short, it means asking what is the true nature of morality.