Culture and Morality

one

Culture as a Standard for Morality

People need standards for their behavior. We are built to live according to principles, to standards. Of course, God is the only rational and viable basis for morality. So if you reject or ignore Him, how are you going to decide how to live your life?

Some people say that they can come up with their own moral principles for their own lives. But in practice, almost nobody really does this. Instead, what most people do is just follow the crowd.

This kind of hive morality is so pervasive, that some people have even started to take it for granted. You’ll hear things like, “Well, everything is relative to the culture you’re a part of.” Or, “Right and wrong is determined by cultural consensus.” But it’s not true. The group doesn’t decide what’s right, or what’s wrong.

Mob morality is no morality, and much of the time being a good person means standing up for what is right against the mob. Which you’ll never do unless you have some other clear and objective standard for what is truly right, as opposed to just popular.

two

Moral Reformers

The most obvious way we know that morality is not based on cultural consensus is the heroic example of social reformers. These are men and women who courageously stood up to the dominant culture of their time. They stood up for what is right against the culture.

Take for instance Franz Jaegerstatter, who was executed for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. Nearly everyone else in the culture thought taking an oath to Hitler was the right move, but they were wrong and Jaegerstatter was right.

People like Franz show the world that you can’t get your values just from what everyone else is doing. Which means you have to get them somewhere else.

three

Cultural Comparison

Another way we know that no culture is the source of Morality is the way we compare different cultures from an ethical point of view. For instance, we might think our own culture is more moral in its treatment of ethnic minorities than, say, the slaveholding South of the early 19th century, or Nazi Germany during World War II. Or, some people might think that our own culture is less moral when it comes to abortion, or pornography, or the way we relate to the environment as compared to other cultures.

The point is that we instinctively compare different cultures and we say that one culture is more moral than another in some ways or less moral than others in some ways which proves that no culture is its own standard of morality.

Cultures are like every other human thing. They have some good points and some bad points.

But then where do we get that moral system which lets us assess some aspects as morally good and others as morally bad?

four

The Moral Contemptibility of the Herd Mentality

With just a little reflection, everybody realizes that a mere herd mentality is a contemptible thing. A mob mentality causes people to do terrible things.

When you live your life based on “fitting in” with the dominant group, it makes you slavish, mindless. When you spend your life trying to fit in, it makes you intolerant of those who don’t. It makes you condemn unpopular people just because they’re unpopular. It makes you condemn those who are in the minority just because they’re in the minority.

No, the cultural consensus, the cultural norm, what everybody else is doing — that won’t tell you how to be moral. What it will do is stunt your sense of morality, your sensitivity to right and wrong.

If you outsource your code of ethics to the mob, you’ll wake up one day to find out that you’ve supported abominable things, and you will be less than a human being.

five

God as the Only Standard of Moral Goodness

Over the last few meditations, we’ve seen that nothing in creation is morally secure. You can’t trust the world because the world is full of evil things. We can’t trust our decisions and our impulses, because we sometimes make bad choices, and have disordered impulses. You can’t trust the society we live in because even though every culture gets certain things right, it gets certain other things terribly wrong.

So the standard for right and wrong doesn’t come from the world, it doesn’t come from ourselves, and it doesn’t come from other people

So what does that leave? Morality, goodness, rightness, the standard for all that is Something beyond this world, beyond ourselves, beyond other people. The only standard for what is good is God Himself

That’s why Jesus says, “Only one is good, God alone.” Everything else is only good to the extent that it measures up to Him, is like Him, reflects Him, in some small way.

Now we know something else about God. He is a necessary being who gave existence to every other thing that is. He is an Intelligent Being, who organized the whole world. And He is the Standard of Goodness, who invites us to be like Him by drawing close to Him.

We worship a necessary God. An Intelligent God. And we worship a good God.