OK, I’m really trying not to do the long Twitter thread thing. But let’s start from a tweet.
Rush Limbaugh is a moral monster, of course. ‘Demeritorous’ would be the word. But it’s interesting to think about the semantic fate of ‘moralizing’.
Limbaugh is using the term to mean ‘getting on your high horse’, ‘morally grandstanding’. Now: it is not true that, if someone is sitting on their moral high horse, that gives you a license to torture innocent 3rd parties, and cause them gratuitous pain, as Limbaugh supposes. But it is also interesting that this familiar, derogatory sense of ‘moralize’ isn’t even in the OED, although Google definitions catches it at the primary sense.
You get a hint of it in the examples illustrating the OED entry for ‘moralizing’. The seed idea is: people who moralize – who have that as their characteristic activity – are high-horse jerks.
It’s worth noting as well that the primary sense of the verb, for centuries, is now totally obsolete, washed-out, by derogatory connotation. No one says ‘moralize’ on the model of ‘vaporize’. That is, make moral. It’s tempting to blame modern relativism. Kids coming up these days no longer accept ‘trying to make other people more moral’ as a legitimate goal. It’s coercive and presumptuous! I’m ok, you’re ok. But that isn’t it, I think. The critique of ‘moralizing’ is hypocrisy-based.
High-horse rider are all hypocrites. But this gets crossed with a condensed, Falstaffian ‘cakes and ale’ notion that, in fact, moral perfection is not the best. The best life is not sin-free but contains significant – but non-excessive, as excess goes – amount of sinning.
It isn’t normal to be a saint! Ain’t healthy for average joes to aspire. Hence it’s wrong to bum them out by pointing out they aren’t.
This indulgence-based, lower-the-bar morality is, I think, typically, hierarchical – hence ‘conservative’ – although not necessarily so. You could be perfectly democratic and egalitarian about it. Everyone is allowed to torture the innocent a little. As a treat! But since most people don’t think THEY personally may, permissibly, be tortured, with impunity, as a treat for others, the notion gets folded into a larger ‘the moral law protects me, but does not bind me, whereas it binds, but does not protect, my inferiors’ privilege ethos.
Moral relativism – that conservative bugaboo – proceeds from other premises.
{ 25 comments }
Chetan Murthy 05.28.20 at 2:06 am
It’s not just Limbaugh [spit]: https://twitter.com/JerryFalwellJr/status/1265686470259552256
There’s nothing “moral” about their “moralizing”. Nothing at all.
Tyler 05.28.20 at 4:14 am
I’m just here to give encouragement for John’s return to the blog. Like, retweet, reply, retweet with comment.
John Holbo 05.28.20 at 4:20 am
Thenk you.
Alan White 05.28.20 at 4:43 am
Good post as usual John (the only CTer I’ve ever dedicated a poem to!). Thought-experiment: take any random Moral Majority-er in the 80s and pose them this question: would you ever vote for a Presidential candidate who was a demonstrated serial marital cheater, constantly lied just to promote his/her insatiable ego, professed and boasted about supporting Christianity but showed zero signs of practicing it (and many signs of its opposite), promoted racism and exuded misogyny, etc. etc.–what do you think they’d have said? Well, in the right circumstances I might? This is just how far right from the Moral Majority–as sexist and homophobic as it was then–right-wing Protestants and some Catholics have come. The equivalent to “well, at least Trump is as not quite Satanic as Clinton or Biden!” Talk about aspiring to be Christ-like. . .
John Holbo 05.28.20 at 5:57 am
Thank you, Alan!
oldster 05.28.20 at 9:51 am
“cakes and ale” is from Twelfth Night, so Sir Toby Belchian rather than Falstaffian.
No, you’re the pedant, you moralizer.
Anyhow, yeah, what you say is true. Plus the racial angle, inescapable in the US: the commission of minor sins by a white person is evidence that they are ordinary good people who don’t look down on regular Joe’s.
The commission of minor sins by a poc is evidence that they are shiftless, criminal, capable of any evil, no angel, and deserved to be shot down in the streets.
DavidtheK 05.28.20 at 11:23 am
I have always found moral improvement to be quite hard work – in that it takes a good deal of self mastery, a brave commitment to values, and a real openness to a rigorous analysis of the decisions in front of you. I suspect that many people who prattle on like Limbaugh does; are in fact very lazy (at least in this respect).
@Alan White #4 “…Promote Racicism…” even in the 80’s that there seals the deal. He’s got there vote. Whatever values they had were always tainted by this problem and were always going to be sacrificed to accomplish that goal.
Plucky Underdog 05.28.20 at 12:36 pm
(Moderator — please delete either previous post if mangled, or this post)
Moralizing (moralization) is a transformation in graph theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_graph
John Holbo 05.28.20 at 12:39 pm
Argh. Toby Belch. Of course!
Jeffrey BRANDT 05.28.20 at 12:55 pm
Doug…
I liked your insight.. I dont agree with everything but your thoughts are intriguing….
Great Blog… It kept me reading.!!!!
Aardvark Cheeselog 05.28.20 at 1:45 pm
Precisely. Because the notion of “morality,” at least in English-speaking countries, has been completely redefined to mean “keeping up the right appearance.” So moralizers are of necessity hypocrites. How could it be otherwise?
The notion that the good life involves a certain amount of sin, if it enters into the situation at all, comes from this confusion about morality. If morality is just keeping up appearances, then sin is merely not being bothered with what Miss Grundy thinks.
bianca steele 05.28.20 at 4:27 pm
John Holbo replying to himself every couple of days! It feels like 2014 again!
I wonder what the OP’s argument is supposed to be doing here? There’s a puzzle about how he can be so stupid, from the point of view of people who don’t use the word the way he does, but this seems a lot stronger than what’s needed.
Is it a description of Limbaugh’s psychology? An explanation of how the metaphysical metanarrative that produced him was constructed? A kind of legal defense, of how he simply couldn’t have done otherwise?
As a kind of sociological speculation, it does seem suggestive, but I think it would probably go too far to say it actually describes a historical fact. Surely Limbaugh heard people using “moralizers†in certain ways, to describe certain people, by induction he formed some kind of mental generalization and applied an emotional tenor to it, and now uses it in ways that seem close enough to how he’s heard the word used in the past.
Peter Dorman 05.28.20 at 7:24 pm
I think the hypocrisy claim is a little more specific. It fits into the larger notion that a cultural elite exists which deems itself morally superior to those beneath it. This elite is the “new class” of academics, journalists, artists, celebrity trend-setters, etc., abetted by a traitorous faction of the financial upper stratum — the limousine liberals of Steve Fraser’s book. Moralizing becomes a shorthand for the accusation that you are part of this evil group. But “moralize” is almost the opposite of “moral”. Members of the moralizing group are immoral virtually by definition, since they sneer at common people and attack their deep values. Their moralizing is a corrupt attack on true morality.
marcel proust 05.28.20 at 7:25 pm
One upvote for Tyler’s comment. Why does Mme Waring not also deign to grace us ordinary good people with her
presencelively wit? That is some moralizing that would be well worth reading.alfredlordbleep 05.28.20 at 11:19 pm
footnoting Cheeselog
that is, Mrs. Grundy
[Derived from Mrs. Grundy, a prudish character from the play Speed the Plough (1798) by the English playwright Thomas Morton]
anon 05.29.20 at 2:36 am
If you don’t live in the States you may not be able to figure out Limbaugh’s appeal.
I am (un-)fortunate enough to be able to receive his radio show on one of our local 50,000 watt blasters.
I have to say his show is actually quite entertaining and he is pretty funny. I believe at least 99% of what he says is … wrong. But his presentation is first rate. At least he was the last time I spent an hour or so listening in last fall.
So I guess I can understand his attraction to someone toiling in a dead-end job that does not enable them to WFH.
MisterMr 05.29.20 at 2:29 pm
If you use Freudian concepts, “morality” would be part of the superego, but nobody can be completely squeezed into his/her superego.
Or for those familiar with D&D, it’s the nazipaladine problem: someone who is so obsessed with morals as to become obnoxious, not so much hypocrite.
nastywoman 05.30.20 at 6:12 am
and I had to think for a loooong time if I should comment here – as I am very obviously NOT a very ”moral” person –
but then I though: ”Heck”! -(as I love the word ”heck”) what’s to lose as Mr. Holbo always will forgive me if I write:
”It’s only because these old Trumpers think they can use OUR arguments against US.
But WE ALL KNOW – what they up to!
(with the exception of ph and this… Brexiter whose name I have forgotten and these other ”Trumpers” here)
Jeffrey Kramer 05.30.20 at 3:55 pm
Relatedly, whenever an American policeman or soldier is caught committing some atrocity, the inevitable reaction from the right is, “We can’t expect these men to be Boy Scouts!” I mean, inevitably somebody will use that exact phrase. When it comes to our men in uniform, no invocation of the most minimal of moral standards (“try not to kill innocent people for your pleasure”) is ever minimal enough.
The trip through the OED also reminded me of one of my all-time favorite Medieval quotes. In a collection of tales offered for the use of priests in sermons, there are several supposedly true stories from the animal kingdom, some with obvious moral or theological application which the author is at paints to point to explicitly; the story of how the pelican feeds its brood with its own blood, for example, draws the obvious comment, “this reminds us of Christ’s sacrifice for us,” and some other tale of animal derring-do will be glossed, “this teaches us the beauty of courage,” etc. But the author also includes the story of how a monkey being pursued by a leopard will sometimes toss its own baby to the predator in order to escape with its own life. Having apparently tried and failed to find anything inspirational here, the author was reduced to the gloss, “moraliza sicut placet” or “draw whatever moral you like”; in other words, “you’re on your own with this one.”
George Louis de Verges 05.30.20 at 4:05 pm
OK. ok. I am always late to the party, but good to hear from you, Mr. Holbo.
Orange Watch 05.30.20 at 4:56 pm
I’d be more tempted to suggest the “not necessarily so” is most like to manifest its nominally-not-conservative parallel in not so much an indulgence-based rhetoric, but a pragmatic-based one. See e.g. scornful dismissals of “purity ponies” by self-named liberals and progressives; the rhetorical gist of their derision is not much different than Rushan inveighment against elites in function even if it’s wildly different in form. In either case, the idea that is undermined is the idea that someone outside a hierarchy has legitimacy to criticize them, and the proof held up is a well-poisoning observation that anyone not complicit in those selfsame acts is morally compromised in a deeper sense by unforgivably dangerous and wholly unwarranted hubris.
John Holbo 05.31.20 at 1:15 am
Sorry, late getting to my moderation duties. Now, my cup of coffee.
Jeffrey Kramer 05.31.20 at 2:06 am
@17 “The author was at paints to point to [the moral].” Yes I meant to type “paints”; it wasn’t a typo, it was a portmanteau for “he was at pains, but he was pants at it.”
J-D 05.31.20 at 2:58 am
Hm. So what is to be expected, that they be the opposite of Boy Scouts: unreliable, treacherous, unhelpful, hostile, rude, cruel, disobedient, grim, improvident, cowardly, unclean, and irreverent?
Jeffrey Kramer 05.31.20 at 1:41 pm
Unreliable, improvident: it’s there in “Madman Theory,” that’s how you keep your enemies on their toes!
Treacherous, disobedient, irreverent: When your superiors are just fancy-pants elites, and instead of being on your side they turn against you, just for an occasional murder, you’re entitled to pay them back.
Unhelpful: There’s no point trying to help Those People, they’ll just take what you give them, out of the goodness of your heart, and spit in your face.
Hostile, rude, cruel: Nowadays any man who acts like a man gets called these names; Some of us are sick of having to bow down to political correctness like this.
Unclean: you think you can stand here at the wall, facing this invasion of human filth, and fight them off without getting your own hands a little dirty?
Cowardly: There’s nothing cowardly in shooting them before they shoot you, before they know you’re there, before they’ve had a chance to buy a gun; that’s just smart self-defense; that’s the survival of the fittest.
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