Glenden BrownMorality - internal versus external
Over at Pandagon, Amanda has an amazing post about the FLDS. She describes the FLDS compound as a rape farm. But, my favorite part where she describes the radical fundamentalist mindset:
It’s really their worldview, that posits that men rule over women and children, that is the path towards growing and swapping teenage girls for rape and child-bearing/housework purposes (and to show other men who the top dogs are). Whereas the path that legalizes gay marriage is one that’s born out of a moral centeredness, a true belief in fairness and equality. I get that this is confusing for a lot of fundies—as Sara demonstrated in her remarkable series, one of the most disturbing things about the dogmatic, hyper-religious, authoritarian worldview is it makes it hard for followers to develop internal moral compasses (of the sort that might make you object to raping 13-year-olds under the guise of “spiritual marriageâ€) because it’s believed that morality is just a series of rules imposed from the outside. Which isn’t to say that fundies don’t have internal moral compasses—I think people have them somewhat naturally, and they can exist even with pressure from the outside not to exist—but just that it’s a worldview that doesn’t have much room for conceptualizing that.
In Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, he suggets a series of techniques a person can use to resist pressure to behave in immoral ways - learned from his observations at the Stanford Prison Experiment and interviews with guards at Abu Ghraib. One of his key points is “I will assert my unique identity.” When our identity is subsumed into a larger community identity, we are less able to resist situational influences that would inspire us to act in immoral ways.
The FLDS are different than other fundamentalist groups in terms of degree. The social isolation and fear of the outside world, removing or reducing marks of individual identity, enforcing strict obedience to authority. The Christian subculture in the US - created by the Christian fundamentalist and evangelical world. The Christian subculture takes almost from mainstream culture and “sanitizes” it. If you mainstream publishers put out a book called “The Eight Secrets of Happy Marriages” you’ll see a Christian publisher put out a book called “The Eight Secrets of Happy Christian Marriages.” Where subculture christians have chosen to live “in but not of” mainstream culture, the FLDS have chosen complete isolation.
The fear of contagion from mainstream culture pervades fundamentalist thought - often expressed in terms of a desire to maintain the purity of fundamentalist culture. The obsession with moral purity, and female sexual chastity, seem part and parcel of fundamentalism. The FLDS resolved that dilemna by marrying girls as soon as the hit puberty and began to sexually mature. Other fundamentalist groups, more discerning concering institutional pedophilia, deal with the dilemna through purity balls, silver rings and abstinence pledges. All these efforts are about creating external pressure to conform to specific moral standards rather than helping kids develop their internal moral sense.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I find your internal/ external matrix to be very useful in my thinking about parenting. My observation is that there is a “Not on my watch” parenting style that holds that your duty is to deliver them whole and intact to the door of adulthood. I take it that the purity balls, and abstinence pledges fit into that style.
And there is another style, which is to wish and even orchestrate new experiences, new challenges for your kids. Your job is to guide, to supervise, but you’ll know you’ve done your job right when they tell you what you can do with all your good advice. The one style arguably produces good kids; the other produces good adults.
The difference is philosophical, but it is also strategic. It is just simply a better bet that my child will not get into or stay in the kind of trouble that parents fear because she has someplace better to be than because she’s not allowed.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:17 am
AD - FWIW, I’m not worried about your kids having problems. I have confidence they will turn out just fine.
In When Sex Goes to School, the author talks about the internal style, describing it is a process of getting kids ready to make decisions by teaching them to make decisions and trusting them to do it. The idea behind it holding that adults have to make decsions and should practice making them as kids. In this model, in some sense, the granddaddy of all decisions is the decision to have kids of your own.
I like your description of the strategic aspect - if we show the kids in our lives that they have better things to do, they won’t get into trouble.
We can also talk about the idea of boundaries rather than limits. A boundary can change, it can be permeable, for a kid who demonstrates he/she can be trusted, the boundary is larger than for one who demonstrates he/she makes bad decsions. Lakoff talks about the nurturant parent versus strict father models - the nurturant parent wants to teach their child to make their own decisions to be self-sufficient and be able to face unexpected situations on their own. By contrast, the strict father expects to teach a child the rules they have to follow but doesn’t really prepare a child to face unexpectd situations.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Glenden - That’s an interesting angle on it. I’ve heard religionists squawking for years that if you get rid of religion, then there will be no “absolute morality.” But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. What if, instead of training people to obey an external, absolute moral authority, we help them develop their own moral compasses? Surely that’s a better approach because it actually makes people more moral (not just obedient).
Also, I thought this was the best part of Amanda’s post:
April 14th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Lucidity - there’s been some minimal research on it, but what I’ve seen has shown that atheists actually have significantly lower rates of divorce, domestic violence, drug abuse etc. than devout Christians. If nothing else, such findings are provocative. There’s also a living example in Northern Europe where rates of religious belief are at historical lows, as are crime rates, divorces, STIs, and other social pathologies.
I prefer the notion of teaching people to develop their own internal moral compass. It’s harder than teaching a set of rules to follow but is much more empowering.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
We were talking about kabbalah in church yesterday, and there was an anecdote where one rabbi is holding out on a point of law against the rest of the council. I’m not going to get the story exactly right, but the gist is that the lone rabbi says, if I am right, then may the temple walls show that they agree. Whereupon the temple walls begain to collapse on the rabbis. Another of the council freezes the walls mid-collapse by saying, we are having a discussion here. Who are you to butt in?
The point is that the law has ALREADY been given to us, literally or symbolically, on Mt. Sinai. That transfer has ALREADY occurred. Thenceforth, the law is no longer externally imposed but created continually in community.