Moral Compass
Life's Navigation Tool
From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
Moral compasses
A set of beliefs or values that help guide ethical decisions, judgments, and behavior : an internal sense of right and wrong.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moral%20compass
Your author’s everyday wear compass. It just points north.
Everyone has a moral compass of one sort or another, but they vary from person to person based on things like the culture they live in, their age, what they learn from friends and relatives, their life experiences, and an X factor of what's inside their very soul. (To those who would reply that we don't have souls, I would refer to the comment of C. S. Lewis, to wit: “You don't have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.”)
Without a moral compass your rudder of destiny is useless.
The Rudder of Destiny
A ship crossing an ocean is something of a metaphor for life. If it's going from, say, London, England to New York in the U.S.A. it must follow a particular heading, but if the heading is changed a few degrees it will be found far from New York. What does this have to do with life? Small changes that we make in our lives may have large effects after a n…
As our culture here in the USA has been decaying so has the moral compass of the citizenry. More and more stores are reluctant to leave merchandise on display on shelves and feel the need to keep items locked up. California is famous for not prosecuting shoplifters for stealing less than, if memory serves, less than $1,000 worth of goods, so large scale thefts started taking place.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ~ John Adams
When I was in school the major problems were running in the halls and chewing gum, now we have criminality, lousy education and school shootings. (For sure, we didn't have school shootings until after the passing of the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990, but there is more to it than that.) Just why is it that the moral compass has gone wonky?
I had a co-worker who had worked in Saudi Arabia for some time. He said that, given the climate, many merchants would move much of their merchandise outdoors, and at the time of public prayers the jewelers would simply put a cloth over their wares while gone. No doubt a thief would be concerned about being sent to chop chop square to be relieved of a hand, and I don't think you could do that in the US. When arguing with a Saudi the Saudi supposedly said to him, “I can walk through any part of any city in my country, at any time of the day or night. Can you say the same?” (Note to readers; I am not Muslim.) Different culture and moral compass (in many ways) than ours.
Where Have All The Morals Gone
Growing up in the fifties and sixties we had these quaint things called morals. Now they are often seen as passe or corny, and blocking personal freedom, but they did tend to keep life on a more even keel. Nowadays we may be reviled as hypocrites by those saying that that's just an illusion and morality was as bad back then, but it was different.
It does need to be said that the US is still a relatively high trust society. In most places you don't need bars on your windows, whereas in many parts of the world you do.
"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." ~ George Washington
Recently we've all been hearing about terrible things being done, the trafficking of people for profit, the effective slavery of the trafficked, rapes of illegal immigrants, even human sacrifice. It sounds like people without a moral compass.
It's not like politicians don't have a moral compass, assuming they have one the problem is that it's hard to know which way it points. No one knows what the moral compass of another person points, and often not even their own. Unfortunately many with inoperable compasses make it into high positions in government and elsewhere. Those without one will do things to get ahead that others won't – the classic climb the ladder at all costs story.
Much of the game of politics comes down to convincing would be voters of the perfection of one's moral compass – not so much that it is a virtuous one so much as convincing people that it aligns with their own.
Scientism
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids Congress from establishing a state religion, but it seems we have one anyway. The state religion, that of scientism, is the belief that there is nothing beyond the physical. Atheism.
True atheists, the ones who believe in only the material and believe there is no creator or spiritual reality, might say that, since there are no consequences, and it's all about survival of the fittest, there is no need for a moral compass. In reality most of them do have one – where did it come from? Then again, some bad people want to adopt an atheistic point of view in hopes of not being held accountable. There seems to have been a top down effort for the past few decades to atheiatize the populations of the western culture. Lets deatheiatize it. (Two new words to add to your vocabulary.)
https://drp314.substack.com/p/scientism
Minneapolis burning. Where does their moral compass point?
A sociopath is a person without a moral compass, and their world view seems to be something like it's all just a game. If I con you out of your life savings, hey, no hard feelings, I just won that round. No doubt most of them implicitly assume that others also have no moral compass.
We are all concerned about abuse coming from the government, the healthcare system, banking, large corporation, mainstream media and the military industrial complex, but one might maintain that it is actually a matter of the many individuals' moral compasses, the compasses of those who make up said organizations.
The point of all this rambling is that if we want to live in a country that's a decent place to live and not a totalitarian nightmare we might want to do what we can to improve the moral compass of the average, and not so average, individual.
"There could never be enough rules so finely crafted as to anticipate and cover every situation, and even if there were, enforcement would be impossibly expensive and burdensome. This approach leads to diminished freedom for everyone...In the end, it is only an internal moral compass in each individual that can effectively deal with the root causes as well as the symptoms of societal decay. Societies will struggle in vain to establish the common good until sin is denounced as sin and moral discipline takes its place in the pantheon of civic virtues." ~ D. Todd Christofferson
Some will say that this is religiosity, but I don't think so. It's just about having a basic sense of right and wrong.
"Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity." ~ Karen Armstrong
"The most acceptable service of God is doing good to man." ~ Benjamin Franklin
Stay Brave, Stay Free and Merry Christmas
“…some bad people want to adopt an atheistic point of view in hopes of not being held accountable. There seems to have been a top down effort for the past few decades to atheiatize the populations of the western culture.”
Very true! (I will be using that great quote in an upcoming Substack).
I think most people don't know what a moral compass is. If you asked them they would be confused.