A long time ago, on a train to Edinburgh, I was approached by two Mormon missionaries. As usual, these were Americans in business suits, speaking in the friendly outgoing way that is such an attractive part of their culture. They told me that becoming a Mormon would confer many advantages for my career. Mormons, they said, had such a reputation for honesty that Howard Hughes recruited only Mormons to run his business interests in Las Vegas. I pointed out that Howard Hughes was running a vast gambling enterprise in that city, which was also a major centre for (legal) prostitution. The missionaries were used to rejection, but found my point puzzling. They saw no problem in combining morality in their private life with the promotion of mass corruption in business.
I was reminded of this encounter by the recent presidential election in the USA, in which another Mormon (Mitt Romney) managed to combine a strict personal morality with a political campaign that involved a startling sequence of dishonest statements, bewildering changes of opinion on the most fundamental issues, and a set of policies that would drive millions of the poorest people in his country to even greater misery. Like the Mormon missionaries on the train to Edinburgh, he drew a clear distinction between two quite different moral standards: private morality (how we behave with our family and friends) and public morality (how we behave with everyone else).
This distinction is not of course found among Mormons alone, and is much older than the Mormon religion. The idea that we should be compassionate with our families and cruel to others probably dates from the earliest human history: we co-operate with and trust members of our own tribe, but arm ourselves against other tribes. In warfare, honest and peaceful men come together to kill strangers. The justification for distinguishing our private and public moralities is therefore that members of other tribes can not be trusted, and that our relations with them are a matter of actual or potential warfare. It is a simple matter for some people to extend this principle to the operation of politics and economics: whatever moral standards we apply to our family lives, it is assumed that survival in political and business affairs necessitates fraud and double-dealing.
The trouble with living with this distinction is that it confirms the evils of the world. Advances in human life have come about when people have chosen to apply the ethics of their private morality to public affairs. In his great book Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild gives the example of the English sea captain John Newton. In 1748, he experienced a spiritual conversion (we would say he was ‘born again’), which led him eventually to become ordained in the Church of England and to write several hymns. The most famous of these, Amazing Grace is often mistakenly categorised as a ‘negro spiritual’. This is particularly ironic since Newton made his living by captaining ships bringing slaves from Africa to the North American colonies. Newton was apparently able to reconcile his conversion with an active role in the most brutal and cruel of all trades. Even after leaving the sea in 1754, he continued to invest in the slave trade and said nothing against it for another 34 years.
But during that time, the campaign to abolish the slave trade gathered strength. This was at first led by Quakers, who were joined later by evangelical Christians and political radicals. The campaign at some point must have produced great soul-searching in Newton, and eventually in 1788, by now a prominent Anglican clergyman, he published a forceful pamphlet denouncing the slave trade and describing the horrors he had seen as captain of a slave ship. He later became a star witness before Parliament on behalf of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and lived to see the success of the campaign with the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.
So if Newton could eventually apply the principles of his private morality to his public morality and have such a positive influence on mankind, there must surely be hope even for Mitt Romney.
I was reminded of this encounter by the recent presidential election in the USA, in which another Mormon (Mitt Romney) managed to combine a strict personal morality with a political campaign that involved a startling sequence of dishonest statements, bewildering changes of opinion on the most fundamental issues, and a set of policies that would drive millions of the poorest people in his country to even greater misery. Like the Mormon missionaries on the train to Edinburgh, he drew a clear distinction between two quite different moral standards: private morality (how we behave with our family and friends) and public morality (how we behave with everyone else).
This distinction is not of course found among Mormons alone, and is much older than the Mormon religion. The idea that we should be compassionate with our families and cruel to others probably dates from the earliest human history: we co-operate with and trust members of our own tribe, but arm ourselves against other tribes. In warfare, honest and peaceful men come together to kill strangers. The justification for distinguishing our private and public moralities is therefore that members of other tribes can not be trusted, and that our relations with them are a matter of actual or potential warfare. It is a simple matter for some people to extend this principle to the operation of politics and economics: whatever moral standards we apply to our family lives, it is assumed that survival in political and business affairs necessitates fraud and double-dealing.
The trouble with living with this distinction is that it confirms the evils of the world. Advances in human life have come about when people have chosen to apply the ethics of their private morality to public affairs. In his great book Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild gives the example of the English sea captain John Newton. In 1748, he experienced a spiritual conversion (we would say he was ‘born again’), which led him eventually to become ordained in the Church of England and to write several hymns. The most famous of these, Amazing Grace is often mistakenly categorised as a ‘negro spiritual’. This is particularly ironic since Newton made his living by captaining ships bringing slaves from Africa to the North American colonies. Newton was apparently able to reconcile his conversion with an active role in the most brutal and cruel of all trades. Even after leaving the sea in 1754, he continued to invest in the slave trade and said nothing against it for another 34 years.
But during that time, the campaign to abolish the slave trade gathered strength. This was at first led by Quakers, who were joined later by evangelical Christians and political radicals. The campaign at some point must have produced great soul-searching in Newton, and eventually in 1788, by now a prominent Anglican clergyman, he published a forceful pamphlet denouncing the slave trade and describing the horrors he had seen as captain of a slave ship. He later became a star witness before Parliament on behalf of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and lived to see the success of the campaign with the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.
So if Newton could eventually apply the principles of his private morality to his public morality and have such a positive influence on mankind, there must surely be hope even for Mitt Romney.
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