Morality in the Mind of the Times
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 8, 2022
THE NEW DIVISIVE AGE
Western society entered
the 20th century on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism and atheism
“God is dead," and Sigmund Freud’s sexuality, gender, and sex role
identity. These ideas became popular after WWI and led to the unrestrained
“Roaring Twenties” followed by the international economic collapse of “The
Great Depression.”
British historical and novelist Phillip Kerr (1956 – 2018), best known for his
Bernie Gunther crime novels, captures the essence of this in “Metropolis” (2019)
published posthumously. This novel focuses on German societal decline,
decadence, and obsession with sexuality after WWI, not unlike ubiquitous
Western society morality today.
With the triumph of the West in WWII, Western Society transitioned from a “God-centered” to a “Man-centered” universe with the digital and analytics of the "Machine Age” driving the popular
culture with the United States of Anxiety following in an uncertain world.
A quarter century earlier German-speaking Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka
(1883 – 1924) wrote the novel “The Trial” (1925) published posthumously. It
opens with the line,
“Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having
done anything wrong, he was arrested.”
It is Joseph K.'s 30th birthday when two policemen arrive at his boardinghouse
to inform him that he was under arrest.
Kafka, a novelist, and short-story writer is widely regarded today as one of
the major figures of 20th century literature. His works fuse
elements of realism and the fantastic to unmask the crushing reality of our
changing times. In 1924, the year of Kafka’s death at age 40, Nazism,
antisemitism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War Two were on the horizon.
Yet, it was Kafka, a minor clerk in an insurance company, who sensed the
emerging insanity, and its decadence that historians, politicians, scholars,
theologians, scientists, and people, in general, failed to anticipate as did Kafka’s
Joseph K.
Throughout history, societal madness is perceived after the fact too late to avoid
its damages. Seemingly, only artists like Kafka escape this limitation.
Consider the vanishing of a community.
THE VANISHING COMMUNITY
By 1990 the community of Clinton, Iowa, once a community of 33,000, had shrunk
by a third, the industrial community by two-thirds, and the downtown area of
department stores, office buildings, restaurants, and retail stores had
virtually vanished.
This was evident as
Second Street snaked downtown and onto Cammache Avenue then out of Clinton onto
Highway 30 with new landmarks along the way such as a Walmart, other
supermarkets, motels, and fast foods stores (*The watercolor artist Carl H.
Johnson of Galena, Illinois captures Clinton as it was in a series of prints,
some of which are included in this book with permission).
This shrinkage was accompanied by double-digit inflation and double-digit
unemployment in the 1980s across the nation. A decade earlier there was the
embarrassing defeat of the United States in the twenty-year war (1955 – 1975)
in Vietnam where some 50,000 American lost their lives disproportionately
African Americans.
The 1980s and 1990s or a quarter century after WWII suggest the United States
had lost its moral compass and its way.
Ancillary to this was the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophile scandals of the
sexual abuse of children in the care of Catholic priests and nuns that had not
been dealt with for decades.
Once parents were aware their children had been abused, they demanded financial
reparations at a time when the church could least afford such demands. Add to
this less revenue was coming into the church’s coffers as fewer baptized
Catholics were attending church services regularly including Sunday Mass while
fewer young men and young women were becoming priests and nuns.
As society has become increasingly secular and less community-centered,
voluntarism and community services have suffered. The new civil religion has
made “greed good,” while paradoxically, in times of disaster (e.g., when
communities are decimated by tornadoes, floods, mudslides, or hurricanes), then
the collective will of the community resurfaces.
These thoughts occurred to me while researching this book. Clintonian Catholics
would ask me to contact the Bishop of Davenport, The Clinton
Herald, and The Davenport Democrat on their behalf
while knowing I had no such influence. It was an act of desperation not unlike
the fictitious Joseph K.
Many interviewed were Catholics, and echoed these sentiments, “This
can’t happen, can it; it will blow over, won’t it? It makes no sense to raze
our churches and schools and sell the land, does it?” It was
inconceivable to the Catholic community that it could be erased as if it never
existed when it had done nothing wrong, We know how denial worked for German
Jews in the era of Adolf Hitler.
THE PUNDITS KNOW
Failure to face reality is like the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.
Scholars are quick to tell us why after the fact. That said, as honorable
as their intentions, our culture cannot imagine the evil that exists within our
species.
Cognitive psychologist Canadian American Steven Pinker argues in “Rationality:
What it is, Why it seems Scarce, Why it Matters” (2021) that while we
are plagued with irrationality the rational pursuit of the rational can lead up
illogically to crippling irrationality. Say what?
Neurologist Guy Leschzinger gives us a different slant to this dilemma in “The
Man Who Tasted Words” (2022). Leschziner guides the reader through the
senses and how, through them, our brain understands or misunderstands the world
around us. Vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are what we rely on us to
perceive the reality of our world. He explores how our nervous systems define
our words and how we can be victims of falsehoods perpetuated by our brains.
Leschzinger explains how our lives and what we perceive as reality are both
ultimately defined by the complexities of our nervous system and not by our
thinking.
A spate of books continues to appear such as “Useful Delusions: The
Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain” (2021).
Journalists Bill Mesler, and Shankar Vedantam argue that self-deception can do terrible harm
causing us to fail to act, yet self-delusion may also be vital to our success
and well-being. Say what?
Small wonder the complexities of life make it difficult to discern reality from
illusion and what is prudent to do or not do.
We have gravitated to a
simplistic, shallow, and reductionist corporate climate that successfully has
obscured the traditional anchors of family, church, and God treating them as
redundant or as if they never existed. “We have lost our moral compass
and our way.”
One of the benefits of "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" is that it is possible to show how radically
society can and does change over time. Yes, this is an unusual approach but one
this author felt appropriate for this third edition. Morality is always in the
mind of the times, even for sleepy Clinton, Iowa.
GROWING UP IN A TIME OF
WAR
It occurred to me that my generation of preteens was on the cusp of monumental
change. In 1945, my generation was coming of age when the role of the
United States was leaving its halcyon days of isolation nostalgia to assume the
uncertain role of a superpower.
Over ten year period (1993 to 2003), I felt
the full impact of this as I made twelve trips to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa
from Tampa, Florida a distance of some 1300 miles, staying a week or more
interviewing some hundred Clintonians of my generation and those of the previous
generation still alive to get a sense of this place, space, and circumstance.
In 1945, Clinton was a thriving blue-collar town along the banks of the
Mississippi River with a score of manufacturing plants nestled along the
southeastern part of the city critical to the industrial/military demands of
WWII. Nearly all of Clinton's parents during this period either worked in these
factories or on the railroad. I write:
Imagine coming of age in Clinton, Iowa in
the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and the middle of
this farm belt community of 33,000 snuggled against the muddy Mississippi River
during World War II.
It is a working-class climate in which
the author came of age “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” while the nation
struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.
There was no television, mega sports, big automobiles, or manicured lawns.
There was radio, movies, high school sports, and the Clinton Industrial
Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to the war played for the
fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus,
or rode their bikes to work.
It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse
clock chimed on the half-hour and threw a metamorphic shadow over young
people’s lives. This made certain they would not be late for meals made from
victory garden staples.
The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent
families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked
in Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral
language.
It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview
Park. Left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and
if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger
would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when
snowbanks were four feet high.
This is a narrative snapshot with core neighborhood activities of young people
against the backdrop of the Clinton County Courthouse, St. Patrick School,
Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and uptown Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Mount
St. Clare College, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, many
churches, schools, and three hospitals, including the US Army’s Schick General
Hospital which brought the war to this place tending battlefield casualties. There was also the USO, Chicago & North
Western Railway and its boxcar manufacturing factory, Clinton Foods, Dupont,
and many other industrial workplaces which were operating 24/7 in support of
the war effort. This was seen through
the impressionistic eyes of a boy from the ages of eight to thirteen.
It was a time when kids created their own play as parents were too tired or too
involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind. Clinton
youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom or its concomitant brutality
again.
This is not a history of the times nor is it a novel in the conventional sense of
the word but rather the recollections of a time, place, and circumstance
through the author’s confessed imperfect vision. “In the Shadow of the
Courthouse” promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.
*Excerpt from “In the Shadow of the Courthouse,” © James
R. Fisher, Jr. 3rd edition 2022.
