Moral Clarity

Another change of meaning fits the moment

I start this post with a new, I want to say direction, but that is not the correct word. And Business Plan is not the exact term either. The word or phrase or thought currently eluding my grasp is somewhere in between.

Upon the advice of some smart people, not the least of which is The Wife, I created an “Editorial Calendar” today(4/14 for 4/19 publish date), and started a SEO tutorial. Something she muttered under her breath about how much bacon this writing thing can buy. I have seen some chatter on Substack and elsewhere lately fretting about frequency. This link to Freddie deBoer will open some interesting doors for you. Please barge in.

So following that advice from those afore-mentioned smart people, I created a publishing plan (maybe that’s the term?) that will see free posts hit your inbox two times per week. Mondays and Fridays. One post will highlight other Substack writers and be a drill-down into their topic from my take.

I will actively solicit (read: beg) you to make comments. And please visit their platforms and subscribe there if you like. Or comment about where you found their link. We are building a community of supportive writers and readers here.

There is some kind of internal psychological ranking I am falling behind in because I lack “community commentary.” Please help me combat that personal trauma.

The other post will be an “At-Will” topic. More than likely something related to my 5-elements of culture. Again, I see many of my fellow Substack writers asking for reader input. More correctly, and collectively, the realization is setting in that a subscriber-based platform is not boss-free, it is boss multiplied by paid subscribers.

Paid Subscribers are the modern-day Patrons of Yore. Your financial support allows others to accomplish goals and whims you entertain but acknowledge that, for some reason or another, are beyond your individual production capability. Let us know what your eyeballs want to see.

Much like the Court Jester in Medieval Times and the Stand-up Comedian in the 1980s, the Substack Writer in the Now Normal evades authoritarian thought-control by elucidating and illuminating outward human behavior while simultaneously and surreptitiously exposing universal-but-secretly-held realities that most people operate on.

Only the arrogantly pompous and willfully ignorant fail to discern the wheat from the chaff. The truly disturbed fight back with crybully screeds of racism, homo/transphobia, misogyny, and yada yada yada. There is always time to listen to those who criticize, but it is beyond time to quit automatically yielding to their demands, especially without a reasoned argument.

I will not always agree with the writers I highlight, but the variety of takes here on Substack is remarkable. And refreshing. They are here because they believe in what I believe in. That readers can read what they want, and thinkers can think what they dream, and writers can write what they think.

---

With all that house-keeping out of the way, the focus of this post is Moral Clarity. It is a term I thought I was familiar with, and when I saw it in Michael Tracey’s excellent post titled “Activist” Journalists Have Completely Taken Over The Media Industry I did not recognize the context it was used in.

I looked it up. First as a phrase. Then as individual terms. This activity reminds me of some high-school hi-jinks we used to pull on the hated Mr. Hunter, my 11th grade English teacher. It is the only class in my academic history that I ever got an “F” in. English! Holy Hell!

The game was to put Mr. Hunter’s knowledge of the Queen’s English to the test. Occasionally Latin. Publicly. In class. To our ultimate detriment in hind sight. To even compete in the game, much less win, required studious concentration in the discipline of Library Studies. Basically, ditch 3rd period to get stoned and eat, then spend lunch hour in the library (otherwise called detention) poring over Britannica Encyclopedia and all other sorts of leather-bound knowledge-fountains.

Due to the collective nature of our delinquency, group study was easily accomplished. Leadership of the consortium rotated amongst whomever was most pissed off at Mr. Hunter for the personal humiliation of the day. See Another Brick in the Wall. Given the state of Zoom teachers today, I can relate to those pour souls. Thanks God I am not a parent of a school-aged child.

So, after completing our assigned homework, we would dissect the topic of the day into researchable chunks and complete a brief Q and A. Now I see the foreshadowing of FAQs. Thanks to the Dewey Decimal System small scratch-paper notes were plentiful. Again, depending on where you were sitting or standing, it was a stroke of good luck that about a dozen of us were in 5th period English together. Or a dark act of bad luck.

The activity would proceed, at great hilarity, until a question was posed that Mr. Hunter would not know the answer to. Then an accusatory follow-up exposing the subject not knowing the answer would be asked, and then Mr. Hunter ended the game. Usually by screaming and threatening to paddle us. So much for the art of interrogation.

It reminds me of journalists and others self-tasked with imparting their judgement, err, knowledge unto the public at large in today’s media environment. Self-presented and peer-adulated as an expert, often interviewed by those same peers as a subject of yet-another-hard-titled-soft-hitting-news feature, their published arguments become fair game in the art of interrogation.

But much like Mr. Hunter when the classroom narrative escaped his control, the melt-down occurs when the questioning becomes too intense. Like asking for evidence. Or source-corroboration. Or more than one anonymous source. Or actual statistical data. Or a retraction when you are proven wrong. Jus sayin.

Glenn Greenwald has basically been slandered by critics defending the “young” (36-years-old) journalist Taylor Lorenz. I wrote about the dust-up here. In a nutshell, he criticized her published writing. She was caught lying in two of her articles and Greenwald called her out. The twitter mob started crying. He didn’t care.

Many of these journalists live their lives as emotionally-stunted-eternally-woke-hollow-souls permanently stuck in the superficial loop of high school. I get it that it’s her job, but Ms. Lorenz admits to spending three hours a day on TikTok. Speaking from other experience, that sounds like cruel and unusual punishment.

Moral Clarity is one of those wonderfully confident sounding terms. It feels like the opposite of Moral Relativism. But isn’t. The Presbyterian Sunday School I attended as a child vaguely felt like that.

---

So I got to a pausing point at that line above this sentence and applied for a bunch of remote WFH jobs. I did this because I need to find something soon. WFH would be preferable to wiping down the shopping carts at Wal-Mart. But hey, whatever it takes, right? But also, it seemed a good place to stop and take a breath.

I checked the headlines. I saw a Yahoo piece on Brett Favre. Written by Shalise Manza Young. I had seen the crawler on the statements Favre made about politics in sports. Whatever you think about that, whatever. I know what I think about it. I don’t really care what he says. Sometimes, I don’t even listen to what football players say. I haven’t most of my life. Or other athletes for that matter.

And if I were to listen to an athlete, it would be most likely a college softball player. Or some athlete in some obscure amateur sport. They have more integrity and credibility than any professional athlete. In my opinion. It must be why I pretty much quit watching pro sports.

Despite the title Brett Favre's bleating about politics in sports is rank with privilege, ignorance and hypocrisy, I read the article. She makes some valid points. The opening two paragraphs started out well

One of the things about being in this position is that you have to do your best to be fair. Journalism shouldn't be a lack of objectivity because that's impossible; every human approaches a story through their lens, colored by their experiences. It should be about fairness.

To wit: Writers love interview subjects who are fun, frank, even unpredictable. We want people to say what's on their mind because it makes for better stories.

Ok, I agree with that. But then this jab

But as a human being, seeing Brett Favre still bleating the same privileged, narrow-minded, anti-Black rhetoric makes my blood boil.

A rope-a-dope, a feign and a shuffle, then a haymaker for the knockout (I know, a boxing analogy for a football player story. Curious.)

In theory, journalists or not, we're all supposed to be trying to do a better job listening to people with different opinions than us, so hushing someone should be verboten.

Racism isn't a difference of opinion, though, like whether or not pineapple should be on pizza (answer: yes). Repeating myths that have been disproven time and again isn't right or fair. Being a blatant hypocrite makes it worse.

So here we are.

A couple of things to unpack here, as they say. I probably won’t stay in my lane either. Her link, to disprove the repeated myths of racists, is a link to another Yahoo article (great objectivity in factchecking) that is a story about another pro football QB, Drew Brees.

How does this disprove the myths you ask? By informing us that when Brees said something similar to Favre, and especially too similar to the bad orange, he was a racist. Brees that is. The bad orange too, but another post in another galaxy sometime. The article is about Brees apologizing for both transgressions: racism and supporting the bad orange. So that disproves the repeated myths of racism. Huh?

Ok, that was just the top-of-mind stuff that needs to be pointed out. But what really got me to comment on Ms. Manza Young’s piece does not really even concern her, per se. I agree with some of her points, even though she talks about objectivity but does not employ it. The comments are running against the author and her take, probably at an 8-1 clip, when I last checked.

My concern is this: Her analysis is factory-built, and her complaint is intellectually lazy. I had never read her before. Never even heard of her. But she grinds the same axe as all the others. Reading her felt like reading everybody else. It is the evil white guy.  Zero fresh take.

But the bottom line is, I read her piece, was mostly ambivalent about it, even the provocative parts that could be (mis)interpreted as painting all white men with the same pejorative brush. But I read it. And 100% support her right to publish it and believe it and whatever with it. Good for her. I was not threatened by her words. BECAUSE THEY ARE WORDS.

These new journalists cannot have it both ways. These statements are mutually exclusive: Silence is Violence and Words Cause Violence.  

It certainly relates to the topic here, Moral Clarity. Ms. Manza Young obviously knows what is in the mind and heart of another human being. And she judges it to be inferior to her own moral stance. Another’s poor moral condition in fact “makes my blood boil” “as a human being” she informs her readers.

Moral Superiority, according to Wikipedia is

Moral superiority is the belief or attitude that one's position and actions are justified by having higher moral values than others.

It can refer to:

Morality, when two systems of morality are compared

Self-righteousness: when proclamations and posturing of moral superiority become a negative personal trait

Superiority complex: when the moral superiority is a psychological reaction to insecurity and self-doubt

Moral Superiority is a prerequisite of Moral Clarity. Moral Clarity is a concept described by Wikipedia thusly,

Moral clarity is a catchphrase associated with American political conservatives. Popularized by William J. Bennett's Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, the phrase was first used in its current context during the 1980s, in reference to the politics of Ronald Reagan.

This description was my basic understanding of the term. In fact, when I read Moral Clarity the other day, I instantly thought of Anita Bryant. Remember that wing-nut? She really hated Rob Halford. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that this phrase too had been hijacked and mutilated to alter the meaning.                           

I read this piece in the New Yorker by Marsha Gessen to gauge my take. I was right. But here is the term, now being weaponized as a blunt force object to crush racists and other evil bad-thinkers. And we know what you are thinking, they say. Yeah, if you sink and drown, you are not a witch, either. Anita Bryant used it to oppose gay marriage. Was Moral Clarity ok back then?

Ms. Gessen quotes one expert saying Moral Clarity should not be confused with Moral Simplicity. Fair enough. Utilizing the objective-neutral-both-sides model the author actually spends ink on decrying, the opposite-side expert says those journalists certainly have Moral Clarity, but they lack Moral Complexity.

I think that is the point. In both episodes of Moral Clarity, claimed by opposite political sides as their own, the term not only obscures, but completely removes complexity from issues. This is Moral. And this is Clear. Get in line. Or you are morally inferior.

The new journalistic standard removes empiricism and fact-based reporting from the equation and replaces it with the moral point of view of the author. How they felt about the story. So like the New Bible for the Now Normal? For people who make fun of Bible readers. And gun-clingers. Sounds very religious to me.

The goal, as Tracey writes, is as old as the world’s oldest profession. Power.

Media figures like Lowery were and are campaigning against a mentality that is simply not meaningfully operative anymore within the industry. So what are they trying to achieve, exactly? What they so obviously want is for their values — which generally align with the already-dominant left/liberal monoculture — to be the new governing standard, replete with speech codes and various shortcuts engineered to effectuate their own professional and social advancement. What they want is power. It’s not particularly complicated. Nor is it a coincidence that these same people tend to be most fluent in “therapeutic trauma jargon,” which provides a turbo-charged boost in their maneuvers to bludgeon editors and managers into submission.

Power. Disguised as Moral Clarity. Just as racism is the new classicism. Moral Superiority was the yardstick old Catholic nuns measured by and beat down their inferiors with, i.e., their students. And now it is back. Wielded by ever more demanding and cruel masters of a Now Normal Religion.

What is so interesting and so elusive for right-thinkers to conceptualize is true intersectionality. I write about how and where this term came into being here. The sad truth is that the spectrum of white maleness spans all of the other spectrums of the human condition. Sad truth because the right-thinkers have pinned all of their woes on this narrow slice of humanity.

When will the realization hit that those woes have a bit more complexity than their clarity allowed for?

Sadly, this constant shameless display of advocacy instead of journalistic reality is NOT Mirabile Dictu.

Ric