Moral Alienation

  In this entry, I want to coin a term 'moral alienation' to describe a belief that a person cannot possibly please an authority figure (either inward or outward), due to a sense of pervasive shame or failure to live up to normative standards or expectations. This phenomena, I believe, not only applies to external authorities but might also describe an experience of failing to live up to one's own ethical standards, which might sometimes feel too high or unattainable at certain points in a person's life.

   "Losing face" is one example of moral alienation. A person might lose their reputation in front of one's peers and suffer from public humiliation as a result. This can create a sense of low self-esteem, or a sense that one is not as competent as one's peers in fulfilling moral requirements such as being generous, hard-working, and so on. Sometimes, this also happens when a person perceives others as being superior in their capacity to fulfill moral requirements or be good people. A lot of this talk about who is good and who is bad, of course, is based on subjective perceptions or consensus, but it's also reinforced by a tendency to think in terms of binaries: either a person is absolutely "good" or absolutely "bad", with no in between or spaces for acknowledgement of both qualities within the same person.

   One of the causes, to my thinking, of moral alienation, is a tendency to reduce complex matters to slogans that are designed to "wake people up". This happens a lot on social media, where a person will write a message or post a graphic that seems to sum up all the things that are bad about the world, and blame certain people for that badness. People are targeted or scapegoated, in other words. Slogans are justified as being rightful expressions of moral condemnation for things that are deemed indisputably wrong. But one of the problems with slogans is that, quite simply... they are too short! Short and trite statements don't really expose the complex or nuanced nature of problems, and often leave readers feeling that there is one simplified way of looking at the issue. I don't think this approach is particularly helpful, and it often leaves people defensive or lost, rather than truly "woke". Such kinds of statements don't necessarily foster dialogue, collaboration or even the work necessary to resolve problems. It's very easy to click that "send" button and try to state a strong case for something, but again, most of the situations that people face require efforts and long-term, everyday working on problems. They can't be resolved simply by shocking people or trying to assign blame.

  Moral alienation seems to be best addressed by acknowledging complexity and cultivating a space of compassion for complexity. If my objects of compassion are only certain kinds of things and not other things, I become selective in my compassion, and this selectiveness leaves some without a voice. It's important also that people can make a choice not to fall for shock appeals or statements that are designed to arouse anger or defensiveness. Instead, a respect for nuance and complexity is an antidote to moral alienation, and can allow people to continue the path based on their own conditions rather than trying to reduce everything to absolutes or binaries.