Securlarism and moral anarchy


Last years film The Hours presents a very mature and sophisticated defense of the doctrine "doing as one likes." In this, it is much like the academy award winning American Beauty, except that the latter film presented a far less sophisticated, and even somewhat juvenile version the creed.

Appropriately enough, The Hours finds its focus in the English novelist Virginia Woolf, who famously said that human nature had changed in 1910. Although literally speaking, this is nonsense, if it is meant simply to mark a sea-change in attitudes toward personal morality and social obligations, there's some truth to it. Before 1910, most people believed in some degree of duty, of obligations that individuals owed to others, especially family members. Somewhere around 1910, this began to change — a change no where more faithfully championed and chronicled than in Woolf's own Bloomsbury circle. The idea was that a person's first obligation was to his own self and to something which would later be called "self-fulfillment." This frame of mind did not altogether dismiss the idea of obligations to others; after all, most of the Bloomsbury set were socialists. But even here, the attitude was extremely self-orientated. The state was seen as the party responsible for "others," leaving the individual free to go about the business of self-fulfillment with a free and easy conscience.

There was another factor behind this whole rebellion against personal obligations. Many of the Bloomsbury intellectuals were practicing homosexuals. Self-fulfillment in their eyes simply meant thumbling their noses at traditional morality. This theme shows up The Hours, though it is muted. Yet nearly all the main characters are at least to some extent tarred with the homosexual brush. It is a sort of badge of their uniqueness.

The film involves three stories. Using Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway as its starting point, it chronicles a critical day in the life of three women, each living in different eras. There's the fifties' housewife; a present day bisexual woman; and Virginia Woolf. The fifties woman is unhappy and, after contemplating suicide, decides to abandon her husband and her children. Later, she admits to not regretting what she had done in the least, only perhaps wishing she could regret it. Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf, suffering from mental illness, rebels against her husband's attempt to treat her. She wants to do as she pleases, even if it means another bout of mental illness and the threat of suicide. In the third story, the bisexual woman, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep, must allow the man she loves, a bitter gay AIDs victim, to commit suicide. In all three stories, allegiance to self becomes paramount, even when it causes great harm and trauma to others.

The Hours is a very disturbing film. It pulls no punches. It does not try to prettify or glamorize the ideals it upholds. The film is starkly honest and richly profound. It acknowledges the difficulties, the problems, the tragedy of the ideals it espouses yet it goes right on espousing them anyway, without apology. It offers a very nuanced, adult defense for what is basically a hedonistic system of ethics. In this sense, it is a much better film than American Beauty, which presented simply a juvenile version of hedonism — the hedonism of a adolescent or the spoiled-child. The hedonism of The Hours is far darker; it is the hedonism of the outsider, of the mentally ill and the deviant. It is the hedonism of an entirely securalist vision of the world.

The problem of moral obligations and what individuals owe others does not have an easy solution. Most rational people can agree that neither extreme represents a plausible theory. People can no more live solely for others than they can live solely for themselves. Some type of balance has to be sought. Christianity attempts to achieve this balance by harmonizing the obligation the individual owes others with obligation he owes himself. Of course, this is much easier said than done. But that, in any case, was the ideal. When the ideal could not be achieved, Christianity insisted that the primary obligations to others, including to God, had to be fulfilled; yet it still attempted to regard those who could not live up to their obligations with a certain amount of forbearance and charity, while at the same time not excusing them altogether. The secularist vision of the world, however, by the very logic of its premises, must lead to rank hedonism and the dissolving of the social bonds, including the social bonds of the family. In a sense, we are confronted with Dostoevsky's grave adage: "Without God, everything is permitted." The Hours represents a particularly intelligent and, within the context of the vision itself, even responsible version of this law. But it is still, at its core, a defense of moral anarchy — the moral anarchy that must result from any secularist vision of the world.

Posted: Fri - March 19, 2004 at 08:29 PM          

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