The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition [Paperback]

Thomas Fleming (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2007

Fleming offers an alternative to enlightened liberalism, where moral and political problems are looked at from an objective point of view and a decision made from a distant perspective that is both rational and universally applied to all comparable cases. He instead places importance on the particular, the local, and moral complexity, advocating a return to premodern traditions for a solution to ethical predicaments. In his view, liberalism and postmodernism ignore the fact that human beings by their very nature refuse to live in a world of abstractions where the attachments of friends, neighbors, family, and country make no difference. Fleming believes that a modern type of casuistry should be applied to moral conflicts, using examples from history, literature, and religion to explain this moral ecology that refuses to divorce organisms from their interactions with each other and with their environment.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* For at least 50 years, one rallying cry of reform has been for politics, economics, and so forth on a "human scale," by which is meant a politics, economics, and so forth responsive to ordinary peoples' concerns in their families, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, and workplaces. Fleming perhaps sympathizes with the sentiment, but he points to the stumbling block to realizing it--the set of "hallmarks of the modern (that is, since the seventeenth century) ethical tradition" that constitutes what he calls liberalism. Modern liberalism and modern conservatism alike use those hallmarks--universality, rationality, individualism, objectivity, and abstract idealism--to determine what is ethical. He subjects those hallmarks to scrutiny, arguing that each has contributed to the common person's loss of effectiveness and the trivialization of common concerns and associations. Exalting objectivity, for instance, derogates the importance of such subjective interests as love, friendship, and personal and familial survival. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews mostly understood that survival, the family, the community, and the material world--natural things rooted in concrete existence--must be the bases of ethics, and that human beings were limited creatures incapable of the perfections dreamed of by philosophical system builders. Writing much more accessibly and knowledgeably than most modern, professional philosophers, Fleming revivifies the body of thought with which civilization was created and without which it is disintegrating. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“No more important book has been published in this new century. If the American people ever win back their traditional way of life, founded on family, faith, and federalism, The Morality of Everyday Life will be remembered as an important milestone in that victory.”— American Conservative

“Writing much more accessibly and knowledgeably than most modern, professional philosophers, Fleming revivifies the body of thought with which civilization was created and without which it is disintegrating.”—Booklist

"This book is a pleasure to read, filled with telling and memorable examples--both erudite and popular--and continually stimulating in its account. Its rhetoric blends something of a Nietzschean subversion with the humane balance of Hume. It is the most devastating critique of liberalism since MacIntyre."
—Donald W. Livingston

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri Press; 1 edition (August 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826217672
• ISBN-13: 978-0826217677
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #983,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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49 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Think Locally, Act Locally, June 13, 2004

By 

Steve Jackson "stevejackson100atyahoocom" (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition (Hardcover)

THE MORALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE is one of the more interesting books on ethics that I've read in a while. Thomas Fleming, a top paleconservative writer, contrasts an "ancient alternative" to the liberal tradition. The liberal tradition (growing out of Descartes, Locke and others) is characterized by certain assumptions: Individuals and governments are the central players in ethical considerations; moral behavior is a question on rational decision-making; moral principles must be applied with equal consistency to all situations.

Yet the ancient (and in fact almost universal) way of looking at moral questions is different. I have different obligations to different people. My duties to family and the world are not equal. Charity, as they say, beings at home. To the liberal "citizen of the world" this is provincialism at its worst. "[T]here is a consistency of tone, a certain universal high-mindedness that is impatient with distinctions and disdainful of irrational attachments. Sentiments of loyalty, because they are not entirely rational, do not yield their secrets to analysis or measurement." [p. 103.] People who profess a love for mankind first and foremost have the tendency to be cruel to their family and friends. It's easy to justify almost anything in the name of one's love for mankind. (A point made in Paul Johnson's suggestive, if problematic book, INTELLECTUALS.)

Dr. Fleming's book, as one might suggest by my brief description, is hardly rationalistic and abstract. There are plenty of examples from "everyday life" illustrating the arguments of the book. My only complaint is that I had hoped Dr. Fleming would have situated his ethical approach within the tradition advanced by writers of the Old Right. Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet are mentioned once, and Russell Kirk not at all.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of this years best!, October 21, 2005

By 

Monty Rainey (New Braunfels, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition (Hardcover)

Dr. Fleming's book, The Morality of Everyday Life, presents seven essays that examine, in depth and detail, the unraveling of our culture and government. What's that, you ask? What do I mean, "unraveling of our culture and government? Well, okay, take a look around. We do know, for example, that the combined various levels of government costs us half our income, that our hard-earned wages that we use to feed, house, and clothe our families is being transferred, by government fiat, to people we don't even know (not to mention the funding of certain, select corporations and fulminating academics), and countless other inane programs. Programs which are proven and utter failures, such as the $6 trillion war on poverty, environmental restrictions taken to an absurd level such as prohibiting oil exploration in a barren wasteland. Or how about the disintegration of the family and acceptance of degenerate sexual lifestyles? Or perhaps we could examine the countless times in our society when innocent people are convicted for simply protecting their homes and families.

These are just a sampling of the problems Dr. Fleming seeks to explore in his book. Dr. Fleming argues that since the birth of classical liberalism in the seventeenth century, a century that gave us "universality, rationality, individualism, objectivity, and abstract idealism," Western Civilization has developed a flaw in its ethics, moral behavior, and thus in the construction of its state apparatus. He points out that the two primary political philosophies, liberalism and conservatism, have both embraced a "farsighted" or "long view" of human life. The problem, then, is that both political "positions (liberalism and conservatism)" in order to engage this farsighted, idealistic, perspective of mankind (modernity) have in the very act of "freeing themselves from the shackles of particular circumstances and traditions" introduced an ethical virus that eats away at the traditional duties and obligations of the individual while disenfranchising the very foundation of human society, the family.

This sort of "one size fits all" thinking that government and society are pushing us towards is at once, both dangerous and absurd. For example: a man murders a storekeeper during a robbery. In a one size fits all society, the woman who kills her abusive husband in self defense would receive the same punishment

In his essay "Hell and Other People", Fleming describes the eighteenth century and the philosophies of "Voltaire, Kant, and (later) the New England transcendentalists" as the time when the concepts of "universal brotherhood, international law, and world government reemerged." The twentieth century saw the idea of a "just state," or government that is committed to "economic equality," the idea that one is to "sacrifice private life to public good," (can you say "eminant domain"?)not to mention the onslaught of self-righteous who are constantly interfering in the private lives of citizens. So the state has become the vehicle of moral certitude and each of us, through the wisdom of the state, is to take his place as "deputies" in providing for the necessary expansion in order that it might provide, among other things, largesse to the "underprivileged," justice for all, and, of course, the ever elusive, equality.

Dr. Fleming does not, however, stop at just revealing the problems, but details how America, as a people, can reverse the trends he has cited. I will stop short of discussing Fleming's outline and leave that to the reader to discover. This is an exceptional work from a brilliant author.

Monty Rainey
www.juntosociety.com

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT STUFF, June 5, 2009

By 

M. R. Sheffield (Herkimer, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition (Paperback)

Mr Fleming is one of the best philo-lit writer/thinkers on the scene today. His CHRONICLES magazine is must reading, especially if you are inclined to disagree with the so-called right. Over the years he has helped educate me in the true sense of the word, something for which college had no time. I heartily recommend anything he writes, and especially this, which next to Wendell Berry is the best reading material I have encountered over the past few years.