The essay begins with this:
....[T]here’s a big difference between being moral and moralizing. Being moral is about changing the way you act and actually helping others. It requires humility and tolerance because it arises from an awareness of one’s own moral failings.Being moral in America is no longer "in", as Davidson puts it, largely because many folks no longer believe there is any such thing as an objective moral duty, but nevertheless when people have dispensed with objective morality for themselves they still find that there are lots of things that others do that they don't like.
Moralizing, by contrast, is about changing the way other people act—by force if necessary. Moralizing breeds intolerance and even tyranny because it springs from a belief that...not only do you know the truth but you also have a solemn duty to impose it on others.
In America today, being moral is out and moralizing is in. Just witness the nonstop spectacle of moralizing everywhere you turn—from The New Yorker’s panicked denunciation of Chick-fil-A’s “infiltration” of New York, to gun control activist David Hogg’s boycotts, to the protestor with a megaphone shouting in a Starbucks clerk’s face.
So, having left themselves no grounds for trying to persuade those with whom they disagree that they're objectively wrong, they seek to impose their preferences on others through force, intimidation, shouting louder than the other person, etc.
We live in a society that claims to value equality, individual freedom, justice for all, tolerance, human worth, human rights and so on, but these are all virtues that are based upon a Judeo-Christian worldview. They're unsustainable on any other. Individuals who discard the foundational belief system but still seek to retain the values to which that system gives birth can do so only by forcibly imposing them. attempts at persuasion through rational, logical argumentation are futile since the values are untethered from any solid and firm metaphysical foundation.
How, after all, can our elites insist on one hand that we're just highly evolved animals filled with genetic dispositions toward selfishness, tribalism, aggression, violence, prejudice and lust and then try to persuade us that, even so, it's wrong to hate and kill each other?
Most people, if they think about it, will see that as nonsensical. Most people will say that if it's all true that there are no objective moral obligations, if there's no afterlife in which I'll be accountable for how I live on earth, if neither my life nor the lives of others have any intrinsic value, if no one is made in the image of God and loved by God, then I might just as well look out for #1 and let everyone else fend for themselves.
And why would anyone who came to that conclusion be wrong to have done so?
If you're a Simpsons fan, by the way, you might want to read Davidson's whole article. He includes a funny excerpt from the show to help make his point.
Here's how he concludes his essay:
In the most recent edition of National Review I have a review of a new biography of Woodrow Wilson by Patricia O’Toole. The book — aptly titled “The Moralist” — is a withering chronicle of Wilson’s moralizing, from his days as a college professor to his ignominious departure from the White House.The description of Woodrow Wilson reads as if it were lifted directly from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In the novel one of the brothers is relating to another a parable about Christ coming back to earth at Seville in Spain during the height of the Inquisition. A Cardinal of the Church has Christ arrested and imprisoned and goes to his cell to confront him. The Inquisitor, convinced that Christ had botched the job during his first coming, angrily condemns him for returning and assures him that the Church would make right Christ's failure.
Throughout his academic and political career, Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister and the father of American progressivism, was incessantly preaching at people. Once he wielded real power he was willing to use it to silence his opponents and detractors, as he did during World War One. His belligerent sanctimoniousness was a direct consequence of an unshakable belief that he was right and if you didn’t see things his way you were either a fool or traitor.
After the war, at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson’s arrogance and moralizing became untethered from reality. O’Toole recounts one instance when Wilson “startled Lloyd George by observing that organized religion had yet to devise practical solutions to the problems of the world. Christ had articulated the ideal, he said, but He had offered no instruction on how to attain it. ‘That is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to carry out His aims,’ he told his fellow statesmen.”
George later wrote that, “Clemenceau slowly opened his dark eyes to their widest dimensions and swept them round the assembly to see how the Christians gathered round the table enjoyed this exposure of the futility of their master.” Imagine being so possessed of your own self-righteousness that you think you should propose “a practical scheme” to carry out the aims of Jesus Christ.
That, in a nutshell, is progressivism. It is hubris and conceit mixed with a tyrannical impulse, and it is one of the reasons we have so much moralizing in America today, yet so little morality.
The Inquisitor was a blend of hubris, conceit and tyranny. We might say that his attitude had something of the Wilsonian about it. He certainly has many spiritual descendants in America today, especially in our universities.
For those who might be interested, here's a dramatization of Dostoyevsky's memorable parable by famed British actor the late John Gielgud: