Didion’s on Morality Essay

What is it that forms and drives our moral behaviors? Are we born with a basic sense of morality or do we develop a set of moral social codes to keep society from falling into funny farm and anarchy? In her essay On Morality, Joan Didion dissects what lies beneath the surface of humanitys morality. By recounting several stories and historical events, she shows that morality at its basic most primitive level is nothing to a greater extent than our loyalties to the iodins we love, everything else is subjective. Didions first story points out our commitment to family.She is in Death vale writing an article about morality, a word she distrust more every day. She relates a story about a young man who was drunk, had a car accident, and died while driving to Death Valley. His girl was institute alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock, Didion states. She talked to the nurse who had determined his girl 185 miles to the nearest doctor. The nurses husband had stayed with the body until the coroner could get there. The nurse said, You just cant leave a body on the highway, its immoral. According to Didion this was one instance in which she did not distrust the word, because the nurse meant something quite specific. She argues we dont desert a body for even a few minutes lest it be desecrated. Didion claims this is more than only a artificial consideration. She claims that we promise each other to raise and retrieve our casualties and not abandon our dead it is more than a sentimental consideration. She stresses this point by saying that if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is intelligent plenteous we stay with the body, or put on bad dreams. Her point is that morality at its most primary level is a sense of loyalty to one another that we learned from our love ones. She is saying that we stick with our loved ones no matter what, in sickness, in health, in bad times and good times we dont abandon our dead because we dont want someone to abandon us. She is professing that morality is to do what we designate is right whatever is necessary to meet our primary loyalties to care for our loved ones, even if it means sacrificing ourselves.Didion emphatically states she is talking about a wagon-train morality, and For recrudesce or for worse, we are what we learned as children. She talks about her puerility and hearing graphic litanies about the Donner-Reed party and the Jayhawkers. She maintains they failed in their loyalties to each other, and bedraggled one another. She says they breached their primary loyalties, or they would not have been in those situations. If we go against our primary loyalties we have failed, we regret it, and thus have bad dreams. Didion asseverate that we have no way of knowingwhat is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is sin. She sees politics, and public policy falsely assigned aspects of morality. She warns us not to deceive ourselves into thinking that because we want or need some thing that it is a moral exigent that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen. She is saying this will be our demise, and she may well be correct. Hitlers idea that he had a moral imperative to purify the Aryan race serves as a poignant reminder of such a delusion.In 1939 Hitlers national socialist army invaded Poland and started World War II. World War II came to an annihilate in large part due to the United States displace 2 atomic bombs. If the war had continued and escalated to the point of Hitlers Nazis and the United States dropping more atomic bombs we could have destroyed most, if not all, of humanity, the ultimate displace of fashionable madmen. We may believe our behaviors are just and righteous, but Didions essay makes us closely examine our motives and morals. She contends that madmen, murders, war criminals and religious icons throughout history have said I followed my own conscience. I did what I thought was right. Maybe we have all said it and maybe we have been wrong. She shows us that our moral codes are often subjective and fallacious, that we rationalize and relieve our actions to suit our ulterior motives, and our only true morality is our loyalty to those we love. It is this loyalty to those we love that forms our families, then our cities, our states, our countries and ultimately our global community. Without these moral codes, social coiffe would break down into chaos and anarchy.