Didion’s on Morality Essay

What is it that forms and drives our virtuous 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 pandemonium and anarchy? In her essay On Morality, Joan Didion dissects what lies beneath the surface of humanitys morality. By relative several stories and historical events, she shows that morality at its basic virtually primitive level is nonhing much than our loyalties to the ones we love, everything else is subjective. Didions first story points out our loyalty to family.She is in Death Valley 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 found animated but bleeding internally, deep in shock, Didion states. She talked to the nurse who had driven his girl 185 miles to the ne arst doctor. The nurses husband had stayed with the body until the corone r could get there. The nurse say, 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 a 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 sentimental consideration. She claims that we promise each other to try and retrieve our casualties and not wildness our dead it is more than a sentimental consideration. She stresses this point by locution that if, in the simplest terms, our nurture is devout enough we stay with the body, or have bad dreams. Her point is that morality at its most old level is a sense of loyalty to one another that we learned from our loved 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 mor ality is to do what we think is right whatever is necessary to meet our primary loyalties to help for our loved ones, even if it means sacrificing ourselves.Didion emphatically states she is talking about a wagon-train morality, and For better or for worse, we are what we learned as children. She talks about her childhood and hearing graphic litanies about the Donner-Reed party and the Jayhawkers. She maintains they failed in their loyalties to each other, and deserted 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 insist that we have no way of conditionedwhat is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. She sees politics, and public policy falsely assigned aspects of morality. She warns us not to victimize ourselves into thinking that because we want or need something that it is a moral imperative t hat we have it, then is when we union 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 Nazi army invaded Poland and started World state of war II. World War II came to an end in large part due to the United States dropping two 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 undo most, if not all, of humanity, the ultimate act 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 by chance we have been wrong. She shows us that our moral codes are often subjective and fallacious, that we rationalize and justify 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 order would break down into chaos and anarchy.