Archive for category Morality
Morality Through Narrative: The Role of Folk and Fairy Tales
As children, we read stories for many reasons:
to have some quality quiet-time with a parent;
to begin to learn how to read;
to expand our capacity for visualization; and
to discover the world-beyond-our-world.
Beyond those rationales, we should also consider the kind of stories we are told – after all, children’s tales have a very distinctive character, as genres go, that are created with a very special goal in mind. Given this design, perhaps the most important reason we are read children’s stories – as opposed to, for example, magazine articles or instruction manuals – is that, through this medium, we are taught two crucial elements of how to get along, those being:
morality; and
our shared constructs of being (also known as archetypes).
Morality through narrative is not a new concept. Young girls and boys have been taught the elementary concepts of right and wrong through the stories that they were told for a very long time. Cautionary tales, such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ do not hide the fact that they are aimed at giving their audience the vicarious learning opportunity to, respectively, avoiding associating with bad people and lying.
The moral sentiments expressed repeated in illustrated stories for the children of the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries are more subtle in content but no less influential in shaping the behaviour of girls and boy by the consequence of their sheer number. One such tale is ‘Rosebud’ collected by the Brothers Grimm – known in modern times as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – which communicates that every good girl has a prince ‘out there’ waiting to find and save her. Read the rest of this entry »
Communist Morality
Soviet communists, members of the Bolshevik party, created a new kind of “morality.” That was done to facilitate activities which most of us would consider immoral. The party leader, Lenin, believed that capitalism could not be defeated without violence. Strict top-to-bottom discipline was a precondition for party membership. The difference between Bolsheviks and ordinary people was described by Juri Pyatakov. He wrote:
“We are not like other people. We are a party who makes the impossible possible… And if the party demands it, if it is necessary or important for the party, we will be able by an act of will to expel from our brains in twenty-four hours ideas we have held for years. Yes, I will see black where I thought I saw white, or may still see it, because for me there is no life outside the party or apart from agreement with it.” It is ironic that in 1937 Pyatakov, the deputy minister of heavy industry, was accused of anti-party activities. He confessed and was at once executed. The same happened to many other Bolsheviks, such as Bukharin, Radek, Rykov, Zinoview, etc. Together with Lenin they led the revolution, became top party leaders, authors of books about communism, etc. Were their confessions extracted under torture or were they persuaded to sing in order to serve the party for the last time? Read the rest of this entry »