“On Morality”

1. “On Morality” by Joan Didion An essay excerpted from Slouching Towards Bethlehem -1965

2. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by W.B. Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert. A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

3. Hieronymus Bosch

6. Reading Rhetorically How did charting help you make sense of Didion’s challenging argument?

7. Reading Rhetorically by Charting • Paragraph 1: Didion describes her physical discomfort to illustrate her intellectual discomfort with the word “morality”; however, she does introduceher concept of the “particular.” • Paragraphs 2-4: Didion exemplifies what she means by the “particular” (157), providing a current as well as historical cases of primitive moral beliefs/codes that are taught to us as children. • Paragraphs 5-6: Didion maintainsthat it is difficult to move beyond particular primitive examples of what is good in a place like Death Valley as she describes how stories travel as well as how their tone is mostly dark and ominous. • Paragraph 7: Didion asserts that morality is not “manageable”(161) as it is guided by the individual conscience, which can be good or bad, and again, provideshistorical examples to illustrate her point. • Paragraphs 8-9: Didion concedes the problem with asserting what is right or wrong (including her own assertion), but claims that we have no way of knowing what is moral beyond fundamental/primitive social codes and insists that when we feel that we have a “moral imperative” (163) to push our virtues on others it is dangerously bad.

8. Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or that we need something, not that is is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we already are. (Didion 163)

9. What is Didion’s main argument (thesis, major claim, key assertion)?Does she make any ideological assumptions?

11. Evaluation To what extent do you find Joan Didion’s “On Morality” convincing?