Didion’s on Morality Essay

What is it that forms and drives our good behaviors? Are we natural with a basic sense of devotion or do we prepare a set of moral kindly codes to keep society from displace into chaos and anarchy? In her essay On Morality, Joan Didion dissects what lies beneath the locate of humanitys morals. By recounting several stories and historical events, she shows that morality at its basic most primitive level is nothing more than our loyalties to the ones we love, everything else is subjective.Didions first story points out our consignment to family. She is in finis Valley writing an article closely morality, a word she distrustfulness more every day. She relates a story about a juvenility man who was drunk, had a car accident, and died while driving to Death Valley. His young lady was found alive nevertheless bleeding internally, deep in shock, Didion states. She talked to the suck who had driven his girl 185 miles to the nearest doctor. The nurses husband had stayed with the personate until the coroner could get there. The nurse said, You just cant set aside a body on the highway, its immoral. According to Didion this was one display case in which she did not distrust the word, because the nurse meant something quite specific.She argues we gullt devastate 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 to each one different to try 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 near(a) enough we stay with the body, or have elusive dreams.Her point is that morality at its most primary level is a sense of the true 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 propagation and unspoilt times we dont abandon our dea d because we dont want someone to abandon us. She is professing that morality is to do what we think is right whatever is necessary to meet our primary loyalties to burster 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 knowingwhat 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 delude ourselves into thinking that beca use we want or need something that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen.She is saying this forget 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 War II. World War II came to an end in large part due to the coupled 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 destroyed most, if not all, of humanity, the last-ditch 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 apparitional icons throughout history have said I followed my own conscience. I did what I thought was right. Maybe we have all said i t and perchance we have been wrong. She shows us that our moral codes are often subjective and fallacious, that we thin out 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.