The Question: What does the Eliot Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?
Yes, Governor Spitzer should have resigned. New York government would have been paralyzed and the media would have remained paroxysmal in its obsession with the story of one person, while six billion others also have lives to live.
What does his fall tell us about the state of morals in the United States? Ethicists urge that one should not make full-blown generalizations on the basis of single extreme cases. This is an extreme case. Step back from it and survey the scene, and you will find plenty of moral lapses and human faults and falls to inspire immeasurable whining, finger-pointing, and judging.
The question implies that this case might reveal something about the state of the present culture in contrast to that in other times. Optimists and moral progressives have little to cheer: we are not rising to new moral heights. But pessimists and crabby people who always think that earlier times offer no such cases need some history lessons.
To illustrate: much of Western moral language descends from the Greco-Roman world and its great philosophers. Most of the Greek heroes and gods and exemplars would make Governor Spitzer look like the head of his class at Sabbath School The Jewish-Christian heritage, to which I happily adhere and from which I would learn, offers sad cases on almost every page of the records.. The Gospel of Matthew (1:1-16) lists one version of the family tree of Jesus of
Nazareth, "who is called the Messiah." One of his great-great-great-etc. grandmothers in this telling was Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho. And among the males, Governor (strike that: King!) David lusted after a women whom, before he could marry her, he had to first turn into a widow by having her husband killed.
The sacred books do not cover up the flaws of people of power, but, in the case of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament ,which are realistic in their accounting of what happened to them--usually worse than impeachment--also included stories of grace and love, gain and growth, restitution and reconciliation, which finally portrayed moral lives which remain worthy as examples and inspirations. Maybe some day Governor Spitzer can come back to the public world and play a positive role. He can't do that right now.
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