The Making of Immorality

I wrote this for English class as a rhetorical essay, but it really isn't a rhetorical analysis so much as an articulation through the lens of The Grapes of Wrath of my beliefs regarding morality in general.

That's why, if you'll notice (as my teacher did), the first paragraph is missing a proper thesis.

The Making of Immorality

For centuries, people have theorized about the nature of morality; what it is and why immoral acts are committed. Humanist psychologists, for example, believe that people are “innately good” and that deviance from this natural state leads to problems. The bible (or, at least, one reading of it), in contrast, teaches that all people inherited sin from Adam and Eve. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck argues that emotional separation leads to immorality.

In making his argument, Steinbeck must establish what morality is, which he does in defiance of enumerated rules. Morality conflicts clearly with law multiple times in The Grapes of Wrath, such as when the Joad family buries Grampa against the law because they don’t have the money for the state to bury him and don’t want to see him buried a pauper (190). For the Joads, their personal moral responsibility to see their loved one buried with dignity outweighs the law’s mandate. The biblical definition of sin, too, is kept distinct from immorality. In the government camp the Joads are in, the group of people named as the “Jesus-lovers” disapprove of dancing and acting and call it sin. One of them, Lisbeth Sandry, terrifies Rose of Sharon by telling her that the stage play the camp once gave was “sin an’ delusion an’ devil stuff” (422). Steinbeck makes it clear that this is not the majority opinion, nor is it a sane opinion. Mrs. Sandry is a crazy trouble-maker; she eventually goes into a fit and the respected and kind camp manager says of her, “She isn’t well” (439). Steinbeck presents those who are fixed on the bible’s definitions of sin as, far from righteous, insane.

It may be tempting to say that Steinbeck is rejecting the idea of sin. Jim Casy, the former preacher who ends up sacrificing himself for the migrants, suggests that “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do” (32). However, Casy, in practice, demonstrates that he does believe that some things are wrong, such as by protesting wages of two and a half cents for a box of peaches. His statement is more accurately interpreted to mean that there is no fundamental sin or virtue, despite what the bible says, and it must follow that if actions are not fundamentally labelled, people cannot be innately inclined to sin or virtue. Steinbeck certainly lays moral judgment on some acts, notably, destroying food when children nearby are dying of malnutrition, calling it “a crime here that goes beyond denunciation” (477). Steinbeck believes that there are sins and crimes; they are merely not necessarily the things officially labelled sins or crimes.

Then what is morality? Early on, there are many things presented as good or bad. Steinbeck refers to the bank forcing tenants off their land for profit as “the monster” (44), clearly presenting this act and the construct as immoral. For the migrants, sharing is a moral obligation. When Pa questions whether or not they can take Casy along, Ma scolds him harshly, saying, “ ‘An’ any time when we got two pigs an’ over a hunderd dollars, an’ we wonderin’ if we kin feed a fella’ ” (139). Ma expresses another of Steinbeck’s messages; that it is good for people to unite and be together. She champions keeping the family together, even going so far as to threaten Pa with death to do so (230), and Tom later says, “Jesus, I’m glad Ma stopped us” (252), proving her correct. There is a definite implication that people uniting is good, such as when people collectively provide the money to bury babies honorably (266). What Steinbeck considers the origin of these, and other moral laws, is stated plainly in the passage that describes how the migrants built worlds, and more specifically the creation of codes. While certain rights, in the creation of codes, were required to be honored, others, such as the right to murder were crushed “because the little worlds could not exist for even a night with such rights alive” (265). The purpose of morality is to allow worlds, or, societies, to survive.

Both the right to offer help and the right to murder are called rights, though the latter are not upheld, reflecting the fact that humans have inclinations to do both. There must be, then, punishments to ensure that the former right is observed while the latter is destroyed, which are stated to be “a quick and murderous fight or ostracism” (266). Of the two, Steinbeck says, “ostracism was the worst. For…his name and face went with him” (266). Ostracism, thus, effectively blacklists one among ones’ peers, which is worse than death. Social pressure is brought to bear to persuade or dissuade without resorting to ostracism. The influence of the opinion of peers is shown frequently. The government camp uses it most effectively, running the entire camp on it. The watchman explains the disciplinary system to Tom as, simply, “Well, the first time the Central Committee warns him. And the second time they really warn him. The third time they kick him out of the camp” (392). This is apparently the only form of official discipline in the camp, and would not be effective if ostracism did not blacklist the migrant, as failing to get a job appears to be a common reason to leave anyways. The camp does not need death to enforce order; ostracism is enough. The camp residents additionally take care to enforce minor rules, as one does when Ma walks into the men’s bathroom harshly demanding, “How you come in here?” (411). Ma is duly apologetic. Social pressure successfully keeps order in the government camp.

Social pressure is shown to be enormously powerful, even capable of defeating stringent economic pressure, as it did for Thomas, a small farmer who tipped off the government camp about a fight planned at the dance (404). Though Thomas was under threat of losing his job, he tells them to maintain the respect his workers have for him. Social pressure is not just something used to encourage people to perform moral acts, but a tool used to determine morality. Pa says about Tom’s imprisonment for homicide, “When Tom here got in trouble we could hold up our heads. He only done what any man would a done” (190). Tom’s act is not judged as immoral, but completely natural, and therefore, the Joads treat it with pride as a moral act. Pity, too, is not as powerful as social pressure. Most representative of this is Mae, who gives a migrant bread against her normal policy despite initial resistance. Her resistance does not fall because of pity but because Al judges her negatively for her resistance (217). When people are affected by social pressure, it is enormously powerful. Social pressure in this way enforces morality.

As people have inclinations to be immoral, the converse is then true. The lack of social pressure, or, more accurately, the ability to not feel social pressure, leads to immorality, because such people do not have immoral inclinations suppressed. Noah is the definition of the ability to not feel social pressure, as he does not feel much at all. He is described and apparently lamented as someone who “didn’t seem to care” (106). This emotional separation from the world, including his family, allows him to commit the established crime of breaking up the family despite Tom’s reproaches and the knowledge of Ma’s need. Earlier in the book, in one of the interlude chapters, cold figuring allows the tractor driver representative of all tractor drivers native to the people they drive off the land to perform the act despite their remonstrance. The tenant tells the driver, “But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can’t eat at all,” appealing to the driver’s moral sensibilities. However, the driver responds with, “Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids” (50). For survival, out of desperation, the tractor driver learns to use his family as an emotional barrier between him and the tenants, his former neighbors.

 Numbers appear multiple times as methods of emotional separation, usually appearing as money. Other men, tasked with throwing tenants off the land, are said to have “worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling” (42), and these “would take no responsibility” (43). While all of the owner men find their ways to deal with their actions, the ones who use numbers as a shield are portrayed as the most irresponsible and the most immoral. It is, similarly, for economic purposes that fruit is destroyed while children die of malnutrition, the “crime here that goes beyond denunciation” (476-477). The small farmers’ calculations of the amount it cost to put crop out for sale and conclusion that it was not economically viable ultimately allows them to destroy food when faced with the starving. Numbers, combined with necessity, are a powerful barrier from emotion.

Numbers also contribute to distance, which is another powerful separator and the ones the ultimate villains, the huge landowners, use. The huge landowners, such as the monster, the bank, drive down wages to keep profits high without mercy. Their distance is both physical and in power. Many of the huge landowners are situated far away, such as in the east as one tractor driver reports (52). So far removed are they that “many of them had never seen the farms they owned” (317) and value their farms at “principal plus interest” (316). Because they do not see their farms or the people that worked on them, they were capable of ordering starvation. The power difference also allows them to view their workers as inferior, saying things like, “Sure, they talk the same language, but they ain’t the same. Look how they live. Think any of us folks’d live like that?” (322). The migrants are different and inferior, and thus, they are not peers, and their opinion does not matter. This is quite literal for the individual migrant because the individual migrant cannot make an impact. The landowners’ power extends far, as Thomas reports, saying that the men who burned out a migrant camp were “sent out by the Association”, which is controlled by a large landowner bank (402-403). As there are always migrants willing to work and migrants are landless and nameless, migrants only have power collectively, and the landowners work in this way to keep them from uniting. Because of the gap between the landowner and the migrant in both physical distance and power, the landowners commit immoral acts against the migrants without qualms.

An obvious argument is that the cited actions are not actually immoral, as the society the perpetuators are part of has not been threatened by their actions; that the laws they are breaking are laws for the migrants so that their worlds might survive. But Steinbeck takes care to show that all the actions are working towards a rebellion that will overturn the social order, destroying and remaking it. First, the tractor drivers and owner men are directly responsible for destroying a society, because once the tenants are forced to become migrants, the former community of small farmers is gone and without replacement. But they are not the main point. It is the large landowners who have the largest hand, and they are the ones working towards their own destruction. Migrants’ anger is something the large landowners clearly fear. In an interlude chapter, one thinks, “What if some time an army of them marches on the land as the Lombards did in Italy…?” (323). For this reason they order camps to be destroyed. However, they know themselves that this cannot work indefinitely, because “Slaughter and terror did not stop [the Lombards]” (323). At some point, if they starve the migrants indefinitely, the migrants will unite despite their attempts to repress them and rise. Already the whispers are beginning. The threat of death even has no effect, because, as a migrant asks rhetorically, “Which’d you ruther for your kids, dead now or dead in two years with…malnutrition?” (322). They consider themselves certain to die, and have reason to do so, and instant death is preferable to a slow one by starvation. The landowners’ actions are self-destructive and therefore immoral. Steinbeck concludes this with the words, “And the great owners…ran to their destruction…cemented the inevitability of the day [of their destruction]” (325). There is left no doubt that all the actions against the migrants are immoral, because, whether by citing history or the migrants’ words, Steinbeck leaves no doubt that these actions are destructive. What the great landowners’ distance has led to is immorality.

In the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck argues that the purpose of morality is so that society can function, and naturally, it is enforced through social pressure. When social pressure does not have effect, immorality ensues. Whether through mathematics or distance, all people committing immoral acts have separated from those who would judge them as immoral, whether they have separated themselves so they can perform the immoral act, as the tractor drivers forcing their neighbors off their land do, or can perform immoral acts because they had already separated themselves, as is true for the large landowners. Either way, emotional separation necessarily precedes immorality.