Positively Cretinous

Oscar Wilde, in Intentions, spoke of "the crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals". He attributed this to the country's "national hero", George Washington, whose "cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature."

Though Washington's inability to tell a lie may have cast a long shadow over morality in the US, I would say that there is now an abundance, not a lack, of high unattainable ideals floating around North America. Ironically, it has commingled with the homely wisdom of George Washington's cherry tree, creating a truly hideous beast that leads all self-respecting Englishmen to break out into a rash.

In a similar manner to their French cousins, Americans have a very republican notion of civic pride and attach a lofty importance to virtue and morality. But this is not the kind of dedicated intellectual delusion that you will find in France's past. Louis St-Just once said, "Between the people and their enemies there can be nothing in common but the sword; we must govern by iron those who cannot be governed by justice; we must oppress the tyrant". Though America has its fair share of revolutionary firebrands, they would all willingly cast away their tomes in favour of George Washington's innocent, schmaltzy announcement to his father: "I cannot tell a lie."

Starry-eyed morality is just not the British way of doing things. There's an excellent piece in today's Financial Times about the 'positively cretinous' oath that all students of the Thunderbird Business School in Arizona must take. "As a Thunderbird and a global citizen," the fresh-faced magnates of the future declare, "I will strive to act with honesty and integrity. I will respect the rights and dignity of all people, I will strive to create sustainable prosperity worldwide . . ." Lucy Kellaway dismisses this as 'so vague as to amount to nothing'. The underlying problem is that these vague aspirations are positive and idealistic, rather than stern admonishments explaining what NOT to do.

Last week, one of the professors here embarked on yet another of his deeply pretentious rambles about ethics in journalism, which could simply be summed up as "don't make stuff up." But he just would not stop talking in inflated tones about the importance of morality in journalism, at one point saying that journalists should take the Ancient Egyptian god Thoth as their example, weighing up good and evil before putting pen to paper. But he didn't fool me. I could tell that in fact he saw HIMSELF as Thoth, who was not just a moral scribe but in fact a crucial part of the universe and creator of all forms of knowledge. Only a psychotic with a God complex could imagine that journalists have such a crucial place in the moral universe.

We in Britain know better. We know that journalism is a grubby profession, which involves lying, stealing and bribing your way into a story so that you don't get fired by your exacting editor. The rest is common sense: whoever decided to doctor those photos of the bombardment of Lebanon earlier this year was not doing so because of a lack of Aristotelian direction, but simply because he was an idiot. Or because he was under pressure from his boss at Reuters. Or both. Either way, just try not to make stuff up.

In class after the speech, we were all asked to explain where our own morality comes from. I think it says something that only the international students - myself, Lorenzo and Claire - had real problems explaining ourselves. The American students had clearly fretted a lot about how to be Good, but only in a permanently unattainable way. It would make far more sense to create a simple list of what NOT to do, rather than to pore over Martin Luther King's writing as some sort of magical codex that might unlock the ethereal power of Good. Following in the footsteps of Milton, De Sade and William Blake, I think it would be much better to throw yourself into Evil in order to truly understand what Good is.