If you are
under about 35 you probably didn’t hear much about the term ‘relativism’ during
your schooling in your teenage and young(er) adult years. That is because it was so de rigueur (cool)
by then and so pervasive (common) now. Since about the mid-‘60’s-‘70’s, life,
as you are now experiencing it, is taken as simply ‘the way it is.’ But there
was a time, before the cataclysmic epoch-changing 1960’s, when things were very
different.
Social
scientists, philosophers, and traditional religionists looking back recognize a
tremendous shift in the attitudes and perceptions young people developed in
those years—a huge cultural shift.
Consider the words to an immensely popular song in the late ‘60’s:
“There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear. . . /
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down. . . /
There’s battle
lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind. . .”
(lyrics from Stephen Sills’song For What It’s Worth, Buffalo
Springfield, 1966.)
Explanatory
to those views, here is how an esteemed university scholar and representative
of the older generations (people born before about 1955) views the majority of
today’s young people—especially high-school and college-age students (ages 14-39).
Contrast it with earlier times:
“Students are deficient in moral formation, in reading of
serious books, in musical tastes, and above all in love [he rightly considers ‘relationships’
as a sad excuse for love]. They are
shallow. They have no longing in their
souls for anything high or great. Their minds
are empty, their characters weak, and their bodies sated with rock and roll and
easy sex—or at least with the belief that sex is ‘no big deal.’ These students come equipped with a
simple-minded relativism that is quick to close off all discussion with
the tag, ‘Who’s to say what’s right and wrong?’
Their relativism justifies [to themselves] an easygoing openness
to everything, an openness which expresses their incapacity for being serious
about anything. Their proclaimed
openness [today they call it ‘tolerance’] in fact, turns out to be a
dogmatic closedness toward moral virtue.”
(Thomas G. West, notes from “Allen Bloom and
America,” in
The Claremont Institute, the Claremont Review of Books, 1988.)
The high schools,
and particularly the universities, along with fractured families with the
debilitating effect of divorce on children and the child’s capacity or
motivation to learn and to love, are largely to blame for these distorted
views. Many educational institutions (again, particularly
the ‘elite’ liberal universities whose faculty are largely children—those spoken of in the song lyrics
quoted—of the 60’s and 70’s) have openly taught that life has no intrinsic
meaning and therefore that there is no principled difference between good and
evil (or that there is no evil). Therefore, law is a joke. Many of their students who believed these
things have children (the current young adult generation) who also believe
these things, who claim to be open to everything, who “are filled with
boundless seas of rage, doubt, and fear and that liberty means nothing more
than self-realization or self-expression with no intrinsic moral limit. Their music, which is reflective of their
culture, has anger and desperation in it. . . ”
(Allen Bloom, The
Closing of the American Mind).
So what is
the solution to this sorry state of affairs? Well, for starters, how about revisiting America’s founding principles?
Even
inspired foreign observers could see what we need or would need to salvage the
mess our society has become. The French observer of society and culture, Alexis
de Tocqueville wrote of it with prescience in the mid 1830’s in his Democracy
in America, and the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the
1970’s understood our founding principles better than many of our politicians
and young people when he said, in A World Split Apart, “In American
democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because
man is God’s creature. That is, freedom
was given to the individual [by God, not by government] conditionally, on the
assumption of his constant religious responsibility. . . . [They] have
lost the concept of [divine principles and] inalienable rights which used to
restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.” The language of the Declaration of
Independence, of course, supports Solzhenitsyn’s claim: “We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights . . . .”
Men are
subject to the laws of nature’s God.
The Founders
were well-aware of the need for public-spirited citizens. I think that they well-understood and
welcomed immigrants who would desire citizenship with the duties and loyalty it
required (and restricted entrance to those who wouldn’t). They anticipated with clarity the consequence
of a loss of public virtue by any who came here, or resided here by birth—even
their own offspring, if they did not subscribe to these expectations. They believed that a people accustomed to
living however it pleased, who saw no higher purpose than, say, entertainment
and having fun—or indolently living off a government and disrespecting its laws,
a people demonstrably incapable of self-government in the sense of controlling
selfish passions and interests—would also be incapable of self-government in
the sense off democracy, making public laws for themselves to live by.
Founder James Madison says in Federalist 55:
“Republican
government presupposes the existence of these qualities [men’s capacity for virtue]
in a higher degree than any other form [of government].” But if a people ever becomes slavishly lacking in
self-restraint, lacking in understanding or respect for law, if their
"spirit shall ever be so far debased," they, alas, "will be
prepared to tolerate anything but liberty."
And
so they have. And that is the crux of
the problem.
Some
things--many things-- are not relative.
