PERVASIVE RELATIVISM

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.