Since FOX refused to run this particular advertisement (featuring people who, still in the womb, survived attempts to end their lives through abortion) during Super Bowl 54 but aired the pornographic pole-dancing/crotch-grabbing halftime show that network executives knew children would be watching, I’m more certain than ever (if that’s possible) that popular culture is imposing values totally at odds with the values my wife and I are trying to impart to our children, and that imposition has become downright adversarial. Maybe you’ve also likely experienced some tension with friends or family members who aren’t on the same page with your parental ambitions, who don’t see any value in modesty or reverence for the sacredness of human life, who bought into the lie of the Sexual Revolution, who retreat into the philosophically obtuse and self-contradictory thicket of moral relativism the moment they’re confronted with the possibility of objective moral truth, and who frustratingly use words like “right” and “wrong” while expecting a universal understanding of what they’ve just claimed can’t possibly be universally agreed upon.
I’ve said before that genuine education is not merely about imparting knowledge but rather about instilling virtue, a standard that can’t even be defined without an objective moral framework, and so it would be easy to dismiss moral relativism as merely an affliction of the uneducated mind–and I could make a compelling case as a recovering casualty of the public “education” system myself as I’m still undoing the damage of some collective 16-20 years of progressive indoctrination–but this one factor alone would not explain the inconsistency of relatively educated 19th-Century philosophers turning to relativism (like Nietzche’s Perspectivism) or of progressive elites publicly espousing social engineering and situational ethics while privately embracing the traditional mores of the nuclear family.
The late Roger Scruton clarifies the origin and problem of moral relativism in an interview from 2012, first by defining it:
“In layman’s terms, a moral relativist is somebody who believes that a moral judgement is the expression of the subjective opinion of a particular person and that it cannot be evaluated from any other position than his own. Every judgement is relative to the interests and position of the person who makes it, so that in the end there’s no position outside the individual from which he can be judged.”
This is an essential component of the Postmodern view, and any logically sound examination of it should conclude that it suffers from an inherent contradiction.
Since subjective morality is confined to the individual, it’s socially useless. Attempts to establish a secular/non-theistic objective moral framework have been made at least since the days of Aristotle and culminated in the Enlightenment:
“That has been one of the efforts of philosophy down the centuries … the effort to produce a fulcrum on which our world view can turn, which is not simply our individual desires. For a long time after the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals believed that they’d discovered that, in the idea of morality put forward by Kant or perhaps some version that was downstream from that, like the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, which gave a secular grounding to a shared moral position, which would not be the position of any particular person but the position of all of us. And from that we could come to conclusions about what was right and wrong which didn’t privilege the individual and his desires.”
This secular grounding to a shared moral position did not endure into the 20th Century, by which time philosophers began to despair that any viable secular/non-theistic objective moral framework could be made. The most rhetorically important expression of this despair was the Existentialist view, perhaps best articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, who fully embraced the outright egocentric Postmodern version of moral relativism we encounter today, which when carried to its logical conclusions is incompatible with and inimical to civilization:
“Sartre argued that there is no position from which I can be judged except my own, so that the only thing that can authenticate my moral judgments is my choice that those are my judgments. So the difference between a moral and an immoral person, on Sartre’s view, is simply that the moral person is somebody who wills his own desires as commitments, whereas the immoral person is someone who just has those desires. On that view, the authentic Existentialist rapist is the one whom you should praise, not the person who simply is tempted by his sexual appetites.”
Humans by nature tend to affirm themselves through moral judgments, and so when moral relativists naturally impose their relativism on others, they paradoxically create an absurd kind of objective moral norm:
“You see this happening especially in the European Court of Human Rights, where you found people with old-fashioned objective systems of values constantly being called before the judges and reproached for the fact that they are ‘discriminating against’ people who don’t share their values. So it becomes ever more difficult to retain those old-fashioned objective views of what morality is without being condemned on moral grounds for having those views.”
Scruton contrasts the 18th-Century Enlightenment concept of human rights, based in a secular/non-theistic objective morality and defined negatively in terms of how inalienable rights are not to be infringed upon, with the mid-20th Century concept of positive rights that obligate/appropriate the property and labor of others:
“It all went terribly wrong, in my view, after the Second World War, when people lost any sight of what the list of human rights consisted of. Originally, in people like Locke and also in Kant, human rights are fundamentally negative things: A right not to be interfered with, not to have your life taken away, not to have your freedom taken away, not to have your property taken away. Essentially liberal ideas, and it’s a sort of axiom of that way of thinking that your right is my duty …. If your right is simply not to be interfered with, it’s easy for me to fulfill that duty. I don’t interfere with you, I don’t kill you, take your property, enslave you, and so on. But with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War, all kinds of new rights … were postulated by the process that then was initiated, including the right to have a job, the right to have security of home life, the right to cover the basic needs of existence, the right to health care …. These are not freedoms but claims. They’re very different … because once you make these claims, if you hold on to the axiom that my right is somebody else’s duty, you automatically have to answer the question ‘Well, whose is the duty to provide?'”
This radical change in the definition of rights necessarily entails expansion of the state, its intrusion into our lives, and the corresponding curtailment of individual liberties, especially (for Americans) the “negative” inalienable rights outlined in the Constitution. It also causes confusion as to the basis of rights (an objective moral framework vs. the arrogation of the state) and results in social tension. Scruton takes as an example the historic Christian view of human rights (specifically the Roman Catholic view in this instance):
“But these rights are not for us to determine according to political criteria or according to the desires of people in secular society. They are eternal. So for instance, although there is a right to life, the Roman Catholic would say that right attaches to the unborn, too, and the European Court of Human Rights would say ‘No, because that interferes with the right to abortion that we guarantee because it’s part of what is offered by way of settling disputes in a secular society.’ The Polish government has had to confront this. I’m not sure if it’s resolved it yet as to whether it’s going to change its law on abortion or not.”
Moral relativism has also radically changed, and even inverted, the concept of tolerance:
“The influence of moral relativism is to say that it’s intolerant to make judgements at all. This is what we find often said in my country that someone being judgemental is committing the primary moral fault, and real toleration means not discriminating at all against rival views, accepting all views as equally valid. But actually, toleration means the opposite of that. Toleration means accepting what you don’t approve of, accepting what you do disagree with. And our tradition in England of toleration, which grew up in the 17th Century, was a solution to radical conflict. People learned to be tolerant precisely of the things that they really hated. Learning not to hate them means not tolerating at all because there’s nothing to tolerate. This is a very important virtue in this case, but it depends upon having objective moral values.”
Which is why, I would argue, moral relativists are actually among the least tolerant people you’ll find.
This only covers the first 25 minutes of the full 62-minute interview, but it’s worth watching all of it. Unless I’m mistaken, Scruton only speaks to the origin of moral relativism but not to its motivation, and maybe that’s because the motivation is actually quite obvious: 20th-Century philsophers who despaired of establishing a workable secular/non-theistic objective moral framework cast themselves into the painfully chaotic, nonorientable limbo of Postmodernism, rather than turn back to the only proven source of an objective moral framework, because doing otherwise posed moral implications that were unacceptable to them. It’s the creator of an engine, not the user, who decides what fuel that engine will use–putting gasoline into the fuel tank of a diesel vehicle will certainly have very bad consequences–and the same truth applies to humanity: If we are not the result of a random collision of amino acids and unguided evolutionary processes–and the truth that we’re not can be incontrovertibly demonstrated both mathematically and scientifically–but are instead created beings, then we do not get to make up our own rules about what’s right and wrong. Hence the moral relativist’s hostility toward the very notion of God, Whose existence shows us all how desperately wretched we really are. Pretending that life is a series of meaningless coincidences and that behavior has no absolute moral consequence, the moral relativist sits atop his self-affirming illusion of goodness and smugly indulges himself, exemplifying Ivan’s argument in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamozov” that, without God, all things are permissible. This is our contemporary culture.
But cultures and civilizations are not the same: While cultures may disagree about morality, civilizations must adhere to common set of values (viz. C.S. Lewis’ concept of Tao) without which those civilizations cannot survive. For example, a civilization whose culture does not value children will face an inevitable demographic crisis, whose culture abandons modesty and sexual restraint will precipitate irresponsibility and ultimately victimization/predation, and whose culture, as Scruton would say, “privileges the individual” over equal enforcement of the law will suffer civil unrest, if not outright civil war, at some point. And these common values, this objective moral framework, has a way of intruding on and dispelling illusion.
Unfortunately, the more tightly that illusion is held, the more painful is the intrusion of reality. As author Denise McAllister puts it, “History has a way of cycling back to normalcy. The sad thing is, societies often have to go through terrible trials and tribulations to wake up to reality. Historically, that has often been brutal.” Sad indeed. I’m assuming FOX and Pepsi, which funded the halftime show, will likely ignore the complaints of outraged parents. This culture, these values make the Super Bowl a cash cow … for now. But mark my words: it won’t last. A culture as sick as ours is toxic to civilization, and what can’t continue won’t. If you don’t see that, you’re blind or kidding yourself. If you keep pushing your toxic values up against reality, you can expect reality to push back, and maybe with a ferocity you never expected. That’s something to think about as you count your money among the ruins.