Everyone is worried, concerned that society is tearing itself apart, split by social and cultural differences that appear impossible to bridge. What’s the real problem? And is there, if not a ready solution, a path ahead that might bring us to some solution?
Beginning in the late 1800s political free-thinkers and academicians sought to change society. Their motives were, I’d like to think, positive. (It’s distinctly possible that, at least in some cases, the motives were not positive. But I’ll leave that to others to judge, at least for today).
They wanted changes to society, all of them couched in terms of equality, justice, and rights. The philosophies they espoused had their roots in just a few thinkers: Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche in particular. These philosophies, placed atop the scientific efforts of a few others – who were not trying to change the world, simply understand it – Darwin, Wallace, Mendel, et al, and the whole array of great physicists of the last 150 years, led to a rejection of the past, and with it a rejection of traditional values and traditional morality.
Thus arose the Fabians, Marxists, Socialists and Fascists. They eschewed religion as well as traditional morality and replaced it with more “liberal” situational ethics, all couched in a benign vocabulary. They argued that religion had caused more violence throughout history than anything else. Their arguments took hold, and religion was fundamentally removed from the political arena during the 20th century. And power flowed to the Communists, the Fascists, the Nazis – all believers in very strong central governments, all believers in the state as the source of power and rights, all believers in “more power” as the right aim of those in power. (The leftward shift continues to this day.) And the 20th century was also the most violent on record. Is there a connection?
Marriage was redefined, love and sex were conflated, and in doing so we’ve nearly eradicated the former and trivialized the latter. Traditional marriage has been attacked as being either the cause or result of nearly everything bad. Marriage in the Western world – Europe and North and South America – went into a long slow decline, that continues to this day, with roughly half of all marriages now ending in divorce. Many more people choose not to marry at all. Meanwhile, crime statisticians point out that children of single parents earn less, and are far more likely to commit crimes of violence than are other children. But at the same time the number of children born out of wedlock (how quaint that phrase sounds today) continues to rise. And the vast majority of crime in the US is now committed by children who grew up in single parent houses. Is there a connection?
We devalued life. Imagine if drowning kittens was declared a right, protected by the courts. Wouldn’t its practice make our hearts a little harder? Would it make a less civilized world if every year we celebrated the drowning of 50 million kittens? But we do live in a world with 50 million abortions each year. Is it a wonder we are inured to violence? Two dozen slain in El Paso is a tragedy. Because it’s new. And it fits a storyline. But those slain in Baltimore or Chicago on a daily basis? Old news, move along. 3 to 5 million dead in the last 20 years in the Congo Civil War? Hey, so what, it’s Africa. A million in concentration camps in western China? Too bad… Next. Abortion on demand… Drown a kitten… Did we really think that this studied callousness towards life would have no consequence?
Over the century or more we’ve bent society around like pretzel, we’ve thrown away virtually all moral anchors – and we’ve seen not only the most violent century in history, we’ve seen the rise of the most brutal governments in history, watched our western culture unravel, and yet we wonder why all the mental stress? Is there a connection?
The world of 150 years ago wasn’t perfect, far from it. But it did recognize the value of moral absolutes, and recognized a need to consider God, even when it chose to ignore morals, and equally often chose to ignore God. But in the last century or so we abandoned those absolutes, and abandoned God altogether. And we replaced them with “all knowing governments” and infinitely flexible situational ethics. What followed was most violent century in history, in which governments around the world – claiming to act “for the greater good” – managed to kill perhaps 250 million of their own people. Never mind allowing 1.5 billion abortions. Even as nuclear weapons proliferate…
Maybe the root of our social ills is the denial of fundamental truths; and maybe we need to remember that every decision has consequences, and just because some decisions “feel good,” decisions need to be evaluated in light morals and of those consequences. And when the consequences become too costly, maybe it means we’re moving in the wrong direction.
Maybe it’s time we go back and look again at those decisions that threw God and morals on the ash heap, rebuilt academia, recast the role of governments, turned language on its head, that substituted situational ethics for morals…
Copyright 2019 Arrias
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