Benightenment
Here is an article by Dennis Prager. It is short enough that to reprint the whole thing would take no more words than to describe it:
Why Young Americans Can’t Think Morally
Moral standards have been replaced by feelings.Last week, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column on an academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral vocabulary among most American young people. Here are excerpts from Brooks’s summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. It was led by “the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith”:
● “Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.”
● “When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all.”
● “Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.”
● “The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste.”
● “As one put it, ‘I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.’”
● “Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.” (Emphases mine.)
Ever since I attended college I have been convinced that “studies” either confirm what common sense suggests or they are mistaken. I realized this when I was presented study after study showing that boys and girls were not inherently different from one another, and they acted differently only because of sexist upbringings.
This latest study cited by David Brooks confirms what conservatives have known for a generation: Moral standards have been replaced by feelings. Of course, those on the left only believe this when an “eminent sociologist” is cited by a writer at a major liberal newspaper.
What is disconcerting about Brooks’s piece is that nowhere in what is an important column does he mention the reason for this disturbing trend: namely, secularism.
The intellectual class and the Left still believe that secularism is an unalloyed blessing. They are wrong. Secularism is good for government. But it is terrible for society (though still preferable to bad religion) and for the individual.
One key reason is what secularism does to moral standards. If moral standards are not rooted in God, they do not objectively exist. Good and evil are no more real than “yummy” and “yucky.” They are simply a matter of personal preference. One of the foremost liberal philosophers, Richard Rorty, an atheist, acknowledged that for the secular liberal, “There is no answer to the question, ‘Why not be cruel?’”
With the death of Judeo-Christian God-based standards, people have simply substituted feelings for those standards. Millions of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with “How do you feel about it?” as the only guide to what they ought to do. The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide. And now, as Brooks points out, we see the results. A vast number of American young people do not even ask whether an action is right or wrong. The question would strike them as foreign. Why? Because the question suggests that there is a right and wrong outside of themselves. And just as there is no God higher than them, there is no morality higher than them, either.
Forty years ago, I began writing and lecturing about this problem. It was then that I began asking students if they would save their dog or a stranger first if both were drowning. The majority always voted against the stranger — because, they explained, they loved their dog and they didn’t love the stranger.
They followed their feelings.
Without God and Judeo-Christian religions, what else is there?
My comment: I have watched with rising contempt over the past ten year the rise of a diminished capacity among atheists to defend themselves from this, indeed, or any argument. I pretend no careful study, no do I know if the somewhat random encounters I have had with the thought of others are typical or no: yet the trend of what I have encountered is unmistakable.
The atheists are losing their ability to put forward a logical argument for their case. I am not saying their argument has changed: I merely mean the atheists are no longer catechized. They cannot present their argument logically because they are not instructed in logic.
The routine objection to theism is that it is unscientific or irrational. This objection when make by someone who knows the basics of the scientific method or the basics of formal logic is sober. This objection made by someone who lacks such basic knowledge is frivolous.
Psychologically, it is common enough for a man who fornicates or commits some other sin his conscience knows to be sin but which his society pretends is praiseworthy to abandon logic once logic becomes his enemy, and to retreat into emotion, subjectivity, scorn, and to substitute mockery for reasoning.
Metaphysically, a man who does not believe in God, or, rather, who takes as a supreme principle of good nothing more than his own preference or sentiment, having abandoned objectivity in one field, either must embrace the general idea that objectivity is subjective, or much explain a carefully nuanced metaphysical stance that allows for moral law without admitting a lawgiver.
The rational atheist prefers the latter, finding moral law in the laws of nature, or in the nature of being, or in human nature. Rational atheist tend to be either angry Ayn Randians, to whom moral law is obvious and immediate, or melancholy stoics, to whom the moral law is an unachievable ideal.
The irrational atheist prefers the former, as it requires no particular thought and imposes no particular duty. That the idea of an objective subjectivity is a manifest self-contradiction in terms does not disturb the placid self-righteousness of these lotus-eaters of all matters philosophical. Irrational atheists tend to be Progressives.
But irrationality is not something which a man can accept into his soul piecemeal. There is a tendency (even if some men can resist that tendency for one reason or another) for any man’s psychology to attempt to flatter him, and for any man’s metaphysical system to seek a more consistent, even if not more rational, expression. In any case where he has not a strong reason to do otherwise, his view of life, his metaphysics, his sentiments, his self-love, will incline him to adopt the default view of his worldview unquestioned.
The great Ayn Rand — whom I do not hesitate to describe as great even though, as a Christian, I perceive her philosophy to be as wrongheaded as it is blackhearted — avoided the danger of unreason that besets most schools of atheism for the simple reason that she respected metaphysical and axiomatic thinking. She concentrated on axioms, and she wrote as a moralist, one of the few thinkers in the modern age who saw the moral aspect of economic questions. She attempted to deduce moral universals from the desire of all living beings to live, and from a (sadly inarticulate) axiom that all rational beings have a moral duty to live well, nay, to live as befits heroic stature.
Ayn Rand is a classical and not a modern thinker: she follows Aristotelian methods and assumptions. Among men of letters in the post-Enlightenment era, Aristotelians are as rare as one-eyed Arimaspians.
It is not a coincidence that Aristotle, not to mention classical education, fell out of fashion among the intellectual classes in the West at about the same time reason fell out of fashion, in the age immediately following the Enlightenment, which embraced secularism, utopianism, godlessness and (paradoxically) woozy mysticism, and age I like to call the Benightenment.
Marx and Nietzsche and the other shabby, makeshift thinkers of the Benightenment whose epigone and culmination is the advocate of child-murder Peter Singer, deduce such moral universals as may be convenient to their rhetoric, but they cannot reach the moral conclusions a bright schoolboy of seven reaches who deduces that cruelty is wrong.
It is possible to retain the ability to think, and to analyze and defend a philosophical position logically without a belief in God, but only if one assumes without justification the type of belief in the sanctity of human life and the righteousness of moral purity which belief in God makes clear and logical.
There are moral atheists. They are very rare and growing more rare. There are logical atheists. They are very rare and growing very, very rare.
Most atheists I encounter these days (or at least the most vocal) are radical materialists or Progressives or both, who cannot even give an account for such things as cause and effect, or free will, or monogamy, or the need to avoid torture and brutality.
They cannot account for civilization, or utter a word in its defense, because their metaphysical principles do not admit that it is objectively rational to prefer civilization to barbarism.
So the inability of the moderns to think about morals is merely the local symptom of a broader social malaise: the inability to think logically about anything at all.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
