 |
| Greek philosophers. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons.) |
The victory of the LGBT bloc in creating the
right to “same-sex marriage” is simply the most recent and most potentially
devastating consequence of a tectonic shift in Western morality. Like the
culture that produced it, though, the morality which shattered the traditional
definition of marriage is something of a cyborg — a half-organic,
half-artificial construct produced by combining an intemperate worship of the
natural with an equally unrestrained desire to dominate the natural through
technology and social engineering.
Consider, for instance, the bill New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo
recently signed into law extending the state government’s “yes means yes” rules
to include private schools and universities. The “yes means yes” standard has
more potential for court-clogging legal action than the older “no means no” because
— theoretically, at least — the least unconsidered, not-previously-agreed-to
touch could be interpreted as sexual assault.
However, the standard has become so widespread that, as
Heather Wilhelm reports, one group has launched a “Consent Conscious Kit”
which features breath mints, a condom, and (of all things) a sex contract by
which college kids can lay out the terms and conditions of their sexual contact
with each other. Thus, the “Sexual Revolution” degrades from “kicking the
government out of the bedroom” to the state-sanctioned micromanagement of affectionate
touching, even while maintaining the fiction that sexual restraint is neither
possible nor desirable.
As another example, this past Thursday the UN Human Rights
Council passed a
resolution calling for the protection of the family as a fundamental unit of
society, a resolution the US and most Western European countries opposed, by
a vote of 27-14. The paradoxical nature of the opposition is highlighted by a
sentence in a statement issued by the Sexual Rights Initiative: the resolution
didn’t “[acknowledge] the harms and human rights abuses that are known to occur
within families, or [recognize] that diverse forms of family exist.” Families
are bad; yet a diversity of family types is good. The cognitive dissonance is
deafening.
Before going further, let me make it clear that secular morality, as I use it in this post,
refers to certain moral propositions that differ from traditional
Judeo-Christian teachings (religious
morality). Taking the whole of the moral sphere into consideration, there
are arguably more points of contact between religious morality and secular
morality than there are points of separation. Where secular morality separates
from religious morality, religious and irreligious people can be found to some
extent on both sides. Secular morality,
then, should not be construed as held in full or part by all the irreligious,
or rejected in whole or part by all the religious.
In this restricted sense, secular morality is not a new
orthodoxy but rather a mere heresy. But precisely because it is a heterodox
version of religious morality, the differences matter — so much so that the
word morality is often used as if it
only applied to those topics on which there is substantial disagreement.
Indeed, it’s only within this limited, even crippled context that moral
relativism could have been adhered to without any sense of hypocrisy. Now that
the heresy has been established as the state cult, secular morality can be
absolutist; relativism is a dead horse which only Christian apologists are
interested in beating.
But how can the secular morality be, in any meaningful sense,
“better than” religious morality? The only response which can succeed is, “Because
we say so;” any further attempt to
defend it quickly mires the secular moralist in begged questions and unexamined
assumptions. Sic volo, sic iubeo:[*] you can neither
defend nor defeat on rational grounds that which never pretended to be a
product of reason; nor can you criticize for subjectivity that which never
claimed to be objective.
Most defenders of religious morality have missed the mark by
treating secular morality as though it had been produced by people engaged in
moral philosophy qua moral
philosophy; that is, as a serious and comprehensive inquiry into the eternal question
of how we humans ought to live, requiring a certain background knowledge and a
certain discipline of thought. On the contrary: the heresies of secular
morality were largely produced “on the fly” by people who, for the most part,
never had any meaningful contact with philosophy as a discipline, and were less
concerned with how we ought to live than with what the law ought to allow,
forbid, or require.
The Western philosophical tradition has desiccated to the
point where the public discussion of the eternal questions is dominated by
philistines and dilettantes. One class is not only ignorant of philosophy but proudly
dismisses it as “bulls**t”, “a waste of time”, and/or “a bunch of people’s
subjective opinions”. The other class has a passing acquaintance with Western philosophy
but possesses neither the discipline or the energy to make a respectable hobby
of it. Dilettantes (like, alas, Your Humble Blogger) may at least know enough philosophy
to know they don’t know enough; the philistines, having characterized
philosophy as “bulls**t”, are not thereby restrained from inflicting their bulls**t
on everyone else and expecting it to be taken as fact.
However, so far as it’s true that a culture’s morality is a
social construct, the society ordinarily constructs it in an organic manner
which facilitates community survival in its environmental and technological
context. Secular morality, by contrast, is an arbitrary, artificial construct, foisted
on the community via mass manipulation. The only apparent consistency in
secular morality is a dogmatic abhorrence of human differences. In practice,
however, there are marked inconsistencies, as both artificial distinctions (e.g.,
race) and intrinsic distinctions (e.g., sex) are arbitrarily cast aside for one
policy purpose, only to be reintroduced and concretized for another.
Science, all but worshipped by many irreligious, nevertheless
isn’t trusted to speak to the question. The scientific method is praised as the
source of all real knowledge when it
reaches one result, damned as a product of class bias when it reaches another, and
actively subverted to produce a third. Various concepts are enthusiastically
embraced or unceremoniously abandoned as its precepts require; for example,
essentialism (genes determine behavior) is dogmatized by gay liberation, anathematized
by transgenderism, and alternately assumed and denied by third-wave feminism
depending on the moment. In this context, social constructionism as a
sociological concept has been distorted to become a pretext for engineering
social change through language; its original purpose — explaining social change
as adaptation to environment — is lost.
The ideological label under which secular morality is most
often marketed, progressivism,
entails an equivocation of simple forward motion — advancement — with a value judgment. What advances, it assumes, by necessity improves. However, such an equivocation is often propounded in the
face of the secular moralist’s own complaints about environmental devastation, economic
inequities, and social fragmentation, which are often produced or aggravated by
the very technological and cultural innovations he depends upon for his
association of progress with improvement. This confirmation bias,
when combined with the secular moralist’s inability to question his
assumptions, shows up as faith in an “historical inevitability of
progress” when in fact our culture may be on its way to a cascade failure.
Cultures have failed before.
Secular morality, in sum, is merely a Mulligan stew of
precepts and imperatives mashed together without an overarching, coherent ethical
theory to make sense of them; it is the acme of
results-first-premisses-to-follow thinking. Far from being liberal, it’s
becoming illiberal even in its libertinism. It can’t provide consistent
arguments as to why its preferred policies should lead to equality or human
flourishing. It can’t articulate a theory of the human being that gives
coherence to the human rights it proclaims. It can’t even celebrate cultural
diversity in one human sphere of activity without demanding pan-cultural
uniformity in another.
Secular morality, I submit, is foolish precisely because it
seeks to oppose religious morality without first understanding what either religion or morality is. It’s like a bridge designed by people who have never
bothered to learn the principles of structural engineering, or an airplane built
by people who dismiss aerodynamics as “ineffable twaddle”.
It’s a house built on sand (Matthew
7:26-27). And when it falls, it will most likely take us all down with it.
