I woke up with a sudden realization about our dire, and worsening, national problem of division. Considering we are supposed to be the United States of America, this problem of becoming ever more divided is a serious threat to our national existence. We will fall if we can't get past our great divisions and reunite as a people.
This flash of insight came, as such flashes often do, as a result not of bad pizza, but rather from a couple of things I watched last night before going to sleep, and which fermented in my mind all night.
Today is October 17, 2024, and last night I watched Brett Baier interview Kamala Harris on Fox News. She brought up the problem of divisiveness, and rhetorically laid it all at the feet of the ugly, insulting words spoken by Donald Trump. While former President Trump does say some things that deeply offend some folks, I remember divisive words uttered by Democrat presidents and leaders long before that. For instance, in 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama describing (in what was supposed to be a private meeting) conservative mid-westerners as “bitterly clinging to their guns and bibles.” That was divisive and insulting speech long before Trump entered politics.
After watching and digesting the interview, I slipped a DVD in to watch a movie, as is my habit many nights. Last night I watched “God's Not Dead 4, We the People.” Good movie.
One of the points this pro-home-schooling movie made was that one of the major reasons many Christian parents choose to home school is because the public schools insist that the children be taught moral relativism. That is the notion that there is not really any objective right or wrong.
I laid down with these ideas swirling around in my sleepy brain, and snapped awake this morning with a certain understanding that I had discerned the cause of our growing national division. It is not some politician hurling some vile insults. We have always had those, and never let them so divide us before. No, our great division has obviously grown out of the moral relativism which our children have been indoctrinated with lo these many years; at least thirty years by my reckoning, maybe more like fifty. This mindset divides us at the molecular level of society, causing each individual to be in it for themselves, answerable only to whatever rationalizations they concoct to justify their actions. This individualistic divisive mindset prevents almost any unifying sentiments from ever gaining traction.
This is a great crime we have allowed to be perpetrated on our young. In ancient Israel, in the various episodes when things were falling apart, one of the signs of total social collapse was that “men did that which was right in their own eyes.” In other words, they embraced moral relativism, and radical individualism, as both a cause and effect of national decline.
Our case is worse, because at least those ancient Israelis started out with objective moral standards, which they then rebelled against. Our young people seem to not even be aware there is such a thing as objective morality, (or think the concept is laughable) and are thus rendered almost incapable of the cultural unity necessary for self government. It is kind of like trying to make rice crispy squares, leaving out the marshmallow needed to hold the treat together, and wondering why, no matter how hard you press them, the individual grains won't stick together.
The one concept the young are taught as universally applicable is tolerance, amended by self esteem thinking, but that is not a glue to hold things together, rather it works as a sedative to allow us to feel okay about living in an increasingly crumbling society. If the next generations are going to sustain as a self governing republic they will have to do the hard work of finding some objective moral standard around which to adhere. They need to add some warmed marshmallows to the recipe to make the rice crispy squares edible.
While daunting, the task is not impossible because previous generations have dealt with the same problem, and came up with (more like inherited) a solution agreeable to all. We used to call it the “Golden Rule,” and it was taught in all our public schools. Simply stated, it goes like this. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
While at first blush this seems similar to the tolerance and self esteem taught these days, the difference between the two mindsets is profound. Tolerance and self esteem boils down to, at best, treat other people the way they treat you. So if folks are nice, be nice back. But if they are mean, it is okay to be even meaner back so as to stop them from being mean to you next time. With that philosophy guiding them, the gang and revenge violence so common today makes sense. Social life is put on a downward sliding spiral. One can often hear the young, in person and on the internet, justifying some random act of violence with the idea that the victim should not have said that, or been there, or should have known better. Thus our social matrix comes to resemble the world of Nietzsche's will to power. Whoever prevails must be the one in the right.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” boils down to “treat other people the way that you would want to be treated if you were them.” With this philosophy as a guide, the status of the other person, not my own desire for self indulgence, becomes the guiding thought. Social life is thereby put on an upward trending spiral. The individual tries to treat people better than they were treated. Consideration, not just tolerance, (sincere consideration of others necessarily includes tolerance) becomes foundational, and then we have a built in basis to stand up for the weak and defenseless. With this basic attitude, this social glue, instilled in the young from their earliest days, it becomes possible to freely come together in unity.
So the young have some work to do, if they want to remain a free nation going into the future. Those of us who are older need to do some changing too. I remember, more than twenty years ago now when I was painting custom T-shirts. I made one that said, “Love your neighbor as yourself: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.”
I thought it was kind of clever, riffing on an old public service announcement about the speed limit. I happily wore it around the streets of Denver. A neighbor, a nice lady, a boomer like me, objected one day, asking “whose law?” Even though she was of an older generation, and had been educated with the Golden Rule, she had come to embrace moral relativism.
My response was that it is God's law, or stating it in a secular way, it is a natural law of the universe, much like the law of gravity. It can not be repealed, and is foolish to ignore. Which is why it has been taught, in various forms, in every culture on earth until these recent generations. Only in the last few decades has any culture moved away from this teaching, and now in our culture, as we reap the divisive whirlwind we have sown, we pretend to not understand how we have become so divided as a people.
The beginning to finding a remedy to our great cultural divisions is to reject the seemingly benign but actually slyly wicked idea of moral relativism, and once again embrace the basic moral foundation all great societies have always taught. Let us determine to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. It really is as simple as that, but that then brings up one last point.
I grew up with the idea that we should always vote and work for a better society, and that one way of voting is to realize we vote every time we spend a dollar. In our day we must also realize that we cast a vote for the kind of society we want every time we share something on the internet.
I am so disappointed in my fellow Americans about this, because, hard as it is to believe, no one ever shares any of my brilliant writings. Some like my stuff, and tell me so, but still no sharing. Why not?
I figure it is because those who like my stuff are not sure others will like it, so they keep it to themselves. It is like someone at a public meeting and the speaker calls for a show of hands of those who agree. Some courageous hands might shoot up, but many others are looking around to see what their friends are doing first. They will stand for the truth, but only if they think others will stand with them. They are not sure enough of their own ability to know the truth to bravely stand alone.
So if you think it would be a good idea for us to reject the teaching of moral relativism to the young, and instead we should once again teach them the Golden Rule, simply share this blog. If not, quit pretending to care about our great national divisions.