We often refer to “moral relativism” as characterizing today’s mindset. I think we went through that phase a few decades ago, with people insisting that there are no absolutes, so different cultures and different individuals can have different moral values.
Today, though, today’s progressives are dogmatic, self-righteous, and extremely judgmental when it comes to morality. They still reject traditional morality, but if you reject homosexuality, transgenderism, and abortion, you are considered evil.
So where are they getting their moral convictions? What is their moral authority? How can they rebel against the traditional moral absolutes, while asserting new moral absolutes?
Conservative thinker Robert P. George deals with these contradiction in his brand new book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. It was just released on July 8, so I haven’t read it, but National Review has published a sample in the article The Age of Feelings.
George says that the medieval period could be described as the “Age of Faith,” though reason played a big role in uncovering truth, including moral truth. The Enlightenment of the 18th century could be described as the “Age of Reason,” which by the 20th century morphed into an “Age of Science,” though faith continued to be influential. Today, though, according to George, we are in an “Age of Feeling.”
George himself, being a good natural-law Catholic, believes truth should be pursued using both faith and reason. But what we have today is people determining truth, including moral truth, according to what they feel. They then turn that feeling into an absolute!
Here is how George explains it (my bolds):
A great many people today have come to suppose that the touchstone of truth is not faith or reason (or, as I myself believe, faith and reason) but rather feeling and feelings.
Because feelings are subjective, what this development has produced is a widespread subjectivism or relativism. But to say that is itself to oversimplify and potentially mislead. Things are more complicated. That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth. And so, we witness the spectacle of many people embracing a fierce moral absolutism based on beliefs that are the products of nothing more than subjective feelings. It is this aggressive — and, let me add, rationally indefensible and dangerous — absolutism that undergirds people’s willingness to toss out basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, and to join “cancellation” mobs determined to ruin the reputations and destroy the careers and lives of people whose ideas they regard, often quite absurdly, as “hateful” and “harmful.”
I think George is mostly right, but let me refine his thesis a bit. The “Age of Feeling” describes 19th century Romanticism fairly well. But I think what we have today is the “Age of the Will.” What makes something morally right, according to the prevailing worldview, is choice. Those who believe in abortion describe themselves as pro-choice. Conversely, if there is no choice in an action, that action is bad. Thus, anything goes with sex, along as there is consent. If a person chooses to be killed, then who are we to oppose euthanasia?
Since, as George says, each age kept aspects of the previous age (Medieval = Faith + Reason; Enlightenment = Reason + Faith), what we are seeing today is Will + Feeling. A man feels like a woman, so he chooses to identify as one, and this must be accepted as a new truth. The objective facts of his body make no difference whatsoever to his subjective feelings and the assertion of his will, which is what imposes his feelings on reality.
George says,
The antidote to all this is a renewed commitment to getting at the truth of things — especially the great moral and political questions that divide and vex our fractured society. The truth, not “my” truth or “your” truth — because, contrary to what many influential voices in our culture, politics, and even our institutions of higher education would have you believe, the truth about even the most controversial matters can be objectively known and cannot be altered by one’s subjective feelings or “lived experiences.” Indeed, one’s acknowledgment of truth’s objectivity is essential if one is to be what we should all strive to be, namely, committed truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. From the morality of intentional killing and the meaning of marriage to more abstract philosophical and theological propositions, there are right and wrong answers to these questions.
Right. But postmodernists don’t believe in either faith or reason. Arriving at objective truth requires one or the other or both. It won’t be enough to simply tell people to pursue objective truth when they have no capacity to do so–that is, when they lack the worldview, the underlying set of assumptions, that makes it possible for them to think in these terms. They must start at the beginning, with an Age of Faith.
Photo: Robert P. George by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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