The thing I like best about public intellectual David Brooks is his open and unapologetic belief in a universal cosmic moral order. These days that is not something anyone can simply take for granted. I am sure Brooks does not think such a universal cosmic moral order is obvious to everyone, but I am sure he believes it is objectively real and something needing to be discovered. He thinks, as I do, that it is not a social construction, infinitely flexible. Simply put, he is not a relativist as are most postmodern intellectuals and most politicians.
The biggest change in Western culture and society in the twentieth century was the sacrifice of belief in a universal cosmic moral order. Why did that happen?
First, increasing secularism (as opposed to mere secularity) and ideological pluralism (as opposed to mere recognition of plurality) became normative in intellectual circles and it filtered down into the grassroots.
Secularism cannot sustain belief in a universal cosmic moral order.
Second, people by-and-large become wrongly convinced that the lack of consensus about right and wrong meant there are no such things. Nominalism arose and took over the public square. The result was relativism. People adopted the illusion that just because people disagree about what is right and what is wrong those categories do not really exist.
Secularism is disbelief in anything transcendent to nature. Nature is all there is. Secularity is belief that no religion should dominate the public square. Secularism forces religious belief into privatization. Secularity says all religious beliefs can have voice in the public square.
Just because people truly disagree about right and wrong does NOT indicate that they do not really exist—as objective, really different categories. Good and evil are opposites in reality, not just in people’s opinions. As a professor of ethics and religion I was confronted almost daily with sophomoric arguments that because one vision of morality cannot find universal agreement there must not be any moral order that is universal.
Does the fact that there exists much disagreement about the meaning of the US Constitution mean it is meaningless? No. Our job is to discover its meaning and come to as much agreement as possible using historical reasoning. Some interpretations are simply wrong. Some are more right than others. That means there is meaning there.
I have said this before and I will say it again. The FACT that every sane person agrees that torturing children is wrong, evil, means everyone knows there is some universal cosmic moral order. Torturing children is not wrong BECAUSE everyone agrees it is wrong. It is wrong because it IS. Backing up from there…what else is objectively, universally, absolutely wrong? Genocide, in spite of the fact that some people in the world still think it is justified and attempt it.
Brooks and I agree on this and that sets us apart from even people who may say they agree but betray that with their rage for power over all else. Or their unwillingness to say “No. Stop. We should not go there.”
The majority of people would agree, if asked, that there is a universal, cosmic moral order. But they are too easily swayed away from that as secularism and pluralism in the public square convinces them otherwise. Tolerance is confused with relativism and vice versa. Many people are simply unable to hold onto their supposed belief in a universal, cosmic moral order when confronted with a demand for discarding moral norms in favor of radical individualism and “freedom.”
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