Modern Liberals' Horrid Legacy
by Nelson Hultberg
December 7, 2005
There is a spectre haunting our world today ushering in a malevolence
that portends a coming dark age. The spectre is moral relativism,
and it has come to haunt us because those who were supposed to intellectually
lead our society wandered off into a no-man's land of philosophical
insanity throughout the 20th century. They became spiritually crippled
dwarfs spouting a Mad Hatter's mumbo-jumbo of logical positivism
and craven neutrality in face of the great issues of life -- issues
that demand rigorous clarity and judgment if a free, humane
society is to be achieved.
Because of the 19th century philosopher Auguste Comte's teaching
of positivism, the 20th century has ushered in the idea that there
are no objective moral values to be found in reality. This has led
to the collapse of the idea of natural law and its moral structure
that is needed to sustain a free society.
Unfortunately as a result of this confusion, certain sectors of
the libertarian movement (the leftist types) have fallen prey to
the fallacy of "moral relativism" in which the traditional vices
of history become permissible. The enshrinement of objective moral
rights and wrongs, whether by coercion or persuasion, becomes
the enemy. Man's development of institutions of authority is not
to be trusted. We must ceaselessly challenge all forms of authority,
for authority itself is the precursor to tyranny. Not just the coercive
authority of the state and its bureaucracies, but even the voluntary
institutions of human authority such as churches and schools must
also be neutered in favor of individual autarky.
What is needed is a "value-neutral" society, many of these libertarians
maintain. Only in this way can we protect ourselves from man's damnable
propensity to tyrannize his fellows. Whatever values men wish to
adopt should be permissible as long as force is not used to try and
impose those values upon others.
But teaching one's conception of morality is not forcing that
morality upon others. It is precisely this practice of teaching a
framework of metaphysical and moral values from a universalist perspective
that is the fount of civilization itself, out of which springs freedom
when the framework is rational. Freedom can never be restored to
our country without also restoring the metaphysics upon which it
relies -- the metaphysics that built Western civilization and ignited
the American Revolution. Freedom is just one of the values in this
metaphysical framework, a framework which must be taught in its entirety.
Freedom cannot be abstracted out and made a fundamental axiom to
stand alone as many libertarians insist.
All the great thinkers of history have understood that there are
basic rights and wrongs that must be upheld. Only charlatans preach
moral relativism. The great contribution of the 18th and 19th century classical liberals
such as the Founding Fathers was that they (like modern liberals)
believed moral values should not be legislated by the state, but
(unlike modern liberals), they insisted on moral values being
implemented persuasively, i.e., they believed in basic rights and
wrongs being taught and preached as absolutes to the populace.
Because today's intellectual leaders of the left (along with those
libertarians who sympathize with the left in a cultural sense) have
defaulted on this issue, they have stripped their fellows of the
most important tool in the combatting of evil -- its identification.
It is only by first being intellectually defined that evil can be
fought. If we relativize evil (i.e., refuse to define what it is),
then evil must grow because men cannot contest something that they
cannot objectively define.
This identification process of good and evil comes to us through
moral philosophy and religion. No civilization has ever survived
without employing it, and ours will be no exception. What is being
said here is the polar opposite of what is taught and taken for granted
today. What is being said is that there are objectively definable
rights and wrongs for all humans in all cultures, and they must be
proclaimed, or life will degenerate into a hell-hole of misery, chaos,
and death.
We were given a glimpse into that hell-hole early in the 20th century
by one of relativism's great champions, Benito Mussolini:
"Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism....If
relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim
to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth...then there is
nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity....
[T]he modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create
for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all
the energy of which he is capable." [Mussolini, Diuturna,
pp. 374-377, cited in Henry Veatch, Rational Man, 1962, p.
41].
Is this not what modern liberals and their love of big government
are doing to America -- rejecting "fixed categories" and "objective,
immortal truth" in favor of moral neutrality? Are not all modern
governments expanding their agendas "with all the energy of which
they are capable?" Have not our collectivist schools taught for decades
that there is no "objective immortal truth" existent in reality to
which men must conform? Have not our popular Freudian intellects
proclaimed that fixed morality is repressive, that cultural values
are arbitrary, and that man must free himself from such claims by "doing
his own thing?" Are not today's liberals then philosophical brothers
of Mussolini and the fascist way of looking at life and politics?
Is it any wonder that artists now spew out the putrescence of pornography,
politicians scorn the idea of individual rights, and young people
gun down their comrades in schoolyards? Moral relativism (the idol
of modern liberalism) is creating a society of vacant animals instead
of conceptual men -- a society of self-absorbed, alienated, materialistically
obsessed creatures of nihilism voting themselves into the yoke of
tyranny. This is the end result of rejecting the idea of an objective
natural law for man.
What is so misunderstood by the modern mind is this causal link
between collectivist tyranny and moral relativism. In order for tyranny
to take over a society, the intellectual path for such usurpation
must first be prepared by the teaching of false truths. The minds
of the citizens must be conditioned to feel a paramount need for
massive state authority. Men must be made to see themselves as weak
and dependent in face of the "awesome dangers of a complex, incomprehensible
world." They must be taught that they are incapable of handling life on
their own, that they need legions of bureaucratic overseers in
Washington to take care of them by smoothing over the difficulties
of the free-market through pervasive redistribution of wealth and
government planning.
The philosophy of individualism must be discredited, and in conjunction
with this discrediting, men must be made to see right and wrong as
relative, as ever-shifting to accommodate the social needs of the
moment. In this way, the tyrannical policies required to destroy
individualism can be smuggled into the political arena without the
fear of being attacked for what they are -- evil and unconstitutional.
As Ayn Rand told us several decades ago, a nation of men, who believe
in their capacity to face up to life independently and who hold a
clear cut conception of good and evil, cannot be enslaved.
But a nation of men, who have lost faith in their capacity to handle
life on their own merits and who see right and wrong as ever-shifting, can be
enslaved. They can be sold the regimentation of massive centralized
statism as a "modern necessity" -- for they no longer conceive of
themselves as capable of self-reliance, and they can no longer recognize
evil when it descends upon them.
It is in this manner, that modern liberalism is corrupting the American
way of life. It is boring into the soul of America to erode the great
moral-philosophical truths upon which our country and our civilization
were formed.
By gathering into the leftist political tent all those who are not
very astute or industrious, and then inculcating them with propaganda
about how "old fashioned" and "primitive" individualism and moral
absolutism are, today's liberals are establishing a power base to
control the political levers of the country and move America into
a state dominated society.
Once they have convinced the American people that history's great
individualist heroes were "fakes" and that good and evil are "relative," freedom
as a way of life (and thus America's capitalist system) is dead.
Men will have lost their lofty image of themselves and thus their
confidence in themselves. They will be unable to contest the evil
stealing over their society because they will have been stripped
of their ability to define it. This is what the doctrine of "moral
relativism" does. It makes it impossible for men and women to identify what
is evil in life, and thus it makes it impossible for men and women
to fight against evil. It destroys the validity of our rights as
something higher than government grants. It turns all actions (even
tyrannical actions) into "neutral preferences."
Therefore, when the federal government opts to shoot down Randy
Weaver's wife, or incinerate a Waco religious cult, or confiscate
ever-larger portions of our incomes, or stultify independent businesses
with oppressive regulation, or mass bus our children away from their
neighborhood schools, or load us up with $7 trillion in debt -- we
as citizens cannot declare such tyrannical actions to be the
heinous acts that they are. Such outrages merely become "necessary
policies mandated by the emergency of the moment."
To those on the left, "moral relativism" is liberating because it
allows one to cavort through life immersed in irresponsibility. But
in the long run, moral relativism is the precursor to tyranny because
it allows the authoritarian state to ignore individual rights and
squash our freedoms. It allows politicians, bureaucrats and the
police to operate irresponsibly also. This is the nefarious disease
that collectivist liberals are infecting our society with when they
pontificate on the need to get away from a strict moral code that
applies to everyone. They are stripping the people of their power
to condemn their state oppressors and thus to fight passionately
against the dictatorial development of modern day government. A dictatorship
needs the preachments of moral relativism. It needs a philosophically
confused populace that lacks the self-assurance to contest its usurpations.
This, modern liberalism gives it by means of the propaganda being
taught in today's schools.
It is thus that the all-pervasive state usurps the freedom of men
through ideological stealth. It will not have to militarily take
over. The people will vote to be taken over and to be taken
care of. They will see themselves as collectivist liberalism
has painted them -- tiny in stature, alone and helpless in a dangerous
marketplace of corporate predators. Reality will appear to them as
ominous, overwhelming, indecipherable. Right and wrong will be an
incomprehensible fog, and they will beg the collectivist intellectuals
and statist henchmen to rule their lives. This is what has taken
place in Sweden, and modern liberalism is paving the same path here
in America.
Throughout history, tyrants have always seized what power they crave
through intellectual justification -- i.e., propaganda. Things are
no different today. Our New Class authoritarians are collectivizing
America's political system by means of economic sophistry, historical
lies, biographical smears, and philosophical subterfuge -- all geared
toward eroding the values of independence and moral discernment in
man so as to move him toward submitting voluntarily to being ruled.
There is only one way to stop this tragedy. And that is through
restoration of the classical liberalism of the Founders with
its acceptance of moral absolutes and the necessity to inculcate
them into the youth of society as they are growing into adults who
are to run society.
The entire historical experience of mankind demonstrates quite clearly
that there are definable laws of human conduct instilled into human
nature and existence to which we all must conform. Without recognition
of these laws, freedom cannot exist. When we try to evade, or ignore,
or twist, or suppress, or flee from these laws, the result is not
a "progressive and tolerant society." It is an ugly, contradictory
primitivism. It is an insufferable tyranny. It is death. This is
modern liberalism's horrid legacy to us in the 21st century.
© 2005 Email Nelson
Hultberg .... Author's Bio .... More
articles by Nelson Hultberg
