Moral Fragmentation

America's major problem is a progressive loss of moral unity.

I keep reading posts on social media and news stories from exasperated individuals. There is rarely any kind of argument in their words, but only apocalyptic emotional splutterings about Trump or global warming or the evils of socialism. People on the left of the political spectrum are fed up, with racism, classism, inequality and, well, conservatives. People on the right are fed up with radical Islam, the attack on gun rights, taxes and, well, Obama. And these two groups have lost the ability to dialogue meaningfully. They now merely shout at or past each other. Our democracy has devolved into mob rule and an endless cacophony of opinion without moral authority.

It seems clear that the American experiment in democracy is on the verge of failure, but not because some other system has shown itself to be better. The reason for the collapse of America will not come from any army, but it will come from our inability to argue towards the truth with each other. Our democracy, though many would deny this, was built on a particular set of moral assumptions. They came from a robust ethical system. All one needs to do to be convinced of this is to read the various founding documents. These were profoundly religious people, and the religion was Christianity. Of course there were a handful of deists and even an atheist here and there, but all held that a democracy cannot function without moral unity, which is just good philosophical sense given the often polarizing nature of democracy. And they could think of nothing better than the various values afforded to them by the Christian religion. Now, the devastating critique of this rather obvious observation is something like, "well, yeah, but they also had slaves and drove out the Indians." Mic drop. End of conversation. This is sufficient to tear down the Judeo-Christian Ethic and atomize all moral continuity and all moral authority. In its place we have the utter moral insanity of relativism. The real question I want to ask the leftist self-congratulatory critic of early American moral authority is this: What moral authority would you put in the place of Christianity? Human reason? That has given us the gulags, Hitler, the French Revolution, Mao, utilitarianism and the modern insanity of political correctness, where moral offense is judged by the subjective feelings of a vocal minority.

How can America survive when it no longer affirms a defining set of moral presuppositions? The current running thesis appears to be a kind of unexpressed positive law theory. We no longer affirm a perspicuous natural law as the foundation of our laws. We now tacitly affirm democracy itself as the foundation of not just our laws but our values as well. And that is precisely why we are in regression. This moral regression will precede economic and political regression. The glory of America is, and will remain, in our past, at lease so far as I can see.

When that which previously stood on the bedrock of the Christian ethic now stands merely on its own, it can only collapse under its own weight.

Examples of this lack of moral unity:

1. Marriage:

The important question here is this: On whose authority should we accept definition X? All the cultural noise is irrelevant until this question is answered. Why define marriage the way we have chosen to define it? Is it up to us to define it? There are many who tacitly accept materialistic nominalism--namely, that we make up the realities around us and assign the meanings and the words. Reality is not independent of our mental activity. If that is true, then of course marriage is whatever we want it to be. But surely we can see where such a conclusion leads logically. For one, if human mental activity is the source of realities like marriage, then it can radically rearrange reality in the future. Marriage, and everything else, becomes infinitely malleable as a concept and we are left with an invincible relativism. If there is any system of ethics conceived by the mind of man that utterly destroys moral unity, it is relativism.

2. Islamic migration:

Here is an important question: Is America, the great "melting pot," capable of ingesting any and all worldviews? Are all worldviews compatible with western democratic values? And the answer is an unequivocal no! All it takes is a brief survey of Islamic history and theology to understand quickly that Islam as a religion can never be content to be "added" to a democracy. So then, the question becomes, "If Islam can never be content with assimilation into democratic societies, how then can faithful Muslims be content with such a thing?"

Here again we see that some people would say that Islam is perfectly compatible with democracy, that Muslims, taken as individuals, may be fine with assimilation. Many Muslims would agree here. And on the other side of this you have voices saying that Islam as a religion is incompatible with America, and many of them are Muslims as well. As a thought experiment, imagine what things would have been like if even 20% of the framers of the constitution were Muslims. How much progress would have been made? If you think there would have been no problem, then you clearly don't understand Islam, or Christianity.

Theodore Dalrymple discusses this point in his fine work, Life at the Bottom. In that work, he asserts that not all people groups can be compatible with a country like Great Britain. They bring with them worldviews that are inherently incompatible with western values. He discusses various groups who won't permit their daughters to go to English schools because they learn too much about freedom for women in English society within the schools. The problem with the melting pot is that clearly some things don't melt! And that leads to radical moral disunity.

3. Political correctness on college campuses:

I find this movement among the most interesting in modern history. In the first universities in America and in Europe, there was a prevailing moral code that governed student behavior, and indeed informed educators and administrators. Again that moral code was Christianity, and could almost be taken for granted. Students entered their education with this code firmly etched upon their minds.

Today, there is no appreciable influence of Christian teaching in the university setting, even among many Christian colleges. This seems to me to be merely the sober truth of the matter, though at this point I confess only experiential and anecdotal evidence. But I submit this assertion to the experiences of those who read it and my guess is that you will find it true as well.

The problem is that, as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum. One can't simply remove Christian ethics from university life without something occupying the void. Today that void is filled with enlightened intellectuals, the artisans of the political correctness movement. Christianity was jettisoned ages ago in the name of the free search for knowledge and personal expression, but then it became apparent that others want to assert themselves as well. Some form of regulation (a term much preferred to morality by liberal intellectuals) had to be invented.

The problem with these "regulations" is that no student takes them all that seriously, because they are only backed by feeble human intelligence, which can always be doubted, or at the very least re-examined. The only thing that this enlightened godless generation of young people has learned from all of this is that anything and everyone can be questioned. There is no moral authority.

There are other examples, but that will do for now. A final thought here: If atheism is true, then the pattern of nature is toward fragmentation. Nature can perhaps stitch various things together into accidental arrangements, but always promises to break them down into constituent parts again and then leave them in that condition. Is it any wonder that the more a godless worldview captivates the hearts and minds of people, the more a society trends toward fragmentation?