MORAL ORDER

Condolences to poor Ochlophobe for his recent illness; that's a problem I don't have, my lungs having been developed while growing up on the high Andean plateau, but I know many suffer from it tremendously.

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So; Truth being so complicated and all, is there a real, discenable right and wrong? There is a persistent tendency in Modernity to say that all values are arbitrary; at this point, all categorical imperatives and all merely pragmatic moralities are quite exploded. They were minimally functional (yet still socially corrosive, in my view) as long as there was a sufficient social memory of a more forcefully articulated, and indeed, more natural morality, but now that these things have receded into the near-legendary past, what can be said against those who choose to regard their own immediate pleasure, or even inclination, as of more value than the good of other people, or the eventual good of society? I am going to say that, if you are an atheist, or even an agnostic, there is nothing. If your neighbor decides to torture your dog, rape your daughter, or burn down your house, you can certainly say that you will do everything in your power to prevent them, including appealing to the relevant social authorities to aid you, but you cannot say he is doing wrong, in any absolute sense of the word. You may say that right is defined by what the majority of the people want, as if when the majority of the people decide that it's o.k. to rape your daughter it makes any difference in the morality of violating a young girl; it is also the case that certain peoples historically have found themselves outside the circle of concern of their community. People may be quite positive that they don't want anyone raping their daughter, or the daughters of the people they are accustomed to associating with directly, and yet be blithely unconcerned over what happens to your daughter. It seems usually to go unnoticed that the minimal protections provided by a traditional ethics for those outside of society's circle of concern have been quite eroded away by today's politically-correct ethicists; Jews, Blacks, and Homosexuals would have had no hope of a hearing, if the society of the early 20th century had been founded on the ethics of the 21st century. The politically-correct mentality has no tradition of mercy towards its opponents; for those who fall out of its circle of concern, the future is indeed bleak. Late modernity has already proven a continual holocaust for those who, through no choice of their own, occasionally invade the bodies of women, thereby threatening to impose responsibilities on them; later on, no doubt, the holocaust will extend to all those who offend against its totalitarian ethics by holding on to more traditional moralities, and have the temerity to regard them mandated by Divine authority.

The ethical imperative of late Modernity is that all individuals are self-determinative; any factor that serves at all to impose limits on the ability of an individual to absolutely determine what kind of creature they are to be, and what kind of responsibility (if any) they have for the happiness and well-being of another, is seen as a gross imposition on the rights of the individual. I will engage in sexual activity, and I will regard the being that comes in the course of nature to be a hostile invader, to be expelled without guilt or consideration from the womb; I will jump from this high building, and I will bring a lawsuit against the ground for smiting me.

The only refuge from this lunacy that I can see is to believe in a Creator; that being given, all else proceeds rationally. Because I am not my own creator, I do not determine my own nature. Whatever rights I may have spring from this nature; that being the case, I must know my nature in order to determine what kinds of demands I may justly make on my universe. Because the Creator created me, His knowledge of me is much greater and much more intimate than my knowledge of myself. All my operations, physical and spiritual, are a mystery to me; I must appeal to my Creator for the key to the understanding of my being. If I choose to make up my own rules of conduct, it is the same as if the owner of a new automobile were to say "The manufacturer demands that I put oil in the car before driving it, but I choose not to do so". In one sense, he is free to make that decision, but obviously if he does so, he is not free to drive a smoothly functioning automobile, and very soon will be unable to drive at all. Similarly, he may choose to put the oil in the gas tank, and the windshield wiper fluid in the crankcase, but if so, he must accept the naturally occurring, deletrious results.

Obviously, any complex entity such as a man or an automobile has a vast number of processes which must be complied with to maintain functional integrity. Some have major consequences, some minor; some consequences of wrong behavior may not reveal themselves for years, or be such that they are not apparent at all until suddenly manifest in catastrophic circumstances.

Because Modernity believes in physical reality, it knows, when building towers and bridges, that there are designs which work, and those that don't, materials which will withstand particular stresses, and those which will fail to do so; because Modernity does not believe in spiritual reality, it regards Man's spiritual nature as infinitely manipulable. This is why the spiritual towers and bridges erected in early Modernity are collapsing spectacularly around us, to the ruin of families and communities, and the eventual dissolution of the social fabric itself.