Riffs on Moral Relativism

Kevin at A Western Heart has some insightful musings about moral relativism in American politics. Among other things, Kevin points out that the kind of moral relativism that seems to pervade a great deal of American political thought can be harmful to social and cultural cohesion; in other words, the openness toward a "diversity of beliefs" that is only possible in a liberal society can paradoxically weaken that society with respect to threats that arise from illiberal ideologies:

Francis Fukuyama repeatedly argues (and persuades) in his books that the concepts of cultural diversity and moral relativism have weakened the bonds of community that unite us, and have forced us into smaller and less cohesive groups, whose ties are weaker, not stronger. In Western societies, the focus on the individual as the arbiter of his or her "unique" (rather than shared) values is "atomizing" us, rather than providing the "social capital" (i.e., shared values) we need to build and maintain strong, cohesive liberal democratic societies capable of withstanding attacks from the outside, such as the attack we face today from fundamental Islamism.

When he denounced his Communist past, Whittaker Chambers famously remarked that he had abandoned the winning side for the losing side. He was wrong, of course, but his despair for the future of Western liberal democracies is understandable given his conviction that a dying Western culture could offer nothing positive -- nothing that Westerners were willing to believe in -- to stand against a brutal ideology which nevertheless proposed a solution to the crisis of the twentieth century. One of the challenges of our present crisis is to determine what we stand for.

James Lileks makes the same point -- though more eloquently and far more amusingly than I -- in one of my all-time favorite Bleats. In the midst of eviscerating an absurd review of the final Matrix movie, Lileks seizes on the reviewer's assertion that "[u]ltimately what they believe or we believe is inconsequential," and responds thus:

Spoken like a man with no beliefs. Or, more accurately, spoken like someone who thinks that line above demonstrates some sort of intellectual sophistication lost on people who do the whole work-kids-church thing. Trust me, Harry – what someone believes is of great consequence. And if your society believes nothing it ends up making its last stand in the Temple of No Particular Belief System with the squiddies hammering on the door, possessed of a terrible certainty: they believe you should die.

As Crispin Sartwell points out in an excellent editorial about John Kerry's illogical position on abortion, all societies agree upon particular values, and all societies enact laws to impose those values: " . . .no human values, whether encoded into law or not, rest on science or reason or unanimous agreement. All human values rest on faith. . . . Moral insights are, ultimately, rationally indefensible, though we could not do without them. If we could not bring our faith to bear on law, we would have to separate the state not from the church but from all human values." Through the enactment of laws (among other things), liberal societies place limits on the openness and tolerance they value, and it is precisely in remaining willing to define those limits that "open" societies remain "open" -- and keep the "squiddies" out.