The Culture War
By Robert Harrington

What it's really about January 14, 1999
And Moral Relativism April 20, 1998

The Culture War: what it's really about
January 14, 1999

In a recent column in the New York Post, David Gelernter remarked on the fact that President Clinton handily beat the Pope in a Gallup poll as "most admired man" of 1998. It "fits neatly into a pattern," he said, in which "most Americans support Clinton and shudder at Republican attempts to bring him down."

The datum illustrates one of the great mysteries of 1998 that pundits spent oceans of ink on with meager result: the contradiction that most people consider the president to be a liar and a cheat but support him nevertheless. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale (and surviving victim of the Unabomber), attributes it to a sea change in our culture:

That things have changed radically in the past 30 years is undeniable, but few people understand what happened or why. One person who offers a thoughtful and erudite explanation is Danish scholar David Gress, and he spells it out in very readable language in his book, "From Plato to NATO: the Idea of the West and Its Opponents" (The Free Press, 1998).

The idea of Western culture has been under determined attack from several groups, some believing it to be in decline, others hostile. The most radical, a not insignificant number, actually hope for its demise because they view it as racist, sexist, environmentally destructive, and hostile to human dignity. Taken together, the attacks have largely succeeded, as Gelernter recognized, especially in our colleges and universities.

Gress attributes the success to defects in the way Western civilization was taught in colleges between the 1920s and 1960s, for which he coined the term, the Grand Narrative. The Grand Narrative was conceived at Columbia University and the University of Chicago in the 1920s as a core curriculum to form a common ground for the surge of students entering higher education in that period. It constructed the formation of Western civilization on the basis of Great Ideas, including democracy and philosophy from the Greeks, law from the Romans, individual autonomy from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, liberal democracy from the revolutionary era, and science and technology from the modern era. The canon of Great Books, which became the target of many critics, was part of the Grand Narrative.

The Grand Narrative was vulnerable to attack, according to Gress, because it was bad history, picking and choosing only those ideas and events that propped up its preconceived ideas. As he put it: "History is strong drink, and the Grand Narrative turned it into soda pop."

A basic flaw in the Grand Narrative was that it conceived of Western identity as a set of abstract ideas "divorced from their historical, ideological, and institutional context." This forced defenders "to explain how the reality differed from the ideal, and to see that difference as a problem to be addressed by political will - the will of the enlightened few." (Sound familiar? Consider this quote from Katha Pollitt, writer for The Nation magazine: "Liberalism is the idea that the good people close to power can solve the problems of those beneath them in the social order.")

The war on the old concept of Western identity was essentially over when Stanford students in 1986 protested the Western Civ course, and the faculty took little convincing to revise the curriculum. In the few institutions where the core course in Western Civilization was still taught (Columbia, for one), the West was portrayed as "a morally dubious enterprise whose only chance of redemption was to adopt the multiculturalist, feminist, and environmentalist agenda of the new, post-1960s American liberalism."

The value in Gress' book is in defining the battle lines and explaining what is driving what many call the Culture War. It will be especially enlightening to those who don't know or wish to pretend there is no such war. It is an excellent answer to Gelernter's plaintive observation: "We need to understand what happened, so we can figure out what to do about it."

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The Culture War and Moral Relativism

By Robert Harrington

April 20, 1998

Underlying much of the debate in the Gilroy Dispatch is the Culture War, roughly speaking the debate between conservatives and liberals. Regrettably, most of what passes for debate, not only here but generally, is aimed not at convincing anyone but only at getting one up on the other guy. I don't claim to be faultless, but I do try to understand the axioms and beliefs that underlie the discussion. This strategy doesn't necessarily lead to resolution of differences, but it is a necessary condition for resolution and at least brings hope of better understanding.

One of those axioms is that taking a stand based on a moral precept is out of order in any political debate; that any judgment on moral grounds is out of bounds in civil discourse.

On the surface this idea is tolerance, with which I have no quarrel, but when taken to the extreme that it commonly is, it damages our public debate and society itself. It turns up in a wide variety of subjects and explains much of what seems puzzling in our social scene.

The most common manifestation is the complaint that one side in a debate is trying to impose its morality on the rest. The answer on one level is: Of course it is; political debate is about gaining dominance for your concept of what's right. Those who make this complaint are pretending to a false objectivity. In truth, they are usually arguing from a premise that simply weighs moral considerations in a different way.

The idea that it is rude to make any public judgment of right or wrong is moral relativism, the idea that all moral systems are equal and none has a claim to be dominant. Moral relativism flows from postmodernism, the idea, basically, that there is no objective truth and that only perceptions count. Postmodernists make a sport of destroying the assumptions and beliefs of the past, a practice known as "deconstruction," and they claim to have "deconstructed" practically everything from religion to the whole of Western intellectual tradition.

In common usage, moral relativism is nothing more than a rhetorical construct corrupted by the fallacy I mentioned. The fact is that Americans substantially agree on the basic precepts of right and wrong in our manners and daily interactions as enunciated, for example, in the Ten Commandments. The danger is that constant use of the rhetoric of moral relativism will bring about the consequences of its internal logic.

One of the fronts of the Culture War for which it is hard to argue that the dark forces have not won is the sexual revolution. This is exemplified most prominently by the widespread disobservance of the Seventh Commandment. I don't have to name the prime example of the day, in reference to which the Reverend Jesse Jackson recently said, "It's only one of ten." One wag proposed an edit to "Thou shalt not admit adultery."

The example of the rhetoric of moral relativism closest to home is in the library-Internet-porn debate, where the opponents of measures to control pornography accuse the anti-porn group of trying to impose its morality on the rest while pretending that their position is morally neutral. In reality, the issue entails weighing the relative good of protecting children from pornography as against an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment. Both sides are arguing from unprovable axioms; the difference is that one side acknowledges that fact and the other denies it.

A historic example is the reaction to President Reagan's famous speech in which he characterized the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire." His statement seems almost mundane from today's perspective, but he was thoroughly castigated from many quarters at the time. The reason Reagan was attacked so viciously is that he was making an openly moral judgment, and that was a sin that liberals could not let go unpunished.

My last example of the working of moral relativism is the reluctance of many people to make a judgment call on President Clinton amid his mounting scandals. His approval rating actually rose, seemingly in proportion to the abomination in the daily reports. I attribute this phenomenon to people's fear of being labeled churlish under the rubric of moral relativism. They have a deeply ingrained aversion to the appearance of being "judgmental" or "attempting to impose their morality" on others. All of this occurred in spite of the fact that a majority believes he is lying. It is dissembling on a massive scale.

Part of the basis of moral relativism is the idea that human beings are entirely malleable and can be acculturated to any system of beliefs and way of life. This is an aspect of the nature versus nurture argument that holds that nurture is dominant. If it's true, then there is no basis for saying that one society or system of beliefs is better or worse than any other. It is this thought which leads to the ideology of multiculturalism.

The extent to which the rhetoric of moral relativism pervades our society could hardly be overstated. It is de rigueur on our college campuses and is an unconscious part of pop culture. Many liberals have adopted the basic axioms of postmodernism more or less indiscriminately, although few of them have any inkling of the origin of their assumptions or even a clear idea of what they are. It is as the 1930s economist Lord Keynes said: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

Speaking of postmodernism in our universities, historian Page Smith wrote: "The entire Western tradition is to be 'deconstructed' in order to expose the shakiness of its unconscious presuppositions. What is left is, in simplest terms, a void, a vast emptiness. There is no way of adjudicating between conflicting systems of values, traditions, and symbols. It is a kind of intellectual pulling of wings off flies. For decades professors have been destroying their students' illusions, their 'false consciousness,' their naïve adherence to certain obsolete values (religion being one of the most obvious)."

Referring to contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Smith continued: "Now the shoe appears to be on the other foot. Derrida is destroying their illusions, especially their illusion that they are engaged in objective, scientific investigation of the world. What they are really doing is imposing their own, ultimately baseless, views on their students and their colleagues, and there is no independent, 'objective' evidence that their illusions are any better than those of their students; ... it is not yet clear that professors can assemble a post-Derridarian world out of the lumber of the deconstructed one. All we can say is that the human psyche, like the rest of nature, abhors a vacuum and something will fill it." That something too often turns out to be narcissism or some angry ideology.

Walter Truett Anderson wrote that you can "look at the postmodern world as a kind of jailbreak from the Grand Hotel, with people charging in all directions while anxious conservatives try to round them up and get them back inside."

Anderson no doubt views this as a joke, but James Q. Wilson wrote a book that provides an excellent rationale for "getting back inside." The name of it is The Moral Sense, and George Will called it "the intellectual event of the year" in 1993 when it was first published.

In it Wilson presents a well-argued thesis that the human mind at birth is not a blank slate on which anything can be written but that human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong. The powerful implication of his thesis is that there is indeed a central core of moral urgings that dominate in human society for the very good reason that we're born with it.

Wilson does not deny the power of human drives for survival and sex and acknowledges that the moral sense requires nurturing to become strong. His book is strictly science, but it contains nothing that denies religion. Indeed, it is good news for people of faith because it accords with their essentially universal moral teachings.

Despite the extent to which moral relativism has invaded our thinking, we share a large body of common understandings of what is decent and right and act on those understandings in most of what we do. Moral relativism, however, corrupts our speech and damages our social institutions, especially our colleges and universities. As Wilson argues, "most of us have a moral sense, but ... some of us have tried to talk ourselves our of it." They should stop trying because, as he says, "we may create a world that more and more resembles our diminished moral expectations."

(Remarks given at private get-together of columnists and letter writers for the Gilroy Dispatch)

References

Brandeis quote from Rights Talk (1991) by Mary Ann Glendon, p. 171.

Lord Keynes quote from Legacy of Freedom (1969), by George Charles Roche III, p.2.

Page Smith quotes from Killing the Spirit (1990).

Walter Truett Anderson quote from The Truth About the Truth (1995), p. 16.

Remark by George Will from The Levelling Wind (1994), p. 111.

James Q. Wilson quotes from The Moral Sense (1993).

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