The New Morality

I Don’t Know Where to Start.

I see our civil behavior spinning out of control as mobs become the angry voice as people charged with being leaders bend over to appease the mob.  The liberal/progressive/socialists and conservative/status quo/capitalist leaders of our society have abrogated any sort of balance in social discourse and they now bemoan the fact we are uncivil. 

The educational system has moved so far off-center in this country that we see only one side of the political debate allowed on most university campuses.  Professors are now more concerned with indoctrinating the minds they influence than in actually creating in them the ability to question what they see and judge for themselves.  The attempts to have professors who disagree with the outrage of the Black Lives Matter movement fired and the denial of admittance of young minds with dissenting opinions into the universities are just two examples of this trend.

Each side is now so entrenched in their own moral superiority that there can be no compromise.  The idea of identity politics is so prevalent that we pick our heroes based on whatever media outlet we like shows us about them.  We don’t want to see the whole story; we want to hear only what we already believe.  A company supports a cause we don’t like, by God, we need to boycott their product.  An industry CEO says something we disagree with, he/she must be eliminated. 

Those who support the destruction of civil war statues buy-in completely with the views of the Southern Poverty Law Center that these statues were erected to intimidate the black community during the era of Jim Crow.  They find the destruction of public property, without any kind of legal process, to be perfectly fine.  What they can’t define is what is acceptable and what is unacceptable from a destruction standpoint. 

It is not very different than the on-going debate over gun ownership.  The why of erecting the statues is long gone.  The statues are inanimate objects they have no voice, except the voices of those who want to inflame the passions of the mobs (both left and right).  If we ignore those voices they eventually tire and turn into whispers, but we can’t do that.  The media won’t allow it.  A gathering of a few dozen angry bigots becomes national news.  We must all join into the groupthink of outrage.

Where does society draw the line?  What is the acceptable level of hate and vitriol?  Why stop at the tearing down of Civil War reminders?  Why not destroy all the memorials to those who created this country.  Jefferson Davis has a home in Biloxi, shouldn’t we burn it to the ground?  Andrew Jackson started the Democratic Party that encouraged and supported the South to wage a war of separation, shouldn’t all his statues be destroyed?  How about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington?  They have homes in Virginia and monuments in Washington.  They both were slave owners; we can’t celebrate their contributions to the nation.  We must destroy all traces of them.

But why stop there.  Columbus brought Europeans to the continent and ruined the lives of countless thousands who were killed by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English who followed him.  Shouldn’t we wipe his image off the face of the continent?

Then, of course, we have the Christian church.  How many lives have been ruined by the missionary zealots who traveled with the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors, the French Catholics, or the English Protestants?  Why should their memorials continue to stand?  But why stop there?  Since an ever-increasing number of us are rejecting the notion there is a God, shouldn’t we turn the houses of worship of those few fools who’ve not yet seen the light of reason into something practical?  By all means, we must destroy their books of worship for they paint a false picture of the reality of the universe as modern science shows us.  Those foolish people insist on two genders and we all know science has said there are countless others they ignore.

In the end, this debate really boils down to what is moral and right.  Once we reject the idea of a God, the decision on morality becomes relative to the age we live in.  Therefore, the need to understand the choices of past generations can be rejected out of hand.  We can choose whatever moralities and truths are convenient to fit the mob we are a part of.  If our mob is the strongest, our morality must be as well.  If we control the Government we can certainly set the moral judgments of the people.