Chapter One
Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the
horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind
must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that
for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep
in our collective memory.
HILAIRE BELLOC (1870-1953)
Unless a man become the enemy of evil, he will not even
become its slave but rather its champion. God Himself will
not help us to ignore evil, but only to defy and defeat it.
G. K. CHESTERTON (1874-1936)
Oftentimes, to win us our harm, the instruments of darkness
tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest
consequence.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)
1 Evil Is a Horrible and Present Reality
The reality of evil exposes the
bankruptcy of relativism.
No sane person who watched the unfolding horror at the
World Trade Center or saw the destruction at the Pentagon
could deny the reality of evil in the world. In those terrifying
moments, our perspective changed. The nation was jolted out
of its complacency by the sheer wickedness of the attacks.
Almost immediately our vocabulary-including that of otherwise
politically correct journalists, politicians, and law
enforcement officials-became downright theological. The
tension and uncertainty of possible further attacks dramatically
adjusted our priorities.
The events of September 11 reminded us once again that
evil exists in the world. In the glare of such purposeful brutality
and devastation, the shabby ambiguities of relativism no longer
seemed adequate. Out of the rubble of Ground Zero, the truth of
the absolutes began to reemerge with extraordinary poignancy
and power: Our beliefs and our actions matter. Life and death
matter. Justice and injustice matter. Right and wrong matter.
The absolutes matter. EVIL IS A HORRIBLE AND PRESENT REALITY
Throughout human history, the existence of evil is a reality
that people have had to take into account-in dealing with one
another, in commerce, in passing laws, and in building civil
societies. Because the world is infected by sin and populated by
sinners, evil wreaks havoc on our best-laid plans and our sincerest
intentions. The existence of evil is self-evident. Its effects are
the most basic observations of both anthropology and sociology.
No one ever has to teach a child how to do wrong. It doesn't
take a bad environment to teach someone how to be cruel, selfish,
or perverse. No one needs a role model to learn about greed,
pride, or dishonesty. Sin is inbred in us.
Our natural inclination to sin is no petty or trivial matter.
Evil is destructive. It runs roughshod over everything and everyone
-including the person who perpetrates the evil. Left unrestrained,
evil morbidly embraces death. "There is a way that
seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."
The consequences of unrestrained evil are all too familiar to
us. We have seen their tragic end far too many times over the
course of the last century. The memories are carved on our
hearts with a dull familiar blade-a blade variously wielded by
Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Idi Amin,
Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the gruesome results of
evil clutter the pages of human history. Every great society has
had to take evil into account-and decisive, principled action
has been the only proven remedy. In response to evil, the bankruptcy
of relativism and appeasement are clearly evident. What
is needed is a return to the absolutes.
The absolutes are the principles that undergird our most
basic assumptions about life. They are the underlying foundations
of common sense, the standards by which we determine
the difference between right and wrong, truth and falsehood,
essential and trivial. They are the truths that support our truisms.
They form the bedrock of our civility. The absolutes are the fixed
points on the horizon by which we navigate the river of life.
Nineteenth-century historian and philosopher Robert
Goguet argues that the genius of the Constitution was that it
took the necessity of the absolutes fully into account:
The more [the founders] meditated on the biblical standards
for civil morality, the more they perceived their
wisdom and inspiration. Those standards alone have the
inestimable advantage never to have undergone any of the
revolutions common to all human laws, which have
always demanded frequent amendments; sometimes
changes; sometimes additions; sometimes the retrenching
of superfluities. There has been nothing changed, nothing
added, nothing retrenched from biblical morality for
above three thousand years.
The founders, fresh from the experience of the Revolutionary
War, were well aware of the consequences of moral disarray.
They knew that in order to build cultural consensus-let alone a
nation-they needed an identifiable, objective standard of
good. Although many of them were not practicing Christians,
the priority they gave to biblical morality was a matter of soberminded
practicality.
John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court,
affirmed the necessity of having a standard of virtue to ensure
the proper maintenance of civil stability and order:
No human society has ever been able to maintain both
order and freedom, both cohesiveness and liberty, apart
from the moral precepts of the Christian Religion applied
and accepted by all the classes. Should our Republic e'er
forget this fundamental precept of governance, men are
certain to shed their responsibilities for licentiousness and
this great experiment will then surely be doomed.
The founders recognized the futility of creating and implementing
a system of laws without a foundation of absolute principles.
Constitutional provisions such as the separation of
powers, mixed government, checks and balances, jury trials,
and civil rights were all predicated on the notion that people are
bent toward chaos if left to their own devices. Laws were
designed with the understanding that in a fallen world both sin
and sinners must be restrained if justice is to prevail. For a system
of law and order to succeed, the difference between right
and wrong must not only be defined, it must also be accounted
for in the very fabric of our relationships.
Abandoning the Absolutes
During the waning days of the twentieth century, as a society we
began to contradict many previously held assumptions about
life by turning the absolutes upside down. According to our
topsy-turvy logic, "bad" came to mean "good," and "good" was
a label that every status-conscious teen desperately wished to
avoid. Some people began to take pride in things that once
would have shocked, shamed, and silenced us. As the apostle
Paul said, "Their future is eternal destruction. Their god is their
appetite, they brag about shameful things, and all they think
about is this life here on earth." Breaking traditions, violating
conventions, and upsetting taboos became fashionable. Rebels
were seen as heroes, whereas true heroes were either forgotten
altogether or became the object of cynicism.
The relativists recast certainty as intolerance. Virtue was
considered a potential liability, if not an actual vice. Orthodoxy
was labeled as radical fundamentalism-giving fundamentalism
a negative connotation-while heresy was praised for its
honesty, courage, and ingenuity. Society began to question
whether there was any such thing as a standard by which we
could judge truth from falsehood or right from wrong. Judgment
and discretion were abandoned for fear of being found guilty
of judgmentalism and discrimination. Thus, adherence to
absolutes no longer seemed reasonable, normal, and practical,
but small-minded, mean-spirited, and insensitive. Even the
gentlest reminder of their relevance served as an unwelcome
distraction to our "politically correct" society.
In dismissing objective standards upon which right and
wrong were judged, our culture came to value all ideas as equally
valid and good. As philosopher Richard Weaver observed, "That
it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heard on
every side today. This statement carries a fearful implication: It
does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take
his beliefs seriously." To a great extent Americans have not taken
their beliefs-or any one else's, for that matter-seriously for
quite some time. As a result, we have become embroiled in a running
battle over the meaning of values and truth. In the face of an
increasingly subjective or "relative" mind-set, it has become
harder and harder to forge consensus, build community, nurture
families, uphold freedom, and develop trust.
Ravi Zacharias shared the following observation in his
important post-September 11 book titled
Light in the Shadow of
Jihad
:
The relativist who argues for the absence of absolutes
smuggles absolutes into his arguments all the time, while shouting loudly that all morality is private belief.
Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School, spares no vitriol in his pronouncements that there
are no absolutes and that that's the way it is. "I do not
know what is right," he contends. It all sounds very
honest and real, until he points his finger at his audience
and says, "And you know what? Neither do you." So
it is not just that he does not know what is right. It
is also that he knows the impossibility of knowing
what is right so well that he is absolutely certain that
nobody else can know what is right either. There is his
absolute.
Zacharias later added that Professor Dershowitz, "who
denies our ability to define good, says with equal vehemence
that he does recognize evil when he sees it. Fascinating!"
Are All Ideas Equally Valid?
In practice, relativism is an attempt to create "out of the
mosaic of our religious and cultural differences, a common
vision for the common good." But that is just so much wishful
thinking. After all, if "everything's relative," who decides what
is and what is not a part of the common vision? Who defines
honesty
, or
loyalty
, or
justice
-or any other ideal, for that matter?
Under relativism, the public opinion poll becomes the
voice of virtue-subject to continual update and a certain margin
of error.
Perhaps the most destructive trait of modern relativism, so
common in our culture today, is the brash and cavalier attitude
it has toward the existence of an objective standard of goodness
and morality. In the name of civil liberty and cultural diversity,
the conscience of the individual is elevated to the role of moral
compass. What's good and true for me might not be good and
true for anyone else. Of course, if all ideas are deemed equally
valid, there can be no action or idea that is objectively "worse"
(i.e., more harmful) than another. Reaching that logical conclusion,
however, forces people to fudge the reality of good and
evil, because the existence of an objective standard would
negate the assumptions of relativism.
To disregard objective standards in the name of liberty only
serves to undermine that very same liberty. First, by denying the
existence of evil, relativism by definition precludes the ability of
a society to restrain evil. How can we legitimately criminalize
something that might just be the result of a difference in values?
You can see how relativism quickly becomes a self-defeating
philosophy. It should be clear that unrestrained evil is the
enemy of all free societies.
Further, relativism cheapens our freedom by seeking to
bestow liberty as an unearned, undeserved, and unwarranted
entitlement, ignoring the fact that with great privilege comes
great responsibility. Throughout the history of our country, freedom
has been bought with a price-through moral diligence, virtuous
sacrifice, and ethical uprightness in opposition to objective
evil. Relativism shuns the idea of sacrifice because it implies that
no idea is more valuable than another. Unless the sacrifices and
responsibilities of freedom are recognized, however, those freedoms
will be neglected and then lost, because people only truly
value those things for which they have worked or sacrificed.
As Thomas Paine so aptly said, "The harder the conflict, the
more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we
esteem too lightly; 'tis dearness only that gives everything its
value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods;
and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as
Freedom should not be highly rated."
By confusing liberty with license, relativism threatens our
freedom rather than upholds it. Also, by its very nature, relativism
weakens the common vision and destabilizes the common
good by its emphasis on the primacy of the individual.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the brilliant Russian novelist, historian,
and Nobel laureate, was alarmed by this drift in Western cultures
and offered a stern critique:
Fifty years ago it would have seemed quite impossible in
America that an individual be granted boundless freedom
with no purpose but simply for the satisfaction of his
whims. The defense of individual rights has reached such
extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless. It is
time to defend, not so much human rights, as human
obligations.
According to political analyst James Q. Wilson, those who
embrace relativism end up disguising their wrongheaded thinking
in a cloak of reasonable-sounding euphemisms:
Many people have persuaded themselves that no law has
any foundation in a widely shared sense of justice; each is
the arbitrary enactment of the politically powerful. This is
called
legal realism
, but it strikes me as utterly unrealistic.
Many people have persuaded themselves that children
will be harmed if they are told right from wrong; instead
they should be encouraged to discuss the merits of moral
alternatives. This is called
values clarification
, but I think it
is a recipe for confusion rather than clarity. Many people
have persuaded themselves that it is wrong to judge the
customs of another society since there are no standards
apart from custom on which such judgments can rest; presumably they would oppose infanticide only if it
involved their own child. This is sometimes called
tolerance; I think a better name would be barbarism.
Although relativism purposely blurs the distinctions between
good and evil-so much so that one might wonder if there is any
distinction at all-every now and then a tragic event will snap us
to attention, bringing back into stark focus the great chasm
between right and wrong, righteousness and wickedness, good
and evil.
Continues.
