Instead of a required course in ethics or religion, many colleges today require a course in "pluralism," which is really a course in relativism. It undermines any notion of absolute values that might be morally binding on all. Instead, morals are viewed simply as one's personal psychological reactions to outside situations. Guilt is only psychological, as is moral rightness.
People of the nineteenth century were just as sinful as we are today, but they tended to have moral categories to remind them of that fact. Twentieth-century morals have no condemning or justifying power at all; they do not really even qualify as morals. Today we are engulfed in a fog bank of blindness that few nineteenth-century folks (except the intellectual elite) experienced.
Our culture therefore cannot understand the divinely instituted moral bond that undergirds the family, marriage, civic community, and the workplace. These relationships and structures are portrayed as products of our biological and social evolution. They are merely means for achieving individual personal goals, with no intrinsic value or transcendent validity. This blindness is demonstrated in our high rate of divorce and incarceration, increased domestic violence, and the growing confusion about the institution of marriage and the family.
If guidance comes from wisdom and wisdom is the application of values to life, then our culture--despite its great technological knowledge--cannot provide real guidance. Our society can only offer instruction in cleverness, self-interest, self-esteem, and ways to gain power for the self. Self-help motivational books like Think and Grow Rich (Hill 1960) are classics of our age just because they reflect, in rather crass terms, the guiding wisdom of our time.
(James C. Petty)
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