This is a cultural virus,” Governor Bill Owens of Colorado observed regarding the Columbine High School massacre. “We have to ask ourselves what kind of children we are raising.”Governor Owens said volumes. The demented young killers weren’t products of material poverty. Their parents, all four employed outside the home, are successful professionals. One boy lived in a $400,000 home.
But deprived they were – spiritually, philosophically, emotionally, and morally – like the vast majority of their generational peers. The faulty values of the anti-culture bequeathed them by their parents’ and grandparents’ generations deprived them of the innocence of youth that was the birthright of children up until a couple of decades ago.
The “cultural virus” Governor Owens cites is incubated by liberal humanism – the ideology that proposes sovereignty of the human will, that advocates no imposed discipline, no direction, no meaning, no order, no structure, no purpose, no objective right or wrong, no sin, no moral truth, only the shallowest concept of love, and, of course, no God. Just self-esteem, self-realization, and the pursuit of pleasure and material acquisition.
A book by ethics professor Paul Chamberlain asks, Can We Be Good Without God? “No!” replies Boston College professor Peter Kreeft. “Since God is the source of all being and goodness, we can’t even exist without Him.”
Without divine revelation, Kreeft warns, people may sense the moral law in their hearts, but will not know that it proceeds from their Creator. This stunted perception is shared by the secular state, he argues, which expects its citizens to be moral, but fails to acknowledge the true source of morality.
Western civilization began with the Christian religion, was sustained by it, and is dying with Christianity’s popular decline. It’s probably fair to say that most people never lived strictly by Christian standards, but in the past a majority affirmed them as the ideal model of behaviour.
Carl Jung prophetically warned of hell to pay if the moral consensus ever broke down. In 1911, he wrote: “Today, the individual still feels himself restrained by public hypocritical opinion, and therefore, prefers to lead a secret, separate life, but publicly to represent morality. It might be different if men in general all at once found the moral mask too dull, and if they realized how dangerously their (inner) beasts lie in wait for each other, and then truly a frenzy of demoralization might sweep over humanity.”
Sweeping it is, into a moral and philosophical vacuum created by the compounding effect of three or four generations who have “found the moral mask too dull,” discarded Christian standards, and embraced liberal humanism’s bogus claim that right and wrong are merely matters of personal taste and that morality is “relative.”
Other signs of cultural decay are that preoccupation with eroticism, the obsessive pursuit of excitement, oppressive boredom, and general dissatisfaction with life – all characteristics of today’s youth culture. Don’t infer that I’m attacking young people here. My heart goes out to them. I have teenage kids of my own. Despite the fact that the only culture most of them know, to borrow their vernacular, “sucks,” most manage to muddle through without becoming sociopaths.
But it gets harder and harder. Youth today are tragic victims of their parents’ and grandparents’ philosophical bankruptcy. There are lots of good kids out there, but they haven’t inherited quality values to work with.
Liberal humanists wring their hands and whine that, “There’s nothing we can do to stop: kids watching violent and-or pornographic videos and movies; kids listening to nihilistic music; kids smoking, drinking, and doing drugs; kids hanging out in gangs; kids having sex; etc.” Most parents capitulate to pernicious popular culture when their kids are infants, then wonder years later “where they went wrong.” Setting objective standards of behaviour – imposing limits – contradicts the secular-humanist creed most people under 50 have been indoctrinated with since cradle days.
Listening to psycho-babble spouted by many educators, you might infer that the sole focus of modern education is to nurture children’s “self-esteem.” But survey after survey of today’s teenagers finds that lack of “self-esteem” is almost universal among these kids. Why? Because a genuine sense of self-worth comes only by measuring up to objective standards. The “make-up-your-values-as-you-go-along” approach is as bogus as a three-dollar bill, and kids are smart enough to sense this intuitively.
