With too much travel, visits with friends
and family, and local activities, I’ve been remiss in writing for my blog. Being the lazy old guy that I am, I’m going
to cheat and give you a post I wrote back in January of 2013. Since it has application to today’s events
and since most of you haven’t read it, I decided to post it again. It’s worth some thought.
* * *
"We have no government armed with power capable of
contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice,
ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our
Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”
This is a quote from John Adams’ address to the military in 1798.
We’ve all
seen pictures of men standing in soup lines during the Great Depression. People were lined up for rations to feed
their families. Some tried to get menial
work. Anything to provide for their
families. My dad told me his family made
soup out of chicken feet.
What can we
expect to happen in our cities if we had a depression today? Would people sell an apple, line up for
rations, or would the “uncivilized” element go on a looting rampage? Remember the rioting in Los
Angeles in 1992 and the post Katrina riots and looting in New Orleans ? What has
changed since the Great Depression?
A brief
glance at countries around the world provide a blatant picture of atrocities
beyond belief, but here in the U.S. ,
where our country was founded on Judeo/Christian principles, we expect
more. But do we still hold to those
values?
Do we have
such a thin veneer of civilization in this country that a brief loss of
electricity, a flood, or a trial verdict, for example, can provide a catalyst
for the savages among us to plunder, rape, and kill? What does Japan
have that we no longer have?
Are we as
civilized as we pretend to be? Are white
collar crimes or government malfeasance different than looting from a moral
perspective? Could this relate to the
lack of a commonly agreed upon moral code?
Japan
has its problems, but evidently they agree on a moral standard of some kind.
I’ve come
to believe that the basis of every problem in our modern culture is based on
moral ambiguity. That belief is
reinforced daily by what I see happening in this country.
The concept
of moral relativism and the rejection of any authority higher than man could
result in nothing less than confusion and a “disconnect” from a moral standard
based on something outside of one’s own personal design. By definition, morals are standards outside
of ourselves that we believe in and strive to live by. Personal opinions don’t count.
Back when I
was a kid in the ‘50s we knew what was right and what was wrong. The fact that we chose “wrong” didn’t make it
“right” and we knew it. That moral
gyroscope might have failed to inhibit us on many occasions, but it functioned
as an essential guide and still does for many of us, despite our personal
fallibility.
If you take
every aspect of our culture, from economics and social issues to politics and
the media, at the root of any problem you will find a missing or compromised moral
imperative. Something has changed.
Now that we
as a society have thrown off the shackles of “that old time religion,” God, and
any accountability to a higher authority, we are free to set our own rules;
free to establish our own personal “morality.” Fyoder Dostoevsky said, “If there is no God,
everything is permitted.”
Law
has replaced our former moral underpinnings.
If it’s legal, it must be moral. Legality equals morality to many. Abortion may be legal, but is it moral? And laws can always be changed to be more
accommodating.
Morality
restrains us from inside. The law
restrains us from outside. In other
words, if there is no internal moral restraint, the law will apply controls externally.
We have a
culture that has filled our vacuous morality with flexible legality.
In short,
we have managed to destroy America ’s
primary moral construct. As John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only
for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of
any other.” In my opinion, that’s why we
are where we are.
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