Whether or not you caught it the first time around, here’s a good reason to visit January’s special section, featuring contributions from Roger Kimball, Anthony Daniels, James W. Ceaser, Christie Davies, Daniel Johnson, and Andrew McCarthy: The redoubtable Paul Johnson recommends it in his recent Spectator column on the subject of moral relativism and its dangers. (In fact, he gives TNC higher billing than a new book by the Pope. How’s that for an endorsement?)
I made the triumph of moral relativism the central theme of my history of the 20th century, Modern Times, first published in 1983. Relativism took many different forms but all put the real or imagined needs of ‘society’ (in practice the group in power) before the claims of an absolute code of right and wrong, such as the Ten Commandments. Hitler and the Nazis called the criterion of morality ‘the Higher Law of the Party’, and followed it to launch world war and kill nearly six million Jews. Lenin and Stalin called it ‘the Revolutionary Conscience’, and its dictates led to the murder or death in the Gulag of 20 million ‘enemies of the people’. In China, Mao’s revolutionary conscience as the sole measure of right and wrong produced 70 million victims. Pre-war Japan followed the European lead and conducted its wars of aggression, first against China, then the West, without the smallest regard for morality in any form, except the relativism of ‘National Survival’. In this competitive corruption, the West succumbed, at least in part. Churchill used the spirit of moral relativism to authorise ‘aerial bombing’ of Germany: ‘The one thing that will bring [Hitler] down . . . is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ The Americans used the same argument for dropping nuclear weapons on Japan. . . .
. . . There is a special issue, on the Dictatorship of Relativism, of the New York monthly New Criterion, for January 2009. I have also been reading the Pope’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth, the first part of a projected life of Christ, which has been published by Bloomsbury in an excellent translation by Adrian J. Walker. This book is worth reading for many reasons, but particularly for its presentation of Jesus as the upholder of absolute morality in the face of all temptations to compromise, to take the easy way out and to bow to current fashions and social orthodoxies.
Prepare to be surprised: The piece takes an unabashedly religious tack, and even anticipates the rapid and inevitable (Johnson’s words) self-destruction of mankind. Dire stuff, and likely to be laughed off by a certain type of reader. That type of reader might glance at a list of Johnson’s books: A lifetime spent studying the trajectory of human progress and failure, in minute detail, is nothing to sniff at.
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