Thinking Long Term

Having just finished reading Justice Robert Bork's critque of modern culture, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, I was reminded of the long term danger we face as a nation. We are literally heading toward a moral and spiritual black hole.

While we still use the term "truth," we, for all intents and purposes, have rejected its actual existence. If "truth" is relative or culturally constructed then we can claim that all sorts of things are true when they aren't and conversely claim that historically accepted truths are actually false. In either case, declaring the false true or denying historic truths, we are left with nothing that is authentically true. We have rejected what our forefathers knew to be true to replace it with the byproducts of unproven ideologies. It really is no wonder that ours is an age of growing dysfunction or that so many young people define themselves by their maladies.

Here's the problem. Truth matters, we deny it or delude ourselves about it to our peril. It matters because there are real consequences connected to our behaviors whether permitted or forbidden. We have already proven that being raised in a single family home is the largest factor behind juvenile crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and failure in school. In other words, we reject the traditional view of marriage at great risk to children and society not to mention the adults in the relationships.

We could multiply this instance by the many other assumptions in play today about men, women, morality, religion, or economics that are based upon a rejection of tradition and the acceptance of some form of modern ideology. We will pay a very high price for this exercise in social experimentation.

My fear is localized on our college campuses. So many of the departments and courses in our colleges and universities are driven by ideology and the assumptions of postmodern thought. Twenty years from now, we will see the consequences of this anti-education that has passed for education, and bemoan our foolishness. We actually are already seeing some of the early consequences of the emphasis on feminist ideology with the reduction in male graduation rates and reduced number of males entering college. This is not just an abstract sociological statistic, it will have terrible repurcusions for a society with a large number of dysfunctional men.

It is our universities that produce our public school teachers, and thus it dramatically impacts K-12 education in America. When you couple the influence of the schools with the influence of popular culture (movies, music, video games, etc.) you have a dangerous mix moving us away from the values and traditions of our forefathers and into the uncharted territory of ideologically driven assumptions. We will not like the place this journey takes us.