ARE THERE MORAL ABSOLUTES IN 2022?

April 7, 2022 11:22 am

When I was younger the world had heroes made of real people and sometimes fictitious characters or even real people made large. My first hero, after my dad, was our first President, George Washington. At five years old I knew little of George Washington the man but knew a whole lot about the legend.

We were told George Washington never told a lie with the story about the cherry tree. Why were we told this story? Our parents, coming fresh from the defeat of Nazism and the horrors of World War II, wanted us to understand that there was good in the world. We were all raised to praise America and its values. Our first history lessons were about the American Revolution, and we learned names like Benjamin Franklin, a uniquely American character who was a truly self-created man. Unlike many other leaders of his time, he grew up in relative poverty and through his ingenuity created hundreds of inventions (for which he never received a dime) some, like the lightning rod and bifocal glasses, are still in use today some 250 years later.

When I got older, I became familiar with more than what these founders did, I learned about their values. The founders had the unique ability to articulate exactly what these values were in simple and unambiguous language in documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and later the Bill of Rights. When we go back and look at what they were able to accomplish, we learn that the politics of their day were very much like the dysfunctional politics of today, and that the systems they created were the result of much angst and compromise. We find that these were human beings with family dramas and personal flaws just like the rest of us. What is remarkable is what they were able to accomplish, in spite of this.

So, what was it exactly that enabled all these very talented yet very flawed human characters to come together to create something great? I believe that they had something that we, in 2022, have in short supply. They had moral absolutes.

What is a moral absolute? A moral absolute is a statement from a higher power where there can be no equivocation. The system that they designed was taken directly from the Judeo-Christian Bible. The Ten Commandments, the central tenet in law then and now states, “Thou shall not commit murder”. Murder is wrong, period! That is a moral absolute.

In a recent survey of today’s college students more than 70 percent believe that there are no moral absolutes. They instead believe that there are degrees of right and wrong, and that morality is a matter of perspective.  The danger here is that when moral relativism becomes the norm, what is right and wrong gets blurred, and people lose a sense of a moral society. They feel that it is okay to cheat a little here and there, as long as you can get away with it and no one is looking.

Maturity, in my view, is doing the right thing when no one is looking. I grew up in a world with problems, but we were all working to improve that world, and that was our mission. I would like to believe that we can get back to that mission by inspiring our children to become something greater. I would hope that as a first step we can inspire our children to appreciate how truly fortunate they are for their unique birthright. Born in the USA.

Regards,
Lawrence Dickstein

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