The Dark Side of the American Dream : Moral Relativism? ‘You Don’t Get It’

For the last few years, a hot-button cultural debate in this country has been raging over multiculturalism and the competing claims of Afro- centrism and Euro-centrism. But under cover of multiculturalism, some thing has been smuggled in that could have far greater consequences: The belief that morality itself is culture-bound and therefore, in an increasingly pluralistic society, wholly malleable.

Moral revolutions are usually obstreperous affairs. This time, multiculturalism stealthily slid into moral relativism without anyone paying much attention to the confusion between the anthropological and moral realms. Yet, the new swell of moral relativism challenges the predicates of our moral system. It says any behavior is all right, as long as there is some culture or subculture that permits it. All this converts the popular T-shirt slogan--”It’s a -------- thing. You wouldn’t understand”--from a cultural assertion into a new moral standard.

It was on these grounds that Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson excused Justice Clarence Thomas’ alleged remarks to Anita F. Hill. He asserted that what Thomas supposedly said “may have been completely out of the cultural frame of his white, upper-middle-class work world, but immediately recognizable to Professor Hill” as a form of “down-home courting.” In other words: It’s a Southern black thing. You wouldn’t understand.

It was on similar grounds that two Palestinian emigres, who had slaughtered their Americanized teen-age daughter, asked for acquittal. As a friend said, “We follow our religion.” If the parents hadn’t disciplined their wayward daughter, “they’d be embarrassed in front of everybody.” In short: It’s a Palestinian thing. You wouldn’t understand. With Leona Helmsley, it’s a rich thing; with the Mob, a Cosa Nostra thing; with crooked politicians, a political thing; with looters, a poverty thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Applied to culture, this may be a sensible formulation. We don’t always understand other cultures, even other American subcultures, and we often aren’t in a position to judge customs, languages, aesthetics, mythologies, even cosmologies. Applied to morality, on the other hand, it can become a license to do anything you like and not feel responsible, since no one’s moral coordinates can be imposed on anyone else’s actions--certainly not the coordinates of white middle-class morality. The result is not just that people think they can get away with anything, it is that they believe they are entitled to get away with anything.

As fundamental a change as this is, one reason it has received so little attention is that no one really objects to it--at least in his own bailiwick. For years, liberals have offered explanations for what might be regarded as antisocial behavior by the underprivileged and the disenfranchised. These explanations, as one saw vividly after the Los Angeles riots, often sounded remarkably like excuses. If society was at fault for creating a culture of poverty, individuals were not responsible for abiding by the values of that culture. In any case, many liberals have become uncomfortable about judging the poor and minorities by white middle-class standards of moral conduct--as if it were as unfair as using white, middle-class-biased IQ tests to determine their intelligence.

If anything, conservatives found morality even more flexible than liberals, though their blather about traditional values did as much to hide the rise of moral relativism as the liberal insistence on multiculturalism. However, it was only minorities that needed to be lashed with the moral whip. What liberals were excusing because of poverty, conservatives were excusing because of wealth and patriotism. As both Wall Street and Irangate made clear, amorality in the furtherance of the conservative cause is no vice. In this view, Michael Milken and Oliver L. North were both heroes snagged by legal technicalities, not wrongdoers receiving justice.

Perhaps the major casualty of moral relativism has been the notion of guilt. For when there is easy absolution, there is no guilt--at least not moral guilt. To everyone from the drug lords to insider traders, getting caught was the real crime. Recently, former Wall Street sovereign and current convict Milken labeled the six counts of criminal fraud, to which he had pleaded guilty, as “securities violations.” For Milken and his advocates, there is no wrong involved. “It’s a Wall Street thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

Similarly, North cannot conceive that he may have done wrong and hence he cannot possibly feel guilt--though he baldly lied. “I know the difference between right and wrong,” he wrote, “and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.” North makes these calls and gets cheered for them, but--it’s a conservative thing. You wouldn’t understand.

For too many conservatives, guilt is the psychological equivalent of all those government regulations they abhor. Guilt is an encumbrance that keeps one from the untrammeled pursuit of wealth, which is the engine of our welfare.

Meanwhile, the self-help movement may have inadvertently abetted the lack of remorse by targeting guilt as psychologically damaging. We have to learn to love ourselves, forgive ourselves, or so the experts say. Their idea is that there is too much guilt, while the real problem may be that there may be too little--not the unmoored Freudian anxiety that parades as guilt, but the moral variety that tells us when we have transgressed.

Admittedly, when you talk about guilt this way, you are bound to sound like one of those moral troglodytes who assume their own standards are universal and immutable. Indeed, Samuel Johnson may have been wrong--morality, not patriotism, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Whenever the prevailing social order has been challenged in this country, its defenders have always waved the bloody shirt of morality and condemned the challengers as insufficiently versed in our values--just as Dan Quayle is doing now.

No doubt that is why some people, skeptical that moral rearmament can ever be anything more than the last gasp of the withering genteel Establishment, believe that when we argue morality, we are really arguing politics; that the real issue is whose morality? I wouldn’t dispute that. Morality is a function of many factors, including culture; from one society to another, one set of moral precepts may indeed be no more valid than another.

But in this country, while we may disagree on which issues are moral ones--prostitution, for example--and while we may be divided over selected moral problems, such as abortion, there has long been a surprising consensus over morality. In arguing against moral relativism, I am not arguing the Judeo-Christian moral consensus is the only one, or even the right one. Nor am I arguing that morality is a rigid thing, impervious to changing times. A consensus, after all, is organic.

It is simply that the old consensus is under siege and we need some consensus--something that enables us to say Milken, the Palestinian parents and the looters were wrong. By declaring instead that there are dozens, hundreds, of separate moral systems within America, all perfectly acceptable, proponents of moral relativism strike at the heart of our social covenant, at the very basis of our society in a way cultural relativism does not.

Without a consensus, we will have not just moral anomie; we will have a society so fragmented that it ceases to exist.