Whatever Goes

This is scary but immediately unsurprising. Influential conservative commentator David Brooks wrote in the New York Times today about a study of moral relativism amongst young adults. The story - called "If it Feels Right ..." - highlights the conclusion of the study that young adults in the US have little concept of right-and-wrong - they seem to really believe that moral decisions are made with the heart, according to how you feel just then. The title of the story was a perfect fit in that as soon as I read that conclusion it felt completely accurate to my own experiences and observations about how young adults behave in this country. More than anything, it explains the overwhelmingly nasty, mean-spirited comments monopolizing the thought sphere wherever people can vent anonymously.

Brooks is the only right-wing commentator I can stomach, and not just because he's conservative with a small "c", but also because he's extremely widely read, and razor smart. I frequently disagree with his conclusions, sometimes even finding them a little naive, but far better that than the self-righteous dogma that passes for most commentary from the right. He has an unparalleled ability to sample the Zeitgeist and keep it in context with sociological history, against which most of his opinions are framed.

It doesn't take many quotes from the study to understand Brooks' concerns:

• "I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often..."
•  “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
•  “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel."

Brooks is not saying that these young people live immoral lives, but that they are completely unaware of the moral stakes in living. They really don't seem to get that there is any such thing as a real right or wrong.

As I read through the column, I began to wonder how and when he'd tie in religion. It's accepted wisdom that the diminishment of religion as an  authority serves to weaken the foundation for morality, but I know Brooks is too smart to blame it all on losing Jesus.

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines.

I like that he's merely pointing out the vacuum formed by the absence of the role religion formerly played in society, instead of implying or stating that religion is the fount of morality. It would be interesting to read the book that's derived from this study, Lost in Transition: the Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, and try to correlate viewpoints with their religious background. My bet is that there'd be little correlation. In fact, I'd even go so far as to expect that kids who were raised by adults who were expressly humanistic would probably have a much greater grasp of morality than otherwise.

You have to wonder what forces are at work here, beyond the lack of moral structure entrenched in society. If you think back to how you learned moral values yourself - well, I can't speak for anybody else (and I'm aware that almost sounds like moral relativism), but I'm sure my own sense of wrong and right come from my parents. Although both of my parents held quiet Christian beliefs, they believed in giving their children the right to choose their own. Not once, while I was growing up, did they go to church, mention God or Jesus, or make any reference to heavens. Instead we absorbed the way they lived: courtesy, consideration of others, following through on your word. And since we respected them, we did as they did until morality became ingrained.

But this generation learned their way to live in other ways: much less contact with parents who, I suspect, were too focused on their own fulfilment and achievement to realize that kids won't magically, by osmosis, learn moral values. Increasingly, since the PC revolution, people spend more time alone, interacting with computers, or watching television in their own room. There's less opportunity for a constant source of quietly moral behavior to influence them. To make matters worse, television has, over the last ten years or so, been taken over by reality television, where the prevailing ethos is to be as loud and self-assertive as possible. Kids are passively learning the lesson that everything is okay so long as I feel good about it. And that's scary.