Turns Out, I Wasn’t Buying It Even Then

In my last post I included Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of the idea of situation ethics or relative morality.  When writing that post I was put in mind of my having read Joeseph Fletcher’s book “Situation Ethics: The New Morality” for a sociology class.  That would have been in the late 60s (the copyright date is 1966).  My memories were that I was swayed by the arguments in that book to look at my views of morality differently.  Turns out I actually still have my original copy (price on cover: $1.95) with my notes from the time.

My notes throughout the book reveal that I seem to have open mindedly considered as well as questioned the arguments and theses of the book, but that in the end I wasn’t sold.  Indeed, I seem to have at least intuited the criticisms spoken by Solzhenitsyn 5 or 10 years later.  The inside cover includes my handwritten comment that reads as follows:

whole book, & idea appears as just a way of rationalizing your sins, and “is trying to get out of it.”

makes us all out to be gods, who can choose to take a life for example, but we aren’t and we can’t.

Seems very slanted.  Only uses a very few Biblical examples over and over.

I don’t recall myself as being that perceptive.  But maybe it takes one looking back with later experience and history to see what one actually knew in the past.  The fact that my memory was that I had a fairly positive and transformative reaction to the book when I studied it is telling as to how the book and this new philosophy of relativism must have taken hold within our culture. 

Now, looking back with what I know and what I see around me today, I find the book truly frightening.  I see how right Solzhenitsyn was when he noted that the Communist ideology of relative (or class and identity) morality was a successful tool in its (and today’s Leftist Progressive ideology) anti-humanity crusade to gain power only for itself and gain the ability to fully manipulate the rest of us.

THE LURE OF SITUATIONAL MORALITY

The back of my copy of Situation Ethics touts it as “a manifesto of individual freedom and individual responsibility, elaborated within an ethic of love, which extricates modern man from rigid, archaic rules and codes.”

That was the 60s.  Think how enlightened that sounded.  “Individual freedom and individual responsibility”: isn’t that what people of the 60s were discovering – their ability to be themselves, to not conform and be like everyone else?  “Elaborated within an ethic of love”:  love one another was a sound and phrase of the times, how could that be bad?  And with these positive slogans we will “extricate modern man from rigid, archaic rules and codes”:  those would be the absolutes, the good and evil that served us well since civilized time began, the absolutes whose removal, Solzhenitsyn notes, leave us with nothing but the manipulation of one by another.

On page 56 of the book one finds a summary of the six propositions on which its philosophy of situation ethics rests: “The first one pins down the nature of value.  The second reduces all values to love.   The third equates love and justice.  The fourth frees love from sentimentality.  The fifth states the relation between means and ends.  The sixth authenticates every decision within its own content.” 

According to the author, “The new morality, situation ethics, declares that anything and everything is right or wrong, according to the situation.”  The author declares this new morality is not new, but is Bible-based and, like so many false prophets before and after him, he takes selected quotes from the Bible out of context to justify his philosophy that essentially comes down to:  do what feels good for you – if it feels good, it’s OK.

WHERE DID IT LEAD US

I think that in the 60s most who considered it didn’t notice the possible consequences of what embracing situational or relative morality might mean.  It is, I believe, a part of the lives of most of us today, and the Left has fully embraced it.

I think most everyone today will ignore otherwise rigid rules in at least some situations.  And probably people have always done this to some extent (is there anyone who has never told “a little white lie”?). 

But when there are absolute rules of right and wrong, good and evil, the breaking of these rules is less prevalent and is accompanied by some sort of guilt and understanding of one’s own wrongdoing.  When those “rigid” rules are gone one is ultimately left to do whatever one wants, regardless of what may be right or wrong for others.

Today, beyond more prevalent acceptance of excusing rule breaking in some circumstances, there are those who seem to believe that there really are no rules – they truly believe that a situation itself is the governing body in all circumstances. 

How else would we find people justifying theft and robbery (because they are just taking what they need), justifying the killing of police (because they are allegedly systemically racist), justifying violent riots called protests when they claim to serve a popular cause, even when they hurt or kill innocent bystanders, businesses, and government buildings (BLM riots after Floyd killing) but demanding severe punishment, even death to those whose protests violated the perimeter of the Capital building for a cause out of favor with the Left?

How else would we find people justifying the silencing of opposing viewpoints that they find uncomfortable, the disinviting of conservative speakers to college campuses because their views are offensive to Left-leaning students and faculty, the justification of harassing, namecalling, and sometimes physically attacking individuals who speak out in opposition to Leftist causes (most recently those who oppose CRT)? 

How else would we find the entertainment business and the elite and progressive individuals who profit from it justifying a daily diet of “entertainment” that sexualizes women and children while then acting as if they are horrified when someone whose politics are contrary to theirs commits even the slightest “MeToo” violation?

How else would we find the Left asserting its support for women’s rights and equal opportunity, then undermining those assertions when a biological male wants to compete as a female?   

How else would we find people believing that they can claim to be a devout follower of Catholicism yet be pro-abortion (a mortal sin in that faith) and demand they still be allowed to participate in the holy eucharist which requires adherence to the Catholic liturgy?

How else would we have a President requesting that social media censor and ban any posting that does not speak the truth, yet giving no criteria for what is “truth” or who will decide if a posting meets it, resulting, for example, in the idea that any suggestion that the Wuhan Virus came from the Wuhan lab should have been banned as untruthful, even though that now is the prevalent scientific theory?  How can science and humanity progress if no one is allowed to question or to present alternate ideas and theories?

THE RESULT OF EMBRACING RELATIVE MORALITY IS NOT PRETTY AND IT IS ANTI-HUMANITY

The above list could go on and on.  It includes just some of the examples of situation ethics in action that immediately come to mind.  I am sure every reader of this blog can think of many others.

We are destroying ourselves while believing that we have raised ourselves to some higher level of love.  Self-love seems to be the guiding principle – open any lifestyle magazine, any Sunday supplement, any self-help blog, any TV morning-show type supplement and you will hear about the importance of “self-care.”    That is where situational morality has taken us – to place the self as a god and the center of one’s universe. 

That’s fine if you live alone on some mountain top, but when two or more people come together who believe the situation and their feelings govern all even to the extent of justifying murder of the other, someone is going to have to determine whose self-love is superior. 

Once people have been manipulated into giving up absolute moral values, they need someone in power to decide what is OK in this or that situation.  That is where the progressive Leftist philosophy comes in.  They believe they can and should decide for each and every one of us, not because they know or care what is best, but because their philosophy requires and entitles them to do so.  They will take away humanity and replace it with manipulation and indifference.  As Solzhenitsyn so aptly noted, their goal is to destroy our social order.  The back cover of the Situation Ethics book essentially admits that as its intent.

My 1960s notes on Situation Ethics were more accurate than I understood at the time. I didn’t buy into it then, even though I thought I had.  Perhaps you didn’t buy into Situation Ethics either when you were first introduced.  But when there is what Solzhenitsyn calls a “constant dinning” and what we would today call propaganda with a daily barrage of one viewpoint taught from almost birth, it is easy to lose what one knows to be true and to buy into what we inherently know to be a mistake.   

We are not gods and relative morality, no matter how honorable and humane and even holy it may sound, is nothing more than a way to destroy the human essence and individuality and replace it with an ugly and oppressive power wielded by an elite and selfish few.  Each one of us who has let this destructive situation ethics into our lives needs to exorcise it immediately.

It’s So Much More Than Just the Biden Coverup

By now you are (or should be) aware of the fact that the press conveniently ignored and suppressed the Hunter Biden investigation until after the election.  Now, when the result is fairly certain, they begin to report it, though generally with the best spin possible. 

We should all be appalled about their coverup, but the concern goes or should go far beyond that.  Anyone who does not believe their vote this election was at least in part manipulated by the media is dreaming.  But, beyond vote manipulation, we should all be concerned about the way that more generally our thinking is being manipulated.    

        The Hunter Biden Affair
First, a quick recap of the Hunter Biden affair. If you are not inclined to research the actual documents, two current opinion pieces present the key facts fairly objectively and I will quote from them in this summary. They are from the Wall Street Journal LINK-HERE  and The Hill LINK-HERE 

If you only read the mainstream Left media or get your news from social media, you probably don’t remember when the Biden story broke last October.  The New York Post published an exclusive story about Hunter Biden being under investigation.  There was a laptop and incriminating email from and to Hunter including about arranging a meeting between his father Joe and executives of the Ukrainian oil company with which his father may have used his influence when he was Vice President.  There are texts and witness statements from people close to Biden. 

The story’s sources were verified.  Here is what happened to that story:  It and any reference to it was banned from Twitter and accounts were locked down; other media outlets and all Democrats simply and immediately dismissed it as either Russian disinformation or a smear campaign by Trump and the Republicans. 

Here is what some of the more popular “news” outlets said:

Politico: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”;
CNN: “The anatomy of the New York Post's dubious Hunter Biden story.”;
Washington Post: “The truth behind the Hunter Biden non-scandal”;
New York Times: “Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It: Inside the White House’s secret, last-ditch effort to change the narrative, and the election — and the return of the media gatekeepers.”;
Taxpayer-funded NPR: "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories. And we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."

Leslie Stahl interviewed President Trump for 60 minutes and here is a portion of that interview relating to the Biden story:

Stahl (response when Trump brought up the topic): “This is the most important issue in the country right now?” 
Trump: “It’s a very important issue to find out whether a man’s corrupt who’s running for president, who’s accepted money from China, and Ukraine, and from Russia. . . .Take a look at what’s going on, Leslie, and you say that shouldn’t be discussed? I think it’s one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever seen, and you don’t cover it.”
Stahl: “Well, because it can’t be verified.  I’m telling you —”
Trump: “Of course it can be verified.  Excuse me, Leslie, they found a laptop…”
Stahl: “It can’t be verified.”

As the Hill article notes, “Well, it's difficult to verify anything when you don't bother to check under the hood in the first place, right? Because that's exactly what happened here, except that the cake was baked with a condemnation of the few who decided to pursue the story.”

None of these responses should surprise us.  Before the NY Post Story, there were earlier reports that Hunter’s position on the board of Ukrainian energy company Bursima was tied to improper influence by his then Vice President father Joe.  The media chose to ignore this along with Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, the chairmen of investigating Senate committees who in September released a joint report detailing some of Hunter’s million-dollar dealings with politically connected foreigners. The report said they raised “serious counterintelligence and extortion concerns relating to Hunter Biden and his family.” And as the WSJ states, the press merely “yawned.”

But now, the election is over, Hunter admitted that he is under investigation, and the story can no longer be ignored (although, the press is putting the best spin possible on it to make it as innocuous as possible for presumptive president-elect Biden).

            Omission Bias
There was widespread omission bias by the media and big tech.  Omission bias is “when an outlet or publication purposely suppresses or outright ignores a newsworthy story that is carried by others.”  In this case the story carrier was the NY Post and the suppressing (actually outright banning) outlets were the rest of the media.      

The Hill piece notes “There are two kinds of bias in the media. First there is the kind we regularly see from many – not all – outlets in broad daylight, which includes openly rooting for one political party while echoing rapid-response opposition research against another. And then there is the more invisible, insidious variety — the bias of omission.”

Clearly, the Hunter problem is a clear example of this insidious bias.  But it is not in any way the only example.  For four years we have had the worst spin possible put on anything that President Trump did while any achievements were either downplayed or ignored.  Ask those who get their news from the mainstream or social media or late-night TV.  They never heard about Trump’s criminal justice reform, about his peace accords in the Middle East, about his work to improve the economic status of minorities or to preserve funding for Black colleges.  They don’t know the positive effects that his re-negotiated trade agreements had for American businesses.  And the positives that they have heard about are couched in such things as:  the previous administration set up the ability for him to do this or that; despite a litany of negatives, he did one small thing; etc.  They still believe that the Obama border cages did not exist before Trump took office. 

The political bias is clear and it is indeed a bias of omission rather than just spin.  That is dangerous because without facts, with a preconceived narrative presented to us, we are bound within the facts of the particular narrative being presented.  Our views are being bent to fit within someone else’s narrative.

That should anger us.  And not just because the press is not doing its job of presenting us with fair and unbiased facts.  It should anger us because it means that they are trying to change, create, and determine the way that we think about issues or people.

That the press creates a narrative for us means that they are attempting to manipulate and mold our thinking, and that should be of deep concern to every American.

               The Manipulation goes beyond Political Viewpoint
Not just the news, but everywhere around us our freedom of thought is being interfered with if not obstructed. The Academy Awards now require certain identity qualifications for actors and staff.  Try to get a grant in any of the arts without having a “social justice” aspect to your work.  LeBron James was awarded Time’s athlete of the year because of his activism (I don’t deny that he is a great athlete, but that goes unmentioned in this “athletic” award). 

The political correctness and thought control goes beyond popular entertainments.  People are fired for speaking their mind if it is not in agreement with the appropriate political correctness.  A doctor had his license revoked after giving a view of COVID precautions that was not that of the mainstream.  A medical professor at Harvard expressed the more widespread danger of this sort of action to science generally:  science requires that people question; when questioning is silenced, when people become afraid to speak out, then science cannot progress.  Nor can anything else.

In Russia following the revolution the Communists created a series of 5-year plans to lead the country more and more toward socialism.  Contrary to popular belief, these plans were not just industrial or manufacturing goals.  They also governed things like the arts, media, and most every aspect of life.  The goal was to create a new type of human being, to turn the individual into a communist, a communal being that was little more than an automaton for the State.  The individual voice was no longer welcome and everything the people did, read, watched, or interacted with was designed to display the (often false) positivity and beauty of communism and the proper behavior of the communist.

So, when the media commits acts of omission and when it presents clear positive bias for its narrative and negative bias against those who disagree, when the arts present only one view of life as that which should be lived and strived for, when athletics become about how good an activist (for the right cause) rather than athlete you are, when you cease questioning either because you are afraid to or simply not allowed to, when these things happen, remember this:  media can change your thinking, remold who you are.  The Soviets tried it, and it worked for 75 years. But those 75 years were far from the utopia that the people were told it was.

We live in dangerous times.  This is a post-truth America.  I’d like to think that those whose votes were manipulated this election cycle will wake up when they see the bait and switch that occurred.  I doubt they will because the media will continue to hide what is inconvenient to its narrative.  More dangerous is the media, film, music, entertainment generally that is with us 24/7.  That and the social shunning of those who question or disagree. 

We are definitely being manipulated and the danger is that we end up losing ourselves.  Stay alert.  Keep questioning.  And most importantly, think for yourself.