It is evident that if we are to pursue what is “good,” “true,” “right,” “honest” or “beautiful” in life, there must be something “good,” “true,” “right,” “honest” or “beautiful” to pursue. And this means that there must be absolutes. Otherwise, we would be looking for something that is not there, and looking for something that does not exist is insanity. This is exactly the problem, of course, and it is why America is experiencing its present “values vacuum” or “morals morass,” as Time magazine wrote a few years back.1 In other words, our problem is relativism.
You will recall that this is what Allan Bloom said so powerfully in his exposure of the failure of American higher education during the decades of the seventies and eighties, called The Closing of the American Mind.2 Bloom is a Platonist, or at least he shares the educational goals of the Greek philosophers. He wants to pursue the “good.” He thinks that is what higher education is all about. But today, he says, people no longer believe that there is a higher, absolute truth or good to be discovered, especially in education, and as a result, the whole educational enterprise is in chaos.
In order to pursue a goal, there must be a goal. To have a strong moral society, we must have moral absolutes. Otherwise, all we can have is what is pragmatic or expedient, which is what education, politics and American life as a whole has come to. It is why we do not have any heroes today and why we do not have any moral leadership in the country.
A generation or two ago there were heroes, people like Charles Lindberg, Babe Ruth, Henry Ford, Douglas MacArthur, George Washington Carver and many others. Today’s heroes are only television stars, and they are not actually heroes; they are only celebrities—people like Michael Jackson and Madonna.
Why are there no heroes? The Day America Told the Truth says, “There are no heroes because we have ceased to believe in anything strongly enough to be impressed by its attainment.”3 Now that’s a sad fact. And we who are to be salt and light in our culture must live differently. We must have strong convictions of what is right and wrong. And, with God’s unchanging Word as our guidebook, this is possible.
1Time, May 25, 1987, 14.
2Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
3James Patterson and Peter Kim, The Day America Told the Truth: What People Really Believe About Everything That Really Matters (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991), 208.
