Moral Outrage

You can't be part of this society without noticing that there seems to be a sharp increase these days in moral outrage. Because Chick-fil-A's president is personally opposed to gay marriage, all sorts of outrage has been levied against a business that displays no prejudice against gay marriage. Because a pastor preached a sermon to his church about how God made male and female and nothing else, outrage requires that the church be shamed and beaten in public (so to speak). You get the idea.

Our moral outrage is inconsistent. A white cop kills a black man and we're outraged at the overt racism. A black cop kills a black man and we're outraged at the overt racism. Oh, wait ... no, it doesn't make sense, but that's what the public does. Some African-American girls are assaulted by some teenagers of Indian descent and we're outraged at their acting out whiteness. Black-on-black murder and abuse? Let's not really talk about that. Which is more outrageous -- the boy who wants to transition to be a girl but his parents won't let him or the boy that does not want to transition to be a girl but his mother is trying to do it anyway? We're outraged, but we're all over the place with it. We're outraged if Christians hold views we don't like but defend Moslems for holding the same views. We're all over the place with our outrage.

The problem, of course, is that we don't share a common morality so we can't resolve our moral problems. In today's world we deny Objective Morality. It doesn't exist. Maybe it's God. Maybe it's Science. Maybe it's just Me. Maybe a combination. But it is not absolute. Morality is what "I" make it where "I" refers to "me" or "us" or "each individual as it occurs." So we arrive at strange places like "Inclusivity is an ultimate good and we will exclude those who are not inclusive" or "Moral people are not judgmental people and we will judge those who are judgmental." "Every white person is a racist" is morally sound to one and an utter lie to another. Freedom of religion is a right to be discarded even though the Constitution defends it while "I identify as a different gender (and what that gender is may not even have a name)" is to be morally applauded but "I question that conclusion" is not merely discussion, but wrong, wrong, wrong. It is good to declare yourself "gay" or "transgender" but evil to suggest you might have been wrong. You can identify as a different gender but not a different race. All of these and more, as a function of relativistic morality, become insurmountable because to surmount something is to get on top of it and we can't define what it is, let alone where the top is. Without definition -- good/bad, right/wrong -- it is not possible to get down to the basics and figure things out. These conflicts cannot be resolved without an arbitrator, and we've managed to remove the Ultimate Arbitrator.

We're used to relativism. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." We all know that. "One man's junk is another man's treasure." Yeah, sure. "What I believe is right or wrong is not necessarily so" we never really say, but that's where we are. We've decided that X is good and Y is bad and, even though we've simply decided it without any genuine basis, we feel it is our right and even obligation to impose that on others. And if someone says, "But, I am subject to God's rules," we are outraged. Because the one solid absolute moral rule today is "What I want" and you have no right to infringe on that. As a result, of course, we operate on one hand in a realm of rules while, on the other hand, they are rules without objective or even rational basis. We are a "moral society" untethered from morality and quite sure we know a good thing when we see it. And it's not working too well for us.