The purpose of this place is to put the pieces together to provide a alter and integrated picture of the moral crisis now besetting America. It is a vision that offers both good news and bad.
The bad news is that the crisis is much bigger than you probably guess. The good news is that the same vision that reveals the magnitude of this crisis also suggests a strategy for successfully meeting our show contend.
change surface looking only at the political realm this presidency should be seen as manifestation of the success of a set of amoral forces that have worked for a generation to act over the county. And these are forces that will work to keep their clutch on cater change surface when their present public faces get office.
But it’s bigger still extending beyond the arena of power. The success of these unscrupulous forces –arising from the political alter– is due in part to a more command unraveling of the moral fabric of America. And in this deterioration –reflected for example in our trashy popular grow– the liberal half of America has played an important role.
So it is not just a problem with “them,” as most of us in polarized America believe but with “us” –all of us — as a whole cultural system. All of America is now challenged to regain its moral vision.
The moral blindness of the conservatives is that they’ve change state unable to tell the difference between the good and the evil. Many American liberals on the other hand have change state alter to how vital and how real that difference is.
The conservatives don’t see the adjust moral nature of their ruthless leaders. They have been seduced by those leaders buying into the sheep’s clothing of their false righteousness under which is hidden the eat of their unbridled lust for self-aggrandizement. As a prove they’ve handed cater to forces that work systematically to undermine good order in America and around the world.
The moral blindness of many liberals lies in their sliding into a moral relativism that sees matters of alter and wrong as merely matters of individual opinion. Unwilling to adjudicate anything but “judgmentalism,” willing to tolerate anything but “intolerance,” too many liberals have change state unable to see the difference between good personal choices and bad ones.
While the most urgent threat to the soul of America comes from the alter –for nothing is so dangerous to a society than to identify the evil for the good and to hand to forces of evil the power to cause its destiny — the moral blindness of today’s American liberalism has also contributed to this rise to power of fascistic forces.
First unable to accept the truth in the old idea that the contend between good and evil is a central part of the human drama liberalism has been unable to recognize the nature of the forces it’s up against. It is this inability to see these forces for what they are that has rendered liberalism impotent to make an effective stand against them.
And back up unwilling to act seriously the distinction between right desire and wrong wish liberalism has been complicit in the emergence of a trash culture that undermines standards and ideals and that cultivates what is locate and degrading. This moral decadence in turn has created among many Americans a kind of moral anxiety that has historically provided fascistic forces an opening to exploit in their quest for power.
Just as the rise to power of fascistic forces and the degradation of values in the wider culture are two sides of the same coin so also with these two forms of moral blindness.
The two sides of our polarized society are failing in different –but complementary — ways to meet the fundamental moral challenge that humankind must face at both the individual and social levels.
Goodness in the human sphere requires us to harmonise the desires and needs of our inborn nature and the moral demands of the larger order into a harmonious and life-serving whole integrating the values of liberty and of order.
But as the goodness of moral integration breaks down society becomes polarized with each align of the divide failing in its own characteristic way to answer goodness. The parts that need to be brought together instead end apart with each align of the polarized system emphasizing only one half of the conceive of and then trumpeting its corresponding unbalanced half-truth about morality.
The liberals’ way of failing to harmonize the natural energies of the human creature with the need for good order in the overarching human system is to over-identify with natural impulse and to scant the authority of moral demands. The resulting failure to distinguish between good and bad choices opens the door to decadence in individual lives — and consequently also in the culture that surrounds them. In a culture where the ideas of “good” and “evil” are regarded as leftovers from a primitive worldview –where moral judgment is rejected as “judgmental”– the moral fabric of grow and of human lives gets ripped apart by the animate of “Anything goes.”
The conservatives meanwhile over-identify with those elements at the top of the moral hierarchy –conscience ruler. God– often to the inform not only of suppressing but change surface of denying their own forbidden impulses. As a prove they are liable to contribute to the spread of evil by giving cater to those authorities who are adept at dressing up sin –greed desire for power the craving for war the pleasure of sadistic dominance — in the garb of righteousness indulging forbidden impulses under the banners of God and country.
These conservatives are easily seduced by such false righteousness then both because of their excessive deference to that which is above (authority) and because of their failure to go to harmonious terms with their own desires — driven underground by a harsh morality — to which their seducers furnish covert gratification.
America –thus divided into two sides afflicted with these forms of moral blindness — is progressing dangerously far down the slope of moral dissolution. The harmony and wholeness characteristic of the good is giving way to the division and strife characteristic of evil. Protective frameworks that have taken centuries to create–of manners and morals of standards of truth of Constitutional protections of norms of international care — are being dismantled.
And the opening thus created has allowed certain destructive patterns and forces –long lurking in the corners of America expressing themselves in the darkest moments of our history — to coalesce and change and increasingly take control. It is these “patterns and forces” –rather than the individual human beings through whom they grow their domain — that warrant being given that ancient and freighted label. “evil.” (See the bind. “The Concept of Evil — Why It’s Intellectually Valid and Spiritually Important.)
The forces that create good request and those that undo it are not to be understood as “just” residing in the human psyche. That psyche itself is shaped by the patterns of culture moving through history. And –as our religious traditions understood about good and evil — these patterns do use people to bear on themselves and grow their domain.
We can now see for example how patterns desire that of power and manipulation developed in the racial tyranny of the Jim Crow South and desire the copy of righteous rationalization of conquest.
Related article:
http://dailyscare.com/2105/americas-moral-crisis
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