Right and Wrong and Mount Vernon
By Geoffrey Biddulph
I was in the Washingtonrea recently for work and pleasure, and I decided to tour Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, with my two young children. We had just seen a fascinating innovative barn that our first president invented for threshing wheat. A group of young teenagers were walking behind us. Up ahead on the ground was something white and rubbery.
“Gross, it’s a —-,” screamed one of the girls behind me to her friends, using a vulgar word for a male contraceptive. All of her friends laughed and went traipsing off.
The irony of this scene has stuck with me. It’s not that long ago that a young lady in her early teens would have had no idea what the thing on the ground was. (I’m happy to report that my children did not know what it was.) And it’s not that long ago that even if the young lady had known what it was, decorum in front of an adult and young children would have insisted that she not mention the unmentionable.
Imagine how a young lady from George Washington’s day would have acted. Mount Vernon makes it easy for you to imagine, because it is populated with extremely polite young men and women dressed in period costume playing the part of guests at the Washington mansion. They are unfailingly courteous, and screeching something like the young lady screamed would have never crossed their minds.
But of course in our day and age, very few things are sacred. We have become the condom culture. Our children can spot contraceptives from a mile away, but ask them to conjugate a verb, and you get a blank stare. They know all about sexual anatomy, but nothing about history or geography.
The reason for this, of course, is that we are losing the sense of right and wrong. And the special irony of this is that it starts at the top – among our cultural elites.
In George Washington’s day – and indeed until pretty recently – the cultural elites saw it as their responsibility to instill the culture with virtue. To be educated and sophisticated was to have special knowledge about morality and probity and to impart that special knowledge upon the masses. There have always been crude, uneducated and immoral people, but in the best times there was a recognition that their very lack of civility is uncivilized.
The Founding Fathers were unflinchingly aware that American culture would begin to fall apart when America lost this civility. One of America’s biggest challenges, these men knew, was to balance liberty and virtue. Too much liberty, without the proper moral guidance, would lead to a loss of virtue and a breakdown in society.
In President Washington’s farewell address after his second term, our first president said: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
The fourth President James Madison held similar opinions: “Belief in a God All Powerful, wise and good is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.”
Michael Novak in his book “On Two Wings” summarized the logic of the Founding Fathers on their feelings of the importance of balancing morality and liberty:
“Put in its starkest form, this logic moves through seven steps. First the founders saw in the two uniquely human activities reflection and choice the engines of liberty. Second, these activities suggest a highly moral concept of the natural right to liberty. This understanding of liberty draws upon both revelation and reason with the result that, third, in matters of liberty, revelation and reason seems to be allies, not foes. Fourth, as experience teaches, without virtue (that is, habits of certain kinds) liberty cannot be sustained; unless you ‘confirm your soul in self-control,’ you cannot exemplify self-government. Fifth, given the changeability of human morals over time and the persistent tendency of morals to decline, the free society is inherently precarious. Sixth, only a source stronger than moral reflection but inwardly linked to it can arrest this remorseless entropy, and that source is religion of a certain kind. Seventh, trial and error teach that the advantages of liberty and the virtues it inculcates are better secured when religion is not established.”
Now compare the opinions of our Founding Fathers with the actions of a recent president whose most lasting legacy will be a scandal with a White House intern. Every year it appears we hear new disclosures about the sex life of another president, John F. Kennedy, who was once respected but who now appears to have been nothing but the First Lothario. Is it any wonder that our youngsters have become experts at the same things that apparently dominated the minds of these two presidents?
It’s no accident that our culture began to go wrong about the time that President Kennedy was chasing women around Washington. It was then that the pill was invented, that the courts began to take God out of the classroom, that prayer began to be restricted in public places and that the virtues on which our republic were founded began to become controversial. Since then, cultural elites – the media and leaders of the entertainment world — have spent their intellectual capital defending a paradigm of “tolerance” and “nondiscrimination” that is really a sinister plot of intolerance and discrimination.
Before the 1960s, there was an acceptance among most cultural elites of the righteousness of the Natural Law. What is the Natural Law? It’s the law of basic right and wrong that all human beings have written on their hearts. In 1931, John M. Cooper, a man studying primitive cultures worldwide, wrote:
“The people of the world, however much they differ as to details of morality, hold universally, or with practical universality, to at least the following precepts. Respect the Supreme Being or the benevolent being or beings who take his place. Do not ‘blaspheme.’ Care for your children. Malicious murder or maiming, stealing, deliberate slander or ‘black’ lying, when committed against friend or unoffending fellow clansman or tribesman, are reprehensible. Adultery proper is wrong, even though there be exceptional circumstances that permit or enjoin it and even though sexual relations among the unmarried may be viewed leniently. Incest is a heinous offense. This universal moral code agrees rather closely with our own Decalogue taken in a strictly literal sense.” (John M. Cooper, “The Relations between Religion and Morality in Primitive Culture.” See Note 1)
A few years later, C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian thinkers ever, wrote a fascinating book called “The Abolition of Man,” in which he also included a universal moral code, which he called the Natural Law or Tao. Lewis studied a variety of societal rules worldwide and found they had much in common despite their geographical difference. All of these societies accepted the morality that in general makes up our Ten Commandments.
How could it be that all of these people in all of these different cultures, living in isolated tribes or villages, could have the same sense of right and wrong? Could it be they are created that way? Could it be that the Creator writes these things on their hearts?
I know the Natural Law is written on all people’s hearts by the Creator because I spent my teenage and early adult years around secular humanists almost exclusively, and I passed a tremendous amount of time talking to them about religion. This was because I was a virulent agnostic secular humanist who was intolerant of religious people. But even the most vocal atheist secular humanist will admit in private that he doesn’t know there is no Creator. He thinks that our life on Earth is an accident and the most reasonable explanation for our existence is evolution and natural selection. But he can’t know this is true because there is no way to prove it for sure. But if you spend a quiet honest moment with this atheist, he will admit that there are such things as right and wrong and that the universe is really a very mysterious place that seems to run best when people follow certain rules. And he will express a poignant hope that there really is no Creator, because if there is he’s in for quite a day of reckoning and repentance.
Most secular humanists oppose the Natural Law because it’s simply not convenient for them. It gets in the way of their fun. It’s Puritanical and old-fashioned. But in their most quiet, honest moments they will admit that they feel a little guilty when they break the rules of the Natural Law. We are that way because God made us that way.
So, to review: we have brilliant Founding Fathers, among the greatest men ever, who warned us that the moment we banished religion from our public life, our public morality would diminish and our society would suffer; we have great thinkers noting that the Natural Law is a worldwide code written on our hearts; and we have a culture that is doing exactly what the Founding Fathers warned against and is declaring war on the Natural Law. So, is it any wonder that teenagers are more rebellious than ever, that crime is increasing, that families are breaking apart and that it appears harder and harder for people to pursue happiness?
As George Orwell wrote when he began to note some of these trends, “we have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
So, let me re-state the obvious briefly:
We should do everything possible to encourage our children in public and private schools to be taught the Natural Law, which happens to coincide with the Ten Commandments. In the larger society, I don’t really care which version of the Ten Commandments is taught as long as children are taught that there is such a thing as right and wrong.
No adultery means teaching children that sex before marriage is wrong. This includes all kinds of sex and includes the teaching that the right type of relationship is the one between a man and a woman. Condoms are something you use when you are married.
Loving God is healthy and right. We should be respectful of all of the myriad religions that make up our culture, but we must take away the taboo of thanking God in public.
We must teach that loving our neighbors is important. The Golden Rule is the right way to live our lives.
We must teach that people should avoid media (television, movies, internet) that violate the Natural Law. Boycotts are appropriate for material that promotes sex and violence, because this material makes people sexual and violent, which is against the Natural Law. I am especially encouraged by Wal Mart’s recent decision not to sell soft porn magazines like Maxim anymore. This is exactly what the Natural Law would encourage.
We must teach our young that people will always come up with justifications for breaking the Natural Law. For example, everybody knows killing the innocent is wrong, but people come up with all kinds of justifications for killing the innocent unborn if it suits their needs.
This is of course a partial list, but it’s a good start. Now let me anticipate a few objections from the secular humanists in the audience.
“You’re imposing your Christian morality on us, and that’s not right.” Having once been a secular humanist myself, I understand this argument very well. It’s taken me many years to change my programming to crack the sneakiness of this argument. There is no such thing as moral neutrality. Either something is right or wrong. So, the people saying that Christian morality is “wrong” have adopted their own religion, which is one of secular humanism. And they want to impose that religion upon everybody else.
The first point is that until now I have said nothing about Christianity. The Ten Commandments were first given to the Jews. The basically morality behind the Ten Commandments are accepted by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and many native religions, in addition to Jews and Christians. The only religion that does not accept them is secular humanism, which is a minority belief system accepted only by a relatively small group of cultural elites in the West. Should that belief system be allowed to dominate worldwide thought?
The second point is that many of the most intolerant people are liberal secular humanists. They simply despise people whose viewpoints don’t coincide with their own. Ponder for a second the issue of “diversity.” Liberal secular humanists all agree that schools and the workplace should be “diverse.” What they mean by this, of course, is that schools and workplaces should be populated with African Americans, nativeAmericans and Latinos and homosexuals who share the secular humanist agenda. Soon, these institutions become notorious for their monotonous sameness. Just look at the average college campus or big city media outlet today, where you can express any opinion, as long as it is politically correct. Conservative and religious viewpoints are taboo.
So, in this Orwellian world, tolerance becomes intolerance and the people being discriminated against are the ones promoting the same morality that everybody else in the world accepts as basic truth.
Let us promote true freedom of religion (not freedom from religion). This true freedom of religion would go back to the basic worldwide truth that Natural Law is the foundation of a just society. Secular humanists would be allowed to worship as they please, but their religion would stop being society’s dominant religion.
“But if people are taught homosexuality is wrong, they’re going to go out and beat up gays or discriminate against them.” There’s a short answer and a long answer for this. The short answer is: “not if people are also taught to love their neighbor.” The long answer is that just as homosexuality is wrong, violence against others and job discrimination is equally wrong. A just society like the one envisioned by our Founding Fathers is one where minorities and people who make different lifestyle choices are treated with respect and love.
Consider for a second how gays are treated in Communist Cuba (the paradise of secular humanists) or the Taliban-dominated Afghanistan. In Cuba, they are imprisoned. Any gays caught by the Taliban were pushed to their deaths from high walls or roofs. So, maybe Natural Law proponents have a vision that is morally superior to these societies.
“How can you make sure than by promoting Natural Law you do not promote a specific religion and discriminate against other religions?” My personal view is that the promotion of Natural Law should be somewhat generic. I can imagine a world where people are taught a very basic version of the 10 Commandments (see note 2 below) and where there is room for “meditation” as well as “prayer” in the schools and in public. Atheists who are offended by public prayer can simply decide to think about Charles Darwin while people in an audience pray (what a show of tolerance that would be!). There are myriad ways of getting around this problem if we accept the basic premise that morals must be taught and that there is such a thing as right and wrong. To repeat: freedom of religion is not freedom from religion.
“Wouldn’t you be encouraging censorship, which doesn’t work?” Nobody said anything about censorship or limiting freedom of choice. Righteous people should be encouraged to promote morality, which means avoiding media, discussions and forums that violate the Natural Law. Hopefully we will someday have a society where obscenity is nonexistent, but we are far from that today.
“You can’t make all abortion illegal. It’s not practical.” Nobody said anything about making all abortion illegal. I said that innocent life, including fetuses, should not be taken, because that’s murder, which is wrong. Are there rare cases when abortion may be justified? Perhaps. We should all admit that our current culture of abortion on demand is simply mass homicide, and that restrictions on this are in order.
“How do you set up realistic rules for morality based on Natural Law? Wouldn’t that mean morality police going around arresting people for immoral acts they commit in their own bedrooms?” I’m not convinced that making certain sex acts illegal is effective, but I also believe that individual states or counties that want to keep certain sex acts illegal should be able to do so. There have always been homosexuals and adulterers, and very few of them since the founding of our country have ever gone to jail for things they do in private. I am not as concerned about what people do in the privacy of their own homes as I am concerned about what people are taught regarding right and wrong.
In a just society, people would know very clearly right and wrong. Some of them would still make the decision to do things that are wrong. Some of those acts should cause them to go to jail (stealing, violence, killing). Other acts should cause them to simply suffer with a guilty conscience. A moral society will help them overcome that guilty conscience and try to do what is right rather than what is wrong. But the whole process starts with an acceptance that there is such a thing as right and wrong.
If you read the writings of the Founding Fathers, it becomes increasingly clear that they were aware they were setting up a special kind of society. They understood the importance of Natural Law in setting up this society.
People in those days had experienced other forms of government and found them limiting. They were aware that the new United States of America, founded as it was on the principles of Natural Law, was superior to other societies. It still is. The United States is not perfect, but it is the best society yet created. It inspired a worldwide movement of freedom and democracy and rejection of tyranny that is still going on today. We should not be afraid to say that, and we should not be afraid to defend the principles that made it so great and fight against the forces that would tear it down.
Note 1: Recommended reading includes “The Abolition of Man” and “Mere Christianity” by C. S. Lewis and J. Budziszewski’s recently published “What We Can’t Not Know.”
Note 2: A more generic version of the Ten Commandments to which only the Religion of Secular Humanism could object.
Category A: You should love and honor the Creator
1)It is right to love and express gratitude to the Creator.
2)It is wrong to create disrespectful images of the Creator that cause you to honor material things more than Him.
3)It is wrong to speak ill of the Creator and use his many names without reverence.
4)It is right for people to have one day a week for resting and honoring the Creator.
Category B: You should love your neighbor and treat him as you would like to be treated
5)It is right to honor your mother and father.
6)It is wrong to steal.
7)It is wrong to kill.
8)It is wrong to have sexual relations outside of marriage.
9)It is wrong to lie.
10)It is wrong to covet things that belong to someone else.
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