Those relativists next door

In one of the most invigorating-and at the same time depleting-books I have read lately, Alan Wolfe, the Boston University sociologist, introduces us to the modern American middle class.

Maybe, better said, he sets a pier mirror before his overwhelmingly middle class readers, inviting them decorously to inspect themselves. But not for sagging chins or trim bellies; not even for cancerous lumps; rather, for the convictions and concepts his viewers bring to the living of life. Wolfe is set on telling us what we think about right and wrong, truth and falsehood, the way to do things and the way not to do them. The author thinks many viewers will be jolted by what they see in his mirror. I think he is right.

Here are sound bites and snippets and expostulations culled from interviews that Wolfe and his staff conducted with everyday middle-American suburbanites-your Uncle Fred and Aunt Sue, and Old Man Johnson, and Ruby-who-works-behind-the-pharmacy-counter; maybe (though Las Vegas odds warn sternly against it) you yourself:

"You don't have to accept anybody's dogma whole. Live with the concept of God as you perceive it."

"Having morals can exist without believing in God." "[Y]ou try to choose wisely [to make sure] that the choices that you make don't do any harm to any of those people that are choosing differently from the way that you're choosing."

"There's morals, and there's morals. I don't know how we can teach morals as such because it's the fiber of you, and what is socially acceptable in some families is not socially acceptable in another."

". . [T]here is no one right and no one wrong and the greater the exposure you have to different ideas. . more tolerance, I would think, grows out of that."

"I am not here to judge anyone."

"Thou shalt not judge."

Here, standing amid these folk, pad in hand, is Wolfe, head of the Middle Class Morality project he conceived a few years back and brought to fruition:

"Neither determined secularists nor Christian-firsters, middle-class Americans have come to accept religious diversity as a fact of American life. Reluctant to pass judgment, they are tolerant to a fault, not about everything-they have not come to accept homosexuality as normal and they intensely dislike bilingualism-but about a surprising number of things, including rapid transformations in the family, legal immigration, multicultural education, and the separation of church and state. Above all moderate in their outlook on the world, they believe in the importance of leading a virtuous life but are reluctant to impose values they understand as virtuous for themselves on others; strong believers in morality, they do not want to be considered moralists."

Their viewpoint is "morality writ small": local and personal in its applications, non-prescriptive, scornful of abstractions. "Rules are not to be broken," Wolfe translates, "for down that path lies anarchy. But they are made to be bent, for down that path lies modernity."

"Very few" middle-class Americans take their religion "so seriously that they believe [it] should be the sole, or even the more important, guide for reestablishing rules about how other people should live." "Religious tolerance in America bears a distinct resemblance to laissez-faire economics: you can do what you want so long as you let me do what I want."

"It is important to pay homage to such classic virtues as courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, and compassion, but nothing should be taken to extremes . . . Of course children should be taught right from wrong"-just not with "didactic morality plays," please.

I'm OK, You're OK, We're all OK, not to mention Better Than We Ever Were Before-saving, perhaps, the active homosexuals from whom middle class America somewhat contradictorily withholds endorsement. (What, by modern, non-judgmental yardsticks, can be wrong with the pursuit of sexual pleasure and expression?)

Wolfe walks up boldly to the popular concept of culture war, grabs it by the lapels, makes its eyeteeth rattle. Only the "intellectuals," left and right, he instructs his readers, are fighting such a war. In the purlieus of the middle class, where the air-conditioning hums and pagers vibrate, tolerance reigns mildly, sweetly, expansively.

We believe all right-just not strongly enough to enforce our beliefs. The juices have somehow been sucked from belief. The plant is dry and lifeless. It bends with whatever wind blows through the community.

Welcome to fin de siecle America. "Live with the concept of God as you perceive it." Above all, don't step on somebody else's "concept." Relativism is in the saddle. Supposedly.

Two questions leap to the fore, commanding our attention:

1. Is Wolfe right? Is the age as de-valued and de-natured as he makes out?

2. If he is right, what then?

As to Question 1, who can say for dead certain-Wolfe included? A singlefamily portrait of us, the American middle class? Try it yourself some time. In surveying any such portrait, however carefully framed and artfully conducted, we remind ourselves-or should-that here is a sampling only. Wolfe and his staff sought to be scientific. They conducted 200 interviews in Brookline and Medford, Massachusetts; Southeast DeKalb and Cobb Counties, in Georgia; Broken Arrow and Sand Springs, Oklahoma; and Eastlake and Rancho Bernardo, California. The communities were selected to reflect not only different areas of the country but different economic and ethnic groupings. Seventy-one percent of the interviewees were white, 55 percent were female, 36 percent were Baptist or Catholic, two-thirds earned more than $50,000 a year. And so on.

Still, they didn't ask me. Did he ask you? We can bicker about the representational or non-representational character of the responses; we can score pro points and con points. Of greater salience is that the responses seem at least plausible.

Whether or not "culture war" rages among us, we know moral relativism to be alive and well in America and all sprawled out with its feet up. The history of the 20th century is a history of relativism. As Paul Johnson relates, in Modern Times, Albert Einstein's theory that space and time are relative terms in measurement-not absolute at all-achieved verification in 1919. The old, right-angled Newtonian universe was no more.

"At the beginning of the 1920s," says Johnson, "the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism." (The misapprehension distressed Einstein himself.)

Wolfe found believers in absolutes; they just happened not to be numerous, at least in comparison with God-as-you-perceive-it relativists. What surprises here, to the extent anything does, is the fervent middle-class participation in relativism. All of us middle class types know relativists from school, the office, even church and quite possibly home. We simply tend, I think, not to regard them as dominant in the culture.

The Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, readers and disciples of The Book of Virtues, Schlaflyites, Disneyland boycotters, pro-life marchers, home schoolers, Promise Keepers embracing in sports arenas all over the country-such groups and coalitions are so well-known that the temptation exists to credit them with vast social leverage. On Wolfe's showing, the temptation should be resisted. Some leverage, yes. Just not as much as their publicity clippings might seem to call for.

Even on family questions-Mom and Pop and family dinnertime vs. single-- parentism and gay adoption-there is nothing like unity in the Wolfian worldview. Many middle-class Americans could be called "realists": well, the old times weren't bad, but the old days are gone, and divorce and working moms, that's just how things are. A larger number are traditionalist and modernist at the same time: "Ambivalents," Wolfe calls them. The organizing principle for family life, the middle class seems to believe, overall, is tailoring family structures and duties to the needs of individuals rather than making individuals adhere to "some preestablished family structure."

But if we disbelieve such analysis-from Wolfe, I mean, not from his interview subjects-we might look more closely at the culture. How do we actually live, as opposed to how we dream? For one thing, we tell pollsters we don't care whether President William Jefferson Clinton played, ah, fast and loose with a White House intern, or whether Paula Jones' accusations against him struck home. Get off his back! (His figurative back, beg pardon.) Send the independent counsel home! We keep telling pollsters these things, or things close to them. Imagine similar offenses being imputed to most of Clinton's predecessors. Would Americans have stood for it? Not a chance. Clinton's great personal joy is to have emerged at the national political level about the time the Wolfe Era had entered full swing. "Thou shalt not judge": Just what our president loves to hear!

I draw attention also, not for any reason save that it strikes me as true, to a recent New York Times story about the coarsening and crudification of public language. You can say about anything you want to nowadays, the reporter noted. You can show almost anything in an ad. "A new vulgarity and tastelessness are transforming the content of advertising," the Times solemnly reported.

And what about TV talk shows, such as Bill Bennett talked blithely about cleaning up a couple of years ago? What about, specifically, Jerry Springer, with all the fighting and grabbing and clothes-tearing-off and generally awful and crummy people-not a few of whom are middle class, as are the viewers? What about performances of this sort when, as was the case last spring at least, they outdraw the book talk and bromides of "Oprah"?

A truly (and properly) judgmental society would shut down Mr. Springer faster than one of his guests can say "*#&*&!" No: Mr. Springer and his aspirations would never have gone on the air in the first place. Jack Paar, one recalls-the king of late-night talk in the '50s-was disciplined by the network for an inadvertent reference to a toilet. ("You see, it was a better age," sighed the middle-aged controversialist, high school class of 1959.) The general public's attitude toward moral corruption of this sort-so I would guess-could be characterized as, well, some people like it, but I don't have to watch it if I don't want to, and, you know, whatever they do is their choice, and choice is the thing I'm most for. Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr. Wolfe?

Let us concede to our author, then, at least for the sake of argument, his point about the relativism of modern American society. The larger question, I say, is, what then? What do we do about it? This is in fact the question of modern times, touching all we do and say, and how we live life.

The question-What then?-tips the interrogator's hand and still more the question, what do we do about it? These are judgmental questions, antimodern, anti-relativist questions. What then? Nobody cares what-then. It's nobody's business, see? Live and let live. Thou shalt not judge. As for what-- do-we-do: Who asked us, pray, to do anything? Bunch of meddling old fools, sticking their intolerant noses into other people's business! Do? Tell you what you can do, buddy. Pull down your window shade if the view offends you. Mind your own business.

The latter admonition has a peculiarly ironic taste. "Our own business"? "Mankind was my business," said Marley's Ghost. The extreme individualism that Wolfe notes (as did Robert Bork, in Slouching Toward Gomorrah) works out to be anti-social. A society in which individuals make their own choices about everything and no one says boo, is not a society at all. It lacks social properties and attributes, starting with agreement on basic values.

In Alan Wolfe's Middle America, there are values; it's just that they have no value-that is, no extrinsic value. Socially worthless in the sense of commanding respect and observance, modern values are set out for disinterested observation only.

It is as though we inhabited a national museum. ". . . And in this room, ladies and gentlemen, if you'll step in this direction, our old American notions about family: one lifetime, one spouse; father knows best; supper at 7. Mind the glass cases; you'll get dust on your sleeves if you lean down; nobody much comes here any more. Next we come to the Religion Room. ."

A relativist society, living on inherited moral capital, can keep going for a while, particularly if there is general prosperity and opportunity. A 9000 Dow Jones Index calms tempers, papers over stresses and strains by the carload.

This same relativist society depends nonetheless on that elusive quality, tolerance. Wolfe finds tolerance spread thick as chocolate icing across the surface of contemporary life. As we see, he may be right about that. Tolerance is a negative virtue-assuming one calls it a virtue. (Chesterton called it the hallmark of a society that believes in nothing.) All the tolerant must do is withhold judgment, or, failing that, bite their tongues. Individuals thus drive the wagon. Drive it where? Forward? Backward? Off the cliff? We're really not supposed to worry about that. It's up to the individual.

But this is to fantasize. Societies, communities, nations do not work that way. We have heard of the social order? Note the giveaway word, "order"a way of doing things, commonly accepted, generally acknowledged for superiority, perhaps even for rightness.

General acknowledgements are hard to come by these days and, if Wolfe is right, will be still rarer in the future. Nevertheless, they are of the essence. They hold life together, ensure cooperation, prevent the outbreak of Hobbes' "war of all against all."

The professionally, and endlessly, tolerant should worry about that war. Foundations can crumble and creatures of a diverse and repellent sort crawl out from beneath flat rocks. Look only at what has happened in the moral realm. While moral consensus of a certain sort endured-say, up to 30 years ago-there were no illegitimate children, far fewer kids on drugs or alcohol, far fewer broken marriages, far fewer instances of parents abusing children, beating children, killing children. And there were no instances-mark me, not one in those quaint, bygone days-of children slaughtering their teachers and schoolmates with automatic weapons.

The toleration of the intolerable is itself intolerable: an obscenity, one could continue, flung at the natural order. That word again-"order." So antirelativist; so lofty in the judgment it passes on pronouncements such as "There's morals and there's morals."

What if there actually is a natural order; not a let's-pretend order, a construct of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. A real and objective order, rather; a framework within which a real and objective deity works out His sovereign purposes. What then?

Quite a lot of Alan Wolfe's interview subjects claim religious affiliation, or simply report a personal interest in spirituality. However, so-called "nonabsolutists" in religion outnumber so-called "absolutists"-those who believe in objective truth. "Quiet faith" is what Wolfe says we evidence. We just sit there quietly, being faithful. . . to whatever it is we repose our faith in.

"Religious tolerance in America," says Wolfe, "bears a distinct resemblance to laissez-faire economics: you can do what you want so long as you let me do what I want." As a prescription for religious peace, this one may have merit. As a deduction from Jewish and Christian teaching concerning the transcendent God who made this world, such an approach to religion flunks every conceivable test.

This is because it is not religion. Six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the-other tolerance may have a certain spiritual dimension. Is it religious? Not in any common or well-understood sense. A real, not a made-up, God addresses His created beings more or less in the no-nonsense spirit of Edward G. Robinson in the old television commercial: "Do it my way, see?"

In the view of such a God (the only view that matters, when you get down to it), there is right, there is wrong; there is truth, there is falsehood. Tolerance of wrong and falsity and injustice and indecency is a strange commodity to praise as right and just. Indeed, to tolerate falsehood is to call into question the very existence of right and justice. Maybe these are merely names-control devices; weapons the establishment uses to keep subcultures like blacks and women at bay. Such deductions are very much open to acceptance. What is more, we have invited them. We have invited subversion and ultimately violence. What we invite we are altogether likely to get some day.

We get a foretaste now, in truth; violence against the unborn by those following their own noses, acting in accordance with "principles" we forbid society to contradict. Violence, increasingly, against the terminally ill. Permissive violence at first (who can object if they end their own pain?); later, as respect for life wanes further, violence of a more compulsory sort. Anarchic violence as a society unwilling to affirm the goodness of life licenses the taking of "useless" lives-for high and noble purposes, you must understand.

That relativism should take over a society only nominally committed to religious truth, fearful lest that truth be asserted too brusquely, too publiclywhere is the coincidence in this? The thing was bound to happen. Now that it has happened there is one thing to do and one only: shift into reverse; go back; abandon such sterile and dangerous territory as this, where everything seems right and nothing seems to contradict divine purposes.

Wolfe, in his research, uncovered a few prospects willing to aid in such a hopeful enterprise. At least a few Americans with whom he and his team spoke seem clearly to understand the seductions and the dangers of hypertolerance.

"As the country gets `further away from God [said one of these], then we replace it with whoever's morals are in force at the time, and God is out of the picture. Then you have no absolute laws, you have nothing but relativism.' Mr. McLaughlin uses a metaphor from golf to explain his point. If you sliced your drive, it will continue to fade farther and farther off course. America is also off course, moving inexorably away from its proper target. `This nation was not formed by Buddhist framers of the Constitution; it was formed by Christians,' he continues. That is important to him because `our whole nation was founded on the principles of God, and God's principles are absolute, not relative."'

The gentleman from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, says a mouthful. What his fellow Americans must do is back up his words with words of their own, especially words of prayer. Then they must follow up with deeds: kind but firm; "intolerant" even; connected all the same to the overarching purposes of Him who used to run our mortal show.

"There's morals and there's morals"? "There is no one right and no one wrong"?

Oh, shut up.

William Murchison, our contributing editor, is a nationally-syndicated columnist at the Dallas Morning News and a popular speaker on a wide range of current religious and cultural issues.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Summer 1998
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