Takeaways

Moral Absolutism and the Rise of Moral relativism has

taken a hit in America
Authoritarianism in America over the past five
years.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search? Absolutism has
become the defining
charateristic of social
policy.
Social injustice has
been defined by what
the media decides is
newsworthy.
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By Timothy Sexton
The idea of moral relativism has become an object of scorn and derision over the past five years in
America. The new millenium has witnessed the burgeoning growth of a heretofore unknown style of
authoritarianism based on a moral rigidity that is far too simplistic to have any real application in the
modern world. This authoritarian strain puts forth the idea an absolute morality not only does exist in
the world, but can actually be contained and restrained in the pursuit of security and justice for all.
Concepts relating to social justice originate from codified morality; all aspects of society that are
subject to inequalities can be traced back in some manner to a written moral code. In the US that code
is based on a set of Judeo-Christian ethics that range from the Ten Commandments to the Epistles of
Paul. In the Middle East, the code traces back to the Koran. Far Eastern nations derive their concept of
social justice from the teachings of such masters as Buddha or Confucious. It is in the arena of codified
ethics that the problems of trying to enforce ideas of absolute morality enter the fray. In a more Utopian
society, social justice would be proscribed by simple moral truths that would approach something
closer to the absolute. For instance, the social injustice levied against minorities, women and
homosexuals in America can be directedly traced back to the Biblical precepts either misinterpreted or
reinterpreted by the prevailing powers. Over a hundred years ago, it was unceasingly difficult for
Americas growing up in slaveholding states to correctly perceive that owning another human being was
as horrific a social injustice as is possible. Today, though clearly the situation is far less obvious, many
Americans seem incapable of perceiving that denying or restricting certain rights to homosexuals is a
social injustice. Why?
For those growing up during the age of slavery, this difficulty in perception was the result of many
forces. For one thing, slavery had become so institutionalized and naturalized in the minds of people
that it came be regarded as a natural fact. Also contributing to this widespread rejection that slavery
was a social injustice was the fact that black people had been dehumanized to the point where they
weren’t just regarded as property, but as lacking a soul. This mindset was not established out of thin air,
it is a direct result of the philosophical musings by some by very esteemed medieval philosophers that
provide a Biblical justification for slavery of blacks. In fact, this justificatino became dogma among the
Christian denominations that grew to power in the South.
The same thing is happening today as people base their unblinking acceptance of discrimination against
an entire group of people based not on any individual offenses, but rather on a morality deemed
unacceptable based on interpretations of the Bible. Moral absolutes are no place upon which to base a
framework for social justice. Blankly condemning all black people or all homosexuals is perhaps the
worst example of how absolutist approaches are doomed to fail.
The purveyors of moral absolutism in America have drawn a line in the sand by claiming that life
begins at conception, therefore abortion is murder, and therefore it is morally reprehensible. At the
same time, the expression of Americans through both polling and voting indicate that those who are the
most morally outraged by the so-called murder of a fetus are also the core supporters of the war in Iraq
that so far has killed anywhere from 50,000 to half a million civilians, many of them children. Moral
absolutism can be blamed for the mistaken perception of priorities, but what about the rest of society
that ignores such an egregiously ironic circumstance as killing 50,000 civilians—or even just half that
—in the name of bringing freedom and democracy to them? To paraphrase a famous observation, the
death of one pretty blonde teenager in Aruba is murder, but the deaths of 50,000 faceless foreigners is
just a statistic. And, apparently for a pretty large group of people—especially the ones in charge—a
fairly meaningless one at at that.
The politics of distraction remains perhaps the single greatest obstacle in America for renewing the call
for social justice here. What observations can be made about a country that knows more about and
cares more about the mysterious disappearance of a formerly anonymous teenager in Aruba than it
knows about the far less mysterious murders of thousands of lower income minority women and
children and men? Where is the sense of social injustice that the disappearance of an attractive blonde
caucasian girl is worthy of nightly coverage on the national news when every single day Americans of
all ages, races and and income levels go missing? Why is Natalee Holloway’s disappearance seemingly
capable of getting high ratings while other crimes that have far more impact of every American goes
unmentioned?
Blaming simple racial bias for the lack of concern about real social justice misses the point. The
induction into the American consciousness of the Natalee Holloway saga reveals considerably less
about the racial divide in America than it does about about how radically Americans views on social
issues are shaped by the media. Perception informs us that the media in America is an entity of liberal
thought hellbent on inculcating leftist ideology into the minds of viewers. Of course, nothing could be
further from the truth. Which is not to suggest that the media is a conservative entity.
The real issue so often overlooked by those who unquestionably accept the lies about a liberal media
being sold to them by the likes of O’Reilly and Limbaugh is that the media is shaped by economic
need; in order to survive it must sell advertising time and in order to charge the most for that time it
must achieve the highest ratings. The end result is a complete absence of creativity and imagination by
the news media in America; it has become just another cog in the machinery of entertainment. News is
no longer provided for information purposes, but for entertainment purposes.
Issues involving social injustice are only deemed worthy of coverage in the media when there is
exciting visual accompaniment. The outrage that spilled into the streets during the Vietnam War was
spurred in no small part due to the constant stream of images of death and devastation shown every
night on television newscasts. Today’s media heavyweights refuse to show the real devastation taking
place in Iraq because they either willingly accept or hesitantly cave in to the fear that they will be
tagged as “liberals” if they do. Even more egregious was the absolute nadir of media manipulation of
the truth when stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting were forbidden to air an edition of Nightline
that did nothing ideologically leftist that acknowledge the names of all those soldiers have been killed
in the war.
The underlying problem with such media control of the transmission of informatino is that it serves to
reinforce among Americans the issues they feel they need to be concerned most about. Take as the most
recent example the explosion of interest in the issue of immigration over the past six months. A Time
Magazine poll taken in January of 2006 reported that only 33% of respondents considered illegal
immigration to be a “very serious” problem. Compare that with an April poll released by Fox News
asserting that 90% of respondents considered immigration to be very serious problem. Putting aside for
the moment the obvious questions of the validity of any poll taken by Fox, this divergence over such
short period of time is nothing less than astounding. And the only explanation that makes any sense is
that by April the media had been chasing after the idea of illegal immigration as a top priority in
Congress.
The concerns over what are seen as injustices in America are obviously influenced to a great extent by
the lack of imagination and engagement of Americans. With so many distractions at our disposal—
television, the internet, video games, MP3 players, etc.—the time that most Americans spend thinking
about the concept of injustice has fallen to all time lows. Yes, every one of us realizes that thousands of
stories could potentially be covered by news organizations every day, but it has become subconsciously
ingrained into our psyche that the stories that receive coverage by all the media outlets must by
definition be the ones that are most important. Obviously, in more than a fair share of cases, they are
not the most important.
For Americans to work their way back to actually caring about social justice in this country, one of the
requirements will be we get past some of these institutionalized moral codes that presuppose absolute
views. In addition, Americans will be required to dig past those stories being fed them by the media.
It’s not enough to simply understand what the media has decided is an important issue affecting us all,
we must look to the causes of both why that issue has arisen and also why that issue has been chosen
for coverage by the media. The typical route taken in America is to ignore the complexities of the
causes behind social injustice and rather attack the more easily digestible symptoms. For instance, the
influx of illegal immigrants has been shaped as a causal effect contributing to myriad problems in
America. In fact, illegal immigration is a but a symptom of a convergence of other causes that do not,
unfortunately, lend themselves to sound bites and fifteen second video clips.
Facing up to the real causes behind social injustice requires a commitment to critical engagement with
the issue and that is simply too time-consuming. It is far more efficient to take an absolutist approach
and condemn all evils equally. A relativist approach opens the door to explanations and justifications
that all too often tend to undermine the very codified morality that engendered those moral precepts in
the first place.
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