The Three Noble Virtues

In a group text thread, the San Diego Loyal Order of Bloggers (SLOBs), were recently discussing this reaction to my viral Twitter thread. Here's an excerpt.

The truth on sex was an early casualty in the American left's long waged war on the truth.  For those who have foolishly decided to rule their own world — the age-old problem of humanity — going one's own way in the sexual realm is a popular, and typically very early, decision.  In America, around the middle of the twentieth century, "liberation" and "sexual freedom" were typical battle cries for those who wanted to pursue a life of sexual promiscuity and other hedonistic activities.

As much as I appreciate the author taking the time to discuss my thread, I'm going to push back on the essay. It's not a war on the truth or anything so grand. It's the result of a substitution of moral values. When we got rid of God, we also got rid of the atomic virtues.

• Thou shalt not lie,
• Thou shalt not steal,
• Thou shalt not covet,

... and so on. Those virtues were independent of your aims. Lying is a sin, even when you lie for a good cause. That's been the source of conflict in many lives - was it wrong to lie to my sister about the infidelity of her late husband?

Well, we did away with those in favor of larger-scale virtues. I propose the list below as the current top three. They change over time, but the concept of purpose trumping atomic virtues remains.

• Climate Change,
• Racial Justice and
• Gender Affirmation.

Conservatives get their knickers in a twist over the lies the left uses to advance these goals. I blogged about it two days ago, discussing how NBC News implicitly slandered South Carolina parents as racist. Thinking more about that post and more about the SLOBs conversation, it dawned on me that, as a part of the secularization of America, we're experiencing transfer of moral power. Gone are the virtues from the Bible and taking their place are the progressive virtues listed above.

It's no sin to lie if the lie advances the cause of Racial Justice.

One more example. The left loves to call us fascists. This drives me bonkers as fascism is well-defined and clearly does not apply to the right. Fascism is the dominance and cooperation of government and big business in pursuit of a larger, national goal. Mussolin wrote the foundational document on it, called, appropriately, The Doctrine of Fascism. The thing is short. You can read it in 90 minutes or so. 

When I've seen people call us fascists on Twitter, I reply with an angry, Pavlovian spasm, "Do you even know what fascism is?"

Of course they don't. They don't care. They're not going to waste their time reading some blather from the 1930s and they don't need to do so, not in their moral universe. They're pursuing Racial Justice or Gender Affirmation which excuses any and all lies and distortions.

What's more, they don't see it as a moral problem. That's why the NBC News team had no problem slandering the South Carolinians. 

We're talking past each other. It's one of the sources of our national divide.

"This is all lies!"

"You hate black people!"

Those are discussion points at completely different levels of abstraction. Lies are at the atomic level and racism is at the structural level.

We're talking atoms, they're talking biospehere.