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A representative of Generation X named Sam told me he had been discovering the strategic advantages of truth. As an experiment, he decided to stop lying. "It helps people picture you and relate to you more reliably," he said. "Truth can be positively beneficial in many ways." I asked what would happen if he found himself in a situation where it would prove more beneficial for him to lie. He said he would have to judge the context, but he was trying to prefer not-lying.
For Sam, the decision to lie or tell the truth involved not morality but a social construct, to be adopted or rejected as a matter of expedience. In essence, the source of moral authority for Sam is himself, and that in a nutshell is the dilemma confronting moral philosophy in the postmodern world.
Something unprecedented in human history is brewing: a rejection of external moral sources altogether. Individuals and societies have always been im-moral to varying degrees. Individuals (never an entire society) have sometimes declared themselves amoral, professing agnosticism about ethical matters. Only recently, however, have serious thinkers entertained the notion of un-morality: that there is no such thing as morality. A trend prefigured by Nietzsche, prophesied by Dostoyevsky, and analyzed presciently by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man is now coming to fruition. The very concept of morality is undergoing a profound change, led in part by the advance guard of a new science called "evolutionary psychology."
So far, however, the pioneers of unmorality have practiced a blatant contradiction. Following in the style of Jean-Paul Sartre, who declared that meaningful communication is impossible even as he devoted his life to communicating meaningfully, the new moralists first proclaim that morality is capricious, perhaps even a joke, then proceed to use moral categories to condemn their opponents. These new high priests lecture us solemnly about multiculturalism, gender equality, homophobia, and environmental degradation, all the while ignoring the fact that they have systematically destroyed any basis for judging such behavior right or wrong. The emperor so quick to discourse about fashion happens to be stark naked.
For example, George Williams wrote a landmark book in 1966 entitled Adaptation and Natural Selection, which portrayed all behavior as a genetically programmed expression of self-interest. Yet later, after examining some of the grosser examples of animal behavior, he concluded that "Mother Nature is a wicked old witch. … Natural selection really is as bad as it seems and … it should be neither run from nor emulated, but rather combatted."
Williams neglected to explain what allowed him, a product of pure natural selection, to levitate above nature and judge it morally bankrupt. He may understandably disapprove of animal cannibalism and rape, but on what grounds can he judge them "evil"? And how can we—or why should we—combat something programmed into our genes?
Lest I sound like a cranky middle-aged moralist, I should clarify at the beginning that to me the real question is not why modern secularists oppose traditional morality; it is on what grounds they defend any morality.
We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists, that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights but very unequal wrongs … Men will more and more realize that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything. And there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a center of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.
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