In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains that properly ordered pride “seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues” and it is “impossible without nobility and goodness of character.”
The full weight of the failed Enlightenment experiment over-taxes the load bearing pillars that prop up a decaying Western Civilization, pillars that are buckling under the sheer weight of moral corruption on full display in modern society. The ethical structures of the West are in desperate need of repair. This new age is best characterized by the Weird Sisters crowing pronouncement “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, Hover through the fog and filthy air.” The inversion of values has been a massive moral de-construction project that has taken the time honored vertical hierarchy of virtues and vices and turned it upside down. There is still a vertical hierarchy but now society honors vice and maligns virtue; and to add insult to injury, the mind molders call the vertical inversion horizontal equality. The universities and the media constantly hurl out the egalitarian lie that all moral positions are subjective and therefore equally weighted, while clearly giving full gravity to their own positions and often giving practically no weight at all to traditional virtue.
In Ephesians 2:2, St. Paul identifies the root cause and summary of moral decadence as the “spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.” The bent spirit has captivated the imagination of this age and turned too many hearts and minds away from the narrow path of virtue and towards the highways of wickedness renamed. Too long has our gaze been directed downward towards depravity, so long that licentiousness is mistaken for freedom. Too long has material prosperity dulled our moral senses, so long that we believe we can afford an obscene tolerance of vicious acts. Too long has this generation inhaled the polluted ethos manufactured by philosophers who believe that being proceeds from thinking, that nature requires conquering and that all are entitled to equally pleasurable outcomes in this valley of tears.
The moral pollution is often funneled into our homes by airwaves and manifested on an imprudent surplus of screens. Our eyes are bombarded by violent images, our ears by the incessant din of story after story of depraved criminal acts, and an endless stream of degenerate entertainment from a morally vacuous popular culture infects young and old alike. By imperceptible degrees, scales have grown over our eyes. The violence and depravity hardly quicken our pulse anymore as outrage lies mute in a pauper’s grave.
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C.S. Lewis keenly observes in The Abolition of Man, that “for wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.” We must end this mad race to contrive technical solutions for our moral problems.
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