Dumbing Down Evil

Phil Brennan
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Three recent events have coincided to illustrate where we as a nation have come to at the beginning of a new century. Front and center at the moment is former President Bill Clinton, whose new book is currently dominating the headlines and talk shows.

In the past two weeks the death and funeral rites of former President Reagan captured the nation's attention. And now, getting less attention than it deserves, is a brand new poll showing what Americans believe is morally acceptable and morally objectionable and how we divide on the subject along ideological lines.

Clinton's book like Clinton himself, is a jumble. The New York Times called it "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull, the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history ..." The man comes across as, to use a favorite word of his fellow liberals, "conflicted." He admits to having two sides, and doesn't really know which is the real Bill Clinton - as Dick Morris puts it "The Saturday night Bill, or the Sunday Morning Bill."
Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, knew exactly who he was: a man created in the image and likeness of his Lord, totally subservient to God's will, and absolutely convinced he was guided by God in everything he did. And he lived that belief all his life. He was, in no sense, "conflicted."

That's important, because when we speak of Clinton as being such, we fail to define exactly what the conflict is. After all, a conflict is a battle between two extremes. In the case of the human psyche that conflict is the same old struggle that began in the Garden of Eden and has been waged ever since: the conflict between good and evil.

Christians and religiously observant Jews have always recognized this - and have no trouble defining what is basically good, and what is basically evil. But that has changed over the last century; evil has been dumbed down to make it possible for those who want to be seen as being good, to be able to enjoy a few bites at the forbidden - and unfortunately often tasty - fruits from the garden of evil. And that fruit has become addictive. The few bites are now a full-course meal. Good and evil have been redefined: the new commandment is "If it feels good, or is convenient, thou shalt do it." That gets unmarried sex and abortion out of the category of evil.

This leads us to the new Gallup poll which in a fit of political correctness calls evil "morally objectionable" and good "morally acceptable." And the poll also tells us what's acceptable to whom.

Conservatives, on the whole, find evil - let's call it what it is - to be morally objectionable, and liberals find it morally acceptable. We are not informed as to what on earth can be moral when, like abortion, (which is a sacrament in the church of the left) it is the very essence of evil.

Gallup News Service reports that the poll results "tell much about the cultural climate of the country, with most Americans expressing traditional values about polygamy and extramarital affairs as well as toward suicide and human or animal cloning. Americans generally see all of these as morally wrong."

On the other side, divorce, the death penalty, gambling, and sex between unmarried partners all pass the test of moral acceptability for a majority of Americans," according to Gallup."Issues such as having a baby outside of marriage, abortion, homosexual behavior, and doctor assisted suicide - emerge as divisive, nearly splitting the American public in half.

The gap between the percentage of Americans saying each of these issues is morally acceptable or morally wrong is no more than 12 percentage points, with having a child out of wedlock producing the smallest gap: 49 percent think it is morally acceptable; 45 percent say it is morally wrong.

Think about that for a moment. The family is the basic unit of society. Anything that damages the family structure damages society. Divorce is obviously damaging to the family structure, and tragically, to the children set adrift on the turbulent sea of single parenthood. Producing children outside of marriage has the same effect upon the child. Sex outside of marriage inevitably psychologically damages the women involved and cheapens what is meant to be a sacred marital ritual.

As for abortion, 50 percent say its wrong, 40 percent approve of killing a baby in its mother's womb. Of homosexual behavior, 54 percent say it is wrong; 42 percent see it as morally acceptable. And 53 percent approved of doctor assisted suicide while 41 percent opposed it.

In the category of Most Widely Seen as Morally Wrong: Fully 91 percent saw adultery as wrong while only seven percent approved. The same percentages applied to polygamy. Eighty-eight percent condemned cloning of humans while nine percent approved. Seventy-nine percent saw suicide as morally objectionable while 15 percent approved of it, and 64 percent were against cloning animals and 32 percent approved.

On the other hand, divorce was seen as morally acceptable by a 66 percent to 26 percent margin and sex between unmarried men and women got the O.K. by a margin of 60 percent to 30 percent.

Happily, buying and wearing animal fur got the nod of 63 percent to 31 percent to the dismay, no doubt, of the lunatic fanatics at PETA.

The poll showed that self-described conservatives and liberals are most likely to disagree on the issues of homosexual behavior (73 percent of liberals approve while only 23 percent of conservatives approve) and abortion (63 percent of liberals approve while only 23 percent of conservatives give it the nod).

A wide gulf also exists between the two groups with respect to premarital sex, having a baby out of marriage, stem cell research using human embryos, doctor assisted suicide, divorce, and gambling. In each case, liberals are much more likely than conservatives to view the item as morally acceptable.

And that's what I mean by dumbing down evil.

We have a huge moral crisis on our hands when the nation seems to be almost equally divided by issues that clearly fall into the categories of good and evil.

Take abortion, the killing of what medical science says unanimously is a human being from the moment of conception. Killing any human being is called murder in civilized societies and a society where a large percentage of the population approves of it, is a society that condones the murder of its most vulnerable fellow human beings.

But as I have already said, we get around the problem of evil by declaring it to be good, or at the very least, acceptable. The clear and present danger is that once you start down the path of transforming such things the civilized world has always regarded as evil into perfectly acceptable behavior, nothing is exempt from being redefined.

A nation that is "conflicted" - with a large segment of its population unable to recognize the nature of evil, or even its very existence, is a nation well on the way to barbarity.