Six out of 10 told the authors that morality is a "personal choice," like preferring long or short hair. "Moral rights and wrongs are essentially matters of individual opinion." One young woman, a student at an Ivy League college, explained that while she doesn't cheat, she is loath to judge others who do. "I guess that's a decision that everyone is entitled to make for themselves. I'm sort of a proponent of not telling other people what to do." A young man offered that " . . . a lot of the time it's personal. It changes from person to person. What you may think is right may not necessarily be right for me, understand? So it's all individual." Forty-seven percent of the cohort agreed that "morals are relative, there are not definite rights and wrongs for everybody."
It goes beyond cheating or failing to give to charity. One young man who stressed "everyone's right to choose," was pressed about whether murder would be such a choice? He wasn't sure. "I mean, in today's society, sure, like to murder someone is just ridiculous. I don't know. In some societies, back in time, maybe it's a good thing."
The irony is that this supposed reluctance to make moral judgments is itself a moral posture. The young people in the study, like the authors of my son's textbook, and much of the American establishment, believe that it is (set ital) morally wrong (end ital) to judge people harshly. (Except, perhaps, if it's Western civilization you're condemning.)
My son was most exasperated by the textbook's suggestion that Western civilization's response to other cultures was "complex" and that this was probably just as true of Chinese, Persians and others. No, he protested, the only civilization that is self-critical -- at all -- is our own. Other world civilizations continue to express pride and even arrogance about their own histories.
Those who resist the self-flagellation that travels under the name multiculturalism are accused of chauvinism. But the withdrawal from any kind of judgment is yielding a generation of moral cripples.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
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