Nihilism all the way down

Philosopher Justin McBrayer has an illuminating piece over in The New York Times with the somewhat lengthy, but revealing title: Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts. 

He open his essay with a provocative question: "What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests?"

He points out that "philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshman in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture."

It is a clear indication of our decadence that those students who are deemed fit for college enter with less moral education than the dimmest barbarian.  This is not by accident: it is the deliberate policy of the schools:

"When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes."

McBrayer notes the fallacy:

First, the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof — two obviously different features. Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC² is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both.

This is the "dictatorship of relativism" of which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke in his last homily before becoming Pope Benedict XVI.

I offer three observations about this sorry state of affairs.

First, although it seems as if all moral claims will be treated equally--that is, as mere opinions--it is not so.  Every society needs some moral code.  Ours is provided by our elites and their puppets in the media.  They will ostracize our beliefs as mere opinion.  But they will present their worldview as accepted fact.

Consider: is it really questionable whether the child in a womb is a living, breathing human being?  Is it actually a matter of opinion that only a man and a woman are capable of being joined in marriage, and that this union--and only this sort of union--may produce a child?  But these questions are never asked.  The media has no interest in such questions.  And neither do the graduates of our universities, bereft as they are of any moral sense.

Second, such people are incapable of receiving the Good News.  They do not even know that there is goodness!  Our primary objective is to convince them of this.  Before we can make Christians, first we must have pagans.  Only then may they be evangelized.  We should not despair of conversion, but we should recognize the enormity of our task--and pray accordingly.

Third, Christian parents must do everything in their power to remove their children from the schools.  A Christian teacher, if his faith is strong, may be able to withstand the nihilism of the schools and prove a useful bulwark against it.  But no student is that strong.  To hand a child over to be told day in and day out that moral truths do not exist, and yet ask him to maintain that is does, is foolish in the extreme. The children of the light shall have no part with darkness.