And Another Thing

28 February 2009

What the temptations on the high mountain mean today

What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government. However, this, in turn, is made possible by the second and far more serious evil, moral relativism — the belief that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, good for all human beings everywhere and in all ages, and that there is no such thing as unconditional truth.

I made the triumph of moral relativism the central theme of my history of the 20th century, Modern Times, first published in 1983. Relativism took many different forms but all put the real or imagined needs of ‘society’ (in practice the group in power) before the claims of an absolute code of right and wrong, such as the Ten Commandments. Hitler and the Nazis called the criterion of morality ‘the Higher Law of the Party’, and followed it to launch world war and kill nearly six million Jews. Lenin and Stalin called it ‘the Revolutionary Conscience’, and its dictates led to the murder or death in the Gulag of 20 million ‘enemies of the people’. In China, Mao’s revolutionary conscience as the sole measure of right and wrong produced 70 million victims. Pre-war Japan followed the European lead and conducted its wars of aggression, first against China, then the West, without the smallest regard for morality in any form, except the relativism of ‘National Survival’. In this competitive corruption, the West succumbed, at least in part. Churchill used the spirit of moral relativism to authorise ‘aerial bombing’ of Germany: ‘The one thing that will bring [Hitler] down… is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ The Americans used the same argument for dropping nuclear weapons on Japan.

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Roderick Reilly

March 2nd, 2009 10:17pm Report this comment

Dear Sir:

I have no idea what a "quango" is, but I definitely want no part of one. I imagine that on our side of the Great Pond, our new Presdent Mugab -- er -- Obama will wish to infest us with a plague of these quangos, which I am sure are very expensive, as he has signed the largest series of spending measures in human history.

Roderick Reilly

March 2nd, 2009 10:23pm Report this comment

Oh my, upon checking the definition of "quangos," I see that we Americans have plenty of these already. Now we shall have more. Oh joy.

It appears that at least two of our American quangos are at the heart of the financial meltdown. Hmmmm . . . a quango quagmire as it were.

Jamie Jacobs

March 4th, 2009 4:18am Report this comment

I wonder if Mr. Johnson would care to critique Andrew J. Bacevich's new book "The Limits of Power; The End of American Exceptionalism." It might make a great column.

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