"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Thursday, August 07, 2003 Peter Kreeftobserves that making tolerance paramount assumes the goodness of tolerance as a moral absolute – but if no moral values are absolute, neither is tolerance. Meantime, the fashionable academic philosophy of Deconstructionism, by denying objective reality beyond texts, makes "morality as arbitrary as penmanship."
"The logical consequence of a society that revolves around not offending anyone is that the bullies will win," said Kreeft, who quotes Mussolini himself on the topic:
"From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value," Il Duce wrote approvingly, "the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable."
In other words, said Kreeft, moral relativism -- the belief that there is "nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so" -- is the sort of philosophy that leads ultimately to the gas chamber. For if no objective standard of good or evil exists, he said, by what authority do we declare Hitler's view wrong, rather than simply different?
"Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane," said Kreeft, "but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants."
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