It's All Relative, Said the Rabbit

The Madding Crowd

In his book, A Hobbit Journey, author Matthew Dickerson reflects upon why aspects of the writings of J R R Tolkien jar so gratingly upon the ear of the modern Westerner.  The world view of the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion reflects a cosmos with moral absolutes and true moral guilt.  It portrays evil as a personal hatred and malice towards others.  Increasingly in the West, this simply "does not compute". 

Such notions of true moral good and evil are being washed out of the modern mind.  Or the attempt is being made to wash them out.  Firstly, take materialism--the dominant worldview in the West, along with its kissing cousins of atheism, secularism, and progressivism.  In all these variants, there is no such thing as absolute, objective good or evil, right or wrong.  So-called evils are merely the result of particular or societal programming.  Morality and immorality is akin to--in fact, can be identified with--programming the machine.  We are what we are because of the alignment of electrons and quarks.  "We are what we are because we're not what we used to  be."

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in 1934, described this Brave New World: 

Pour Me Another One

Klingon Cloaking Devices and the Starship Ideology

Now we are being told that genetic factors account for about 30 to 40 percent of of whether a man becomes a homosexual or not.  We suspect that similar claims could be made about whether a man becomes a murderer.  But one thing is absolutely sure, apparently.  Environmental factors definitely, most definitely do not play any role whatsoever.  Moreover, choice is absolutely, totally, and completely excluded as a factor in becoming a homosexual.

But they [the research scientists] said this did not imply that upbringing or other social factors, or individual choice, had a bearing on sexual orientation.  “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice,” one of the lead researchers, Dr Michael Bailey, from Northwestern University in Chicago, said. [NZ Herald.  Emphasis, ours.]

Notice the emphatic assertion.  Homosexuality has nothing to do with choice.  When a scientist becomes this emphatic with respect to human behaviour, expect that science has elided into cheap propaganda.