Restoring the Roadmap
“When you are edging closer and closer to the abyss, the most progressive direction is backwards.”
Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue
What the modern world lacks, according to Peter Kreeft in Back to Virtue, is a basic knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. It’s not that individual men are morally weaker or necessarily more prone to wickedness than our ancestors. Our ancestors were better at hard virtues like courage, honesty, chastity, and discipline, but modern man is less cruel, intolerant, and inhumane, Kreeft notes.
Although individually we are not weaker in morality, we are weaker in the basic knowledge of morality. We are much stronger in the knowledge of nature but weaker in the knowledge of virtue. Our ancestors didn’t live up their principles, but we have abolished them.
Our society has lost objective moral law. Relativism and libertinism now rule. The dominant institutions of the education system and media resoundingly reject morality while speaking of “ethics” and “values” which are ways to share viewpoints rather than the actual seeking of objective truth. Most consider morality based on objective standards to be simplistic and naïve.
Ethics without virtue is an illusion.
Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue
The West has submitted to the belief that morality is subjective, private, and based on mere feelings. Yet sociology has resorted to the belief that consensus determines morality thereby submitting it to democracy which then becomes a religion.
As a result, we live in two spheres of reality. As individuals our feelings and beliefs, “values”, are separate from the world of expected social behavior. This separation destroys both individual and collective morality.
The only publicly acceptable opinion to hold is that there are no moral absolutes. Above all, to be popular in society in the modern world, you must not believe in objective morality. Kreeft penned his book in 1992 and the situation is more dire today than ever.
If you look at just the past decade, you see the complete erosion of the institution of marriage in the West. Now Americans are told by the Supreme Court, the highest arbiter of civil justice, that marriage is merely an institution of private subjective feelings and has nothing to do with procreation or as a foundational structure for society.
The present situation is unsustainable in the long term for society. What can we do when the situation in the West seems dire? Unfortunately, I don’t think the answer will be in the conversion of masses of people to the cause of virtue. The educational system taught generations of Americans that morality is subjective and the media which predominates the lives of most Americans continuously reinforces it.
The most workable and practical solution is the personal pursuit of virtue. Individually and as families we can return to those moral standards that create a stable foundation for society.
You may wonder how we can do this in a world hostile to those who want to practice virtue. It is easy to sit around and think abstractly about virtue, but how can we pursue virtue in our everyday lives?
We find the answer in a return to tradition. Traditions are the wisdom of a generation passed on to the next generation. The habits, rituals, and relationships that sustain families are the threads of wisdom woven by traditions into the fabric of society. Over the past century, the fabric that so long sustained Western Civilization has been unraveling.
To many people, tradition evokes a negative reaction as they conceive of an old fashioned, static way of looking at the world.
However, tradition has vitality and is dynamic as every day we share and pass on the beliefs that have shaped us to those around us. Tradition is the foundation upon which we build with the knowledge of today.
There can be no progress without the foundation of tradition from which to build. Otherwise, generation after generation would start anew and repeat the mistakes of the past. When a civilization forgets their traditions, past wisdom is extinguished resulting in instability and even destruction. A society that eschews tradition will always begin in a state of intellectual poverty.
I want to inspire you to return to tradition and the wisdom of our forebears. They didn’t get everything right; they were as prone to vice and sinfulness as we are today. However, they transmitted concrete knowledge through the years that their ancestors had passed to them. It is our duty to fuse our knowledge with their traditional wisdom and transmit it to future generations.
I hope that by highlighting the traditions of the past, we can create a roadmap to lead us out of the wilderness that threatens our way of life.
In an age of “anything goes”, virtue is a revolutionary thing.
Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue
~Rae Carpenter