By Christina Hoff Sommers
1 We hear a lot today about how Johnny can’t read, how he can’t write, and the trouble he is having finding France on a map. It is also true that Johnny is having difficulty distin- guishing right from wrong. Along with illiteracy and innumeracy, we must add deep moral confusion to the list of educational problems. Increasingly, today’s young people know little or nothing about the Western moral tradition.
2 Conceptually and culturally, today’s young people live in a moral haze. Ask one of them if there are such things as “right” and “wrong” and suddenly you are confronted with a confused, tongue- tied, nervous, and insecure individual, the same person who works weekends for Meals on Wheels2, who volunteers for a suicide prevention hotline or a do- mestic violence shelter might tell you, “Well, there really is no such thing as right or wrong. It’s kind of like whatever works best for the individual.3 Each person has to work it out for himself.”
3 I often meet students incapable of making even one single confident moral judgment. And it’s getting worse. The things students now say are more and more unhinged. Recently, several of my students objected to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s4 “principle of hu- manity” — the doctrine that asserts the unique dignity and worth of every human life. They told me that if they were faced with the choice between saving their pet or a human being, they would choose the former.
4 We have been thrown back into a moral Stone Age: many young people are totally un- affected by thousands of years of moral experience and moral progress. The notion of objec- tive moral truths is in disrepute. And this mistrust of objectivity has begun to spill over into other areas of knowledge. Today, the concept of objective truth n science and history is al- so being impugned. An undergraduate at Williams College recently reported that her class- metes who have been taught that “all knowledge is a social construct”, were doubtful that the Holocaust5 ever occurred. One of her classmates said, “Although the Holocaust may not have happened, it’s a perfectly reasonable conceptual hallucination.”
5 When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, he did not say, “At least that is my opnion.”6 He declared it as an objective truth. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton7 amended the Declaration of Independence by changing the phrase “all men” to “all men and women”, she was not merely giving an opin- ion; she was insisting that females are endowed with the same rights and entitlements as males.
6 The assertions of both Jefferson and Stanton were made in the some spirit — as self- evident truths and mot as personal judgments. Today’s young people enjoy the fruits8 of the battles fought by these leaders. But they themselves are not being given the intellectual and moral training to argue for and to justify truth. In fact, the king of education they are get- ting is systematically undermining their common sense about what is true and right.
7 Let me be concrete and specific: men and women died courageously fighting the Nazis. They included American soldiers, Allied soldiers, and resistance fighters. Because brave people took risks to do what was right and necessary, Hitler was eventually defeated. Today, with the assault on objective truth, many college students find themselves unable to say why the Unite States was on the right side in that war. Some even doubt that America was in the right. To add insult to injoury9, they are not even sure that the salient events of the Second World War ever took place. They simply lack confidence in the objectivity of history.
8 The problem is not that young people are ignorant, distrustful, cruel, or treacherous. And it is not that they are moral skeptics. They just talk that way. To put it bluntly, they are conceptually clueless. The problem I am speaking about is cognitive. Our students are suffering from “cognitive moral confusion.”
9 In the late 1960s, a group of hippies living in the Haight-Ashbury District10 of San Francisco decided that hygiene was a middle class hang-up that they could best do without. So, they decided to live without it. For example, baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon. The essayist and novelist Tom Wolfe was intrigued by these hippies who, he said, “sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes ad restraints of the past ad start out from zero.”11
10 Before long, the hippies’ aversion to modern hygiene had consequences that were as unpleasant as they were unforeseen. The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them to seek help from the local free clinics. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiments of modern hygiene. Wolfe refers to this as the “Great Relearning”.
11 The Great Relearning is what has to happen whenever earnest reformers extirpate too much. When “starting from zero”, they jettison basic social practices and institutions, a- bandon common routines, defy common sense, reason, conventional wisdom — and, some- times, sanity itself.12
12 We are living through a great experiment in “moral deregulation”, an experiment whose first principle seems to be: “Conventional morality is oppressive”. What is right is what works for us. We question everything. We casually, even gleefully, throw out old- fashioned customs and practices.
13 We now jokingly call looters “non-traditional shoppers”. Killers are described as “morally challenged” — again jokingly, but the truth behind the jokes is that moral deregu- lation is the order of the day13. We poke fun at bur own society for its lack of moral clarity. In our own way, we are as down and out as those poor hippies knocking at the door of the free clinic.
14 We need our own Great Relearning. What is a society without civility, honesty, con- sideration, self-discipline? Without a population educated to be civil, considerate, and re- spectful of one another, what will we end up with? Not much. We live in a moral environ- ment. We must respect and protect it. We must acquaint out children with it. We must make them aware it is precious and fragile.
15 While it is true that we must debate controversial issues, we must not forget there exists a core of noncontroversial ethical issues that were settled a long time ago. We must make students aware that there is a standard of ethical ideals that all civilizations worthy of the name have discovered.14 We must encourage them to read the Bible, Aristotle’s Ethics, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Koran15, and the Analects16 of Confucius. When they read almost any great work, they will encounter these basic moral values: integrity, respect for human life, self- control, honesty, courage, and self- sacrifice. All the world’s major reli- gions proffer some version of the Golden Rule, if only in its negative form: Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.17
16 We need to transmit the best of our political and cultural heritage. We need to refrain from cynical attacks against our traditions and institutions. We need to expose the folly of all of the schemes for starting from zero. We need to teach our young people to understand. Respect, and protect the institutions that protect us and preserve our kindly, free and demo- cratic society.
17 This we can do. And when we engage in the Great Relearning that is so badly needed today, we will find that the lives of our morally enlightened children will be saner, safer, more dignified, and more humane. (1,241 words)
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Proper Names
Analects / 论语
The Declaration of Dependence （美国）独立宣言
Elizabeth Cady Stanton / (女子名)伊丽莎白•卡迪•斯坦顿
Haight-Ashbury / (地名)海特•爱希布雷（美国旧金山市的一个区）
Immanuel Kant / （男子名）伊曼纽尔•康德
Johnny / (男子名)约翰尼（John的昵称）
Koran / 古兰经，可兰经
Thomas Jefferson / （男子名）托马斯•杰弗逊
Tom Wolfe /(男子名)汤姆•沃尔夫
Williams / College 威廉姆斯学院（在美国马萨诸塞州）