RIGHT OF CENTER: CULTURAL PROGRESS AND AMORAL TOLERANCE IN SOCIETY TODAY

One of the defining characteristics of our post-modern age is the notion that we are progressing as a culture. In terms of technology, this certainly is true.

But what about morality?

The liberal mindset is that we are morally superior to our ancestors. After all, our ancestors were decidedly opposed to certain lifestyles. Indeed, the word wasn't in their vocabulary. Lifestyle is a relatively modern term conceived to accommodate and legitimize behavior that previously was deemed immoral or self-destructive.

Imagine the dismay our ancestors would exhibit over recent legal defenses devised for accused criminals. These people, we are to believe, were driven to their unspeakable crimes because they, not the bloody corpses they sent to premature graves, were victims -- of abuse, institutional racism or economic and cultural deprivation.

The Menendez brothers, for example, successfully persuaded enough jurists that they weren't accountable for their actions -- the brutal shotgun slayings of their parents. The jurors believed that because these men suffered a lifetime of physical and mental abuse at the hands of their father, we shouldn't hold them responsible for the murders.

What about Ms. Bobbit, who maimed her sleeping husband? Again, the abuse card was played successfully, even though a different jury acquitted her husband of abuse charges in an earlier trial.

In both cases, and others like them, defense attorneys transformed the true victims into victimizers while the true criminals garnered the jurors' sympathy as victims.

What would our ancestors have thought about the myriad misfits and malcontents who parade across our daytime TV talk show screens? What would they think of "Beavis and Butthead" and their MTV friends, or gay pride festivals where the participants openly engage in unspeakable acts before an increasingly dazed and numbed public?

Why won't someone stand on the street corner, clenched fist raised defiantly and shout at the top of his lungs, "This is absurd?" Why are we so tolerant of the imposition of amorality and repulsive, vain behavior? Because the new morality forbids insensitivity to amoral, repulsive cretins. Tolerance is the new god of post-modern America.

But are we morally superior to our ancestors simply because we are more tolerant and understanding of what in the past was considered aberrant behavior? The very notion has led to a multitude of cultural and social disasters.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the new morality said that children were better off with a single, loving parent than with two unhappy parents. The new morality also espoused "if it feels good, do it."

From the seeds of no-fault, easy divorce and eschewed commitment, we've reaped an epidemic of selfishness, illegitimacy, poverty and crime. Now the new morality is changing. Marriage and commitment are staging a revival. But what does that say about our morality? That it is capricious, certainly.

More importantly, it shows that what passes as enlightened morality really is nothing more than faddish conformity.

What has our new morality as applied to homosexuality reaped? A growing segment of our people is wasted, searching in vain for purpose and contentment where it never can be found -- in their sexual habits. I'm not talking about AIDS, which continues to destroy people in the prime of their life. I'm speaking of the spiritual emptiness that accompanies the day-to-day existence of people who reject the established order of creation.

Even the most enlightened and compassionate liberal wouldn't want his children to adopt such a "lifestyle."

The only real truths are those that have been revealed or arrived at through "millenniums of intellection," in the words of William F. Buckley Jr., who said, "Certain problems have been disposed of. Certain questions are closed: and with reference to that fact the conservative orders his life and, to the extent he is called upon by circumstances to do so, the life of the community."

A growing number of politicians and social scientists now talk of a return to traditional morality. They should know that traditional morality never left.

Instead, the pseudo-intellectuals of the left -- believing in their own evolving moral superiority -- have cast our culture into the tumultuous seas of relativity, there to be tossed about, anchorless and with no charted course.

Jay Eastlick is news editor of the Southeast Missourian.