Postmodern Morality

Part 3-of-3 (Scroll down for parts 1 & 2)

Through the revolving door of evolving values, childlike immoderation typically trumps mature moral moderation. Accordingly, today’s Olympic-class consumers all too often indulge in what they cannot afford—even if they have to beg, whine, steal, borrow or lie to get what they want. The perpetual child is “worth it” after all; and convenience, comfort and emotion drive the childlike masses.

Lying today is big business. On the heels of indulgence come web sites that provide tips for how to beat a polygraph or fabricate an alibi. A new survey by CareerBuilder.com reveals that over half of hiring managers admit to having caught a lie on a candidate’s application for employment (but just five percent of workers admit to fibbing on their résumés).

This Dot-Com’s vice president of human resources, Rosemary Haefner observes rightly that “catching a lie on a résumé raises a red flag about a candidate’s overall ethics.” The same holds true for students who plagiarize assignments. Crediting self for another’s efforts likewise introduces the leaven of deception. Not only is the offending student robbed of an important educational experience, but he also grasps credit from another whose time, effort and genius warrant due recognition.

Abraham Lincoln once noted, “What is morally wrong can never be politically right.” However, in the contemporary view of things, Lincoln’s maxim is perceived as archaic, old-fashioned and out of touch. Take, for example, the partisan tradition of mud-slinging. The political volley of name-calling not only hits below the belt; this contemporary practice serves also to uncover a culture gone awry.

To characterize all liberals as godless, bleeding-heart, pinko-communists and conservatives as intolerant, extremist right-wing ignoramuses hardly flatters the American ideal of one nation, indivisible under God, and offering liberty and justice to all.

A Little Leaven Leavens the Lump

By definition, leaven is an agent that causes a cook’s batter to rise when baked. By means of fermentation, leaven (yeast) gradually modifies and expands the dough. Metaphorically, leaven symbolizes sin or false doctrine. When mixed with the doctrine of God, a little leaven corrupts largely. Jesus shared the Parable of the Leaven to show how something small becomes something big.

The biblical principle finds expression in Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz’s depiction of a tree of falsehood, grown from a small grain of truth. To “let one’s lie be even more logical than the truth itself” may well attract the weary traveler to find repose in it. Nonetheless, Lenin warned that “a lie told often enough becomes the truth” when bereft of a “grand meta-narrative” (big picture).

Bypassing accountability to God, self-serving “truth” morphs into nothing more than a social or personal construction; and reality dissolves into paltry bits and pieces. Societal permissiveness and partisan politics surely contribute, but America’s ills stem more from absence of the love of truth, lack of which is certain to yield what the Bible fingers as “unfruitful works of darkness.”

In the end, everyone pays for lies; and no one is the better for them.