Decisive Splits

The moral blindness of the conservatives is that they’ve become unable to tell the difference between the good and the evil. Many American liberals, on the other hand, have become blind to how vital and how real that difference is.

The conservatives don’t see the true moral nature of their ruthless leaders. They have been seduced by those leaders, buying into the sheep’s clothing of their false righteousness, under which is hidden the wolf of their unbridled lust for self-aggrandizement. As a result, they’ve handed power to forces that work systematically to undermine good order in America and around the world.

The moral blindness of many liberals lies in their sliding into a moral relativism that sees matters of right and wrong as merely matters of individual opinion. Unwilling to judge anything but “judgmentalism,” willing to tolerate anything but “intolerance,” too many liberals have become unable to see the difference between good personal choices and bad ones.

While the most urgent threat to the soul of America comes from the right –for nothing is so dangerous to a society than to mistake the evil for the good, and to hand to forces of evil the power to shape its destiny—the moral blindness of today’s American liberalism has also contributed to this rise to power of fascistic forces.

....Just as the rise to power of fascistic forces and the degradation of values in the wider culture are two sides of the same coin, so also with these two forms of moral blindness.

The two sides of our polarized society are failing in different –but complementary—ways to meet the fundamental moral challenge that humankind must face at both the individual and social levels.

Goodness in the human sphere requires us to reconcile the desires and needs of our inborn nature and the moral demands of the larger order into a harmonious and life-serving whole, integrating the values of liberty and of order.

But as the goodness of moral integration breaks down, society becomes polarized, with each side of the divide failing in its own characteristic way to serve goodness. The parts that need to be brought together instead break apart, with each side of the polarized system emphasizing only one half of the picture and then trumpeting its corresponding unbalanced half-truth about morality.

Thus, social polarization epitomizes a cultural failure to put the pieces together.

[via See No Evil: The Blinding of America, HT: Jesus Politics]