'Health Has Become Our Morality'

“Would you rather your teenager smoke or cheat?” Dennis Prager asked back in 2003:

Decades of lecturing around America and of speaking with parents on my radio show have led me to an incredible conclusion: More American parents would be upset with their teenage children if they smoked a cigarette than if they cheated on a test.

How has this come about? This is, after all, an entirely new phenomenon. Almost no member of my generation (those who became teenagers in the 1960s), let alone a member of any previous generation, could ever have imagined that parents would be angrier with their teenage child for smoking than for cheating.

There has been a profound change in American values. In a nutshell, health has overtaken morality. Or, if you prefer, health has become our morality.

Which makes sense, given the age of moral relativity we live in. Prager’s article was written in the decade in which Gaia replaced God amongst American “progressive” elites, and concurrently, global warming was an infinitely more important battle for them than global terrorism.

Of course, moral relativists can become mighty inflexible when they want to be. Or as as Peter Wehner writes at Commentary, “Even Relativism is Relative.” Wehner believes that Allan Bloom “was only partially right” in 1987’s The Closing of the American Mind:

It’s quite true that an unwillingness to believe in objective moral truth is widespread in the academy and among those on the left — but only on certain issues. On other matters –gay rights and same-sex marriage, race-based affirmative action, a constitutional right to an abortion, gun control, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, Guantanamo Bay, rendition, the right to a Palestinian state, anthropological global warming, the Tea Party v. the Occupy Wall Street movement, Rush Limbaugh v. Sandra Fluke, and others — those on the left don’t believe truth is relative. They believe, in fact, that their positions are right, moral, and objectively true and better. If a social conservatives debates a social liberal on gay marriage, the odds are quite high that the latter will not say to the former, “Your values are as good as mine. Truth is relative. Who am I to judge?” If you ask liberals “whose truth?” they will gladly tell you, “my truth.”

But then, Bloom’s book is in part, an exploration of how Germany won the war of ideas against America, as I wrote late last year:

One of the key themes in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind is that Germany won the war against America — no, not the Nazis, but the Weimar Republic, and the German intellectuals of the late 19th and 20th century such as Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein and Heidegger (who also courted post-Weimar Germany, IYKWIMAITYD), whose ideas flourished in that 1920s hothouse atmosphere. Add to that Otto von Bismarck as the father of the modern welfare state, plus Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who imported Bauhaus architecture to the US, and Wernher von Braun who created the American space program, not to mention the Frankfurt School putzes. The result, as Bloom wrote, was a surprisingly Germanic intellectual culture in the US after the war, even if it was rarely acknowledged as such. Earlier this year, Thomas Friedman famously asked in the New York Times, “Can Greeks Become Germans.” Bloom posited a quarter century ago that in effect, well, we did, didn’t we?

To return to Prager’s observation at the start of our post, it can be boiled down to two quotes: “Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose,” as Mike Bloomberg said last year. Or more briefly, “gemeinnutz geht vor eigennutz.”

(Fortunately, some courageous souls have resisted the call of the pod people…)