Last time I cited the rejection of God as commencing the postmodern era at around the turn of the twentieth century. Why that matters is that rejection of realism follows.
Realism presupposes universality of values and disvalues, to which we all appealed in our discourse. Without that mediation by principle, we inevitably devolve to power dynamics, the blunt assertion of self-interest in all things. And indeed that is what happened, in the twentieth century, as most forcefully seen in the disastrous mid-century ideological wars, and more subtly in today’s political winds that would be unrecognizable to those who lived before, say, the first world war.
Consider the realism of Aristotle and of Plato. True things are always and everywhere true; good is always and everywhere good; beauty is always and everywhere beautiful. We may differ in opinion about specific instances, but we differ over something external and unchanging; what is rather that what we think ought to be.
Realism contrasts with relativism. Transcendentals of good, true, and beautiful are relative if they are products of collective Narrative or solely of personal conviction. Social Narrative is temporal and mutable, a product of the social collective. In the grip of ideology, we allow social Narrative to displace God, as the authoritative source to which we all appeal in our discourse.
This is stated abstractly, so let’s consider a concrete example. Suppose a morally-fraught and controversial issue like abortion. Those who oppose it see it as the taking of a life, morally indefensible in any situation except to avoid the taking of another, as in the case of a mother’s life gravely imperiled by her pregnancy. This proposition of moral weighing on the question of taking life rests on realism.
But suppose we take into account changing social values. If sex is mentally separated from reproduction, and motherhood devalued, we can imagine the unborn baby a mere blob of tissue that unfairly inconveniences the mother who, we may further imagine, is unfairly burdened as compared to men and should be free to choose against motherhood despite engaging in the act which can make a woman a mother. So maybe “the taking of life” is too strongly worded and in any event must be balanced against other social values like personal autonomy and against unwanted responsibility. That stance requires first rejecting realism, because moral values in that case are assumed to be individually-generated and socially approved, rather than an unchanging element of the cosmos.
Certainly social values have differed from time to time and place to place in history. What’s different about the postmodern era—since c. 1900—is that realism itself is overthrown. This has occurred because of the putative death of God. If God (or gods, or the Tao) sponsor ultimate truth, as the sunshine by which we see all else, our disagreements are limited to what that truth is. But if there is no God and no divine authority of any sort, there is no origin for this capital-T truth. We are here all alone, evolved creatures with a conscience that is no more than the biologically inherited sum of our ancestors’ imperative to survive. Our sense of right and wrong may feel hard-wired within, but is only internalized social messaging.
With God out of the way, and therefore no “thou shalt nots” to interfere with our desires, the collective Narrative becomes our sole referent for morality, and the more so because our technology now makes us all instantly aware of minute changes in the mutable moral order. We have no authority but that of the collective, and of course that can be infinitely fought over until the Machine process of collective uniformity is complete. The social Narrative is becoming our god, as we lurch forward to totalitarianism.
God imbues in us a sense of right and wrong, felt within, which we call the conscience. Though right and wrong are real, objective, and actually existing, we discern them not just rationally but internally as a felt sense. This was what the Christian world understood, when listening to instinct concerning moral gray areas.
In the current dispensation, we likewise look inward for discernment, but with a different mindset and different results. Not to consult the conscience as pointing us to extant moral truths and untruths, but rather to consult our own emotional reactions as authoritative. This is moral skepticism, rejection of the principle that morality exists objectively and universally.
In the postmodern era, moral skepticism has become the dominant way of thinking about moral truth. Most moral skeptics do not deny the existence of morality altogether (though some do) but they typically will say statements of morality are rooted only in instinct, or emotion, perhaps that which is internalized from the cultural climate of the moment.
If a person says a particular act or omission is morally bad because his instinct tells him so, whence that instinct? It comes from the God-given conscience, but that can be corrupted and overridden if one has rejected God. Not that the God-instilled conscience disappears, but that upon ceasing to credit Him for its authoritativeness, other sources will also inform those instincts and corrupt them.
How might that occur? It can occur by internalizing the moral zeitgeist. This is in keeping with the most common form of moral skepticism, which holds that moral values and disvalues are relative to one’s culture. Most people are not moral philosophers explicitly adopting that view, but do so by default. Moral principles are absorbed from the culture, but also the principle that this should be so. Or we might absorb the tenets of the extant moral climate without acknowledging to ourselves that’s what we’re doing. We may imagine ourselves great individualists even as we follow the herd because it satisfies a deeply-felt but poorly-understood psychological need, particularly in this therapeutic age.
The Freudian founding principle of warring inner impulses meant an inward turn to psychology as authoritative, just as we’re ushering out the door the moral realism that had us looking outside ourselves for right and wrong. A century on, this has curdled into a self-care imperative felt across most of society. This means a loss of resilience in the face of emotionally upsetting circumstances, a timorous vulnerability taken now as the new normal. It is much more the case, in this post-Freud, postmodern era, that psychological equanimity drives us more than an abstraction of “doing the right thing,” whatever that may mean in these morally confused times. The moral tenets of the surrounding society in the moment are not just accepted as valid, but insisted upon in reflexive dudgeon.
Reliance for morality on one’s attitude or instinct or emotion is sometimes referred to as “emotivism.” This outlook is traceable not only to the therapeutic imperative, but to more overt philosophical developments made possible by rejecting God, especially logical positivism, which insists nothing can be true without empirical verification.[1] Because right and wrong cannot be empirically verified, according to this view, they don’t describe true facts. Moral statements therefore do not describe the world and so are not “true” or “false” in the way we usually use those words.[2] That means there is no objective right or wrong in the world; only our feelings about this conduct or that event. The emotivist does not employ a paradigm of moral realism. He is an ethical relativist.
Relativism does not mean simply that something is bad relative to situation A but not relative to situation B. That could be true also in a paradigm of moral realism: killing is bad if done in cold blood but not if done in self-defense. Emotivist relativism means something else, therefore. If a statement of morality cannot be true or false, what is it? It has to be a statement of subjective preference only. How do one’s subjective preferences develop, if not by reference to some absolute?
It has to come from the combination of external influences on a person and their own rumination about those influences. The emotivist’s ideas, like those of anyone else, are subject to all kinds of influences and predispositions both cognitive and subconscious. One’s predispositions are the sum of prior influences, but also the product of axiomatic principles like the principle that “good” and “evil” are merely what society says they are in a given moment: a derivation of Narrative.
One would think an “axiomatic principle” necessarily rests on an objective and absolute reality, but an emotivist can hold axiomatic principles without acknowledging them as such. This is the result of confused, emotion-clouded thinking, the angry protection of an inner “identity” that now has the authority people in happier times attributed to the Divine.
Thus, “good” and “evil” are words we attach to things we like and don’t like, respectively, for the emotivist. What we collectively like and don’t like are the subject matter of ideology. If you’re of a disposition to believe there are systemic social forces arrayed against some groups unfairly, you’ll be more sympathetic to Marxism, or the neo-Marxist ideas that share its starting point: feminism, critical race theory, critical legal theory, queer theory, and the like. The disposition will be ever toward transgression and release rather than to formative interdicts manifesting as moral self-restraint.
Once a person is steeped in this emotivist pathology, he finds competition to the hive conscience intolerable. Those who look to an abstract authority above humanity itself are then regarded as dangerous and authoritarian because the abstractions they rely on—revelation, or the objectivity of moral values—are deemed fictional and therefore merely a means of manipulation. They are a dangerous reminder that something may lie beyond the wall of their safe and predictable materialist vision of reality. The reaction is often emotionally over-the-top for this reason. You don’t just disagree, you’re a fascist, shoving your outdated morality down everyone else’s throat. The irony here is that the unacknowledged alternative to moral realism is Narrative that forms the hive conscience which in turn leads to actual fascism and away from the universal moral structure liberalism depended upon.
[1] Discussed by Alisdair MacIntyre in his seminal After Virtue, Notre Dame University Press 1981, it is rooted in the thinking of the early-twentieth-century logical positivists, including most notably A.J. Ayer, in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic. I discussed it in my 2025 book The Discovered Self: Identity in the Therapeutic Age, New English Review Press, p. 19.
[2] We usually use those words in conformance with a realist “correspondence theory” of truth: that truth consists in relation to reality.
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