BC Religious Leader Condones ‘Nihilism, American Style’

When Prof. Alan Wolfe was chosen to head a new religion center at Boston College in 1999, known as the “Center for the Study of Religion and American Public Life,” MassNews did an interview with him in our July 1999 issue.

His appointment was a surprise to many because they questioned the depth of his religious views and the sincerity of his “conservative” politics.

For example, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, director of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York, told MassNews: “Wolfe’s a liberal in the old-fashioned sense, which is a very honorable thing to be. But he is very eager to embrace wisdom that is generally viewed as conservative, while making it clear that he’s not selling out to the ‘right wing.’”

William Donohue, a sociologist and president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told MassNews that Boston College’s choice of Wolfe, a sociologist from Boston University, seemed odd.

“It is interesting that someone who looks somewhat askance at the expression of religious views in American public life would be chosen to head this center,” said Donohue.

Neuhaus said he was surprised that Wolfe would be running the new religion center because he believed, along with many conservatives and particularly Catholic intellectuals, that Wolfe presents a regard for religion that is superficial.

Wolfe made clear his distance from conservative ideas in an article in the June 7, 1999, New Republic, in which he argued that “conservatism is an impossible idea, at least for the twentieth century.”

Alan Wolfe continues his attack on cultural conservatism as he reassures Americans that their moral relativism is nothing to worry about.

“The old adage that America is a free country has, at last, come true, for Americans have come to accept the relevance of individual freedom, not only in their economic and political life, but in their moral life as well,” he says in his latest book, Moral Freedom.

In his previous book, One Nation After All, Wolfe concluded that there was no “culture war” in America, because most Americans had accepted moral relativism. Americans live by “morality writ small,” he said.

“Reluctant to impose their values on others, they are committed to tolerance to such an extent that they have either given up on finding timeless morality or would be unwilling to bring its principles to earth if, by chance, they came across it.”

Wolfe stresses that there is a widespread consensus on this new morality. “There is a ‘moral majority’ in America,” he chastens conservatives. “It just happens to be one that wants to make up its own mind.”

The American people have chosen to reject moral authority and allow each individual to define right and wrong for himself. “The consumer sovereignty that dominates our economy comes to influence our morality,” Wolfe says.

His book describes the complete libertarianism of the future. “Americans borrow from the left its emphasis on the need to respect individual rights but shun its emphasis on government intervention, while they take from the right its belief in freedom and ignore its calls for a moral revival,” Wolfe concludes.

Wolfe denies that traditional Christians or Jews have any significant clash with secular humanism. All Americans, he says, share a general idea of religion. His new book emphasizes “how difficult it is to group people in such a way that puts devotion to God over here and the primacy of the self over there.” Thus, he equates transvestites and sadomasochists in San Francisco with evangelical Christians: The homosexuals want to get married (showing their moral traditionalism) and the Christians believe that they can choose Jesus (showing their individualism). While these homosexuals reject the ideas of sin, redemption, and Christ, they don’t “reject religion and its ability to make sense out of the world’s mysteries.”

Religion Redefined to ‘Fit’

As he noted in his last book, “Middle-class Americans redefine religion to make it more suited to their tastes.” Thus, the worldview of San Francisco sadomasochists is as much a “religion” as that of traditional Jews or Christians. Religion, like morality, is something that everyone makes up for himself. “Morality at the beginning of the 21st century is best approached the way William James treated religion at the beginning of the 20th century,” Wolfe says. Morality should not be treated “as if its commandments were etched in stone, commanding obedience.” We ought to conclude, as James did, that “the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”

Wolfe reassures Americans that their nihilism is nothing to worry about and reinforces the argument that there is no culture war. He reiterates that people have always regarded their own age as morally deficient. “Every generation finds the morality of previous generations better than its own,” he says. On the particular virtue of loyalty, he claims “critics have been bemoaning the lack of loyalty since America was founded.”

“[T]he United States was created through a singular act of disloyalty,” Wolfe writes. He goes on to describe the lack of loyalty displayed by corporations to their customers and employees, and customer and employee disloyalty to their corporations. He then goes on to discuss divorce. Wolfe again conflates and confuses economic morality with personal morality. Blaming capitalism for the new view of marriage, Wolfe argues that, “Silicon Valley has made a religion out of opportunity, and it’s this same belief in opportunity that shapes how Americans view marital commitments in other places.” But when Macy’s tries to attract a customer away from Gimbel’s, this is not the same as a man trying to seduce another man’s wife.

But the correlation between economic freedom and “moral freedom” is really the reverse. America had a freer economy in the Victorian age, when religion and morality were strict and demanding. “Moral freedom” evolved in the 20th century with the American “mixed economy.” But Wolfe says, “America is a business civilization,” as if it were still the 1920s.

Ultimately, as with religion and morality in general, “loyalty has not disappeared in America. Instead, Americans are called upon to determine for themselves what loyalty means.”

Ben Franklin rejected the theology of Puritanism but kept its moral precepts because they helped in the acquisition of wealth. Today’s vestiges of Victorianism are similarly retained for the sake of consumption. “Self-discipline, even in its strictest incarnations, has always been a means to another end, not an end in itself.” But it makes a profound difference if the end is eternal salvation or temporal pleasure. “Americans are actively redefining the Protestant ethic to bring it into accord with the way they believe life should be led.” They are abandoning and repudiating it and descending into nihilism, and Wolfe is helping them along by reassuring them that they are not.

No ‘Demanding’ Tests

“Americans are not going to lead 21st century lives based on 18th and 19th century moral ideals, “ he says. “They will not subject themselves to severe and demanding tests of character.... But that does not mean that the morality by which people live now makes them soft. It means only that the new morality is different....”

Different, but not new. “Philosophically speaking, Americans are consequentialists: they opt for honesty when the consequences of dishonesty get out of hand.” The new American morality is a retread of the old philosophical schools of pragmatism, utilitarianism, nominalism, and sophism-as William James himself said about pragmatism. In religious terms, as Whittaker Chambers remarked of communism, “It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’”

Wolfe is almost never troubled by what he describes, and it is hard not to see him as an apologist for contemporary American relativism. Though he calls it “the impossible idea that defines the way we live now,” he sounds confident that Americans can do what nobody else in history has ever done – hold a society together without any shared morality.

He observes that “never have so many people been so free of moral constraint as contemporary Americans.” But he does not consider some of the obviously frightening results of such thinking. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe and the mystery of human life,” the Supreme Court declared in 1992 when it upheld the right to abortion-on-demand.

Wolfe is trying to explain what Alan Bloom called “nihilism, American style.” American intellectuals have absorbed the continental philosophy whose origins lie in Nietzsche. But while Germany ended up with Hitler, Americans believe that they can have “nihilism with a happy ending.” Wolfe describes what Bloom called “the new American life-style... a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”

Massachusetts’ first governor, John Winthrop, defined “moral liberty” in a famous speech to the General Court in 1645. “This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to do that only which is good, just, and honest.” He contrasted this type of liberty to “natural liberty,” which is “liberty to do what he [desires]; it is a liberty to [do] evil as well as to [do]good.” For centuries Western man and Americans understood this distinction between liberty and license.

Weekly Standard editor David Brooks concluded, “Many readers will take a look at what Wolfe calls Moral Freedom, and they will decide it’s really Moral Narcissism.” He’s right. We ought to recognize that Wolfe’s “moral freedom” is actually John Winthrop’s “license,” and heed the former governor’s admonition that, “This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this authority makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentia deteriores.”

Paul Moreno, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College. He was the first editor of MassNews.

Alan Wolfe’s New Book Says We’ve Changed ‘Moral Freedom’ into ‘Moral License’

Religion Redefined to ‘Fit’

No ‘Demanding’ Tests

Alan Wolfe’s New Book Says We’ve Changed ‘Moral Freedom’
into ‘Moral License’