Secular moral indignation

It is ironic that even while society is making war against boys, American males are extending boyhood well into their adult years. So it is no surprise that college fraternities, those institutionalizations of adult boyish irresponsibility, are embroiled in unusual levels of controversy.

Kappa Delta Rho at Penn State University caused national outrage when fraternity members were discovered to have posted a photo of a nude, intoxicated, unconscious woman on their private Facebook page. But a KDR alumnus defended his brothers anonymously in Philadelphia magazine: “It is shameful to see the self-righteousness that has sprung from the woodworks in response to the alleged Penn State fraternity ‘scandal.’” Everyone does it, he pointed out, and has always done it. “Thus it is laughably pathetic to see the media spring on an occasional incident such as this,” he continued, “especially a media complicit in overturning the same sexual mores and moral standards that for millennia had at least to some extent curbed outright licentiousness.”

But it’s not their frat boy orgiastic abandon that has the cultural elite screaming for their blood. They’re all fine with that. It’s their violation of the young woman’s autonomy that stirred their chiding.

The fraternity could plead that they are victims of the education that is common in our university system. God is barred from campus, admitted to the classroom only to be dissected and debunked. But if there is no God, no Lord of Righteousness in whose image we are made, then every claim of inherent human worth is only groundless assertion.

In addition, evolutionary theory is dogma in the American university. But if we are essentially no different from beasts, just more complicated—with our opposable thumbs and capacity for conceptual thought—then what is morality other than the remnant of an evolutionary advantage that once helped preserve the species? But with no prospect of our extinction in sight, that understanding just frees us from all moral taboos.

Accordingly, everything is only matter in motion. Within that view of the universe, these frat boy Facebook postings—as well as the Rape of Nanking and the Armenian Genocide—have no more moral significance than lightning burning a forest on the ancient American continent. It’s just stuff that happens, matter taking different successive forms. Period.

C.S. Lewis noted in his own day that the intelligentsia spent much of their time debunking moral sentiments as “mere” sentiment, and thus as unreal and unimportant, while at the same time lamenting the character deficiencies of their age.

“In a kind of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Rape on campus? Racist taunts? If education means helping people recognize and work out the implications of a godless, materialist universe, we should not be surprised if people so educated act like beasts.