One of the more obvious facets of the West, particularly since the end of the Second World War, is just how thorough the Left’s victories have been. Since 1945, almost everything the Left has sought after has come to fruition, and the vast majority of that has been so mainstreamed that almost no one, outside the Dissident Right, thinks much of it. Positions that were once considered Center-Left, or even Far Left, in 1945 have become (fake) rightwing positions of today. In 1945, if a man thought the police should stop raiding homosexual bars, he would have been considered a lefty (probably a communist). However, this would be a conservative position today.
There is more going on here than simply a matter of societies organically drifting to the Left. Although this happened in the West, there is nothing to suggest that this was a natural process; for the vast majority of human history, societies have been stable and do not radically change their fundamental moral outlook. What a given society considers abhorrent in one year would still generally be viewed as detestable a century later. The moral climate of the West in 1945 was closer to what it was in 1865, not what it is in 2022. Furthermore, the pace of the Left’s victories has been rapidly increasing. In 1967, the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage. But nearly 30 years later, in the early to mid-1990s, the majority of Americans still opposed it, and even into the late 2000s it was still very much regarded as taboo (at least where I come from). Contrast this to the moral shift since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015 – opposing it can cost someone their job now and it has not even been a decade since it was legalized. It has not even been 15 years since the state of California could vote for both Obama and ban gay marriage, but in the span of less than a child’s education from kindergarten to college graduation there has been a complete moral revolution. And, the transgender issue has come into the mainstream at an even more high-speed pace. While gay marriage was deeply unpopular, there was at least a public debate about it in the 1990s and 2000s. Even as recently as 2010, there was no public debate on transgender people, almost everyone knew they were off their rockers. Now, those who oppose “ trans treatments” for children are routinely vilified.
The reason why we have witnessed such a dramatic shift is due to the West’s change in its moral reasoning since 1945. To put it simply – since the end of World War II, the West’s understanding of morality has been grounded in the concept of “do no harm,” and this has given the Left a distinct advantage in imposing its values on the culture. Now, it should go without saying that “not doing harm” is important and we should try to avoid harming people, generally speaking. The problem with this mode of reasoning is that its central belief is not the primary purpose of morality; and by understanding morality in this way, we are ignoring immoral behavior in situations whereby someone is clearly harmed. Of course, Aristotle is correct, any virtue taken to its excesses becomes a vice. Being thrifty is good, being a miser is not. Likewise, I hold the virtue of loyalty in particularly high esteem, but this can be taken too far. As an example, if “loyalty” is used to justify covering up a horrific crime because the perpetrator is a family member or friend. And when a society holds its entire understanding of morality on one value alone, that value is sure to be taken to its extremes, as we are experiencing with the “do no harm” system.
This is why the Left frequently attacks traditional morality by appealing to the “do no harm” principle, or as it is more commonly framed, “the victimless crime.” Since homosexuals just wanted to be left alone, their behavior should be ignored (now encouraged) by society (no harm, no victim); after all, as we were told, there was no victim involved with their bedroom activities. Pornography and contraception were justified largely the same way. The Left convinced the masses that there was no victim, and thus no crime. To what extent there really was no victim regarding sodomy, porn, and the pill is beside the point, this is the rhetoric the Left utilized, and they had a great number of people who accepted it because this is how their moral framework operated.
With this framework in mind, we can more easily understand why the Left’s victories became more frequent year after year. The last two generations of the West that were raised on the old moral order, the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation, are now advanced in years. The Greatest Generation is all but gone and the Silent Generation is rapidly going out the door- the youngest of them will be 80 in 2025. Thus, each year more people pass away that were raised within a moral framework whereby morality consisted of more than just “do no harm.” The Boomers were the first generation to be indoctrinated in the new moral order, but their parents were from the old moral system, and the Boomers were not fully conditioned to the new morality. Generation X and the Millennials grew up with the “do no harm” principle, but at least they were able to get a taste of the old values via their grandparents. However, for Generation Z, the “do no harm” morality is all they know. Remember, the revolutionaries of Woodstock now have grandchildren in college.
I also think this is why abortion, unlike almost every other issue the Left forced on the West, has stubbornly refused to go away. Indeed, many leftists have expressed bewilderment as to why they could never make the opposition to infanticide disappear. The answer lies in the fact that it is difficult for people to consider abortion a “victimless crime,” hence why the euphemism “a clump of cells” is so important to the Left. They know they have to deny that there is a victim. Ironically, this very same moral order that the Left created has been (and is currently) used against them on abortion. It is this impulse as to why there is a very good chance the transexual issue, especially how it relates to children and biological men competing against women in sports, won’t go away, either. Most people cannot suspend their disbelief that a child being shot full of drugs or a biological man dominating female swim teams is not actually causing some degree of harm.
Eventually, this system must come down, and it will fall by the weight of its own excesses. We are already watching the early signs of this. One reason the “do no harm” conception of morality had so much appeal is because it was supposed to be a clear (and easy) way to end moral dilemmas, moral questions could be answered objectively and scientifically. In reality, things are not that simple. As I have stated before, I reject the understanding that morality can be reduced to “do no harm.” But, let’s say, I accept it for the following hypothetical: in the case of someone fired from their job, and deprived of their livelihood, for their political views, I think serious harm has been caused. However, some cat lady would disagree and would claim that the greater harm would be to the co-worker, from a “marginalized community,” who is forced to work with a mean bigot. The same can be said for abortion or transgender surgery for children. Contra what was promised, a morality centered on “do no harm” does not produce clear and easy results. “Do no harm” is failing in the very department it was supposed to deliver the most.
Furthermore, for many of the morality actions (and consequences) we were told there was no harm done, it turns out that was a lie. Take pornography, for example. Now, I am not naive enough to suggest that there was no pornography a few decades ago. It has always existed and will be with us until the Second Coming. Regardless, consider how access to pornography has changed with each generation:
- Greatest and Silent: pornography is illegal, those who partake in it might be arrested.
- Boomer: pornography is legal, but generally playing in neighborhood theaters with high crime rates.
- Generation X: someone might see you sneaking behind the curtain at the local video store.
- Millennial: the family’s only computer is in a shared room, the chance of getting caught is high.
- Generation Z: the most depraved porn imaginable is now freely available on the phone.
We now have a generation that has been exposed to pornography all their lives, and very few can argue with a straight face this has not caused massive societal problems. We were told that there was no victim, but now we have victims. A generation of them, in fact.
To some extent, even the Left is coming to terms with this. In his The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out six dimensions by which humans come to moral decisions – harm, fairness, authority, liberty, loyalty, and purity. Liberals rely heavily on harm, followed distantly by liberty, and even further away is fairness. All the other moral dimensions fall far behind. With the Woke, they value harm (i.e., the “do no harm” doctrine), fairness, and purity, with purity being understood as that there are some things that should not be said, which explains the kicking and screaming regarding thoughtcrime and “hate speech.” They are realizing that there must be more to the new morality.
There is good news, though. As the destruction of the “do no harm” moral framework becomes more and more apparent, something new must take its place. This is where the Right has an advantage. While liberals (2012 liberals, when the book was written) rely primarily on “harm” for their moral code, conservatives are actually good at balancing each moral dimension. The Woke simply take all the excesses of the “do no harm” mindset and add a heavy dose of purity spiraling. The Right can offer something else – an understanding of morality, one rooted in history, that understands that any virtue can become a vice if taken to extremes. And, the Right must be willing to make this case.
The Left has had an almost 80-year span of unprecedented victories and it’s because they were able to convince society to play by their rules. The average person may have found the idea of homosexual marriage to be disgusting in 1990, but the post-1945 morality made its eventual acceptance inevitable. As long as the Left could deny that there was a victim, or even better, say that the real harm was being caused by the old order, they would win. But these excesses are becoming more and more recognizable by the day (degenerate pride parades and grooming scandals, as examples), and it is clear that while not doing harm is important, it is not and cannot be the sole, or even primary, arbitrator of morality. The Right, by presenting a more robust moral framework that understands restraint and downstream consequences, can present effective solutions and spare the damage that has been caused by the “do no harm” morality.
