Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand (2 page)

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Authors: Mike S. Adams

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In a nutshell, you are acting a lot like I acted when I carried the banner of progressivism, and that is why I say I lack the moral authority to look down on you. But I hope I can warn you.
Zach, you are so bright and have so much potential that I think it’s a shame you are so angry at such a young age. I also think it’s a shame because I know that so much of your anger stems from misinformation. That is why I plan to (at least try to) do something about it.
After the end of this semester, I will be driving out to Colorado to teach at Summit Ministries. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to write to you periodically over the summer to share some of what I learned on my journey from being a progressive atheist to becoming a conservative Christian.
Meanwhile, I’ll see you in class. Before I forget, congratulations on getting the highest score on our last test. Finals will be here before you know it—good luck on your exams!
LETTER 2
 
How Being for Equality Makes You Better than Other People
 
Greetings from Manitou Springs, Colorado, Zach.
The weather outside does not bode well for the global warming apologist. It is 37 degrees here in Colorado in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of May. The light rain is expected to turn into snow this afternoon. So it’s a good time to sit down at the computer and do some writing.
Congratulations on finishing CRM 425 with flying colors. I really appreciated you stopping by my office to discuss the letter I sent you at the end of the semester. This will be the first installment in the correspondence that I promised you this summer.
I’d like to use this letter to discuss a topic I have already broached with you. The comment you made—suggesting some similarities between Glenn Beck and Charles Manson—has been weighing on my mind.
I want you to know that your comment, which trivialized Manson’s moral culpability, was actually not the worst comment I’ve ever heard about Charles Manson. That honor goes to a remark by a professor I once heard characterize Manson as a “poor little guy who got railroaded by the system.”
Of course, Zach, you’ve heard the basic facts of the Manson case; and you know him to be guiltier than—for lack of a better term—sin. The suggestion that Manson is innocent is one of the most careless I’ve ever heard. Let me be blunt. It takes a Ph.D. to be brash enough to say something like that.
Make no mistake about it—your idea about Charles Manson and Glenn Beck was bad. But not all ideas are equally bad. There is a serious movement in the academy—ironically, a movement obsessed with equality in all areas of life, economically, culturally, and morally—that is much worse than the cheap shot you took in class. It’s that ideology that the professor was expressing when he called Manson a “poor little guy.” You’ve heard of Marxist economics, but you may not have heard about the approach to morality that tends to go along with it.
In economics, Marxism is a proven disaster. According to Marx, we should take from each person according to his ability and give to each person according to his need. I once illustrated the disastrous consequences of that economic policy in a column I wrote, entitled “My New Spread the Wealth Grading Policy.”
I suggested that people who made an “A” on the first test really did not need the four grade points associated with a grade of “A,” since it only takes a 2.0 average to graduate. So my column suggested that those with an “A” should give a grade point away to students making an “F” in order to facilitate a more equal grade distribution—one with just three levels: “B”, “C”, and “D.”
My column also suggested that additional modifications could be made after the second exam. I specifically proposed taking a grade point away from those with a “B” test average and giving that point to those with a “D” average. That would mean everyone would have a grade of “C,” which is worth the two grade points everyone needs to average in order to graduate.
Any undergraduate is capable of figuring out the point of my satire. If every student were guaranteed the exact same outcome, no student would put forth any kind of effort on class assignments or tests. Put simply, “My New Spread the Wealth Grading Policy” would destroy academic productivity and create a shoddy and embarrassing academic work product. Academic standards would plummet under such a system.
Socialism, of course, would do exactly the same thing to our economy. If every worker is guaranteed the exact same outcome—via the redistribution of wealth—then no worker will put forth a strong effort on the job. The average standard of living for the nation as a whole will plummet—or, rather, actually has plummeted wherever Marxist economics has been tried.
As a conservative, I take a far different approach to the subject of equality. I believe that our only obligation is to provide people with equal opportunity. We are not obliged to guarantee everyone an equal outcome. We cannot do so. Nor should we even try.
This is good news for you, Zach. You are much brighter than the average student. You are also much more motivated. You will soar to far greater heights if you are merely given the opportunity.
It sounds harsh to say that Marxism is for the lazy and untalented. But that is what I believe. Who else would consider mediocrity to be a satisfactory outcome?
Ironically, equality-loving socialists obviously think they’re morally superior to capitalists. Which is odd, because isn’t equality the whole point? Even odder, the people who call themselves Marxists are usually the same people who subscribe to cultural and moral relativism. In theory, they don’t think there are any universal moral standards to judge other people by.
Just as they want economic equality, they want everyone to be on an equal moral plane. They want to believe that all people are morally equal—for example, that a brutal murderer such as Charles Manson is not particularly guilty. They dub anyone who fails to adopt their relativist views as “ethnocentric.”
I once espoused this “all people and all cultures are equal” mentality. But my moral relativism came to an abrupt end one afternoon when I spent a few hours in an Ecuadorian prison. One day, in another letter, I’ll tell you the whole story of how that visit changed my whole outlook on life. But right now I want to tell you the story of how an editor with an enlightened, progressive attitude didn’t want me to tell that original story.
I wrote an article about that prison visit. But when I submitted the article to a human rights journal, it was nearly rejected by the editor. Two parts of the article offended her. The first was where I acknowledged that the work of Chuck Colson had piqued my own interest in prison conditions in Third World countries. The second was where I complained that the food in the prison had a very bad smell.
Her first issue with the article is of little interest. It would appear that the editor harbored some anti-Christian bigotry, which is not uncommon. But her second complaint is of greater interest, and more thought is required to dissect it.
When the editor told me that it wasn’t nice to judge the foods of other cultures—including the rotten meat I saw being boiled in order to be fed to the prisoners at that Ecuadoran prison—she was, of course, implicitly accusing me of ethnocentrism, which is defined as judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture.
Notice that the accusation of ethnocentrism is self-defeating because it, too, is a form of ethnocentrism. You cannot accuse someone of ethnocentrism without forcing your own standards upon them—standards they do not share. Let me explain.
Ethnocentrism is a concept really only taught within the culture of sociology and anthropology departments at secular universities. The idea that you should not judge other cultures is itself a judgment, and the number of people who subscribe to it make up a very small percentage of the people on this planet. But they demand that we all live by their non-judgmental worldview, which flourishes only in certain departments of elite Western universities, even though that worldview really imposes harsh judgments on others outside their own culture.
Logic aside, there is also a serious practical reason to avoid falling into the trap of cultural relativism—it renders one completely incapable of addressing the problem of evil. It may seem chic to refrain from judging other cultures when it comes to something trivial like tastes in food or fashion. But what about something like genocide?
Are we really prepared to say that our culture today is not superior to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Does anyone consider such a view to be chic?
And is it really morally sophisticated to pretend that you don’t notice that the rotten meat being fed to prisoners in a hellhole of a prison smells badly? Or, coming closer to home, that you don’t see any difference between a talk show host whose politics you don’t agree with, and a man responsible for several gruesome murders?
We know from history that any society foolish enough to experiment with Marxism will find that the quest for equality results in a lower standard of living for all. Similarly, any society foolish enough to embrace cultural relativism will find that the quest for equality results in a lower overall standard of morality.
We all lose something when we try to place all individuals on an equal plane by embracing a general philosophy of moral relativism—or of moral equivalence, as progressives so often do in the political realm. When a progressive does something wrong, his fellow progressives blandly defend him by pointing out the flaws of the guys on the other side. If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
There was a reason why that professor said Charles Manson was a “poor little guy who got railroaded by the system.” The professor is a political liberal who bought into the free-love philosophy of the 1960s. What Manson and the members of his hippie “Family” did makes crystal clear what a failure and a sham that whole free-love movement became. The youths of the 1960s eventually proved themselves to be the worst generation this nation has ever produced.
Manson is a vicious murderer who induced others to murder by preying upon their fears. It is both silly and wrong to call him innocent. It is also silly to compare him to Glenn Beck—a man who, whatever his flaws, has never murdered anyone.
Moral relativism fails logically. But it’s very useful psychologically—for those who want to escape the possibility of ever feeling guilty, so that they may do as they please, whenever they please. I found moral relativism very convenient for this purpose when I was sleeping around and doing drugs.
But moral relativism and moral equivalence don’t just help you feel equal to other, better people when actually you ought to feel bad about yourself. They also help you feel superior when, actually, you ought to feel quite ordinary. Why is it so completely typical for college students (and professors) who have adopted the Marxist program of economic equality—and the moral relativism that tends to go with it—to feel so smugly superior? Somehow their new political stand for equality makes them feel like they’re better than other people—better than the families who are sending them to college, better than ordinary Americans, and, especially, better than Tea Party members, Rush Limbaugh fans, and people who watch Glenn Beck.
LETTER 3
 
“The Trees”
 
Zach,
Speaking of people to whom leftists feel smugly superior, I’m going to write you today about Ayn Rand. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her books.
After escaping from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Rand became a famous American playwright, philosopher, and novelist. She wrote many books, three of which I would urge you to read. The first,
We the Living,
based on her youth in early Soviet Russia, is a lot like Orwell’s
1984.
The second,
The Fountainhead,
is a longer novel expounding her philosophy, which is known as objectivism. The third,
Atlas Shrugged,
is her most famous work and includes the most complete explanation of her views on economics and morality.
As a Christian, I reject a good bit of what Ayn Rand has to say. Because she doesn’t take the fall of man into account, I don’t think she has a complete explanation for why capitalism works better than socialism or communism.
But Rand defends capitalism eloquently by pointing out a key flaw in socialism, and I am not at all uncomfortable recommending her books. (In fact, I have made the case for reading books whose messages I completely reject, including the original works of Marx and of Hitler. There is much to be learned from studying the works of those with whom you disagree—and much to be missed by ignoring them.)
It could take you several weeks to read those three books. Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to a song that was written by a rock musician influenced by Ayn Rand. The artist’s name is Neil Peart—a member of the band Rush. Neil is arguably the greatest rock and roll drummer who has ever lived. He is also one of the greatest songwriters.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, “The Trees” was one of my favorite songs. I didn’t know at the time that the song was a stinging indictment of socialism and communism inspired by Neil’s reading of Ayn Rand novels. It’s literally a song about trees—maples who “want more sunlight” and oaks who “ignore their pleas.”

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