WHAT IS THE MILLENIALS' MORALITY?
Written by Vladimir Moss
WHAT IS THE MILLENIALS' MORALITY?
The world is moving astonishingly fast, and not least in the realm of morality. Since 2000 at the latest, we have seen a new morality gaining the upper hand in the West, which we may call “the millennial morality”. The millennial generation of young (very young) people appears to be at ease with it: those born in earlier generations – much less so. It is surprisingly difficult to define this new morality – it is such a mass of contradictions! Let us explore it a little, beginning in the sphere of sexuality.
Now it is customary to see the West as hedonistic, and it certainly is. However, “pure” hedonism probably reached its peak in the 1960s and in the following decades. “The Swinging Sixties” has a lot to answer for. Everything was permitted – and those who still claimed that not everything was permitted were shouted down as “old fogies”. The older generation that still clung on to the remnants of Christian morality were terrified of being seen to be old-fashioned. So they, too, indulged – if with feelings of guilt no longer felt by their children. Since they, too, were indulging, they were hardly in a position to rebuke their children for indulging. In any case, even for those who remained faithful to their husbands and wives, “judgementalism” was out: “love” was in… “All you need is love,” sang John Lennon – and even the older generation began to believe it. Using this criterion, certain taboos were removed: against sex before marriage, against nudity and overt sexuality in films and theatre, against contraception and abortion.
The taboo on homosexuality took longer to remove. And not surprisingly; for unnatural sex feels unnatural to normal people; it is a natural object of disgust. But as more and more famous people “came out” or were “outed”, the fury against “homophobia” rose higher and higher. When the AIDS epidemic began to cut down the homosexual “community”, famous actors and actresses publicly showed their sympathy for AIDS sufferers, and still more publicly opened their wallets for the scientific attempt to find a cure. It was forbidden to see in this epidemic the judgement of God on sinners – God forbid! And even the obvious threat to public health was played down – the most that public authorities would do was exhort people to have “safe sex”. But if they did not, they were not punished…
However, no society, even the most sinful, can live without a moral code: almost as strong as the sexual impulse is the desire to appear “good”. So a new morality was devised. All sex, natural and unnatural, was good, BUT it had to be between consenting adults. Fornication (to those who understood what that word meant) was good, BUT adultery was wrong. The basis for this way of thinking is: what two people do with each other in private is their business, provided no pain to either person or to a third person is involved. Non-consensual sex (rape) and adultery do involve pain, so they are wrong.
The problem is: a large proportion of the human race commits adultery... The pain this causes can perhaps be assuaged, if not completely removed, by a very liberal approach to divorce and the commitments of marriage in general. Nevertheless, the pain caused by adultery, or by unfaithfulness in unmarried couples, remains a major problem for the new morality. Human beings become so foolishly attached to each other! When will they learn to keep their emotions and jealousies out of their sexual lives!
Of course, the teaching that sexuality is a purely biological function can go some way to solving this problem. Open marriages, legitimized prostitution and online pornography from an early age also “help”. Recently, however, scientists have begun to understand how these practices desensitize human beings to the ineluctably personal nature of sexual relations, causing huge problems later in life for those brought up in this way.
One of the biggest problems that has emerged is paedophilia on a vast scale. Now this, as we have seen, is counter even to the hedonist morality, which assumes – rightly, of course - that sex with children cannot be consensual. So a ban on paedophilia remains one of the red lines that modern society continues to draw. And yet even this taboo appears to be weakening: Some paedophiles argue that even paedophilia can be “loving” and “consensual”, especially if preceded by sensitive “grooming”. Others have argued that it is contradictory to allow and even “celebrate” homosexuality while condemning homosexual relations with an underage child – and they point to the practice of Ancient Greece where such liaisons were quite normal.
Even more harmful for children is the LGBT revolution and especially the fashion for transgenderism. This is causing real psychological harm to many children, who are encouraged to change sex, or be sexless: they don’t know who they are any longer. So we have the spectacle of lesbian couples bringing up a little boy and then dressing him as a girl…
Just recently, some brave people have been sounding the alarm about this, too. For a good 70% of people who have changed gender regret it later, and seek to go back to their original gender. Even the founder of transgender surgery at John Hopkins university is renouncing the practice, declaring that the desire to change sex is a mental illness…
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And now among the millenials a remarkable about-face is taking place. Having been brought up to welcome even the most extreme perversities, they are taking umbrage at the slightest sexual transgression. Thus just recently the British Minister of Defence was forced to resign because years ago he made a sexist comment to a fellow minister of a kind that was (and probably still is) commonplace in pubs and parties throughout the land. The newly prudish press seized on it and forced his resignation, although he was well-respected in the armed forces...
So extremes of perversity combined with extreme prudishness and the destruction of the lives of men for an offence that would have been counted trivial not long ago… Also: permission to do anything if it doesn’t harm others combined with extreme intolerance of dissenting opinions (especially if expressed by white heterosexual men). How are we to explain these contradictions?
First we must understand that complete freedom has never been, and never will be, even a remote possibility in human society. And this not only because it destroys society in the end: it also destroys the individual, going against human nature. For man being made in the image of God will always have a moral sense, a feeling that some things are right and others wrong. If he permits himself to do something that he considers right, then he will attempt to deny himself (and even more, others) in something else that he considers wrong. And the more license and perversity he practices, the more strongly he will seek something to condemn and feel self-righteous about: complete amorality (as opposed to immorality) is impossible.
The philosophy of human rights – that “nonsense on stilts”, as Jeremy Bentham called it – declares that in effect everything that human beings want they have a right to have. But in order to accommodate the ineluctably moral nature of human nature, the human rightists have to supplement their (constantly changing and expanding) list of human rights with an equally impressive list of human wrongs. If liberalism was strong on rights, Marxism was strong on wrongs. And Cultural Marxism has become stronger than both.
Thus old-fashioned Marxism derived its emotional power from fury at the wrongs of the non-labouring classes. These now had to be overthrown or destroyed… This soon mutated into fury at the wrongs of the white, colonialist nations. These now had to grovel before their former slaves, repent of the sins of their ancestors, and provide unlimited access to migration and all the benefits of civilized society… This is turn mutated into fury at the wrongs of the oppressive, male half of human society. All men now had to feel inferior to the newly empowered women, satisfy their every whim, emasculate themselves, renounce their patriarchal rights to have children (if their women want to abort them) – best of all, become women themselves! And if some old-fashioned feminist like Germaine Greer thinks that a man who has undergone a sex-change operation still remains a man in essence, then the students whom she is teaching must rise up against her, revile her, ostracize her, banish her, condemn her to the outer darkness reserved for all pre-millenial thinkers! So the word has come to pass: “As for My people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them.” (Isaiah 3.12).
Nor will this oppression be any milder than previous oppressions; the spirit of the revolution is cruel in all its metamorphoses. One only has to look at the wild fury and extreme leftism of the younger generation of voters in Britain and America – the supporters of Jeremy Corbin, on the one hand, and Bernie Sanders and “Antifa” on the other – to see that the revolution is on the verge of triumphing even in the former bastions of liberalism. As Elder Ignaty of Harbin said: “What began in Russia will end in America…”
October 22 / November 4, 2017.
Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God.
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