Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

by Glenn S. Sunshine

This, at least, is the theory. It turns out that many postmoderns will take these basic ideas and develop alternate or extended forms of moral absolutes from them. One of the earliest and most pervasive emerged in the feminist movement. In feminist theory, everything is ultimately about politics, that is, the e xercise of power. In patriarchal systems, power is competitive. It establishes winners and losers, hierarchies, and pecking orders. Because of this, patriarchal societies are prone to violence, war, pollution, and a host of other ills caused by the type of power they wield. Language is part of this mix as well. Since languages have meaning only in the context of a linguistic community, men use language as a means of social control, and specifically to exert power over other races, lower classes, and women. And since the widely accepted Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that “language shapes thought” rather than the other way around, control of language means control of thought and therefore of culture.1 In contrast, matriarchal societies are seen as cooperative, not competitive, and thus do not go to war, do not oppress, do not pollute Mother Earth, and are intrinsically egalitarian. This type of society is much more congenial to the postmodern worldview, since the radical freedom of the individual is not limited in an egalitarian society the way it is in the oppressive patriarchal system. So postmodernism and this form of feminism are natural allies. (The anticompetiti...

So in Oakland, it is perfectly fine to advocate on behalf of homosexual marriage in a public workplace, however offensive that may be to some employees, but it is not OK to advocate for traditional marriage because to do so is offensive to others, who have the right not to be offended.

The irony, of course, is that in the name of preserving individual autonomy and freedom, freedom of speech is limited only to approved messages. In this version of politicized postmodernism, the primary value of personal autonomy and freedom is actually

secondary to a larger political and cultural agenda with its own set ...

At this point Sigmund Freud’s ideas come to full fruition. Freud argued that the basic cause of human unhappiness is society’s repression of our sex drives. If we were to allow our sexuality its full and free expression, our psychological problems would disappear, and we would live fulfilled and satisfied lives. Any constraint on our sex drives, whether imposed externally or through internalizing society’s values and morality, is

simply wrong. This fits in nicely with the emphasis on personal freedom and autonomy in postmodern ethics.

The sexualization of children is also proceeding apace, in everything from clothing styles to “age-appropriate” sex education as early as kindergarten. Psychiatrist and gynecologist Lena Levine, an associate of Margaret Sanger, put it this way: [Our goal] is to be ready as educators and parents to help young people obtain sex satisfaction before marriage. By sanctioning sex before marriage, we will prevent fear and guilt. . . . We must be ready to provide young boys and girls with the best contraception measures available so they will have the necessary means to achieve sexual satisfaction without having to risk possible pregnancy.5 These curricula typically also include material that normalizes homosexual lifestyles, even over parental objections. Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court said in a 2005 case involving exposure to sexual topics in a California public elementary school, “There is no fundamental right

of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children.” He added that “no such specific right can be found in the deep roots of the nation’s history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty.”

Unfortunately, Freud’s idea that sexual freedom would produce happiness does not seem to be working. Despite the sexual revolution, people are not happier or better adjusted. Instead, the quest for personal satisfaction through sex has brought with it skyrocketing rates of STDs and an epidemic of depression among sexually active young women, teenage pregnancies, and out-of-wedlock births and the accompanying single-parent households (which is the single biggest predictor of poverty in the United States).

Throughout history, in every society without exception, marriage in one form or another has had a privileged place as a means to regulate sexuality, so that children would be brought into the world and raised in a stable environment. The notion of homosexual marriage was thus absurd; it violated the very purpose of marriage. Some societies had provisions for temporary same-sex relationships, usually between an adult and an adolescent male, but nothing that allowed for permanency or gave the status of marriage.

What is left is the idea that marriage is built exclusively for personal satisfaction — again, it is all about freedom and autonomy — and companionship. So why not reconfigure marriage to suit whatever arrangements meet my desires? This is the argument for homosexual marriage, as well as for polygamy, polyandry, and polyamory.

appeal of mysticism to those wanting to escape from modernism is based on a simple idea: Since materialism leads logically to nihilism, the solution is to reject materialism. In fact, why not go in precisely the opposite direction and argue that the matter and energy of the physicists are not the prime reality — that instead there is a universal energy of which we are all a part and to which we can connect via meditation or other kinds of psychotechnologies? ALL IS ONE The principal inspiration for this approach is Eastern thought, whether the Zen of the beatniks, the Indian religions of the Beatles, or the Taiji, Qigong, Reiki, or Yoga of the holistic health community.

The problems we face in life come from seeing only the illusion that we are different beings, and not the reality that all is one. Science is thus something of a problem. It tells us about the illusion, not reality — which is why science did not develop in the East despite their remarkable technological achievements. The best minds were devoted not to studying the world but to seeing through the illusion via meditation, trying to perceive ultimate reality through direct personal experience. Through meditation — whether in stillness as in Zen, or in motion as in the martial arts or Yoga — we can shift away from our rational minds, our reliance on sense perception and reason, and pierce the illusions that surround us.

The largest branch of Neo-Paganism is Wicca and its variants. Although some Wiccans (also known as witches) claim that theirs was the first religion of humanity, dating back to the Stone Age, or that it is the descendent of a witch cult that was persecuted during the witch hunts of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the actual roots are much more recent.

One place where this is obvious is in the various forms of goddess spirituality, where more radical versions of feminism merge with new spirituality ideas. The underlying idea is that in the ancient past, goddess worship was the religion of humanity, and people lived in peace and harmony in egalitarian, matrilineal societies. (These were originally described as matriarchal, but the term implies that women were superior to men, which describes a hierarchical system that only came with patriarchy. So the description of the prehistoric state was rewritten as egalitarian but matrilineal, that is, based on tracing family lines through women.)

The obvious place where this hypothesis has become mainstream is in the agitation over human-caused global warming. Whatever the merits of the scientific arguments on this subject, the idea that the Earth has reached or soon will reach a tipping point in its climate is based on the Gaia hypothesis, which is now becoming an important factor in political, economic, and cultural decisions throughout the Western world.

It’s critical to realize that because there is no cultural consensus on meaning or values, global warming is being presented by some political and environmental leaders as a cause that everyone can and should embrace. Cutting the emissions of carbon dioxide is increasingly being described as a universal moral obligation, with harming the environment seen as the one true evil in the world. This is not because the human causes of global warming are beyond question, as even its advocates sometimes admit.

Most climate scientists would not go this far, of course. But for at least one segment of the environmental movement, the ends justify the means. Truth and honesty are irrelevant, because in a postmodern world, they are relative anyway. All that matters is the cause, the right policy, and the effectiveness. The goal is an increase in government control of the economy and restraints on business, free markets, and capitalism, since, as ecofeminism argues, these are the source of environmental problems, rooted ultimately in patriarchy — or in the West’s concept of inalienable rights. In essence, environmentalism has now become the one moral imperative in the postmodern world that goes beyond personal freedom and autonomy.

In short, in the union of postmodernism with the new spirituality, we have come full circle and returned to the worldview of ancient Rome.

Western civilization was the product of the interaction of Roman civilization with Christianity. As Christianity’s influence on the Western worldview has declined, it is no accident that our thinking has become more like that of Rome. And since ideas have consequences, since worldviews inevitably shape culture and even their most extreme implications are eventually put into practice, it is also no accident that people in our culture are acting more and more like the Romans.

Consider our contemporary values, for example. In postmodernism, tolerance — the affirming and celebrating of virtually any exercise of personal autonomy — is the prime value. The unforgivable sin is being judgmental, that is, believing that an activity or lifestyle choice that does not hurt another person is wrong, immoral, or sinful. A second related unforgivable sin is claiming that what you believe is objectively true and thus binding on another person. A person who holds these beliefs is considered to be bigoted, narrow-minded, and arrogant, just as was true in ancient Rome.

Personal freedom no longer extends to freedom of speech or religion in these cases. The government feels justified in silencing speech and curtailing religious ideas or texts it considers dangerous, antisocial, or intolerant.

Speaking of sexuality, as was true for Roman citizens, we too live in a sex-saturated society — one that has a decidedly antinatal outlook. Contraception is seen as the solution to all sexual problems, from unwanted pregnancies to STDs.

Nonreproductive sexual activity has become normalized, and family sizes are shrinking. In Europe, the native ethnic populations in every major country are reproducing at below the replacement rate. The United States is barely keeping up with the replacement rate — and we are doing better than the Europeans largely because of immigrants, who have more children than people born and raised in America.

Social Security is set up exactly like a Ponzi scheme, an illegal con game that relies on a constantly expanding base on the bottom to pay off the people on the top. If Social Security were run by anyone other than the government, its practice would be illegal. But birthrates have declined sharply — Generation X is less than half the size of the Baby Boomers. Social Security will need to be either eliminated or totally transformed to avoid driving the federal government into bankruptcy. And Medicare is in even worse shape.

This situation of low birthrates and immigration is a direct parallel to the demographic situation of the Roman Empire. And just as Rome was gradually transformed (and then collapsed) with the influx of immigrants, most of whom simply wanted to get the benefits of Roman society and had no intention of destroying it, so too we can expect the transformation of European and American societies through the same process.

Since the postmodern moral imperative is personal freedom and autonomy, people have increasingly seen personal

satisfaction as the primary goal in marriage, with children coming much farther down the list of priorities — or even seen as a hindrance to personal fulfillment. Children are not viewed as important for having a successful marriage or family, and thus families increasingly are trying to avoid pregnancy through contraception — following the pattern of Rome yet again.

And when unwanted pregnancies occur, abortion is always an option. If sex is about personal satisfaction, then what else should you do with unwanted pregnancies? To suggest that the baby should be carried to term, even if only to put him or her up for adoption, violates the personal freedom and autonomy of the woman — though statistics indicate that a very high percentage of abortions are done at the insistence of men, and very few in cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. (In fact, the National Organization for Women originally opposed legalized abortion because they thought it would give men the ability to take advantage of women and not have to deal with the consequences, a fear supported by experience.) Tens of millions of abortions have been performed in the United States since they were legalized, eliminating enough of the population to have made up for much of the projected shortfall in Social Security taxes over the next decades. Approximately one-third of the current generation of college students were aborted.