Perhaps incidents such as the following have always been common, or perhaps they are indicative of a moral climate absurdly in decline due to the amoral world-view of the Left……i.e., a world-view which says that if you are of a certain demographic, you have every right to be angry, every right to lash out.
Today, July 9, The Blaze highlighted an incident that took place in Philadelphia on June 24 in which 7 Black teens, 4 boys and 3 girls, assaulted a perfectly innocent 73 year old Black man, James Lambert, who was walking alone, repeatedly hitting him so viciously with a traffic cone that he would die the next day of his injuries. Camera footage shows one of the teens using his cell phone to photograph his fallen victim. Another image features 2 of the males grinning broadly as they walk away.
Evil has always existed. But the disgusting lack of respect for other people’s property, other people’s rights, indeed other people’s lives, as manifest in the ever increasing occurrence of such random, unprovoked acts of violence as the one cited above, seems to me to be evidence of a culture in decline, a culture from which the moral precepts taken for granted in my youth are now dismissed as just so much White, elitist nonsense.
Example: In a July 7 article posted by the website Common Sense with B., U.C.L.A. professor Joseph Manson says he is leaving his tenured position in the anthropology department prematurely because of the woke madness that has invaded the university. He cites the predicament of his associate Jeffrey Brantingham who has produced models designed to assist law enforcement in predicting the “geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime” only to be vilified by the anthropology department’s Graduate Student’s Association for supporting the “criminalization of Blacks.” Brantingham is a liberal Democrat no doubt concerned with the welfare of those law-abiding, inner city Blacks most affected by the inordinate levels of crime within their communities. Yet his acknowledgement of that statistical reality apparently makes him a racist and, in language typical of the Marxist Left, a proponent of the Capitalist, imperialist agenda. He has been, Manson asserts, more or less ostracized by his fellow “academics,” his professional life turned into a living hell.
The “woke” are immature, ill-informed, self-centered and utterly unfamiliar with what one might consider a genuinely moral perspective. Their sensibility merges perfectly with the Marxist world-view which simplistically consigns all those who have failed to prosper to the ranks of the “oppressed” while ignoring that complex of failings, intellectual and otherwise, which might have contributed to their condition.
The culture of my pre-Woodstock adolescence was implicit with the notion that one must work hard, take school seriously, aspire to the truth and respect other people; indeed that life was a journey fraught with obligations from which no one is exempt. Yet as the advent of wokeness to our educational institutions implies, what makes people feel good about themselves has apparently become our fundamental “moral” principle. Brantingham was vilified at UCLA for engaging in research that might be offensive to some. That his research was valid was apparently irrelevant. A couple in Baltimore recently sued their local school board in response to a report that a significant percent of the city’s high school graduates were barely able to read. Holding them back, failing them, apparently, would have compromised their self-esteem. It was out of the same “woke” concern that Toronto’s School Board, as outlined in a National Post article of May 6, decided to eliminate skill and accomplishment as criteria to entry into various specialized programs in the Arts and Athletics, its random selection process designed to spare the feelings of those who might have been rejected on the basis of their merits.
In this new “woke” world, the Truth is subservient to every man’s need for self-esteem. [Not, of course, if you are a White, heterosexual Male! We are all jerks.] This represents a serious perversion of the traditional Western notion of “morality” as defined by philosophers from Socrates to Sartre who deemed honest self-appraisal as essential. And what is the inevitable result of this new “progressive” cultural regime, a regime from which merit, intelligence, achievement and integrity have been banished? Why it is a group of kids so morally degenerate that they actually chuckle as they walk away from the prone body of an innocent man they have just beaten to death!
Two of the teens responsible for James Lambert’s death have turned themselves in. Their lawyer insists that they are regular kids with no criminal predilections whatsoever. Is this not an indictment of the culture which produced them, an absurd culture which, while preaching unqualified compassion for one’s fellow man, at the same time inveighs against the self-awareness, self-control and respect for others formerly deemed essential to a Moral Mode of Being?
Various “intellectuals” to whom I have already referred suggest that Man is an inherently compassionate Being perverted by his predilection for Reason. It is our Brains that are apparently the cause of most of our problems. History reveals this to be an absurd lie. So also does the contemporary effort to “empower” various demographics without holding them morally accountable. Western Man’s Enlightenment conviction that Reason is an integral aspect of what we are and absolutely essential to our moral progress is demonstrably true. We are neither inherently evil or inherently compassionate. It is our thinking, volitional Self that defines us. How conscious of that fact were the brain-dead simpletons who killed James Lambert?