Morals Charge.("The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis")

The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, by Robert P. George (ISI, 403 pp., $24.95)

To think reasonably is to think morally, said Samuel Johnson, for whom it was self-evident that human life is predicated on a moral structure. Not so in today's America, where moral relativism and "do your own thing" have long been fashionable. Of course, the proponents of moral relativism actually do count on some underlying principles to prevent disorder (more of this later), but they like to keep these principles vague and amorphous, the better to serve their own ends. Allegedly make some off-color remarks to a female subordinate, and you will be branded a serious criminal and face an inquisitorial firestorm -- if, that is, you are a Republican. If you are a Democrat, on the other hand, you can fool around with young interns, feel up a woman job-seeker, be credibly accused of rape on a national news program, and lie under oath: It all becomes either a private matter, of interest only to an obsessed, sexually repressed puritan, or simply irrelevant. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is frequently revived, lest we ever forget the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, but genuine contemporary witch hunts, in which human beings have suffered long prison terms owing to fantastical accusations of sex crimes elicited from children by ideologically motivated prosecutors, attract little notice.

Such is the moral anarchy of our supposedly enlightened age, in which even conservative-leaning writers seem addled by moral relativism. In his otherwise lively, interesting, and useful book Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks presents the differences in past and present behavioral codes as a wash. We don't live in an amoral age, he insists, it's just that our modern morality is different from that of our elders. Where they had stringent codes governing sex, for example, we have stringent codes governing smoking and recycling. The puzzled reader is left to wonder if such an intelligent gentleman could really believe that there is any kind of equivalence between these two types of strictures.

Thankfully, there are still some among us who uphold changeless moral principles, including, notably, former drug czar William Bennett and Robert P. George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton and author of this important new book. Provocatively, the "orthodoxies" to which George refers are traditional Judeo-Christian morality on the one hand and what he calls the "secularist orthodoxy" on the other, which contains the various "isms" that govern contemporary life -- "feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism, lifestyle liberalism." George aims to puncture the notion that secular liberalism is merely a matter of tolerance and procedure, possessing no substantive vision of its own. He shows instead how it is actually based on definite, if faulty, ideas about human nature and human life, and how under the guise of its supposed neutrality, it is aggressively imposing its vision on the rest of us. A second goal of this book is to refute the idea that matters of religious morality are derived from faith and therefore have no place in a liberal society dedicated (supposedly) to rational discourse. While George would surely admit that revelation-based dogmas such as the Trinity have no place in civic discussion, he argues persuasively that religiously based morality governing human action is not only reasonable, but more reasonable than its secular counterpart, and is therefore eminently suited to such discussion.

George addresses three ...