The Era of Moral Relativism

I've said this before: I was educated as a moral relativist. I'm guessing most of my generation was.

Moral relativism is the belief that right and wrong are culturally dependent. In other words, they differ from society to society, and even from person to person. According to this view, no single moral code is necessarily better than any other. I believe in the Ten Commandments, you believe in honour killing — it's all the same. We should not judge the behaviour or values of other cultures because, if no objective moral standard exists, there is no basis for claiming that our culture is more right than theirs.

Moral relativism became ascendant in academia through the intersection of several intellectual and cultural developments.

First was the decline of religion in education and public life. Second was the influence of Marxist and post-colonial thought, which increasingly interpreted history through the prism of oppressor and victim. Third was the emergence of postmodernism, with its argument that culture, knowledge and even truth itself are shaped by underlying structures of power.

The western elite, particularly the academic elite, having imbibed these ideas, grew ashamed of their privilege and power, and they taught their privileged students to feel likewise.

I thought about this recently as I watched a press conference with filmmaker Alex Gibney, discussing his new Elon Musk biopic, along with two participants in the film. I haven't seen it, but by all accounts it sounds pretty devastating.

I listened to the way they described Musk, and it sounded familiar.

A megalomaniac and a technocrat. Someone who believes every human problem can be solved through scientific thinking, engineering and efficiency. A person who believes in the "great man" theory of history — a Howard Roark-type character, if you've read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead — who equates empathy with weakness, lives by the principle that the ends justify the means, and believes power should be wielded by strong-willed visionaries.

Musk is six and a half years younger than me, so he belongs to my generation and wasn't educated that far behind me. The description of him sounds a lot like some of the people I met in graduate school.

I graduated from McGill University in 1986 and then went to a school called IUHEI in Geneva, Switzerland, now called the Geneva Graduate Institute. It was a postgraduate institute of study and research founded with the mission of promoting international relations as a means of resolving global problems.

You'd think a place like this would attract a lot of very smart people, and it did — present company excepted. The seminar classes were very small, usually 10 to 20 people, and most of the students came from elite universities around the world. In truth, I felt like a fish out of water sitting around the table with graduates of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the like.

You'd also think these ambitious young people would be idealists: people who believed in the school's mission of solving global problems through international relations — problems like Cold War tensions, civil war, mass poverty and economic underdevelopment, global health and so on.

I certainly was. I arrived in Geneva thinking I might eventually find work at the UN or for an NGO. I was bent on doing my part to save the world.

There were some people like me there. But, to my surprise, there were many more who seemed to have other ambitions. Particularly the American students.

They seemed to want to become hedge fund managers, Wall Street derivatives traders, or perhaps get jobs with one of the big commodities trading companies based in Geneva.

In other words, they were less interested in promoting values than in acquiring personal wealth. They were in Geneva because it looked good on a résumé.

The leaders of tomorrow.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. After all, these were the 1980s — the heady days of "Greed is Good," when Wall Street traders were making their first million before they turned 25. It was the era that produced what we now think of as the Epstein class: people for whom wealth, status and power became ends in themselves.

Money had become a huge driving force, particularly in education. A generation was beginning to pivot away from an arts-and-humanities-based curriculum toward STEM and business education. That was where the money was.

Universities built brand-new, multi-story business-school buildings and scientific research campuses while their arts faculties languished in old, neglected classrooms.

Philosopher Allan Bloom wrote about this in 1987 in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. He documented what he believed would be the cultural, moral and political price of raising a generation of relativists.

Not even Bloom could have imagined a President trump or an Elon Musk.

Both represent, the idea that there is no higher moral authority beyond the individual and his own conception of what works. Wealth and power are their own justification, rule of law an obstacle to be overcome. 

Musk and trump may not have the same pedigree as the misguided student protesters who cheered for Hamas after the terrorist attacks of October 7. But they share the same moral obtuseness, and play the same special interest, identity politics game.

The irony is that moral relativism was supposed to make us more tolerant. Instead, it left us without the intellectual tools to explain why some things are simply wrong — regardless of who does them.