This tastes rotten.

Note: Pardon my verbosity today. Sometimes it’s fun to use too much paint.

When even the New York Times is lamenting relativism, you know things must not be going very well.

David Brooks laments that we’ve so ingrained to-each-his-own-ism in our children that they don’t even have the capacity to think morally anymore. They know how to seek their internal sense of happiness (and perhaps to express their own personal discomfort with some real abomination such as unrecycled newspaper), but even these blushes are below remedial. And as Brooks notes, this isn’t really their fault. They have been led over this intellectual cliff by educators with a particularly viral form of hostility to reason. The result is a society which lacks both the counterbalancing reference points of the group or the doctrine to balance unadulterated individualism and also the reflective capacity to ask whether this anthropological anomaly might be a problem.

But this is to be expected. When morality, religion, and politics are routinely taught as matters of aesthetics and then aesthetics is routinely pronounced solely a matter of private and immediate gratification, is it any wonder that no one studies anything anymore? Study presumes some relevant measure of progress. But when the unaided (and untainted) individual reaction is gilded, raised aloft, and prayed to on a daily basis, what perverse individual would waste his effort doing otherwise?

In a culture populated with truth-seekers, even matters of taste are treated as such lush opportunities for discovery that we train people to discern varieties of flavor, texture, and tone with courses in wine-tasting, art history, and music theory. But in one bursting with younglings numbed into neural incompetence by the repeated reminder that goodness is in the tongue of the taster, not even the most significant matters merit enough attention to learn the most rudimentary melodies of critical evaluation