RULE 40

Despite the billion-dollar campaign to turn your brain into tapioca pudding, try to learn to think clearly and logically.

Ideas have consequences, so learn to take them seriously. This won’t be easy in an age dominated by feather-headed emotionalism; these days learning to employ linear thought is a subversive act. Learn to distinguish facts from wishful thinking, reason from rationalization, and when you encounter bureaucratic blah, blah, blah, learn to ask, “So what?” (This always throws them off their game.)

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G. K. Chesterton once wrote that the problem when people stop believing in God is not that they believe in nothing, but that they will believe anything at all. The same can be said about people who’ve forgotten how to think.

They’ll believe in the healing powers of St. Didimus’s foreskin, or that an alien spaceship is parked behind the Hale-Bopp comet (a tenet of the Heaven’s Gate cult); they’ll buy into conspiracy theories about September 11, think O. J. Simpson was innocent, or even believe that Madonna can act.

People who’ve lost the knack of linear thought are basically defenseless, blown whichever way the wind or the fads of the day happen to be blowing, chasing one empty banner after another. So they are easy prey and dupes for charlatans with credentials, romantic wishful thinking, and rhetoric dressed up as science—one of the reasons why the media and public are so apt to buy into the latest scary study, only to find out six months later that the earlier scare was bogus or overhyped (but where would the media be without a crisis—“shark attacks at your child’s day care … film at eleven!”).

An even-greater challenge is posed by our rampant nonjudgmentalism, the notion that nothing is inherently good or bad because all values are relative; so, of course, all views are valid, and who are we to say? In this world, the worst sin—the cardinal, unforgivable sin—is to be “judgmental.”

But this is a cop-out, with the added disadvantage of being false. For example, the statement that “no opinion is any more valid than any other” is itself an opinion. And the statement that there are no absolutes is—embarrassingly enough—an absolute itself. It is also lazy, because it spares people the trouble of having to think through their beliefs and arguments. If no idea is better than any other, why bother? Why argue? Why think at all?

But there’s another problem with this posture of nonjudgmental relativism: nobody actually believes it.

You’ll run into people who will say things like: “What is true for me might not be true for you,” or “because I think it is right, that doesn’t mean it is also right for others.” But when you push them, you will always find that they believe in something … if only in the superiority of nonjudgmentalism.

Try this: ask them if their relativism applies to genocide in Rwanda. Is mass murder wrong for them, but a legitimate choice for others? What about the denial of the basic rights of women in some cultures? The Nazi death camps? Stalin’s use of starvation to pacify the Ukraine? The Spanish Inquisition? The lynchings of blacks in the South?

If not, why not? Personal preference? But if there is no moral standard except your personal preference, why should you think your personal preference is any better than anyone else’s? Who are we to say?

Is freedom of religion preferable to putting to death people who pray differently? Is gender equality a better idea than treating women like slaves? Is racial equality morally superior to the racist policies of the South African apartheid regime? If so, why?

Don’t confuse relativism with either skepticism or open-mindedness, because those attitudes involve searching for a true answer. Asking questions implies that there is a correct answer and that some things are better and some things worse, although we don’t know what they are. Relativism, on the other hand, argues that there is nothing that is absolutely good or bad, that all values are relative.

But if that’s true and if you can’t appeal to any higher moral principle, if everyone’s opinion is as valid as anyone else’s, if there is no objective basis for saying that Martin Luther King Jr. was morally superior to Adolf Hitler, then the only way to resolve differences is by force—either by one group imposing its views on the minority or by the minority imposing theirs on the majority.

Multiculturalists will point out that different cultures have different value systems. They will go on to claim that it is something-ocentric to imply that any of these systems is any better than any other. But while cultures may disagree about what is good, the disagreement is never about whether there is a good. They disagree about degree, not substance. “Try to imagine a society,” writes theologian Peter Kreeft, “where honesty and justice and courage and self-control and faith and hope and charity are evil, and lying and cheating and stealing and cowardice and betrayal and addiction and despair and hate are all good. You just can’t do it.”167

No society has ever believed that all values are simply a matter of opinion and personal preference … until our own.

You don’t have to buy into that.

You can start by learning how to talk about ideas.

Despite generations of young people who have relied upon such tactics, rolling your eyes, smirking, and muttering “whatever” are not witty comebacks, much less coherent arguments. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t respond to people with different opinions, politics, and religions than you. If you don’t agree with something someone has said, by all means, take a stand. Make your case.

But your feelings are not an argument.

Calling your opponent a Nazi is not an argument.

Calling him a (fill in the blank)-ist is not a coherent argument.

Make your case with facts, logic, reason, and linear thought. You will rock his world.