by Dennis Prager
Tue, Sep 15, 2020
All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken.
And all of my life, I was wrong.
Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.
I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.
This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms — what we call “Judeo-Christian” — that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.
But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”
It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class — worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.
Therefore, to Marxists, there is no such thing as a universal good or a universal evil. Those of us still in thrall to Judeo-Christian morality believe that good and evil are universal. In other words, whether an act is good or evil has nothing to do with who committed the act — rich or poor, male or female, religious or secular, member of one’s nation or of another nation. Stealing and murder are morally wrong, no matter who stole or who murdered.
That is not the case for Marx and the left. In Marx’s words in “Capital” (“Das Kapital”):
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined. We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law.”
Fifty-three years later, Marx’s foremost disciple, Vladimir Lenin, architect of the Russian Revolution, proclaimed:
