How far away now is that trusting moral universe in which policemen and politicians were considered public servants and everyone had his or her place? The liberation movements of the late twentieth century dramatically changed the ground beneath our feet. We really have been freed from those limiting notions of what it meant to be a good man or a good woman. In the process, we assumed the autonomy to create our individualized versions of the “good life.” To steal a line from a seventies children's song, we became free to be you and me—not only psychologically or socially, but also morally.

And yet, strangely, this greater freedom that granted us greater autonomy and self-determination hasn't provided us with a way to discriminate between right and wrong in relationship to each other and to all that is happening around us. Why? Because postmodernity's moral ground is limited to the individual self. You see, the struggle for emancipation and equality in the sixties was inspired by a profound concern that the egalitarian ideals of democracy were being betrayed, denying the vast majority of people the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Postmodernity upholds a radical egalitarianism that values a plurality of views, where no one view is better than the rest. And so, our moral ground shifted from a shared belief that doing the right thing would bring about the “good life” to a shared belief in the sanctity of the individual to do and develop as he or she pleases. How, then, do we answer that all-important moral question: What is the right thing to do? The answer used to be simple: Whatever is right for your family, community, or country. Today the answer is: It's up to you because no one can tell anyone else what's right for them. What's right for me may not be right for you. Rather than holding some higher shared value, right and wrong become shape shifters as we each respond to the endless play of choices and perspectives that make up postmodern life. Our moral evaluations then too easily become dependent on our often changing personal preferences, on what we want and how we feel.

Morality thereby became relative, no longer resting on universal principles or on some higher value, such as the good of the community. And without being grounded in some vision or value that brings us together for the sake of something larger than ourselves, our moral sense can be co-opted by narcissism. Ethics get confused with personal fulfillment: What's right is what's good for me. When preferences rather than principles guide our behavior and judgments, we find ourselves standing at the center of our own individual moral universe. The phrase “postmodern morality,” then, is almost an oxymoron—because morality is not about the self in isolation but only about the self in relationship to others and the larger world. When care for the self is our most fundamental operating principle, then it is very hard to see clearly and respond to what is around us. The world in all of its glory and complexity becomes merely a reflection of what we're attracted to and repulsed by. And on this slippery slope of moral relativism, there is no way to make sense of the bewildering complexity facing us, which makes it more and more difficult to determine the right course of action.

Postmodernity attempted to solve the problem of inequality and injustice by creating a level playing field for all of us—and at the same time, it flattened any moral value higher than the desires of the self for us to be beholden to. No longer do most of us at the cutting edge of culture have the promise of God's salvation or the nation's “good life” as the frame for our choices and relationships. Fear of punitive fundamentalisms, the horror of ultranationalism, and a general mistrust of any ideology or theory that claims that it works for everyone have led us to value difference for its own sake, without having any way to unite in a common sense of purpose that would create a new ethic for action. Yet, as a result, “the most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence,” writes Andrew Delbanco in The Real American Dream. In other words, we are desperate for a vision that would connect us to some value beyond ourselves. But the Catch-22 is that it is exactly this larger purpose that has been rendered suspect by the postmodern mindset.

Longing for something bigger to give life purpose and yet suspicious of the very thing we long for, we find ourselves caught in a pervasive sense of irony that is the hallmark of postmodern culture. And by irony, I'm not simply referring to a sarcastic tone of voice or a particular kind of humor. More than just an individual attitude, it is a culture-wide expression of this literally self-centered moral relativism. “For most people most of the time, including intellectuals,” philosophy teacher and Harper's magazine contributing editor Thomas de Zengotita told me, “the absence of credible universal principles or apprehensions leads to irony and apathy.” In fact, he noted, “This is a deep cultural manifestation of profound vacuum.” The individual experience of that vacuum is the ironic stance. Being gun-shy about any larger meaning makes having an investment in any meaning suspect: “You have quotes around everything you say to distance yourself from everything you mean.” The painful irony, though, is that even in seeking individual fulfillment, which is the only purpose that moral relativism legitimizes, we never reach anything that is truly fulfilling. Because we each know that our small-minded desires are too flimsy to engage us deeply in life, we find ourselves being ironic about ourselves, too wise to take ourselves seriously and yet not wise enough to risk taking life seriously.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
Where do we go from here? In the tension and tumult of our globalizing world, finding a higher perspective from which we can make sense of differences is key to discovering how to do the right thing. Living with a pluralism of perspectives and views, we have developed an expertise at taking different positions, understanding their relative value. But we rarely go deeply into anything—the restless seeking of experience doesn't let us linger long—so we stop at a superficial understanding, thinking that we get all there is to know. The fact that our facile postmodern minds can understand and appreciate so many different views makes it difficult to distinguish between a passing familiarity and a real understanding that translates into a new way of thinking and acting. “That's a difficult thing to do, you know, to distinguish between what you know and what you don't,” Yasuhiko Kimura, evolutionary philosopher and chairman/president of Vision-in-Action, told me. “But that is what is necessary. The most difficult transition in consciousness, I think, is from this pluralist, egalitarian perspective to a more integrative one because those of us who have reached this pluralistic consciousness are so intelligent, so well-educated, and so clever.” And he concluded that we “actually are so clever that we outsmart ourselves,” assuming we have already attained the higher perspective that we so desperately need to develop.

Hyper-aware of the irony of our own condition and readily believing that we're more developed than we are, we're too smart by half. Postmodernity has brought us to a kind of cultural adolescence: self-involved, sure of ourselves, ironic, and thinking that we know a lot more than we do. We need to reach a real moral maturity—to discover a way of determining what is right and wrong that is not based in our small-minded needs and desires. That takes being honest about where we are and what we're doing. So, first, can we stop, temporarily put aside our overactive minds that grasp everything too quickly, and pause long enough to realize that we may not be quite as evolved as we'd like to be? Slowing down, there's often the strange recognition that holding ourselves at the center of our own moral universe creates a seamless and impenetrable film between ourselves and the rushing reality around us, making everything seem at a slight distance, not quite real. By giving so much weight to our personal experience, we alienate ourselves from the larger whole that we are a part of. But maybe a new morality can start with this, grappling with the ironic unreality that we've imposed on a very real and increasingly dangerous situation. “Irony is not really an attitude,” said Zengotita. “Irony's a kind of cultural condition. If you want to get past postmodernism, you have to go through the irony.” What does that entail? Perhaps it starts by being willing to engage with the actuality of the enormous changes that are happening in the careening, chaotic world beyond the small sphere of our personal concerns.

“All the religions and all the peoples of the world are undergoing the most radical, far-reaching, and challenging transformation in history,” writes Ewert Cousins, Fordham Professor of Theology, Emeritus. “The stakes are high: the very survival of life on our planet; either chaos and destruction, or creative transformation and the birth of a new consciousness. Forces, which have been at work for centuries, have in our day reached a crescendo that has the power to draw the human race into a global network. . . .” We are at the edge of peril, but the same dynamics that have brought us too close for comfort also offer the potential for a moral vision that's based on our interconnectedness and that gives us a way to make sense of the significant differences among us. Riane Eisler, author of the classic The Chalice and the Blade, spoke of this potential transformation as the fulfillment of the “human yearning for caring connection, for freedom. By freedom I don't mean the freedom to do whatever you damn please. I'm talking about freedom to flourish, freedom to develop, freedom to have mutually caring and satisfying relations.” And, she emphasized, “If it isn't global, it isn't going to work.”

Two enormous forces are at work: an evolutionary movement toward a freely developing global humanity and the continued momentum of destruction, isolation, and narcissism. But this isn't only a problem that exists out there in the world—it's also a dilemma that we each carry within us. Those of us living in such privileged circumstances in this care-torn world have been brought to this crux: Do we choose to continue setting our moral gauge according to our own desires, or do we look outward and struggle with the enormity of the situation we are facing? The karmic weight of human history bears down on each of us now as we postmoderns, with our extraordinary capacity for thought and reflection, have to make a choice to take us beyond the selfishness and conflict that has been so much the story of human history. But how do we choose? What do we do? We have to use all of the capacities that we uniquely possess as human beings: our power to think, to care, and to choose—to reach for a mature moral perspective.