Times that try men’s souls

“Fire and Fury” may have gone beyond (or under) responsible journalism, but those offended should not cry foul without expressing equal abhorrence of the trash greeting us in the magazine rack at the supermarket and convenience store check-out lines. I asked, “Does anyone ever actually buy the National Enquirer or The Globe?” The clerk replied, “Sorry to say they do.”

So while we read, “The White House is a child-care center,” we are also met with “Hillary’s dark secrets” and “Democratic Party taken over by aliens.” An old adage warns of the pot calling the kettle black.

In “The Passion of the Western Mind,” Richard Tarnas wrote, “Because Socrates and Plato believed that knowledge of virtue was necessary for a person to live a life of virtue, objective universal concepts of justice and goodness seemed imperative for a genuine ethics. Without such changeless constants that transcended the vagaries of human conventions and political institutions, human beings would possess no firm foundation for ascertaining true values, and would thus be subject to the dangers of an amoral relativism.”

We should read and reread this passage until we see clearly what it teaches us about our times.

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Gallman, Vanessa - Lexington

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This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 4:30 PM with the headline "Times that try men’s souls."