The Empire 160

'The Living Dead
by Michael S. Rozeff

Up until now, I’ve always thought of the American Empire in conventional terms as a continuing enterprise that, sooner or later, would decline and fall. No more. Today I began thinking of it as dead, ethically, that is. This helps to fix its place among good and bad human institutions. I think we can think of the state in the same way. Why give these institutions one shred of credit more than they deserve?
As I see it, the Empire was stillborn ethically. Whatever life it had and has, was and is, ethically invalid. Its life is drawn from us the living; we die as it battens on our blood. Like a vampire, the Empire is morally dead. It lives by night and darkness, has no reflection in any mirror, and can’t survive without inflicting death on the living. The body of the Empire keeps on fighting for blood, round after round; but it’s a moral zombie. Unfortunately for us, we are part of it. As in the Dracula story, we sustain it, we are hypnotized by it, and after awhile we become a disciple of the dreadful creature. We see and live the night and day of the living dead.
Life is identified with ethical behavior. Speaking of his unrighteous enemies, David wrote "their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre." But, "thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield."
Never does one hear more howls of protest as when one proclaims to the modern relativist ear that there is such a thing as absolute right and wrong; and that straying from right does have negative, life-destroying consequences. This reflexive and defensive reaction to any disturbing thought of an absolute value, despite the relativist’s own absolute assumption of no absolutes, shows that our ethics are in bad shape.
In our political lives and thus our individual lives, less and less do we recognize and live by the ethics we once lived by and still should live by. These ethics can still be found in desk drawers of hotel and motel rooms. Our society’s usual institutions for conveying ethics are so weak that business students have to take courses in ethics to compensate for not learning elsewhere that stealing and cheating are wrong.
A hundred or more years ago, when philosophers declared God dead; when science shook faith; when socialism postulated new ideals; when the U.S. pursued national power; Americans turned away from the beliefs, ethics, and practices that had brought them bounty. And now, after many years, we can see clearly, if we would or could, that we made a wrong turn. That wrong turn cannot be dismissed, as the young and naïve are wont to do, by pointing to the reduced time it takes to travel from Los Angeles to Toronto or to the breaking of color barriers. These things or others like them in even more bounteous quantity would have occurred had we stayed on and extended the proper ethical course of a limited and just government that minded its own business at home and abroad. That wrong turn is measured by such things as near-continuous warfare, broken lives and families, a dependent and dumbed-down population, static standards of living, ever-deteriorating money, humongous debts, greater cruelty, greater indifference to suffering, a greater use of violence, less liberty, less freedom of choice, increasing authoritarianism and militarism, greater welfare, more crime, less justice, less innovation, less civility, deteriorating art and culture, and less civilization.'

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