Blind Guides
Our sense of transcendent meaning, purpose and beauty has been lost. However, the failure of secularism, in America, to provide a humane alternative to Christian morality, is beginning to show. From crime to illiteracy, from family breakdown to the degradation of our cities, cracks in the secular utopia are turning into gaping canyons.

Yet, in spite of one failure after another, in spite of our secularized state's inability to provide authentic solutions for poverty, educational reform, public welfare, public safety, economic stability, or to undergird families, our secular elite -- the Knowledge Class that dominated education, the media, the entertainment business, the courts, government, the educational unions and bureaucracies -- continues to masquerade as those to whom we should look for yet more answers to our problems. The Knowledge Class even audaciously proposes to solve the very social pathologies they themselves often contributed to creating. They continue to demand that we give them more money, more time, and even allow them to raise our taxes again and again to underwrite yet more utopian experiments in social engineering and state-sponsored "virtue," in spite of the fact that the least productive people in our society are often those with whom our social engineers and their government programs, have had the most to do.

Have sex education and values clarification techniques of moral instruction led to a tripling of illegitimate births in the last thirty years? Not to worry! Government-funded legal abortion will provide the casual consumer of sex with a cure! Has militantly secularized, amoral public education failed to discipline, educate or produce responsible, self-governing, literate citizens? Not to worry! More money, teachers and facilities will solve the problem; experts in "conflict resolution" will help stem the tide of violence that is sweeping through our need for religious faith! If all else fails, we will lower our standard or academic excellence in the name of politically correct ethnic diversity! After all, isn't feeling good about yourself the most important goal in life?

Yet, to all but the most reflexively conditions, the constant refrain of America's educational and governmental Knowledge Class -- more programs, more money, less traditional Christian religion -- seems to be the battle cry of a failed philosophy.

It is no mystery that our Knowledge Class is at least partially to blame for the social chaos that surrounds us. The secularist and statist missionary crusade, that has overwhelmed American institutions in the twentieth century, has generated a vast, self-important, documentary literature. We know, as Hilton Kramer writes, "what secularized leftist elements in our political life organized the destruction of the public school system." We also know what part of our culture created the legitimization of drugs, even who celebrated drug-taking as a legitimate "life style." We know who launched the black power movement that destroyed the civil rights movement and replaced it with the enslavement of statist entitlement programs that have condemned a whole generation of African-Americans to the welfare plantation. It is no secret as to who it was, in the feminist-lesbian movement, who preached the "gospel" of single-parent, female-headed households as equal to, if not superior to , traditional marriage. Our libraries contain whole rooms full of demands for "new family structures."

However, the jury is no longer out regarding the results produced by the American secularist experiment. Enough time has passed so that our brave new secular theorists have had their ideas tested. We now know that contrary to feminist claims, female-headed families have been a financial and moral disaster, largely incapable of disciplining boys or of escaping poverty -- welfare, day care and affirmative action programs notwithstanding. We have seen that abortion was not legalized, as feminists once loudly proclaimed, to help twelve-year-old rape victims and other "hard cases," but rather so that one million, six hundred thousand "sexual partners" per year can use abortion as a casual means of birth control, or to search for and destroy "imperfect" babies, or to facilitate their career ambitions and to make possible their consumption of sex as a consumer product unrelated to responsibility, commitment and child-bearing. We know who it was that created the climate in which sexual license was encouraged, in the name of liberation from our much-maligned, so-called traditional values. And we have seen the results: the highest incidence of illegitimacy in the world (with the exception of Sweden, whose secularized socialist welfare policies have encouraged an even higher rate of illegitimate births than our own in an all-white, all-middle class, well-educated population). We also know that the proponents of sexual liberation have been nowhere to be found, in order to explain, let alone apologize for, or remedy, their failed sexual utopia that has degenerated into a blizzard of illegitimate births, the AIDS epidemic and a political climate in which the statistics of rape and abortion (now even "date rape"), are the only numbers multiplying as fast as the national debt.