Why Are Americans Vulnerable to Moral Relativism?

PJ Media has an article exploring why Americans are so vulnerable to moral relativism--the idea that no culture is better than another, and America is, possibly, worse. 

This delusion is both pathological and pathetic, yet it’s strong enough to render us incapable of defending our culture and our nation against attacks by other nations – nations that, by any other metric, should be at best pitied and at worst despised.

The author believes that part of the cause is our belief, summed up by Anne Frank, that at heart, all people are good. After discussing the context of Anne Frank's statement, and the circumstances of the death of all but one of her compatriots, the author states:

People are not innately good. Her words were whistling in the dark, written to give herself courage under terrible circumstances. In that context they are admirable. However, it is a grave error to use them as a yardstick for measuring human beings’ natural state.

Anyone who has children knows that, while they have a tremendous capacity for love, and have within them the potential for reason and kindness, their innate state is more Lord of the Flies than universal brotherhood. Children are naturally violent, greedy, and jealous. What tempers children is a society’s externally imposed value system. Significantly, these value systems don’t spring out of whole cloth. They are the results of centuries of give and take, violence, refining, and thought.

 In a chauvinistic way that I’m not even going to bother to defend at length, I firmly believe that our modern Judeo-Christian value system is one of the best ever created — and it’s not innate, it’s learned. I’ll go even further here: I don’t like the current fundamentalist Islamic value system, with its denigration of women, Jews, homosexuals, and non-Muslims, and its obsession with visiting extreme physical violence (and here I include beheading and other slaughters) on those so denigrated. Nor do I like socialist Europe, which has deified the state and is again giving itself permission to approve of or ignore Jewish genocide. People in those cultures, rather than being “truly good at heart,” have been taught inferior values from the cradle on.

Americans are not innately good and those in the fundamentalist Islamic Middle East or in socialist Europe are not inherently bad. We are all humans – but we Americans have the better value system. It’s therefore terribly dangerous for people to put their faith in Anne Frank’s touching but misguided words about humans’ innate goodness. If we pretend that no difference exists between us and the Muslim Brotherhood, then we cannot fight for our superior values because we have deliberately blinded ourselves to their superiority.