I've got a bone to pick with Norman Lear's "All in the Family" TV series, which was popular in the early 1970s.  It's an old bone, or I wouldn't still be thinking about it after all this time.  I think the show has contributed to the philosophical delinquency of a generation, and it's kind of my personal pet peeve.

It was a well-made program which many found entertaining.  Carroll O'Connor played Archie Bunker as a detestable yet adorable buffoon.  Central to the show was the running feud between reactionary Archie and his liberal son-in-law nicknamed Meathead, played by Rob Reiner.  It was a kind of a political "I Love Lucy," with Archie as Lucy of course, always getting himself into trouble.  I personally found the show embarrassing because Archie reminded me of my father, a New Deal liberal, but also closed-minded, buffoonish and reactionary.  (That's when I learned that "conservative" and "reactionary" are descriptions of personality as much as political philosophy.)  I'm sure that liberals enjoyed the show because it offered them a cheap and easy way to feel superior.

I only started to realize the real impact of the program years after it went off the air.  Whenever I'd talk political philosophy with a liberal-type person of my baby boom generation, the discussion would inevitably get to the point where I asserted that freedom and capitalism are moral and will work because they affirm human nature, while socialism and its variants are immoral and doomed to failure because they do not.  That's when Archie Bunker entered the room.  Invariably I could feel the tension in the air rise as my partner responded to my offensive implication that such a thing as human nature can be objectively known, and that moral and practical absolutes can be derived from such heresy.  In their eyes, unbeknownst to them I expect, I had become Archie, the bigot.

It's not that they had any ready refutations, but that I had crossed the line from potentially rational (though perhaps eccentric) person to bigoted reactionary, and the discussion was effectively over at that point.  It has taken me years to recognize the pattern, for reason and skills of emotional perception don't always mix.

In modern political parlance it was moral relativism that I was confronting, and I've come to believe that this was the lesson which Archie Bunker taught my generation.  Archie was written to skillfully combine moral absolutism with buffoonery, racism and political conservatism so that viewers would learn to accept them as a package deal.  These same associations are reinforced day in and day out by liberal political discussion and liberal art.  When Hillary Clinton or Morris Dees describe anyone to their political right as a closet racist reactionary or part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," it may be Archie they imagine.  Last year's Oscar-winning movie "American Beauty," which is chock-full of liberal cultural stereotypes, depicts a highly dysfunctional family being destroyed by a sexually repressed, bigoted, gay retired US Marine (could he be any more of a caricature?), whose life is filled with moral absolutes.  The hero, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), spends the movie acting immature and irresponsible, lacking any moral sense at all as far as I can tell.

So why this concerted attack on moral absolutism?  A historian might answer that it's just the times we're in.  The Age of Reason (the notion that Man can have real knowledge of the world), which was the philosophical fuel of the European renaissance, ended with the 18th century.  Since then the dominant Western philosophies are based on skepticism (The Truth may be out there, but we can't know it).

While I agree with this historical perspective, a more down-to-earth explanation is that those seeking power needed to undermine the "absolutist" foundations of our young nation.  In the political domain, the US Constitution, one of the least-ambiguous legal documents ever written, needed to be converted into a "living document" to rationalize the gross usurpations of power beginning with "Mr. Lincoln's war."  Even more important than politics, the power-seekers had to undermine individualism, and its corollary, private property.  Their success can be judged by the condescension with which statements like, "A man's home is his castle" are greeted today.  The true face of relativism was revealed when a US president, and a boomer like me, under oath answered a direct question with the famous, "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is."

While moral relativism certainly wasn't invented by Norman Lear, it became a philosophical imperative during the takeover of American liberalism by the neo-Luddite New Left around 1970.  The irony is that those imbued with the political disease of New Leftism are bigoted absolutists just as much as Archie ever was.  Just try having a rational discussion about the environment with one of them.