Postmodernism and moral relativism have led us to disaster

Shocking, awful figures indeed. But not remotely surprising. You only have to look at the now regular hate marches to see the poll made flesh on our streets, with calls for globalising the intifada, and, last Saturday, a placard demanding that the government “intern all Zionists now”.

The poll reveals British views but the results would be at least as bad in France, Germany, the US or anywhere else in the West. And it is going to get worse as the views of today’s 18-24 year olds become the mainstream as they get older.

Which begs the question: how have we arrived here, from a West in which young adults once understood the values of democracy and freedom, grasped the nature of good and evil and grew into adults able to win the Cold War?

It is the product of developments that have been decades in the making, but which can best be summarised as the supremacy of postmodern thought on campus and the rise of moral relativism.

Postmodernism essentially rejects the very idea of universal truths and objective reality. In this context it dovetails perfectly with the now prevalent moral relativism, which holds that there is no such thing as good or bad, only different. Two centuries ago, General Sir Charles James Napier responded to Hindu demands that he lift the ban on suttee (where a widow would burn herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre): “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Last week the Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch remarked that “not all cultures are equally valid”, which would once have been seen as a statement of the obvious. Now, however, it is edgy and dangerous, as if only a bigot would not believe that a culture which, for example, throws gay men from rooftops is as valid in its own unique way as one which, er, does not.

This intellectual decadence has taken hold of much – most? – of academia. It is a cliché that today’s students are tomorrow’s Cabinet ministers – and, of course, yesterday’s students are now today’s Cabinet ministers, as we have seen played out with regard to Israel since July’s election.

But there is a further element to the severity and poison towards Israel which has built on this intellectual plane – the deliberate destabilisation strategy of the likes of Russia and China. For the Soviet Union, the Cold War was only partly a military, political and economic confrontation. The USSR was also playing a long game and knew that with the West having injected itself with this intellectual poison, the consequences would at some point be felt. This was coupled with disinformation campaigns to destabilise the West, especially targeting the US during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The USSR also funded terrorist groups such as Italian Red Brigades and the German Red Army Faction. Putin – a former KGB officer – has continued in the same vein, albeit using modern tactics such as troll farms which turn social media into a propaganda vehicle for Russia’s destabilisation agenda.

China has a similar but even more successful tool in TikTok. Gen Z spends at least ten per cent of its waking hours on TikTok, and it is the primary search engine for 40 per cent of that age group. TikTok exposes users to anti-Western and, now, pro-Hamas content. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, for example, posts with the hashtag #lettertoamerica received over ten million views. The letter which the posts celebrated was Osama bin Laden’s notorious Letter to America credo from 2002. Users commented on bin Laden’s supposed insights and relevance to the Israeli operation in Gaza.

It is no use simply bewailing where we now are. We have first to understand how we got here. Only then can we even consider what we need to do.