https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224211041094Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism.
Leftists are becoming moral absolutists. Thus by definition, leftists are ceasing to be liberals. This is also known as wokeness.
Some contemporary accounts depict universities as puritanically committed to a liberal “culture of victimhood” (Campbell and Manning 2018; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018; Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020), a fact seemingly at odds with previous critiques of “permissive” moral relativism (Hunter 1991; Wuthnow 1989).
A relativist can never be sure who is the victim in any encounter, whereas a culture of victimhood demands certainty among the victims that they are victims. Thus it is logically necessary that wokeness is anti-relativist.
Orthodoxy sees moral truth as coming from an “external, definable, and transcendent authority” that provides fixed standards for behavior (Hunter 1991:44). Progressivism, on the other hand, regards moral truth as relative and subject to revision according to the evolving needs of humans and societies. Orthodoxy is generally associated with political conservatism, and progressivism is tied to liberalism.
This is why I keep saying we are not progressives. True Leftism is better labelled as
heterodoxy: we still believe in fixed standards of behaviour, just not the standards rightists believe in! An even better description is to say, as was said in ancient times: we and they worship different gods. (They of course worship Yahweh, whereas we worship the true God. But those who revise morality "according to the evolving needs of humans" in fact also worship Yahweh by prioritizing human interests. This is why we say False Leftists are closer to rightists than to True Leftists.
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits five innate psychological foundations that trigger automatic gut-reactions and motivate judgments of right and wrong (Haidt 2012). These include the “individualizing” foundations of care and justice—individualizing in that they privilege the well-being of individuals—and the “binding” foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity that serve to uphold social order. Conservatives in the United States endorse individualizing and binding foundations about equally. Liberals emphasize individualizing foundations somewhat more strongly than conservatives and place much less weight on binding foundations (Graham et al. 2009; Koleva et al. 2012).
This is misleading. Leftists are trying to destroy the Western social order, so at present must undermine binding foundations as a matter of strategy. This does not imply that, should a time one day come when we have built a social order based on leftist values, we would be similarly nonchalant about binding foundations then. While there may exist genuine liberals who will always try to undermine binding foundations (irrespective of what kind of social order they hold together), they are to be distinguished from True Leftists who are merely opposed to the binding foundations of the currently predominant social order, not to binding foundations in general. We are not against loyalty, just against loyalty to Western civilization! We are not against authority, just against the authority of Westerners. We are not against sanctity, just against the sanctity of Eurocentrism.
Egalitarian values concerned with minority group rights became a hallmark of the growing college-educated class, distinguishing them from the “outmoded” or “bigoted” traditionalism of the less educated.
These are not necessarily egalitarian values. It is perfectly possible to be concerned with a minority not because you believe the minority is equal to the majority, but because you believe the minority to be superior to the majority.
Recent accounts indicate that trends toward identity-based morality may have evolved into a “culture of victimhood” on college campuses (Campbell and Manning 2018; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018; Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020). According to Campbell and Manning (2018), victimhood culture grants moral status to those who suffer, valorizes those who vigilantly monitor conduct for signs of oppression, and treats opposition to its ideals as severe offenses.
This is poorly described. Those (victims) who suffer as a consequence of violence initiated by others are not the same as those (oppressors) who suffer as a consequence of retaliatory violence to the violence they initiated. The latter receive no status no matter how much they suffer.
these developments raise the intriguing possibility that higher education encourages a modified liberal morality: although the college-educated share a high level of concern for others and relatively low concern for traditional social order, they depart from the common liberal profile by infusing their beliefs with a sense of moral certainty, which is seemingly at odds with an emphasis on moral relativism.
So why still call it liberal? Just call it woke or True Leftist!
Smith (2014) advances similar conclusions in his reflection on American sociology, arguing that sociologists are engaged in a “sacred project” aimed at achieving individual emancipation, self-determination, and personal affirmation for all people (cf. Martin 2016).
If the idea of a sacred project is possible in leftist minds, this proves that sanctity remains a leftist value, and hence that such leftists are indeed not liberals (who have been defined as disbelievers in sanctity).
With that said, the woke obviously do not want individual emancipation, self-determination and personal affirmation for oppressors, so the idea that we want these for all people is nonsense. In fact, we want all oppressors burning in hell for eternity.