Arthur.Rubin's Full Review: Christopher Hill - Virtual Morality: A Novel
This is part of sleeper54's Re-Write Write-Off, although I'm going to do this a little differently. My old review will be first, followed by the new parts. OK, starting off now.
No, it's not about pornography on the Internet. It's about a different sort of morality.
I've never seen such a good novel with NO sympathetic characters (with the possible exception of Pidge (short for Pigeon)). On the surface, it appears to be about a 1st Amendment case in which a student conduct board expelled a student for non-PC behavior and the young lawyer who looks at it as a chance to make a name for himself, but the plot twists left me wondering what was going to happen next. The only character who seemed to know what the real issues were struck me (as someone who believes that the purpose of college is education) as evil. Unfortunately, that character may be correct as to what is really happening on small college campuses.
That's where my former review left off. Now, to continue.
The viewpoint characters are:
Everett Overton Broadstreet Ph.D., Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who seems to have gotten to that position by avoiding offending anyone during his 35 years at the college. The last original thought that he expressed was probably in his Ph.D. thesis in Mathematics -- until about a dozen pages before the end of the book. (I hope nobody says that about me.)
Parker Thompson, the "juniorist of the junior partners" at Byrd, Templeton, and Diamonte, only 5 years out of law school, who has a serious drug habit (it appears not to be a problem until around the middle of the book).
There are no heros in this book, no people acting nobly, and, in fact, only one person who seems to be truely aware of what is going on -- some of his words follow -- if the author doesn't consider this to large an excerpt to be "fair use".
I know you want to know this, you want to know why I do the things I do. I don't think most people would see it this way, but I suppose the best way to put it is to say that it has to do with evolution. There is a proper way for humans to evolve from this point in history, and it involves washing away the insanity of the last five thousand years. We have finally reached a time when people are moving away from the hierarchical structure that has held them in shackles of all of recorded history. It is finally dawning on the masses that this, this earth, is all there is, and that all people have the potential to be superior. That's an important word -- superior. The chain of command that has led people around like animals, always seeking the higher authority, the insane idea of God, is finally on its way out. It's a tough one for people to swallow, but it's true: There is no God. It doesn't exist. It never has. And the ludicrous notion of sin, which has kept people from achieving their destiny, and kept them comfortable in slavery, is disappearing from people's thoughts. It has already been practically removed from the language. Finally, finally, we are at a crossroads where the human race can escape the eddy in which it has been trapped by ignorance and fear. With the proper guidance, a new day will dawn when humankind will become the masters of right and wrong. We, my colleagues and I, are providing that guidance....
...In just fifty years, look how far we've come. From the first, vague stirrings of disbelief in particularly uncomfortable aspects of the moral code, to great segments of the population who view the idea of any moral code with suspicion. I know of students who will question whether Hitler was wrong to gas the Jews. Not from any weak sense of right and wrong, not from any unhealthy pity, but from the viewpoint that it is impossible to know what was on the minds of those who marched the wretched Jews into the showers! I'll bet when you were a young man, you wouldn't have believed that the masses could ever begin to think in this way. But they are. They're fed it every day on television, hour after hour, and they believe it. They know that the concept of morality is flawed. Even the great religions are moving away from the idea of sin. They're terrified of it because they can no longer explain it. Too many people are asking too many questions, and they find the gold in their coffers getting dangerously low. And those others, those bible-thumping fools who still buy the nonsense and use it to prey on the weakness of fear are vilified in the press as dangerous or unstable, as well they should be. It's happening all around you. These are great days. Humanity is about to make a great leap.
....We have taken that responsibility from them, or at least from a large percentage of them. And the percentage growing. We have organized the poor and the underclasses and now we take care of them because quite frankly they are currently incapable of taking care of themselves. Now we're beginning to take care of their children, teaching them just what they need to know. I must confess that I get a bit of a laugh when I see these sad-faced idiots, such as myself, lament the destruction of the educational system. It's not being destroyed, it's being refined.
We are witnessing something incredible, epochal. We are seeing the beginnings of the next great intellectual movement, the true reformation, the one where we learn to live without God. It won't be completed in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of my children or of my children's children. But in a few hundred years humanity will fundamentally outgrow the psychological need for its parents. And when that happens, we will be able to truly explore the boundaries of technology. We won't be held back by the nagging suspicion that we really shouldn't do all of the things we are capable of. We will master life itself. And we will master death.
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