It’s interesting how several small events often converge to reveal a larger pattern. A comment on a talk show, a news item, a review of a book, and one or two other items that on their own have no significance but taken together, fit like puzzle pieces to reveal a picture.

Someone who wanted to be taken seriously commented on a talk show that he distrusted anyone who said anything with certainty. With the obvious affirmation of his host, he went on: “It shows a close-mindedness that’s frightening. After all, no one possesses the truth.”

In the news today was an article reporting that 143 German Catholic theologians think the Church should be “de-centralized”, with authority going to local bishops and priests, who should all be elected by laity. They said that one opinion, the Pope’s apparently, should never be trusted because morality varies by local custom.

A recent book review praised the depth of the writer’s research and insight but disallowed any conclusion of the writer, however tentative, calling it “sheer hubris”.

And several other small things. Actually, I think the whole concept of political correctness falls into place here. And little “wise” sayings heard repeatedly: “It’s not the destination, but the journey” or “It’s not the product, but the process”, and so on. We hear this stuff constantly, overtly and covertly, in thematic instant-messaging everywhere—books and films, stories and music. My personal favorite, from an English professor in graduate school with whom I was in love: “The only true answer is that there is no true answer.”

What does all this line-blurring reveal? It’s not just uncertainty. It’s gone far beyond anything as individual as personal doubt, to become a huge collective societal DEMAND for uncertainty, a prohibition of faith, an absolute forbiddance of absolutes.

There is no black or white, only gray. Everything is relative. The only valid morality is existential. (“It’s only bad if you think it is.”) This is not fear—this is pathological, in the etymological sense of the word, diseased logic. There can be no such thing as gray unless there is black and white. Nothing can be relative by or of itself; it must be relative TO something fixed in order to be “relative”. (The word is used to deny a fixed standard of measurement when it actually requires one to make sense.) And existential “morality” simply self-destructs, paralysis in freefall.

We could have sympathy for a person so afflicted with fear, so terrorized by the possible existence of objective truth. But, as no animal is more dangerous than a cornered one, no human being is more dangerous than a fearful one. To be fearful is pitiable, but to impose that fear on others en masse is tyrannical. And what we have is not just one person, but an entire generation, an entire world culture that demands fear, that imposes it in legislation as well as in mere discussion on talk shows, in book reviews—even the pulpit (where it poses as “charity”). The Holy Father said that relativism is a tyranny. Yes, And its source is a fear of certainty, a terror of the possibility of a God who is not a mere projection of one’s own subjectivity.

It’s no wonder, no surprise, that our enemy now is the “terrorist”; but the enemy, as usual, is within, where it is cherished, idolized, transformed into a creed, then fervently preached as gospel, and finally imposed as law. It’s no wonder that we live in a culture of death, of anti-life. And it’s no wonder the modern human intellect has become barren, when darkness, to insist on its own perpetuation, disallows light. A generation of intellectual Numenoreans.

I recently learned that the professor I just mentioned was killed a while back. And I have now the picture that all the pieces revealed: Glen, riding a motorcycle one night, without lights, going 130 miles per hour, hit a fixed concrete embankment on Interstate 4.