A high school principal bans “freak dancing” during school dances. While such an action should be applauded, it doesn’t address our real problem. This is that few seldom ask – and seek to answer – the real question.

Imagine you see a nutritionist for dietary advice, and, instead of rendering counsel based on his best understanding of the laws of health, he simply prescribes what’s popular. Says he, “People ate different things years ago, but they weren’t ‘cool’; here’s what is in today.”

I think you’d wonder why you had to pay a fee, as you could have ascertained what sells best yourself. It may be silly, but it’s exactly what the modern man does with respect to morality.

This occurred to me when I read about Principal Carl Perkins of Howard County's Centennial High and his ban on “freak dancing” – which, putting it mildly, is highly sexually suggestive – at school student functions. While his rule is prudent, it’s not well-received by all.

Writes the Baltimore Sun, “That crackdown brought protests from students. And it led some to threaten a boycott of one of high school's memory-making traditions: the homecoming dance, scheduled for tomorrow.”

The young’s rebellion against morality is no more surprising than their elders’ desire to uphold it. After all, hasn’t this long been the pattern?

The transition from control by chaperones to control by hormones didn’t happen overnight. The principal’s generation had their dancing, their music and their fashions and rebelled against their day’s fuddy-duddies, and the preceding generation did the same. Oh, yes, I know, our generation has it just right, being neither too traditional nor too libertine. Everyone else is the problem.

OK, may reality of "How Not to be a Fuddy-duddy 101" intrude now?

Upon entering the supermarket this afternoon, I saw a flier-stand labeled “Values of the Week.” (What will next week's "values" be?)

It occurred to me that this applies not just to prices nowadays, but also conception of virtue. And, because of this, I can’t put undue onus on today’s defiant youths, as they’re just following a tradition of yesterday’s: a tradition of destroying tradition.

They didn’t set the precedent stating that morality, not being absolute, was really “values,” and values were fluid things. They didn’t originate the belief that values should always be changing to suit the times (what a stupid notion; the “times” are shaped by the values in the first place).

They weren’t the first ones to ignore that all-important question: What . . . is . . . good?

Writing about this more than 100 years ago, G.K. Chesterton gave some examples of questions a people truly interested in determining good would ask. Among them was “...whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom...”

My point is that anyone can wax supercilious about “his day” and sneer at the last generation when young and the next when old. But unless we’re willing to turn that probing eye inwards and consider how we went awry, unless we’re willing to search for Truth (the good), at best we’re simply saying, my mistake is tastier than your mistake. And the young will always feel entitled to their own mistake.

This is where secularists and sloppy thinkers (forgive me for repeating myself) may call me a fuddy-duddy, and I have been accused of being a walking, talking, writing anachronism.

But, no, it’s not that I’m not up with the times; it’s that they’re not up with the timeless. 

And I’ll issue a challenge to them, to these moral relativists who don’t believe in timelessness. If there is no Truth to be found, no immutable, universal and eternal standard, then why merely settle for being with the times? Why not be ahead of your time (or go back to a more barbaric one)?

Don’t content yourself with arguing for non-traditional (outside of one man and one woman) marriage, which is today’s cause célèbre, just cut to the chase and argue for full animal freedom. Why be the next age’s “repressed” relic of the past, one its know-it-all youth will think knew nothing, when you can be this age’s Alfred Kinsey? Aspire higher. Or, I should say, lower. They may make a movie about you. 

Obviously, most will agree that lines need to be drawn, we need some standard. And no one without a firm idea – a doctrine – concerning what it should be has any business criticizing someone for having such an idea.

Otherwise, you’re simply saying that there are no laws governing diet and health, but, nevertheless, you’ll criticize my menu because it doesn’t reflect your tastes. This is why I tell you with no exaggeration, secularists, that the Taliban are better than you. I may disagree with their doctrine, but at least they don’t call me wrong based on beliefs implying there is no right. 

We both believe there is junk food and bread of life; we just disagree on who has which. Secularists, ultimately, believe in neither, but they still scorn me for preferring my grandfather’s palate.

Getting back to Principal Perkins, the Baltimore Sun quotes one of the students unhappy about his policy, writing, “‘It's not like you're going to get pregnant by dancing,’ said Shirley Shin, a senior who is considering skipping tomorrow's dance. ‘There is a distinct difference between dancing and having sex. Without the dance, who knows what people are going to do?’”

Of course, Miss Shin’s children (assuming she goes against the trend and actually has any) will likely have their own, even more decadent tastes, and the pattern will continue – for now. And if we want to break this pattern and hear rationalizing less, we have to talk about Truth more – we have to determine what is “good.” 

A civilization needs to know what the laws of moral and spiritual health are. When it doesn’t, it gravitates toward that junk food for the soul called immorality, or what scripture unabashedly calls sin. 

And on that kind of diet, we shouldn’t expect to live long and prosper.           

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