The Morality of Complacency

This past week, a friend forwarded an article about a book called Icarus Fallen by Chantal Delsol. Here are a couple of quotes from the abstract article:

"The morality of our time could be defined as a morality of complacency.

Complacency indicates a predisposition to seek pleasure. ...To be complacent means to be easily accommodating, to admit whatever is convenient, or to look kindly on whatever comes one's way. It indicates an open or easily obtained indulgence, without any judgment attached.

The ethics of complacency legitimizes and recognizes all thought, all behavior, and all ways of life on the condition, of course, that they do not oppose complacency itself.

The ethics of complacency's indulgent accommodation of everything corresponds to a refusal to accept any established limits, or to a refusal to refuse, which brings to mind the catchphrase of the 1968 generation, "It is forbidden to forbid".
So it is that the individual who develops a moral project and decides to equate his destiny with it becomes dangerous. He is suspected of judging others by his decision, and of secretly harboring the desire to force others to imitate him.
He who deliberately embarks on a project of this nature he who chooses meaning implicates, like it or not, the whole of society, and tends to transform a value into truth, which revolts contemporary man. This is why our contemporary so conscientiously tries to protect himself from the dangerous whisperings of seekers of meaning and strives to conserve a smooth and colorless society peaceful in its indetermination. The only defendable ethics is the ethics of complacency.
Enjoined to invent for himself his own norms, and forbidden to speak about them once he has found them, the contemporary individual is finally reduced to doing without a structured ethics at all, either because he finds that he is not clear-sighted or patient enough to invent one, or because he becomes discouraged by a project that is valid only for himself and derided as soon as it has universal pretensions."

In brief, this is why we Christians so often find ourselves on the wrong side of the Culture war. Our insistence on the existence of Truth offends the complacent. May God strengthen us to understand the world we live in, to stand against complacency, but for the Lord Jesus Christ!