+ Often people will concede that people in general are becoming less and less sensitive to the needs of others. Businesses are becoming increasingly out for themselves as many are no longer above leading on customers and exploiting their workers. Neighbors are becoming more and more phobic of other neighbors simply because they are strangers, instead of realizing that they are strangers because they haven't made any effort to become acquainted.
A woman said to me today that people in Europe are so much friendlier because many cultures still hug one another. (Europe, infact, has greater immorality than much of the US, in terms of legalized euthanasia, abortion, eugenicistic attitudes, socialism, etc.) On the surface, this would have been a good example, except for the fact that hugging does not signify a deep level of morality. It feels good, but it has nothing to do with a morality. This author is not against hugging, but it's definitely not itself a sign of commitment to a greater good. Even our Lord was betrayed with a kiss, which is generally considered a higher degree of affection than hugging. Hugging, handshakes and other signs of affection are not nearly as significant a sign of goodness than veneration to God. That is why prayer, incidentally, is the greatest thing one can give to his neighbor. Good feelings do not necessarily produce good effects, such as if one is attached to something evil, such as sin, or is attached in a disordered manner to something lawful. And even if good feelings are incidental to a truly good action, they are not the means to consistent good because, unlike God, feelings in themselves are not constant.
The reason people are becoming desensitized to their neighbor's welfare is because they lack charity. They lack the very comprehension of what charity actually is. True charity is ordered to God first, as He is the source of all goodness, and love of neighbor born of love of God. Immanentism is the contradictory error that says the highest good is what one can do for one's neighbor. True charity, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, says that the highest good comes from God.
How does this lead to social chaos and moral degradation? If one says that the highest good comes from what one does for his neighbor, or even what a society does for the weak, it then makes its own defintions of morality, seemingly demoting God to a mere bystander, rather than the Ominipotent Creator, who gives us everything, including but not limited to: the 10 Commanments, Divine Laws, the Sacraments, and natural moral law.
Immanentism leads to moral relativity, or more accurately, moral relativism is part en parcel to the heresy of immanentism. If a group of people, such as a political party or a government, or even a single human being, says that "I can choose for myself what is the highest good" (by the way, the error of how evil came into the world), then morality is no longer in obedience to God, since God is not only Himself the highest good, but the Authority by which all creation belongs as He is their Creator.
Once we accept these truths, against relativism, the good and truth comes from God and God alone, as He all Goodness and Truth Incarnate, we can then have first a code of morality that not only we can live by as individuals, but ideally in a society that is not in contradiction to the realities of life -- which can only be respected in the wider view of objective morality. This morality is truly catholicas -- true for all places, for all people, and for all times.
+A.M.D.G.+
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