Rediscovering the Wheel
Morality and Our Cultural Mandate
J. Daryl Charles
April 1, 1996
STANDING ON THE STAGE of the Bolshoi in Moscow three years ago, I realized for the first time that, after forty-three years, I had undergone—musically speaking—something of a "conversion." Vivid childhood memories linger of my father every weekend turning on the radio and listening to the scourge of any red-blooded American teenager—the New York Metropolitan Opera. How could he possibly stomach that stuff? I wondered to myself over and over until I left home for college at the wise age of seventeen.
Now a guest in this magnificent Russian city, I became suddenly aware of my cultural nakedness on the one hand and of how drastically my musical perceptions had changed on the other. Now, too, with three children of my own (all of whom quite naturally despise opera), I find myself in my father's shoes. I have learned to embrace musically what for years I had loathed. Try as he might, my father could not foist upon me an appreciation of opera. I had to come to that point of appreciation on my own.
So it is with the question of morality. Every generation must rediscover (though not reinvent) the wheel, morally and philosophically speaking. Not only must each succeeding generation lay hold of this moral trust—a trust that is intergenerational and binding in character: every generation is held accountable for its relationship to this trust. Historically, moral truth—and thus jurisprudence—has been understood as divine law, that is, revelation, working in concert with natural law theory, that is, reason. Forged in the heat of social, political, and cultural challenges that have confronted generation after generation, this moral trust is an abiding treasure. While existing independently of particular cultures and eras, it must be rediscovered ...
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