The Poison of Subjectivism

When you consider the history of the world and how things of changed, you generally consider it progress. We have been advancing to some higher truth, a better understanding of the universe and ourselves. In this pursuit we have in recent years almost quickly eliminated all worth in judgment. The modern view, "does not believe that value judgements are really judgements at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produces in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another." But is this really true? C.S. Lewis maintains that we are more similar than we think and there is a danger in labeling everything as subjective because the very platform they stand on can be attacked in just the same way. Subjectivism holds no bounds and can drag any argument into the depths. Which is why Lewis says, "we have only two alternatives. Either the maxims of traditional morality must be accepted as axioms of practical reason which neither admit nor require argument to support them and not to "see" which is to have lost human status; or else there are no values at all, what we mistook for values being "projections" or irrational emotions."
Something I thought was very interesting in all of this was the idea that even though we think we have made great shifts in our thinking, we really are just the same. The first good example of this is Lewis describing the modern man who tries to reinterpret morality and how we should act. "We must abandon the irrational taboos and base our values on the good of the community - as if the maxim - thou shalt promote the good of the community were anything more than a polysyllabic variant of, do as you would be done by, which has itself no other basis than the old universal value judgement that he claims to be rejecting." It seems so obvious when Lewis states it-but isn't it exactly what gets said? We try to ignore the moral law and create this new idea, when it is a direct derivative of the moral law. Lewis takes this even farther and says that there are two propositions that we must know. "1) The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum. 2) Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some one maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium."
We like to think of ourselves as incredibly different, but we really aren't. There are many different words, terms and traditions between cultures. But if you look at the root of it all, the base structures upon which most things are built, there is a resounding resemblance. "If a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the encyclopedia of religion and ethics he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the practical reason in man." There are cultures which vary greatly from ourselves, but the morals are not that different. Consider the ancient Mayans to ourselves. They had human sacrifices, something we would consider abominable. But why did they have them? They were for the good of the people, to help everyone else prosper and flourish. It was a sacrifice to benefit the whole. Something that we would consider noble. Now we know that human sacrifices will not bring us good crops or peace, so we do not practice it. But we certainly call for sacrifice. Taxes are a sacrifice to help our country stay strong. Or we sacrifice soldiers in war to protect the nation. They are different situations in different settings definitely. But aren't the very core concepts behind them still the same? We have not come as far as we think. We are subjective creatures and always will be. By doubting everything we know through subjectivism, we are only closing all knowledge off from ourselves.