What Is Happening to Values?
In a 1948 Armistice Day address, General Omar N. Bradley said: “We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. . . . Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” “Humanity,” he said, “is in danger of being trapped in this world by moral adolescence.”
AT ONE time there were traditional values based on Biblical sources. But no more. Now they are pushed aside as no longer fashionable. New life-styles are in vogue. “Truth” is relative. There is no right or wrong anymore. No need to be judgmental. Each one has his own set of values, decides what is right for him, does his own thing. No-fault fornication. No-fault adultery. No-fault divorce. No-fault child neglect. And no blame for any of the consequences—the soaring teenage pregnancies, the millions of abortions, the ruined lives of children. And since there is no fault and no blame, there is no guilt. In these ways the world throws true values in the trash can.
The first human pair decided to determine for themselves what was right and what was wrong. (Genesis 2:17; 3:5) Today, millions have decided that there is no right and no wrong. Motivated by the wish to do as they please, they toss aside the traditional values and cry out: “Free at last! Anything goes!” What goes are the restraints—then the woes pour in!
A headline in a prominent magazine asks, “A Nation of Liars?” and follows up with this blurb: “Government officials dissemble. Scientists falsify research. Workers alter career credentials to get jobs. What’s going on here? The answer, a growing number of social critics fear, is an alarming decline in basic honesty.”
Another major magazine runs a series of articles on ethics, sprinkled with such tidbits as: Scandal-scarred business deals, public trust betrayed, transgressions that run the gamut of human failings. Mistakes admitted, but not bad mistakes, and nothing so damning as sins.
That series of articles concludes: “If Americans wish to strike a truer ethical balance, they may need to re-examine the values that society so seductively parades before them: a top job, political power, sexual allure, a penthouse or lakefront spread, a killing on the market. The real challenge would then become a redefinition of wants so that they serve society as well as self, defining a single ethic that guides means while it also achieves rightful ends.”
The following headline appeared in The New York Times: “Public Officials Around the State Accepted 105 of 106 Bribes Offered, the F.B.I. Says.” Was the 106th bribe offered to an honest man? No, “he didn’t think the amount was enough.”
Matthew Troy, former city councilman and Democratic Party leader from Queens, New York City, speaking on the subject “Corruption and Integrity in Government” told a university class that bribes are commonplace. State Assembly votes are swapped for judgeships. “The usual price for a judgeship on the State Supreme Court was $75,000, with lower court posts going for $35,000.”
Novelist James A. Michener highlights such shenanigans as: glorifying financial adventurers who amass hundreds of millions of other people’s money, insider-trading scandals, takeover artists orchestrating green-mail coups, scandalous religious forces running amok for money, AIDS frightening the populace, terrorists disrupting society, politicians savaging national parks and permitting ecological disasters, an administration that sells arms to a proclaimed enemy and then illegally funnels the profits into a Central American revolution.
Michener’s overall conclusion: “The 1980’s will have to be remembered as The Ugly Decade, because so many distasteful things have surfaced.” And all of this because of one simple development: True values have been tossed into the trash can.
William J. Bennett, then U.S. Secretary of Education, criticized the failure to teach moral values in school and itemized teenage problems that result from this omission:
“Item: Some forty percent of today’s 14-year-olds will be pregnant at least once before the age of twenty, and more than half of those births will be illegitimate.
“Item: Teenage suicide is at a record high, and is the second leading cause of teenage deaths.
“Item: The United States leads the industrialized world in the percentage of youthful drug users.
“Can our schools ‘solve’ these problems? No. Can they help? Yes. Are they doing as much as they can to help? No.
“Why not? In part, because they are reluctant to address one of the chief goals of education: moral education. Take, for example, a recent article quoting several New York area educators proclaiming that ‘they deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.’
“The article tells of an actual counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. During the session the students concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return $1,000 she found in a purse at the school.” The counselor did not pass judgment on their conclusion, explaining: “If I come from the position of what is right and what is wrong, then I’m not their counselor.”
Bennett’s comment: “Once upon a time, a counselor offered counsel. He counseled students about many things—and among them, about right and wrong.”
Failure of Homes, Schools, Churches
The home is rapidly becoming a wasteland as far as the teaching of values is concerned. The disintegration of families makes the home a poor schoolroom—both parents working, divorces, single-parent families with the parent working, children left to sitters or day-care schools or alone in empty homes with TV as a companion pushing sex for fun and teaching violence as the solution to problems. Syndicated columnist Norman Podhoretz comments on the results: “These effects include a rise in criminal behavior; a rise in drug and alcohol use; a rise in teenage pregnancy, abortion and venereal disease, and a rise in the adolescent death rate from violent causes (homicide, motor vehicle accidents, suicide). The only thing that seems to have declined is academic achievement.”
Podhoretz continues: “Two sociologists find hard statistical evidence for what we all know simply from looking around. They find more and more people for whom ‘self-fulfillment’ takes precedence over all other values. They find fewer and fewer people who believe in sacrificing themselves, or even their own convenience, to the needs and demands of their children. An astonishing two-thirds of all American parents feel that ‘parents should be free to live their own lives even if it means spending less time with their children.’”
John D. Garwood, when dean of instruction at Fort Hays State University, Kansas, commented on the loss of true values: “The failure of our homes, schools and churches to transmit a solid, lasting value system for those they influence, has brought about many of our problems today. The great British historian Arnold Toynbee sees in the Western World today a decline in honesty, lack of national purpose and a disastrous emphasis upon materialism, a decline in pride of workmanship, a dedication to a high consumption level with an emphasis upon self-gratification. He sees in our nation’s life styles many of the elements which led to the fall of the Roman empire.”
The trashing of true values has left this world in a mindless pursuit of more of everything. Rich in things but poor in spirit, man is left floundering and directionless. His rescue lies in a return to the source of true values.