Valuable Things that Get Lost in Modern Philosophy and Culture©

(Revised, 13 December 2019.)

There's a tendency to throw aside old values as belonging to an earlier generation. Don't discard those values that have proven, over the period of time, their value. Just believe in those values that made our nation great and keep them: faith, family, hard work, and, above all, freedom.  --Ronald Reagan.(1)

In earlier blogs I have expressed concern that many people today, almost without question, accept the modern world’s philosophies as superior to anything that has gone before. In my view this bodes ill for not only the immediate future, but for subsequent generations as well. Materialism, hedonism, and secularism with their attendant subsidiary doctrines dominate modern culture and much good is left behind and lost.

This concern surfaced again this week as I’m just finishing an interesting book about True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence, where I encountered two examples of things that are being or are already lost, though this is not the author’s main point. The first draws a distinction between personality and character. Tom Morris wrote:

Character is the moral core of personhood.  It ought to be thought of as the foundation of personality. As Stephen Covey and others have begun to point out in recent years, too much of the success literature of our century has been personality-oriented when it should have been character-based. A beautiful house built on a bad foundation cannot provide for secure and stable long-term habitation. Nor can an attractive personality veneered over a bad character provide for any sustainable and fulfilling form of success.(2)

The evidence of this retrograde situation surrounds us. One example, a ubiquitous example–is the near worship of the “celebrity culture.”  It is one that emphasizes externals of personality and largely ignores the interior matter of character. In recent months the “Me too” movement has begun to expose the shallowness of the veneer and the emptiness of the soul of some considered to be celebrities. Alas, that is only one aspect of a much larger problem arising from the emphasis on personality at the expense of character.

The second example comes from the following observation about the culture of winning so prevalent today.

Everybody wants to be a winner. Nobody wants to be a loser. It was once the worst kind of insult and severest sort of condemnation to be called a scoundrel, a cad, a louse, a liar, untrustworthy, unscrupulous, unethical, immoral, or just plain evil. In more recent days, the most dreaded affront and reproach seems to be “loser.” A label to be avoided at all costs. The lowest of the low. The realm of outer darkness.(3)

Interestingly, both of these examples come from a chapter about character and its role in success.  

I am only an amateur and part-time sports fan and I prefer college to professional sports. My two-cheer commitment to sports is due in the main to the nearly total commitment to winning at all cost, including cheating if necessary. Consider how often one observes “holding” penalties in football.  The rules clearly make holding an opponent while blocking a violation. Every act of holding is intentional. There is no “inadvertent holding.” I know this is true because I have played the game. Every act of holding is cheating. Yet we frequently hear announcers, commentators–color and otherwise–as well as coaches and players ignore, dismiss, or rationalize this obvious cheating.

This is just one of many examples of cheating found in football. Another example, which some may consider petty, is that universally ball carriers after they are tackled push the ball out ahead of where they were tackled, hoping the refs will “spot” the ball there. It almost never works, but apparently it works enough so that virtually every ball carrier does it to add more yardage than actually achieved in the run. This is an obvious and very observable attempt to cheat.

“A little thing” the avid fan says. My response: it is cheating and that matters. This is my problem with what is happening today–the casual dismissal of “little” efforts to cheat. Cheating seems to be accepted in most sports if one can get away with it, because as the mantra goes “winning is the only thing.” The situation is exacerbated in  “big money” sports where an economic motive contributes to the “win at any cost” mentality.

Reading in August 2019 brought two additional things that modernity has taken from us, or is taking from us to my consciousness.  They are, 1) freedom of speech is gravely threatened, and 2) pornography has robbed the generations since 1960 of sexual purity, thought purity, speech purity, innocence of children exposed to it readily on the Internet and elsewhere, and a whole lot more. Laws, liberal philosophy, attempts to mold culture and society, and most contemporary religions have proved impotent before both of these losses. I believe Harry Emerson Fosdick has the right answer. Regarding free speech he wrote in the early 1950s,

Nothing that we call progress will reverse that trend--only the restoration in us of our father's love of independence and liberty, their belief in freedom to think, and their determination in a democracy to say what, by God's grace, they see fit to say about the public weal.

And about pornography:

Nothing that we call progress will get us out of that--only the re-emergence in us of something old: self-respect, decency, disgust at things contemptible and low, public revulsion against panderers who grow financially fat on the exploitation of vice.(4)

Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen argued that such losses happen because we have forgotten “the purpose of life” and replaced it with the idea of progress. Here too, we are confused and mistaken, because much of what we call progress can simply be "change without purpose". Thus we can confuse “a step forward with a step in the right direction.” That is, progress is considered good regardless of it’s direction, or what may have been forgotten, left behind, or jettisoned in it’s pursuit.  Progress, in this case, is it’s own purpose and goal, but may be largely misdirected, with the result being unsatisfying, unfulfilling and ultimately unrewarding if not inimical.(4)

Character, honesty, integrity, and fairness are just a few of the abandoned casualties in today’s modern philosophies and culture. I urge you to take such examples seriously and to be skeptical in a healthy way about the contemporary notion that the old is passe and whatever is new is superior. This is especially true regarding today’s erroneous equation of personality and character. Be wary of the popular notion that progress is inevitably good.  It may be retrogression dressed in the flashy fashions of sloppy, untested, and uncontested philosophy, especially if it encourages or contributes to forsaking much good that is old, simply because it is old.

Let’s think again together, soon.

Notes:

1.  Ronald Reagan, in Elizabeth Dole, comp., Hearts Touched With Fire: My 500 Favorite Inspirational Quotations, New York: Carroll & Graff, 2004, 96.

2.  Tom Morris, True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence, New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994, 218.

3. Ibid, 219.

4.  Both quotations come from: Harry Emerson Fosdick, What is Vital in Religion: Sermons on Contemporary Christian Problems, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955, 164, bold emphasis added.  What makes Fosdick's arguments all the more interesting, is that he is a progressive liberal, but in these and other cases he is arguing for a conservative position--the return to earlier philosophies and values that have also been jettisoned by recent generations.

5.  See, Fulton J. Sheen, Freedom Under God.  Washington, D.C., Center for Economic and Social Justice, 2013, chapter 3, “True Liberty,” pp. 19-28.  This book was originally published  by the Bruce Publishing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1940.  I thank my friend Jim Smith for bringing it to my attention.