End of the Waste Land

“I think we can all agree,” Irving Kristol has written, “that the United States today—and Western civilization in general—is experiencing what we call a crisis in values.” Although “crisis” is an overworked word in our day, Kristol’s observation is in the strictest sense correct. There is something about a crisis in values that sets it apart from crises concerning food, energy, population, crime, and so forth. It means that we have lost our bearings and our balance, that we have become disoriented and confused, that there has been a breakdown of ethical standards, that we no longer know how to judge right from wrong.

Disorientation in the area of values is manifest throughout our society. The nation’s institutions of “higher learning” should be able to offer us some counsel in our troubled search for a reorientation in values, in our attempt to distinguish the higher from the lower. But many of the more prestigious universities have become transformed into repositories of technical skill and so-called value-free research. Particularly in the social sciences, with the ascendancy of the behavioral persuasion, we have witnessed the fallacious attempt to separate “values” from “facts,” and to confine “science” to the realm of “empirical facts” while denying that there are any universal standards for choosing between conflicting values (which are categorized in the behavioralist language as “preferences”). “Values,” a European positivist once cavalierly observed, “are capable of confession but not of cognition.” That statement cut the heart out of what had been known as the “perennial philosophy,” which had assumed that the Good was a Reality with which, in the height of his noetic consciousness, man might have contact and in which he might knowingly participate. The Good, according to the perennial philosophy, is not an idiosyncratic “value judgment.” If it is held to be so, we no longer have a common culture, but either a jungle of wild and uncontrollable opinions or a drab and monotonous conformity with the “age.”

DG

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Dante Germino

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“I think we can all agree,” Irving Kristol has written, “that the United States today—and Western civilization in general—is experiencing what we call a crisis in values.” Although “crisis” is an overworked word in our day, Kristol’s observation is in the strictest sense correct. There is something about a crisis in values that sets it apart from crises concerning food, energy, population, crime, and so forth. It means that we have lost our bearings and our balance, that we have become disoriented and confused, that there has been a breakdown of ethical standards, that we no longer know how to judge right from wrong.

Disorientation in the area of values is manifest throughout our society. The nation’s institutions of “higher learning” should be able to offer us some counsel in our troubled search for a reorientation in values, in our attempt to distinguish the higher from the lower. But many of the more prestigious universities have become transformed into repositories of technical skill and so-called value-free research. Particularly in the social sciences, with the ascendancy of the behavioral persuasion, we have witnessed the fallacious attempt to separate “values” from “facts,” and to confine “science” to the realm of “empirical facts” while denying that there are any universal standards for choosing between conflicting values (which are categorized in the behavioralist language as “preferences”). “Values,” a European positivist once cavalierly observed, “are capable of confession but not of cognition.” That statement cut the heart out of what had been known as the “perennial philosophy,” which had assumed that the Good was a Reality with which, in the height of his noetic consciousness, man might have contact and in which he might knowingly participate. The Good, according to the perennial philosophy, is not an idiosyncratic “value judgment.” If it is held to be so, we no longer have a common culture, but either a jungle of wild and uncontrollable opinions or a drab and monotonous conformity with the “age.”