Collapse in providing ethical value screens

Radical changes in world view and life style are effecting a crisis in both having and providing effective sets of ethical values. Current educational and religious systems have led to the acceptance of short-term "faddish" collective and individualistic values. The following of narrow objectives leads to a patchwork morality and the context for action becomes parochial. Responses to real global needs are ineffective and noncommittal as individuals feel themselves tied to increasingly limited social relations. Such attitudes lead to dissipation of the energy directed at global issues in short-term or reduced projects; and they blunt awareness of the need to create real solutions by fostering the illusion that such needs have already been met. Relations with the community at large, in its diverse and dynamic form, are reduced, as social obligations become limited to one's nearest relations.

It may be that the moral unrest be seen is not so much a breakdown in society as a breaking down of social barriers. This dismantling of old certainties, of what could be expected from one's life, offers an almost intolerable form of freedom, but is freedom all the same. This kind of identity crisis seems a hard price to pay so that later generations may believe anything might be possible for them.