2. Modern culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring or compassion. Increasingly the economic-statist-technocratic worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul.
Racism, chauvinism, and other forms of ethnocentricity are by-products of exaggerated claims on behalf of the antecedents of current generations. Every conceivable virtue and gift may be claimed for a nation's forefathers or for the racial ancestors of a continent. Every achievement - artistic, humanistic, theological, or technological - may be cited as unique, and the combination of achievements presented as evidence of superiority. What is claimed for the forebears becomes the transmitted property - physically, culturally, genetically and psychologically - of the present wearers of an ethnic 'identity'. All the institutions and characteristics of the culture receive a sacred character by such excess. Change and improvement become obstructed and inter-ethnic dialogue ceases. Excessive cultural pride may lead to conceding to demands for the creating or maintaining of a separate church or single state religion, and of an official, state-approved, single (and sometimes unique) language.