RE several comments on the relationship between technology and loss of
values.
Personal opinion -- I cannot substantiate this -- is that values have not
changed a great deal over time. One of the great problems we have though,
is that there is no source materials that summarize all value-laden acts
and give us a scorecard. We attempt to use the newspaper for this
purpose, but it is seriously flawed. Aside from the sports pages,
newspapers have no interest in printing stories about all the random acts
of kindness. Thus, we end of with pages of murder and one human interest
story, because, presumably, someone has discovered that this is what
sells.
If there has been a decline in values, I would tend to attribute it
primarily to the loss of community. Moving away from people you know and
love frees you to act in ways that you would never act in their presence.
Especially in large cities, we see this played out over and over. I just
returned from Boston. No one says hello there on the street. In my town
no one would think of passing another person without a friendly hello,
whether you know that person or not. We get tons of tourists in the
summer, and they invariably start out being flumoxed by all the
friendliness.
On this forum we have had some discussion of different cultures, and their
richness. This is true, but there is a price, and that is we tend to
distrust people who act differently than we do. In isolated parts of the
world, citizens of hamlets separated by only a few miles distrust each
other. It is common -- not rare, but common -- for this distrust to flame
up into anger and struggle. In many of these villages, it is considered
"ok" to do harm to the strange people' from another village. Imagine how
this mentality plays out when someone from a small village goes to a large
city and _everyone_ is from another village. The mentality becomes one of
'anything goes' and this is exactly what we see.
--Rol Fessenden LL Bean, Inc 76234,3636@compuserve.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>