In my personal opinion, we are sort of insincere in our accusations against the Western civilization about its lukewarm attitude to traditional, or eternal values and betrayal of all the best things humanity has accumulated! Let them rot in hell for this! All these emotions reflect a false myth that social facilitators’ entire "wearproof" spiritual and moral tooling can be equated to edicts of nature.
Philosophers and cultural scientists are not comfortable with that, although making themselves exposed to conservative criticism. Russian social author Leonid Fishman, for instance, sees it this way: "The first thing needed is to reject the presumed unconditionality of tradition. The certainty presumption ultimately appears as that of meaninglessness, which implies a final reference to the authoritative "shut up and do not reason!". <...> Tradition conditionality awareness means that when a certain tradition is taken from the past, we must compare purposes that guided our ancestors who started this tradition with our own ones. And not only purposes, but also the ideological systems that determined goal-setting."
Today, Western civilization defiantly rejects social tradition, meaningful goal-setting in development, and morality. We have a happy consumer society. A full stomach is deaf to morality. Consider the United States with its record-high abuse-associated child mortality. Over the past decade, American parents have killed over 20,000 kids. Of their total number, 75% did not survive until four, and almost half never celebrated even their first birthday. This is thrice as much as in Canada, 11 times as much as in Italy. But the social makeup from the "High standard of living" bottle can skillfully disguise these flaws.
Present-day youth is safe from falling into moral radicalism or groaning "This is no way to live anymore". Investment bank Piper Sandler conducted a truly serious and detailed survey among American boys and girls. All the zoomers and alphas appeared as respectable bourgeois. Nearly every single respondent considers himself male or female, with only 2% identifying as non-binary. Their families’ average income is almost $68 000, which points to a strong middle class. By the way, a mere 12% of teenagers spend most on video games and food, then come cosmetics and clothes. Their average annual expenses account for about $2,400 dollars, two-thirds of which they get from their parents. At the same time, only 40% of kids are partially employed. Mucius Scaevola or Che Guevara are surely not their heroes!
One of the world's most respected media, the Wall Street Journal, sponsored a study into American people’s commitment to traditional values. The results have just been made public. The central takeaway is that patriotism, religious faith, birth of children and other priorities that have helped determine US national character for generations are losing their significance nowadays.
Take, for example, worn-out propagandistic patriotism. Only 38% attach importance to it, while 39% deem religion as a significant self-identification factor. The most terrible thing is a plunge in these values’ weight. When the same question was asked in 1998, the figures were 70% and 62% respectively.
The share of Americans who say that children, social life engagement and hard work are essential values has also declined. Only 23% of adults under 30 said having children is very important. Tolerance for others, which four years ago appealed to 80% of Americans, is down to 58%.
The only priority that has grown more important over the last quarter of a century is money, which is essential for 43% of those polled, against the 31% in 1998.
Notably, zoomers and alphas demonstrate a clear dismissal of ideals their fathers and grandfathers had. As revealed by the new survey, some 23% of adults under 30 said patriotism was very important to them personally, as compared to 59% of seniors aged 65+. About 31% of young respondents said the same about religion, as compared to 55% among seniors.
