Centre For Change

Values and Visions: Western Culture and Humanity's Future

Address by Richard Eckersley*
to Conference Earth
Humanity and planet Earth - 2001 and beyond
Melbourne, 17-19 November 1995

* The author is senior specialist, strategic analysis, with CSIRO, Australia's national research organisation. While he participated in the ASTEC youth project described in this paper in an official capacity, much of the analysis on which the paper is based has been conducted in a private capacity in his own time. The views expressed are personal.

Introduction

My interest in the subject of my talk today - the links between modern western culture (including how we see the future) and our well-being and prospects,especially those of young people - came about quite by accident. In early 1987, I went on part-time secondment from CSIRO to the then relatively new Commission for the Future.

My first major task was to draw together all the survey material I could find on Australians' attitudes to science and technology and the future. During the course of my research I came across two studies of children's and adolescents' expectations of the world they would inherit.

As the father of three young children, the bleakness of the visions left a deep impression on me. So for my next project, I decided to look into what link, if any, there might be between young people's sense of despair and hopelessness about the future - as suggested by these and other studies - and the evidence of their deteriorating well-being, as evidenced by rising levels of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse and crime etc.

The result was the report, Casualties of Change: the predicament of youth in Australia, published in 1988. Casualties of Change was very wide ranging. Because most of the experts I spoke to stressed the importance of more personal aspects of young people's lives in contributing to these psychosocial problems, I also covered these issues in the report - issues such as unemployment, changes in the family, and education.

Since then, however, I have become more interested in the role of our culture - of our system of beliefs, values, priorities, myths and stories - in shaping western industrial societies and the health and well-being of their citizens, especially their youth. There are two main reasons for this:

The tangible, structural changes - in the labour market and the family, for example - are being widely researched and debated.
The less tangible and all-pervasive influence of culture, on the other hand, has tended to be ignored in our quest to understand the forces at work in western societies. This situation is, however, now beginning to change; the question of values, for example, is attracting more attention.

In my talk today, I want to do two things:

First, I will outline the basic thesis about the fundamental failings of modern western culture that I began to explore in Casualties of Change, and have focused on over the past five years or so (largely in my own time), and some of the recent reaction and evidence.
Second, I will return to the issue that got me into this subject, and report on the results of a project I have been involved in with the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC), which looked at young people's views of probable and preferred futures for Australia in 2010.

Summary of thesis
While I have focused on Australia in my research, I have drawn on overseas research and much of my argument applies generally to western industrial societies. It will also increasingly apply to other, non-western societies as they become more influenced by western culture - if this is in fact what occurs.

Essentially, the argument goes as follows:

· Modern western culture is increasingly failing to do what cultures are designed to do: to give our lives meaning - a sense of identity, belonging and purpose, both socially and spiritually - and to provide a sound framework of values to guide what we do.

There are several dimensions to this cultural failing:
The encouragement of rampant individualism and materialism, and the weakening of communal and spiritual values.
Moral confusion and the promotion of anti-social values. Traditional vices such as pride (self-centeredness), greed, lust, envy and anger are promoted - especially through the media - while many traditional virtues such as faith, hope, compassion and fortitude, are neglected.
The promotion, again mainly through the media, of a negative, demoralising view of the world, and the corresponding lack of a coherent, convincing and appealing vision of the future to serve as a source of optimism, inspiration and common purpose.
A cultural framework that is changing too rapidly across too many fronts, increasing our sense of confusion, uncertainty and insecurity.
This failure weakens social cohesion and personal resilience, our capacity to cope with the trouble and strife of everyday life and to bounce back after misfortune. It is contributing to widespread public disillusionment and disenchantment, especially among the young, who are most vulnerable to its effects. It may also be contributing, directly and indirectly, to more serious social and personal problems such as suicide, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and crime.
Our cultural flaws also weaken our ability to address long-term economic, social and environmental challenges by undermining the strength of purpose, the social will, necessary to meet these challenges. This is an important point, but one I won't have time to go into: the cultural requirements for personal well-being are also those for social, economic and environmental health and sustainability.
Finally, the brighter side to this rather bleak perspective is that for a new order to emerge, the old must first fail, and this is the profound cultural transition or transformation we are now experiencing. It is this hope of a new beginning, the excitement of the challenge, the imperative to look beyond the near horizons of our personal lives that we must impress upon the hearts and minds of young people.

I want to say a little more about the crucial issue of meaning. In modern western culture, meaning is increasingly invested in the individual and his or her attributes, possessions and achievements, rather than through, say, belief in 'god, king and country'. Over-investment of meaning in the individual is, I believe, an intrinsically flawed strategy. It encourages unrealistic expectations and personal excess, and makes us vulnerable to a 'collapse of meaning' when things go wrong in our personal lives. And, as I've noted, it robs communities and societies of the 'glue' needed to hold them together.

Increasingly, young people are being caught in a vice between heightened expectations and diminished hopes - between what our culture encourages them to expect at a personal level, and what it offers at a broader social level. Richard King, this year's winner of the 1995 The Australian Vogel Literary Award for young writers, said in an interview:
"My generation was brought up being promised so much. Advertising promised so much. The lucky country promised so much. We reached adulthood and found it wasn't there."

In arguing that this is a serious cultural flaw, I am not necessarily calling for a return to old, traditional forms of identity and belief, but for a recognition of the need to broaden and deepen meaning in our lives. The American psychologist, Martin Seligman, makes a similar point:
"...surely one necessary condition for meaning...is the attachment to something larger than you are. And the larger the entity that you can attach the self to, the more meaning you can derive. To the extent that it is now difficult for young people to take seriously their relationship to God, to care about their relationship to the country, or to be part of a large and abiding family, meaning in life will be very difficult to find. The self, to put it another way, is a very poor site for meaning."

In a similar vein, another American psychologist, Philip Cushman, has argued that especially since the Second World War, we have created an 'empty self' - devoid of deeper, transcendent meaning - which must be constantly 'filled up' with consumer goods and services, celebrity gossip and other such distractions.

Our times are characterised by the pursuit of distraction. As Woody Allen said: "don't underestimate the power of distraction to keep our minds off the truth of our situation".

(Values and Visions: Western Culture and Humanity's Future, Address by Richard Eckersley)