Science and Erosion of Human Values

Moral values and the march of science

All law in some sense teaches and forms us, while also regulating our behaviour. The same applies to our public policies, including the ones that govern our scientific research. There is no such thing as morally neutral legislation or morally neutral public policy. Every law is the public expression of what somebody thinks we "ought" to do. The question that matters is this: Which moral convictions of which somebodies are going to shape our country's political and cultural future - including the way we do our science?

The answer is pretty obvious: if you and I as citizens don't do the shaping, then somebody else will. That is the nature of a democracy. A healthy democracy depends on people of conviction working hard to advance their ideas in the public square - respectfully and peacefully, but vigorously and without apologies.

Politics always involves the exercise of power in the pursuit of somebody's idea of the common good. And politics always and naturally involves the imposition of somebody's values on the public at large. So if a citizen fails to bring his moral beliefs into our country's political conversation, if he fails to work for them publicly and energetically, then the only thing he ensures is the defeat of his own beliefs.

Religious beliefs

We also need to remember that most people - not everyone, of course, but most of us - root our moral convictions in our religious beliefs. What we believe about God shapes what we think about the nature of men and women, the structure of good human relationships, and our idea of a just society. This has very practical consequences, including the political kind. We act on what we really believe. If we don't act on our beliefs, then we don't really believe them.

As a result, the idea that the "separation of Church and state" should force us to exclude our religious beliefs from guiding our political behaviour makes no sense at all, even superficially. If we don't remain true in our public actions to what we claim to believe in our personal lives, then we only deceive ourselves. Because God certainly isn't fooled. He sees who and what we are. God sees that our duplicity is really a kind of cowardice, and our lack of courage does a lot more damage than simply wounding our own integrity. It also saps the courage of other good people who really do try to publicly witness what they believe. And that compounds a sin of dishonesty with a sin of injustice.

As these concerns are especially pertinent to scientific progress, here let me present some thoughts from two very different sources. Here's the first source:

"Science, by itself, cannot establish the ends to which it is put. Science can discover vaccines and cures for diseases, but it can also create infectious agents; it can uncover the physics of semiconductors, but also the physics of the hydrogen bomb. Science [as] science is indifferent to whether data are gathered under rules that scrupulously protect the interest of human research subjects ... [or by] bending the rules or ignoring them altogether. A number of the Nazi doctors who injected concentration camp victims with infectious agents or tortured prisoners by freezing or burning them to death were in fact legitimate scientists who gathered real data that could potentially be put to good use."

The same source goes on to worry that, "today, many of the bio-ethicists who claim to counsel and guide the moral course of American science "have become nothing more than sophisticated (and sophistic) justifiers of whatever it is the scientific community wants. ... In any discussion of cloning, stem-cell research, gene-line engineering and the like, it is usually the professional bioethicist who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room."

Now, from my second source:

"What is our contemporary idiocy? What is the enemy within the [human] city? If I had to give it a name, I think I would call it 'technological secularism.' The idiot today is the technological secularist who knows everything ... about the organisation of all the instruments and techniques of power that are available in the contemporary world - and who, at the same time, understands nothing about the nature of man or about the nature of true civilisation."

Ethical guidelines

The words from my first source appeared in 2002 from the author and scholar Francis Fukuyama. If you know his work, you know that Fukuyama clearly supports the benefits of science and technology. He is not - to my knowledge - a religious believer, and based on his writings, he seems to have little use for Christianity. But he's also not a fool. He sees exactly where our advances in biotechnology could lead us if we don't find an ethical way of guiding them.

The words from my second source were written exactly 50 years ago, in 1961. They come from John Courtney Murray, the great Jesuit priest and Christian scholar. Murray was a thoughtful man, and he chose his language very carefully. He used the word "idiot" in the original Greek sense of the term, which is quite different from its meaning in modern slang.

For the Greeks, the "idiot" was not a mentally deficient man. Rather, he was a man who did not possess a proper public philosophy, or as Murray says, "a man who is not master of the knowledge and skills that underlie the life of a civilised city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word 'civility'."

As I said, these two sources are very different. One was a believer. The other is not. Father Murray died more than four decades ago, long before today's stem-cell and cloning debates. But both men would agree that science and technology are not ends in themselves. They're enormously valuable tools. But they're tools that can undermine human dignity - and even destroy what it means to be "human" - just as easily as they can serve human progress.

Everything depends on who uses them, and how. Fools with tools are still fools and the more powerful the tools, the more dangerous the fools. Or to put it another way, neither science nor technology requires a moral conscience to produce results. The evidence for that fact is the record of the last century.

Foundational issue

Now I've talked about these things so far for a simple reason. The moral and political struggle we face today in defending human dignity is becoming more complex. I believe that abortion is the foundational human rights issue of our lifetime. We can't simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing of unborn children. We can't build a just society, and at the same time, legally sanction the destruction of generations of unborn human life. The rights of the poor and the rights of the unborn child flow from exactly the same human dignity guaranteed by the God who created us.

Of course, working to end abortion doesn't absolve us from our obligations to the poor. It doesn't excuse us from our duties to the disabled, the elderly and immigrants. In fact, it demands from us a much stronger commitment to materially support women who find themselves in a difficult pregnancy.

All of these obligations are vital. God will hold us accountable if we ignore them. But none of these other duties can obscure the fact that no human rights are secure if the right to life is not. Unfortunately, abortion is no longer the only major bioethical threat to that right in our culture. In fact, the right to life has never, at any time in the past, faced the range of challenges it faces right now, and will face in the coming decades.

Physician-assisted suicide, cloning, brain-computer interface (BCI) research, genetic screening of unwanted fetuses, genetic engineering of preferred physical and intellectual traits, cross-species experimentation, and developments in neuroscience - these things already raise serious questions about the definition of "human nature" and the protection of human dignity in the years ahead.

In Europe and the United States, our knowledge classes like to tell us that we live in an age of declining religious belief. But that isn't quite true. A culture that rejects God always invents another, lesser godling to take His place. As a result, in the words of the great Jewish bioethicist Leon Kass, we live in an age of "salvific science." In the place of the God who became man, "we have man become as god." And in place "of a God who - it is said - sent his son who would, through his own suffering, take away the sins of the world, we have a scientific saviour who would take away the sin of suffering altogether."

The irony is this: the search for human perfection implied in modern science - or at least, the kind of science accountable to no moral authority outside of itself - leads all too easily to a hatred of imperfection in the real human persons who embody it with their disabilities. The simplest way to deal with imperfections is to eliminate the imperfect.

In our daily lives, Kass warns, "the eugenic mentality is taking root, and we are subtly learning with the help of science to believe that there really are certain lives unworthy of being born. ... [T]he most pernicious result of our technological progress ... [is] the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man [as] mere raw material for manipulation and homogenisation."

Dr Kass made those remarks at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, itself a monument to the murderous and genuinely satanic misuse of science and politics in the last century. But he wasn't speaking about genocide in the past, in some faraway, alien dictatorship. He was talking about the temptations we face today in our own democratic societies, the temptations to create "a more perfect human" - and, in the process, to pervert science and attack our own humanity.

The great French scholar Jacques Maritain once wrote: "The devil hangs like a vampire on the side of history. History moves forward nonetheless, and [it] moves forward with the vampire." The devil is condemned to work within time. He works in the present to capture our hearts and steal our future. But he also attacks our memory, the narrative of our own identity. And he does it for a very good reason.

"The way we remember history conditions how we think and choose today, in our daily lives. That's why one of the first things we need to do, if we want to 'live as Catholics,' is to remember what being 'Catholic' really means - and we need to learn that lesson in our identity not from the world not from the tepid and self-satisfied and not from the enemies of the Church, even when they claim to be Catholic but from the mind and memory of the Church herself, who speaks through her pastors."

Good and evil

Jacques Maritain and Leszek Kolakowski came from very different backgrounds. Maritain was deeply Catholic. Kolakowski was in no sense an orthodox religious thinker. But they would have agreed that good and evil, God and the devil, are very real - and that history is the stage where that struggle is played out, both in our personal choices and in our public actions where human souls choose their sides and create their futures. In Kolakowski's own words, "we are not passive observers or victims of this contest, but participants as well, and therefore our destiny is decided on the field on which we run."

Politics is the exercise of power; and power - as Jesus himself saw when Satan tempted him in the desert - can very easily pervert itself by doing evil in the name of pursuing good ends. But this fact is never an excuse for cowardice or paralysis. Christ never absolved us from defending the weak, or resisting evil in the world, or from solidarity with people who suffer.

Our fidelity as Christians is finally to God, but it implies a faithfulness to the needs of God's creation. That means we're involved - intimately - in the life of the world, and that we need to act on what we believe: always with humility, always with charity, and always with prudence - but also with courage. We need to fight for what we believe. As Kolakowski wrote, "Our destiny is decided on the field on which we run."

VALUE EROSION IN THE MODERN WORLD
WRITTEN BY [e-mail] ON OCTOBER 29, 2012 - 9:36 PM - NO COMMENT YET
Man is a unique creation in this universe that under certain parameters is free to make his own destiny. Now, if man has to make his destiny, the question of values in life comes up. He has to think naturally as to what should be the guiding norms of life process. It is therefore clear that the guiding factors for man, which provide the prime motivating force behind his thought, emotion and action, have to be moral and spiritual. The socio-cultural and spiritual life of man has to bring peace, progress and welfare for both the individual and the society. This is precisely the reason why the modern society is worried about the deterioration of values. Value education means inculcating in the children sense humanism, a deep concern for the well being of others and the nation. This can be accomplished only when we instill in the children a deep feeling of commitment to values that would build this country and bring back to the people pride in work that brings order, security and assured progress. Value education refers to a programme of planned educational action aimed at the development of value and character. Every action and thought of ours leaves an impression in our mind. These impressions determine in our behavior at a given moment and our responses to a given situation. The sum total of all our impressions is what determines our character. The past has determined the present and even so the present our present thoughts and actions will shape our future. Here we find the causes for the value erosion. This paper will fling luminosity on Reasons for value erosion and its remedy.

Introduction

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get”.

-Warren Buffet.

Now we are living in the Modern, Scientific and Technological world. Science and Technology have brought enormous changes in the society. The attitudes of the people are also changes in the day to day life of human beings. Man is a unique creation in this universe that under certain parameters is free to make his own destiny. Now, if man has to make his destiny, the question of values in life comes up. He has to think naturally as to what should be the guiding norms of life process. It is therefore clear that the guiding factors for man, which provide the prime motivating force behind his thought, emotion and action, have to be moral and spiritual. The socio-cultural and spiritual life of man has to bring peace, progress and welfare for both the individual and the society. This is precisely the reason why the modern society is worried about the deterioration of values. Value education means inculcating in the children sense humanism, a deep concern for the well being of others and the nation. This can be accomplished only when we instill in the children a deep feeling of commitment to values that would build this country and bring back to the people pride in work that brings order, security and assured progress. Value education refers to a programme of planned educational action aimed at the development of value and character. Every action and thought of ours leaves an impression in our mind. These impressions determine in our behavior at a given moment and our responses to a given situation. The sum total of all our impressions is what determines our character. The past has determined the present and even so the present our present thoughts and actions will shape our future. This is a key principle governing personality development.

Role of Mass Media in Indian Society.

Today, we are living in a world dominated by media. The mass media is increasingly occupying the central stage in our lives. The mass media has an iron grip on the imagination as well as thinking faculties of the society. The programmes and features served by the mass media which instruct people not only what they should eat, drink and wear and groom them but also at times misguide them to commit heinous crimes. Mass media acts as an effective catalyst of change in society. Mass media which is also called the sword-arm of democracy, commands awe and respect of nation as well as individuals it is the most effective instrument which has the potential to bring about the downfall of the despot rulers of the world. It is the most powerful investigative machinery that exposes the injustice, oppression, partiality and misdeeds of society.
In a materialist world of today in which everybody is hankering after power and prosperity and indulging in every kind of malpractices, it is media which brings all these things to notice and make public opinion against them. It creates public awareness. Today, when politicians are abusing their power and privileges and looting their countries, the evil nexus of mafia and crime syndicates is adding to human misery and where ordinary human beings have been reduced to such helplessness that they can do nothing except being silent spectators, the role of mass media assumes greater significance. It is when the media champions the cause of have-nots and acts as the supervisor of their rights and privileges. It is due to these roles of media that it has been called the fourth pillar of democracy. In a country like India where the percentage of poverty and illiteracy is high radio serves as the best means of mass media. It has unparalleled potential to educate, inform and condition people’s mind.

It is noted that each technological improvement result in an increased level of general employment in most of the countries except few centres of concentration of latest generation of technical hands. Just very few places and very few employed people would need to work to meet the needs of the entire world population in the new technology likely to evolve. Most of the people may be rendered useless and considered just a liability. Man would no longer need man for his survival. Could it result in a dinosaur like end of man leaving behind few robots drawing their life from atomic and solar batteries? The value of human life seems to have eroded. Humans are being killed like dogs and cats. Nobody mourns their death except for selfish motives. The value of anything depends upon its usefulness. Now Machines are more useful than humans. Everybody curse poors and not poverty. Poors are unemployed lot who are deprived of opportunities. Others are getting rich by selling their natural homes. Man will be left with glass houses and oxygen cylinders at ration shops. Man’s real worth is almost gone. His mental capabilities have become almost redundant and likely to vanish shortly. Only humans can give a human touch to a decision but what about a decision which is taken by robots and computers. One can put anything in computer memory but never a self enlightened soul. The self enlightened soul has no meaning and value for the money minded. The rest, everyone knows but prefers to keep mum to secure one’s share in illusive financial empire.

Causes of Value erosion

Culture is the beliefs, values we possess which define our set of actions under any situation normal or crisis. After the birth our parents were the immediate influencer of our culture and then the society played the vital role. Our country has such a huge diversity but still there are common values, beliefs which bind us into one and that is Indian culture. Let’s consider the example of our few common cultural beliefs.

A) Athiti Deo Bhawa-: We treated the guests as the god. But in today scenario we are so busy with ourselves that if they visit us we consider them as burden. We are so obsessed with the terms such as personal life, space that we see guests as someone invading our personal life. But this is at home level or minor level. But now if we consider the macro level or country level, government is taking initiatives to create awareness for treating foreign tourists as our guests through numerous ads in which it is teaching us about the importance of this culture. So, at minor level we are losing touch with the culture but at bigger level we are trying to achieve this.

B) Respect for elders-: We have been taught to treat our elders like GOD. We also have inculcated the same spirit of our culture through childhood. But now the trend of old-age homes have increased and that’s why more and more people post-marriage are sending their parents to old-age home which is one kind of disrespect for them.

C) Tradition to live together also decreasing as clearly there are very less families which are living as joint.

D) Patience, Inclination to Truth, restraint, non-violence are all part of our culture which has time to time endorsed by great personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Vivekananda but killing, rape, corruption has become rampant which is violating our culture. But recent coming of every citizen for Anna Hazare campaign highlights that how we still have respect for these virtues.

E) Castism, dowry, sati system which was predominant in our society since historic times have now been removed up to great extent from modern day society due to influence of western culture. But neither of the things mentioned above was part of our culture. It was the wrong interpretation of our religious texts which paved for these evils. So, the culture which we were violating since historic times we became aware off due to influence of other culture.

F) Treating individuals as God-: We respected each person as having GOD inside him in ancient timed and even after killing an individual in war nobody used to show disrespect for their body. But today in colleges among youths it is a trend to kick a person on their Birthday’s disrespecting the GOD lying inside the person. We celebrate an auspicious occasions like birth of the person by drinking wine, making noises in the night disturbing others.

G) Culture of helping others-: But today most of the young generations have picked up the habit of earphones plugged to their ear while roaming. They are so absorbed in themselves that they can’t see and help any needy persons.

Remedies for the value erosion

Values are core traits and qualities that represent an individual’s beliefs and guiding principles, which form the foundation of who we are. Values of people in society differ from one another due to the culture, upbringing, religious beliefs and many other experiences that shape each and every human being. Primarily, values are fundamentally taught at a young age, these values are predominantly learnt from family and friends, the community and through education. Therefore, schools and teachers have the opportunity to input into children positive and worthwhile values, to help build and strengthen personal and social skills and responsibilities. Values can be looked upon and read in many different ways and can interpret many different meanings to an individual. This then can be seen as a global issue towards the teaching and learning styles of each teacher. Issues and key ideas are addressed from local, national and international examples of values framework in order to come to a conclusion as to what is a balanced way of teaching values education in schools today.

“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

In believing in this statement, wouldn’t it be true to say that values should be the driving force in shaping the curriculum. During everyone’s lifetime, there’s always something that they will hold very dear; whether it be principles, beliefs, or values. For some it might be love, friendship, independence, or health. My most important value in life is integrity. It is the single most important quality one can ever develop that will enhance every part of your life. Integrity can be defined as consistency of actions, values, principles, and methods. It’s also the attribute of having sincerity and candor in regard to the reasons for one’s actions. Integrity is the focal point of a successful and happy life. Having integrity means that being absolutely honest and truthful in every part of one’s life. If a person is committed to being honest, the person is trying to guarantee success and happiness in life. Integrity is a value, like courage, intelligence, and persistence. It is a person’s choice of values and resolution to live by those values that form an individual’s moral fiber and character. Integrity also improves a person’s other values. Integrity is the attribute that locks in an individual’s values and causes them to live consistent with them. A person who has integrity also has an untarnished character in every area of his or her life. One of the most important activities an individual can engage in is developing your character. Only a person who is constantly living a life with the highest standards and virtues is a person truly living a life of integrity. To be totally honest with others, you first have to be totally honest with yourself. If you are always honest and true to yourself you cannot be false to anyone else.

Human values are the need of hour in this world. Truth, Right conduct, love, peace, non-violence. These are basics for a golden age of the planet earth. All religions come under this basic foundation. At the outset, I wonder the situation that has prompted somebody to create a “blogspot” for “Human Values” as if they are something distinct and different from us! It sounds as though, were fishes use some discussion group, would they discuss about swimming!! Anyway, that is the great comedown, the ground reality for us, the humans. As for “propagating” “creating awareness” of these values, I firmly believe that only by living them, you serve as the best example. We have enough scriptures, codes of conduct, etc. as to how to lead life, but it seems we loose ourselves in mere intellectual lexicalization and fail to understand the sublimate stuff.

As Sri SathyaSai Baba says, these human values can never be got from outside i.e. from books, shops, etc. but are something inherent in us. Some techniques, as given by Him are really helpful in adhering to these human values. The first thing is: Follow your Conscience. This Conscience is something wonderful which all of us possess and the most precious gift that one can have from God (and it is the one often being discarded!). A very simple example to show where the root of our value system is. And this our Conscience is often clouded by limitless desires. It is often our experience that when we long stop listening to Conscience, it will stop speaking to us.

The second thing is: Integrity (Harmony) in thought, word and deed. The results are amazing if only we make sure that we think only good thoughts and decide to speak only them and put into action what we speak. It is really a very practical solution; try this…

Conclusion

‘Tomorrow is too late to realize what is special in life and to appreciate what it has to offer us’.

When we look at life and value it on the basis of what we want to achieve, there is very little time to appreciate the moments and things that we have in the time of the present. There always seems to be something that is not good enough in our life, some way in which to improve it, also things that annoy us that we wish to move away from. For some people it is based mostly on boredom and wanting more out of life. We seek to find better in new horizons, which will hopefully bring us the fortune we feel we deserve.

They say the grass is greener on the other side. That usually we expect that what we do not have is better than what is given to us in the present. In some cases this might be true , but for most instances it is a matter of not seeing the value in what we have in the present, to understand it for what it really offers us. When we seek to find better, pushing away things that we have in the now can lead at times to loosing valuable things in life, such as people and items that we did not realize had so much importance and impact on our lives.

In some cases this might be a good thing, if there is pain and no reward given by the parties involved. More commonly however people get bored of things in life and do forget to value and appreciate the things that they originally chose for. There is always something better, something more interesting, which tends to put the original choices to the wayside as either a hindrance or for something to take advantage of on the way to finding something else. Instead of valuing the original choices and people that were once loved, they are now used more as a step in order to push a person towards new goals and desires. This might mean that the person is stood on and hurt. Perhaps we no longer care when we have moved on to better things.Life now is where we are living. The true value for life is in the present and the people and things that we have if they cannot be valued and appreciated now, then there might never be anything to satisfy us. Nothing will ever fit into expectation and desires, always leading to wanting more and more, without seeing what is really important to us. Do not wait until tomorrow to realize that many things that you already have in your life are special. Tomorrow is too late to see what is true value and worth in what we have chosen. Living in the now leads to enjoying all that we choose for and fulfilling our desires, and more importantly knowing what we have as truly valuable and to appreciate it for the time that we have left to enjoy it.

‘Every King was a helpless baby once

Every structure is was a blue print’

Every saint has a past similarly

Every sinner has a future’

according to the quote value is not something we get from a shop rather it is by the values we practice. No one born with the full fledged qualities .It is we by the teachings of others and practices of our own we get values. Values should be followed and also to be transcend to the future generation. Life is not everlasting everything will come to an end death is certain to all of us. It may come in any movement, any shape and any reason. Let us live with human values doing good things and helpful to others. Such people will be remembered even after their death.