​​An Ominous Decay of Values

The phrase "In God We Trust" can be seen on an American ten dollar bill on Oct. 23, 2008. Hugh Pinney/Getty Images)

Commentary

According to a sobering new report, the last quarter-century has seen a huge change in some significant traditional social values among the American populace—changes in attitudes toward patriotism, religion, and having children. But before addressing specific values, let’s examine the concept of “value” itself.

“Value” lies at the heart of economics. It’s the core concept from which the entire theoretical structure of economics is derived. The Austrian economist Carl Menger (1840–1921) made the key theoretical breakthrough that defined the neoclassical school of economics when he posited the subjective theory of value in 1871. By “subjective,” Menger meant that value wasn’t some pre-existing quality inherent in things, but that it originates in the mind and that individuals impute it to those things. Economic value is not an objective, fixed reality like size, weight, color, or possessing the identical potential utility for all humans, but rather is like art, of which we say that its “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

A later Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), used Menger’s subjective theory of value as the basis for a comprehensive theory of human action, which he named “praxeology.” The central tenet of praxeology is that human beings act on the basis of what they value; in any given situation, the action they choose is determined by what they value most highly among available alternatives.

What some people fail to understand about Austrian economics is that the things that humans value aren’t limited to goods and services that can be bought and sold (or that can be seized by governments and criminals). The range of things that can have monetary prices attached to them is distinctly narrower in scope than all the things that humans value. (Mises gave this smaller realm of monetary exchange the esoteric label “catallactics,” which is what we call “economics” in everyday usage today.)

We also value things that aren’t susceptible to being expressed in terms of dollars and cents, such as love, peace, freedom, children, etc. In other words, value is attached not only to the economic goods and services that have utility for us, but value can also be ethical or aesthetic; that is, we value things because they’re good or beautiful or are in some other nonmonetary way valuable to us.

Another key point to understand about value is that while the starting point of value is found in the individual mind, value has a social or collective dimension, too. Just as a free market results in the production of economic goods that people collectively value most highly, so a society reflects the intangible or spiritual or attitudinal values of what its members deem good, worthwhile, and important (if not essential). It’s our values—our sense of what is good and right—that gives shape and character to our society.

Let us now look at the shifting values of Americans.

Patriotism

In the recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, 38 percent of respondents affirmed that patriotism was very important to them today, compared to 70 percent 25 years ago. You can imagine what a mess our society would be if only 38 percent of people had positive self-esteem. To not love one’s own country is negative self-esteem writ large.

What we have here is the immature cry of spoiled, entitled people—people who have had it too easy; people who seem to believe that we don’t live in a very nice country because not everybody has every good thing given to them on a silver platter. They should see more of the world; then they might better appreciate what we have here in America. Once again, we see the sorry fruit of the paradox of prosperity and the cult of negativity.

Religion

In this year’s survey, 39 percent of Americans said that religion is very important to them—down from 62 percent 25 years ago. In his 2012 book “Coming Apart” (highly recommended!), social scientist Charles Murray illustrated the connection between a decline in the importance of religion and the increase in broken families, multiple social pathologies, and economic decline.

Today we see the sad effects of secularism and materialism eclipsing religion and spiritual values in increasing violence. (The rise of materialism is evidenced in the poll showing an increase—from 31 percent to 43 percent—in the belief in the importance of having more money.)

In contemporary American society, there’s less of the self-restraint that Christian and other religious teachings inculcate. Thus, we see ruder and more hateful and aggressive interpersonal confrontations. We also see the tragedy of millions of lost souls drifting through life with no sense of purpose or direction, with the most extreme cases reduced to living and defecating on city streets.

Having Children

A mere 23 percent of Americans under the age of 30 say that having children is important to them (not totally surprising given the epidemic of depression among our young). The United States already needs significant immigration to avert our own population implosion.

Whatever kind of society we hope to have in the future, we first have to have a society, which means we need people. Yet, the anti-life ideologues on the left have convinced millions of young Americans that having children is a prohibitively costly venture and an act of environmental desecration. So much to heart have some young American women taken this sinister message that they’re electing to get sterilized to make sure they can never have children. How sad for them and how destructive to our country.

Whether to have children is a very personal decision, but it also has immense social ramifications. Larger populations are actually beneficial to human standards of living. Nevertheless, many countries around the world are rushing pell-mell toward population implosions that, in the most extreme cases, may result in the collapse of nation-states and the self-immolation of societies. Let us hope that America doesn’t catch up to them on the road to collapse. (Check out the work of demographer and geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan for details.)

Tolerance for Others

In 2019, 80 percent of respondents said that having more tolerance for others was important; today, it’s only 58 percent. That may seem counterintuitive because of all the rhetoric about tolerance, but the entire woke movement (regrettably a massive movement) strongly rejects tolerance of conservatives and other objects of their disfavor.

Values are the invisible glue that holds a society together. The reason American society is so polarized today is we’re divided about fundamental values. There’s no easy solution to this problem. Reason, Judeo-Christian principles, and a good dose of common sense will be needed to prevail. Each of us who values America’s goodness more than its warts (which the left exaggerates and sometimes entirely fabricates) needs to courageously defend and promote those traditional American values that have served us so well throughout our history. The contest over values will be the primary battlefield for the soul of America.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.