Values in an age of upheaval
Vatican Council painted a clear portrait of this state of unrest and confusion in the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (1965). They said: “Ours is a new age of history with critical and swift upheavals spreading gradually to all corners of the earth. They are the product of man’s intelligence and creative activity, but they recoil upon him, upon his judgments and desires, both individual and collective, upon his ways of thinking and acting in regard to people and things. We are entitled then to speak of a real social and cultural transformation whose repercussions too are felt on the religious level” (GS 4).
Today, for instance, we can use our mobile phones to reach people in distant parts of the world, but at the same time many people seem to be alienated from people around them. We have access to the best ideas and excellent breeds of education, but many people have lost the sense of how to order their lives in consonance with the vast amount of information and knowledge they enjoy. Our world boasts of huge accomplishments in economics, commerce and finance, yet millions of people live in tragic situation of misery. Marriage and family life constitute one of the best and joyous human institutions ever known, yet many couples today are suffering from serious family crisis and are just living on the margins of life. We have the best technologies for making life comfortable today, but these technologies are also being manipulated and put at the service of destructive ends.
It would appear that with more knowledge and technological advancements humanity recedes to barbarism and savagery. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the man who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, once said that in today’s world “the human mind is more resourceful in discovering new means of destruction than new ways to support life.” During the second half of the 20th century, Henry Queffelec wrote: “Technological progress in this century has far outstripped all predictions and expectations. The result of these advancements has been a great material wealth matched by an alarming decline in spiritual and moral values.”
Today, traditional moral norms and religious values that used to sustain human life and to keep society in check have been abandoned, such that many people live lives without meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. This situation is even more acute in Western societies where the viruses of individualism, subjectivism, relativism, hedonism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism and atheism have eaten into the fabric of societal life, destroying all those cherished values and beliefs that have sustained and enhanced human life for many centuries.
In our own peculiar African setting, many of these deadly poisons come in form of ideologies, technologies and patterns of life prevalent in the Western world. Many of them are finding their way into our homes and destroying the communal nature of our social, religious and cultural systems of supporting and enhancing life. Observers have said that many of the problems we face today as Africans have been as a result of our uncritical acceptance and importation of Western-styled life orientations. Think for a moment the social dislocations occasioned by our wholesale consumption of Western products, which are all too evident today. We have for too long been fooled by the idea that what is new, modern and Western is, ipso facto, superior and better.
Many people have said that we now live in an age of godlessness. We see manifestations of this in the spate of violence, the destruction of human life by technological means, the many crises in family life, the spread of destructive economic and political theories, and in the many ethical challenges facing our society. The deepest poverty today is not material poverty but spiritual poverty, the inability of many people to be joyful and to find meaning, happiness and fulfilment in life. Amidst the aspirations of many people to live happy and comfortable lives, we see godlessness driving people to the abyss of violence and banality. There is widespread suspicion today about the beauty, goodness and the grandeur of life. The conviction that life is altogether absurd, contradictory and bizarre is spreading everywhere and driving people into the devil’s paradise.
This inability to find joy in life and to share that joy with others has made the art of living practically pessimistic in outlook, such that many things seem not to function rightly today. This poverty assumes different forms and manifests itself in different guises both in the materially rich and impoverished nations of the world. The true problem of our time is really the “eclipse of God” as the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber calls it, the absence of God from the lives of many people. Many people live with