Loading ...... The Encyclopedia of Morals uses 669 pages of 7-point type, with a list of writers from Thomas Kingsmill Abbott to Stefan Zweig describing the values of cultures around the world that extends from the Aboriginals of Yirkalla, Australia, to the Zoroastrians of Iran. ...
Some months ago, David Brooks wrote an essay in The New York Times entitled “Dangerous World Doesn’t Share Same Values.”
What did the headline writer mean with the title of the piece? Did she mean to say because we don’t share the same values, the world is dangerous? Did she mean all the same values? Did she mean the values she learned at her place of worship, at her mother’s knee, at the university she attended or in her many travels around New York City?
The Encyclopedia of Morals uses 669 pages of 7-point type, with a list of writers from Thomas Kingsmill Abbott to Stefan Zweig describing the values of cultures around the world that extends from the Aboriginals of Yirkalla, Australia, to the Zoroastrians of Iran.
According to the standard of values of the average citizen of the U.S., I suspect this one volume contains hundreds of unbelievably preposterous values systems when compared to the median in America!
Thomas Hobbes writes in The Leviathan in 1660, “No arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
That was four centuries ago, and the same words can describe 50 percent of the peoples of the world today. While our world is very large and getting larger, theirs is small and conditions exist that have for all the millennia before.
Mr. Brooks, tell us something new. Tell us how we can free ourselves from Stone-Age religions that imprison us, from the dependence on resources that we must share with those who come after us, from the arrogance engendered by a know-it-all pride from the belief that we have cornered the market on right and wrong, good and evil and true justice for all the rest!
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) penned this advice: “If men would consider not so much wherein they differ, as wherein they agree, there would be far less of uncharitableness and angry feeling.”
There are hundreds of important values that we hold dear in the land of the free and the home of the brave. A few that we have attempted to protect and preserve: the Bill of Rights; natural, inalienable rights; democracy (representative government) vs. dictatorship or autocracy; the family unit; free enterprise; the environment; right to hold weapons of mass destruction, as a representative sample. That dangerous world out there would doubtless not share these same values. Nor do all Americans.
Let us determine to find wherein we agree.
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