A tale of two stories: a snapshot of our moral decay
Our society cannot see that the values it prioritises in raising future generations are wrong.
It was fascinating this week, to contrast and compare the response to two very different stories involving our younger generations, and our responsibilities to them. One happened in a foreign country, one on our own shores. One caught the eye of our media, cultural and political elites, the other not so much. I am thinking of both the decision of the US Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, and the tragic murder of Logan Mwangi by his stepbrother, mother and stepfather.
You would be forgiven for thinking the Supreme Court decision had happened here, given the outcry; there have been famous pop singers using concerts as an excuse to vent rage at the decision, as well as celebrities and politicians expressing their disgust, like all good liberals are expected to these days. It was also deemed worthy of an ‘urgent question’ in Parliament, in which somehow the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was expected to commit to encouraging the US to enforce abortion rights following the decision. US Governments have a long tradition of not listening to the UK, I don’t know why they would be expected to change now. Then again, those supportive of an urgent question for this probably knew that too. In contrast, there was no outcry from the cultural elites and no urgent question relating to Logan Mwangi and the horror of child-on-child violence that is becoming sadly more common. There was, incidentally, parliamentary time for a Select Committee Statement this week on the presence of babies in the House of Commons.
Such a contrast is the starkest evidence that our society has failed our future generations. Our society’s response to our responsibility to future generations is like a man drowning in the sea: it makes a sound and flails around, but it cannot act to rescue itself from its precarious situation. Our society certainly does try, with endless interventions by the state, such as endless five-year plans in our education system, justice system and others. But, despite the desperate trying, the precarious situation facing our future generations does not change.
In fact the reason the situation does not change is that our society is a man drowning in the sea who fails to recognise they are drowning. The problem is that our society cannot see that the values it prioritises in raising future generations are wrong; society looks at the matter through a faulty lens. From schools to justice to the Church, our young are being neglected of the values that safeguarded generations of past: values of duty, tradition, faith and such like. The modern values our institutions (or, more accurately, the revolutionaries who engineered our modern institutions and their new values) have put in their place self-evidently show themselves to be the unsatisfactory falsehoods that they are. They breed a society not unified and tolerant, but disordered and conducive to moral chaos.
It is this that has shaped our institutions that nurture future generations, by either dismantling them or engineering them to work against future generations. Our society needs to recognise fast that it is a man drowning, and that it must rescue itself, for the sake not only of itself but for those who by no choice of their own will one day enter into it.
