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A Wicked Problem: Recovering Our Lost Moral Inheritance/Memory

A “wicked problem,” in the language of social theory, is a complex, interconnected issue with no clear stopping point, no single correct solution, and deep conflicts among stakeholder values. It resists resolution because every attempt to fix one aspect ripples unpredictably through the system. The wicked problem I seek to isolate and address is the contemporary crisis of moral formation—what Charles Taylor has called the “crisis of affirmation.” Western culture has undergone a kind of moral lobotomy: we have largely lost a shared moral inheritance capable of sustaining human flourishing, leaving individuals and societies fragile, fragmented, and vulnerable. Nothing less than our very civilization is at stake. This hard problem solving task requires discernment, wisdom, courage and humility.

The Collapse of Trust and the Anxious Generation

Best selling author David Brooks has observed that Western societies suffer from a breakdown in social trust rooted in the erosion of a common moral order. The statistics are sobering. Only 19% of Millennials and Gen Z report trusting their neighbors, while 72% believe others are “out to get them.” They inhabit a world that feels hostile: economic precarity, AI-driven disruption of jobs, online bullying, and a pervasive sense of decline. As New York University’s Jonathan Haidt documents in The Anxious Generation, this cohort is experiencing historically high levels of anxiety, addiction to social media, cynicism, despair, and suicidal ideation. Morally and spiritually, many young people are fragile. They feel deeply insecure; their identities feel precarious in a fractious, uncaring, and increasingly machine-dominated culture.

The Crisis of Affirmation

At the heart of this malaise, Charles Taylor argues in Sources of the Self, lies a painful dilemma: we cannot fully love ourselves or the world because both feel irreparably broken—and we see ourselves as complicit in that very brokenness. The result is self-loathing or an outright rejection of morality itself (a kind of spiritual suicide). Narcissism, as philosopher Roger Scruton notes, often masks deep self-discomfort; the narcissist cannot bear life within his/her own skin and therefore seeks to make others equally uncomfortable. Our culture, some might dare to say, has lost its moral “prefrontal cortex”—the capacity for reflective, ordered judgment. One response to this crisis, says Taylor, is a turn toward grace, gift, calling, the common good, and the transcendent power of agape love.

Relativism, Radical Subjectivity, and Moral Unformation

Modern relativism and the radical subjectivization of morality—now grounded primarily in emotion, self-interest, and personal preference—have left us morally adrift. This is also called “expressive individualism” by Charles Taylor and others–a promotion of difference of values, even weird and ruthless ones. In fact, no individual can reliably construct a coherent ethical system from scratch (Aristotle and Thomas Acquinas’s achievement is the exception, not the rule). The result is a generation that is tragically morally unformed. Lacking mentors in the virtues and character formation, many feel “morally naked,” as Brooks puts it—vulnerable to cults, charismatic personalities, and simplistic ideologies that can swallow them whole. They have traded robust traditions and frameworks for the thin aesthetics of expressive individualism (Taylor, Carl R. Trueman). Objective truth and objective morality have been abandoned together, opening the door to deepfakes, propaganda, and AI-generated deception and techno-scientism. As Chantal Delsol has observed, ideologies of the twentieth century (Marxism, Fascism, and even unchecked market libertarianism) have left us cynical, disenchanted, and prone to treating the very idea of an objective good as itself ‘evil’. This is the trap of nihilism: fragmentation, mis-communication, and division.

Moral Illiteracy, the Loss of Moral Language

Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, diagnoses a profound contemporary moral illiteracy in youth culture—an Alzheimer’s-like forgetting of our moral inheritance. We no longer possess a rich, shared moral vocabulary that transcends subjective opinion. We hesitate to critique anyone else’s values, leaving us unable to deliberate constructively about moral dilemmas. Public discourse collapses into competing opinions or, worse, the reductive language of the marketplace: performance, productivity, efficiency, and the quarterly bottom line. This metric-driven worldview breeds workaholism, burnout, corruption, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and even sadly suicide. Without genuine moral communities capable of setting structure/boundaries and sustaining sanity, individuals are left isolated in the current moral and politicized ideological storm. Charles Taylor further emphasizes in The Language Animal that science cannot supply the constitutive language necessary for morality. Attempts like that of Sam Harris to derive morality directly from empirical science founder at a deep level. Without a transcendent or constitutive vision of the good, we lose the rituals, inspirations, and motivations that once propelled people toward virtue and the common good within communities of trust. Science and technology itself require robust moral guardrails—especially as we confront MAID (medical assistance in dying), nuclear weapons, massive AI compute and weapons, and quantum technologies. The current speed of AI development far outpaces any moral or legal restraints to guide it towards the common good of humanity (Tristan Harris, specialist in ethics of AI).

Neoliberal Ideology/Culture

Some writers are saying that the Neoliberal ideology itself, which has dominated the West for roughly the last fifty years, is a big part of the problem (Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age). John Owen from University of Virginia, one of our GFCF speakers during November of 2025, noted that liberalism itself was coming under deeper scrutiny for serving the few, and ignoring the needs of the many. Does it really work? Ideologies have economic, social, political, theological, and psychological dimensions. Could it be that our culture no longer meets our basic psychological and security needs? Many people feel dislocated in the current economic order (Johann Hari) with its values of: privatization, individualism, competition, self-marketing/self-invention, the requirement that everyone become an entrepreneur. People have relayed experiences of anxiety and depression through a loss of connection with: meaningful work, a supportive community, meaningful values, some childhood trauma, status and respect, the natural world, hope of a secure future. How do we help them reconnect with the basic essentials of their humanity, said Psychiatrist Warren Kinghorn from Duke University, a summer school lecturer at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. Canada. Is depression just how neoliberalism feels for many people? Is it their fate?

The Ambiguities of Rights and the Loss of a Coherent Narrative

Postwar human rights discourse (exemplified by the UN Charter of Rights) offered needed vital protections, yet reputable Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory and others note some of its unintended negative consequences. By intensifying the subjective turn (“my rights,” “my tribe’s rights,” “my country’s rights”), it has often weakened thicker community ethics and international laws and covenants.

A transformation from substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium, in terms of theory, practice, laws, and institutions…. [It entails] a formal ethics of rights rather than a substantive ethics of the good [managed by the state]: combining liberty with equality. It recognizes individuals to hold their respective conceptions of the good, whatever they might be, and to lead the lives as they please, however they might wish, within the laws that it stipulates and enforces, in a manner consistent with the same recognition for everyone else…. The highest political goods are the maximization of individual choice, and the greatest social virtue is the toleration of others’ choices and actions. (B. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 184)

The result is a heightened level of tribal combativeness, victimhood narratives, and egregious narcissistic self-justification. We have also lost the classical narrative of moral life as a quest (MacIntyre’s After Virtue—think King Arthur and the Quest for the Holy Grail). Without shared traditions that give morality depth and coherence, we become easy prey for every new ideology promising simplistic answers of a new utopian dream (snake oil). This speaks to the very important loss of a moral narrative, the story of why we are here on planet earth, plus our core calling and responsibilities. Without a sense of personal growth towards a higher ideal and noble trajectory beyond getting rich and powerful, we flounder in our individual desires and consumption (Paul Ricoeur, William Cavanaugh). Who will inspire us to excellence, justice, gratitude, and benevolence: to think better, live better, become more human, more personal?

The Deepest Loss: Transcendence and the Moral Economy of Grace (Agape)

In the West, we have largely abandoned transcendent sources of the good, especially in the past two hundred years—any notion of a greatest or supreme good beyond human culture that could orient us toward right living/good habits justice and the common good rather than hierarchical power and mechanistic workaholism. British Philosopher Roger Scruton, in On Human Nature, highlighted the vital connection between time and eternity; eternity thickens the experience of time; without strong transcendence, culture flattens and we become disenchanted and bored, cogs in the machine. We have tragically forgotten a moral economy of grace (gift/calling)—an economy inaugurated by the cross and resurrection and sustained by abundant agape love. The fear of God and basic respect for others have eroded, severing the dynamic link between the sacred and everyday morality, meaning and purpose. Life thereby devolves into manipulation, the accumulation of power and wealth (massive economic separation between the rich and the poor), the thrills of new technologies, the rise of autocracy and corrupt oligarchy. D. Steven Long warned of this years ago in his brilliant book The Goodness of God. Whenever humans attempt to control the language of the good, it gets corrupted and endless trouble ensues.

As a consequence, William Cavanaugh reminds us that we tend to erect ever new idols of our own creation—Mammon, techno-feudalism, efficiency, and unaccountable billionaires. We cannot help worshipping someone (an oligarch) or something we invent. Humans are inescapably religious at their core (W. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry). Machine culture increasingly tries to displace our human-to-human relations as we become more isolated. We risk falling into the Moloch Trap: sacrificing our children and our humanity on the altar of wealth and power, utopian dreams of abundance, with competitive escalation and hyperscaling that affects everything (Jonathan Pageau; Karen Hao, The Empire of AI). The AI arms race promises the most rapid, society-wide disruption in human history—reshaping or replacing jobs, education, the economy, and culture within little more than a decade. Will it replace people in a posthumanist dystopia? Dr. Roman Yampolsky, an AI Safety Specialist, claims that when we reach Superintelligence (the core of the current race for dominance), we lose control as a human race. The result will be bad for humans, this is the most dangerous experiment in human history. Then it will be too late to talk about ethics of AI. The question is urgent: How do we build a bridge to this future without losing our moral souls (committing prefrontal moral lobotomy) in the process and becoming subhuman? Shocking implications are articulated by ‘Forecaster’ Daniel Kokotajlo on AI Urgency of Action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4l7YkDQwA

Recovering lost moral inheritance is not nostalgic retreat to a bygone sentimentality, but an immediate, necessary act of cultural repair and renewal. Strong morality is the very software for cooperation within larger societies. It demands honest diagnosis, renewed commitment to human virtue, ideals of faith, hope and love, and openness to transcendent sources of grace that can once again affirm us and retrieve our lost moral-spiritual understanding. This could give us renewed hope to heal the broken world/lives we inhabit. Can we solve problems, build our skills, and love and repair the world as we increase/improve our humanity (R. Scrutin, On Human Nature)? Our very freedom and agency is at stake as we work to recover moral framework/horizon, greater goods, and responsible citizenship from the disaster of a cynical cultural moral lobotomy or spiritual suicide. Perhaps the field of Phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) can help.

Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgrad Students, Author, YouTube Educational Lecture Producer

Never stop learning, reflecting, rethinking life and culture.