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A Wicked Problem: Recovering Our Lost Moral Inheritance (Civilization)

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.

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. Their identities feel precarious in a fractious, noncompassionate, 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 brokenness. The result is self-loathing or a rejection of morality itself (a kind of spiritual suicide). Narcissism, as Roger Scruton notes, often masks deep self-discomfort; the narcissist cannot bear his own skin and therefore seeks to make others equally uncomfortable. Our culture has lost its moral “prefrontal cortex”—the capacity for reflective, ordered judgment. The first response to this crisis must therefore be a turn toward grace, gift, calling, and the transcendent power of agape love. More of this later.

Relativism, 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. No individual can reliably construct a coherent ethical system from scratch (Aristotle’s achievement is the exception, not the rule). The result is a generation that is tragically morally unformed. Lacking mentors in virtue and character development, many are “morally naked,” as Brooks puts it—vulnerable to cults, charismatic personalities, and simplistic ideologies. They have traded robust traditions and frameworks for the thin aesthetics of expressive individualism (Taylor, Trueman). Objective truth and objective morality have been abandoned together, opening the door to deepfakes, propaganda, and AI-generated deception. 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.

Moral Illiteracy and the Loss of Moral Language

Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, diagnoses a profound moral illiteracy—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 bottom line. This metric-driven worldview breeds workaholism, burnout, corruption, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and even suicide. Without genuine moral communities capable of setting boundaries and sustaining sanity, individuals are left isolated in the current storm. Charles Taylor further emphasizes in The Language Animal that science cannot supply the constitutive language necessary for morality. Attempts like Sam Harris’s 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. Science and technology therefore require robust moral guardrails—especially as we confront MAID (medical assistance in dying), nuclear weapons, massive AI compute, and quantum technologies.

The Ambiguities of Rights and the Loss of Narrative

Postwar human rights discourse (exemplified by the UN Charter) offered vital protections, yet reputable Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory and others note its unintended consequences. By intensifying the subjective turn (“my rights,” “my tribe’s rights”), it has often weakened thicker community ethics. The result is heightened tribal combativeness, victimhood narratives, and narcissism. 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 ideological saviour promising simplistic answers.

The Deeper Loss: Transcendence and the Moral Economy of Grace

We have largely abandoned transcendent sources of the good—any notion of a supreme good beyond human culture that could orient us toward justice and the common good rather than hierarchical power. Roger Scruton highlighted the vital connection between time and eternity; without it, culture flattens. We have forgotten a moral economy of grace, gift, and calling—an economy inaugurated by the cross and resurrection and sustained by agape love. The fear of God and basic respect for others have eroded, severing the link between the sacred and everyday morality. Life then devolves into manipulation, the accumulation of power and wealth, and the rise of autocracy.

William Cavanaugh reminds us that we have erected new idols—pride, narcissism, techno-feudalism, efficiency, and unaccountable oligarchies. Machine culture increasingly displaces the human. We risk falling into the Moloch Trap: sacrificing our children and our humanity on the altar of competitive escalation and hyperscaling (Jonathan Pageau/Karen Hao). The AI arms race promises the most rapid, society-wide disruption in human history—reshaping jobs, education, economy, and culture within little more than a decade. The question is urgent: How do we build a bridge to this future without losing our souls in the process? Recovering our lost moral inheritance is not nostalgic retreat but a necessary act of cultural repair. It demands honest diagnosis, renewed commitment to virtue, and openness to transcendent sources of grace that can once again affirm both ourselves and the broken world we inhabit.

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

Never stop learning, reflecting, rethinking life and culture.