TruthBook Religious News Blog

The Daily News

A new Ipsos Reid survey commissioned by CanWest News Service and Global National finds that half of Canadians think schools are more dangerous today than five years ago. They blame bad parenting, society's disintegrating moral fabric and violence in the media as the prime culprits. One-third of respondents identified absent, lax or poor parenting as the root cause of school violence, and about one-quarter citing a perceived "lack of morals, conscience and respect" as being to blame.

Only 15 per cent thought "gangs" are the primary cause of escalating violence in Canadian schools, and just 11 per cent blamed the availability of guns - notwithstanding the histrionics of anti-gun lobbyists and some fellow-travelling politicians such as Toronto Mayor David Miller.

Convenient scapegoats

The public gut differs from many politicians, the media and various special-pleading activists who continue to blame rising adolescent depravity on the Internet, guns, video games and Hollywood violence. These are convenient scapegoats for much deeper distempers afflicting our culture - ones the left/liberal, self-styled elites don't want to acknowledge or address.

The root of the problem is that an ideology of moral relativism has been uncritically assimilated by three or four successive generations, rendering many people incapable of judging right from wrong.

Interestingly, science tends to corroborate grassroots perception more than leftist social theorizing. In criminological literature, "bad" parenting is frequently portrayed as a risk factor for unhealthy social development and, in turn, antisocial behaviour.

For instance, a study by M.R. Gottfredson and T. Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime, (Stanford University Press, 1990) finds that a propensity to engage in crime is the prime cause of involvement in crime and deviant behaviours. It argues that ineffective parenting is the reason children fail to develop self-control - lack of which is a characteristic that persists across the lifespan, predisposing individuals afflicted to lifetimes of criminal behaviour.

Gottfredson and Hirschi contend that children raised in unstructured environments fail to develop the ability to control their behaviour, and are therefore prone to engage in risky behaviours that give them either a short-term reward or relief from momentary irritations. It is failure of parents to make the effort to instil internal control that leads to childhood, and later adult, misconduct.

The baby-boomer and boomer-shadow parents of today's crop of adolescents and pre-teens are arguably the most disastrously ineffectual cohort of parents in history. Steeped in the post-1960s cult of permissiveness and a constellation of other half-baked leftist notions, they have, in the main, failed miserably at executing their parental duty of nurturing ethics of civility, duty, self-control, and responsibility in their offspring.

Reflexive contempt for self-sacrificial virtue and rejection of real religion in favour of facile, feel-good "spirituality" have robbed these postmodern parents of the tools needed to combat the malignancies today's depraved popular culture inflicts on their children. Too many parents are themselves afflicted with "perpetual adolescence syndrome," identifying with their loutish kids against teachers and other authorities as agents of oppression to be opposed at every turn.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University, says many of her students are "incapable of making one single confident moral judgment."There is really no such thing as right or wrong, they tell her. Each person has to work it out for himself.

"The trouble is," laments Hoff Sommers, "that this kind of answer, which is so common as to be typical, is no better than the moral philosophy of a sociopath."Today's kids have been deceived by aggressive advocacy of bad philosophical values - the sort that are big on "rights," and "self-esteem," very light on things like responsibility, respect, duty, honour, self-control, self-sacrifice and other quaint qualities that used to be revered as unquestioned virtues in our society.

Moral naivete

This increasing moral naivete combines catastrophically with a popular culture of violent, sex-saturated entertainment, dysfunctional family life, abdication of parental authority; social science quackery in the educational system and in the social work and judicial arenas; an aggressive consumer/materialist ethos; and the pervasiveness of drugs, booze, violent entertainment, and promiscuous sex in youth culture.

Under these circumstances, it's no mystery why some kids turn predatory. Until the parenting problem is addressed, there is no hope of turning the tide of youthful anarchy, anomie and alienation.

At least the new survey reveals that public perception is finally clueing in to the actual causes and nature of the distemper. Getting people to implement the remedy will be another matter.

cwmoore@gmx.net

Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotian freelance writer and editor whose articles, features, and commentaries have appeared in more than 40 magazines and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

Labels: Canada, morality, parents, relativism, self-control, violence