Values: Where are they going?

Jirtme Bindi Jean-Joseph Goux Authors, 'Keys to the 21st century' United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO Paris

UNESCO recently brought together 20 leading personalities- philosophers, thinkers, writers, artists-to reflect on the future of values.

Voltaire had no doubts on the issue: "There is only one morality, just as there is only one geometry". But that universalist certainty decomposed long ago in the face of the denunciation of a wholly human origin of morality. This great crisis of values, which profoundly stirred up the previous two centuries before us, led to multiple uncertainties.

Does the absence of a transcendent foundation, which allows for the rooting of eternal values, signify the twilight of values? Or, in a world marked by the planetary encounter of cultures, should we foresee virulent antagonisms and shocks between contrasting values? Or will we witness surprising and innovative hybridizations between value systems of origins and orientations that are foreign to one another?

The past century was one of a painful questioning of our certainties. The contemporary crisis of values is not only one of the great traditional moral frameworks, but also one of lay values that have taken over such as emancipation of peoples.

Monstrosity, which left its mark on the 20th century, once again seems to threaten our future. How, in a universe of radical innovations and breaks, do we think about the continuity of a history and maintain the desirable utopia of a better life for the greatest number?

Paul Valiry had already commented that, in a world dominated by speculation, our conception of moral or aesthetic values was tending to get closer to the model of stock-market value. The "spirit" value, he said amusingly, is no different from "wheat" or "coal" values, and continues to drop. Thus the phenomenon of fashion which, up until now, concerned only areas such as clothing in which the arbitrary and convention are de rigueur, is invading our conception of values.

The role of information and the media reinforces this orientation since the stock-market logic of values, implies taking many temporary "indicators" into account, to be grasped at the moment, instant information replacing the sense of history and the recognition of its long evolutions which have become illegible.

How, in this all-powerful context that seems to favor the frivolity of values, do we still think of the seriousness of values? The 21st century could be caught in a strange contradiction: Never will the ephemeral have enjoyed such standing, and yet, the emergence of societies of knowledge, which tends to make ongoing, lifelong education for all no longer merely a dream but a project, seems to prefigure the growth of a new tendency of long-term values that are not only serious, but also playful and juvenile. New values, both cognitive and prospective, seem to emerge: They are less inherited than invented, less received than passed on.

Are we headed towards an aestheticization of values?

Perhaps no other era has placed the artist so high or made him the very model of activity producing sense and novelty. "Creation" is everywhere. Everyone is forced into creation, at least of his or her own existence. In economic life, innovation is recognized as the very driving force of development.

Can we forecast the creation of new values? In many regions of the world, the century witnessed a massive decline in the adherence to traditional religious dogmas, as well as an extraordinary diversification of spiritual-type personal or community research. Are these minority breakthroughs the carrier of strong values that might reveal themselves as essential for the future?

Whereas the social cement has come apart in the face of the rise of an increasingly radical individualism, we note an unprecedented growth in new forms of associations, the birth of new types of solidarity. What values do these original networks bear? These questions are tied up with the collapse of patriarchal contexts, a considerable fracture resulting in a feminization of values with profound future consequences.

Thinking about the future of values makes sense only if one lays down the value of the future. The prospective of values is therefore, indissolubly, a prospective of time which must lay the bases for ethics of the future: Not ethics in the future, but ethics of the present for the future.

The sketch of such ethics is already drawn by the remarkable evolutions of three concepts: Responsibility, formerly turned towards the past, is henceforth concerned, in large part, with the potential consequences of our actions. The principle of precaution teaches us that the Earth, the city, the human species itself and the biosphere are perishable, and that their fate lies mainly in our hands.

The evolution of the concept of heritage and its extension to all culture and all of Nature make it the very vector of the transmission to the coming generations, and no longer the simple relief of the past. The blossoming of ethics of the future could thus be opening a new road to get out of the impasses in which we are confined by the tyranny of urgency and the ephemeral.