Morals in the West

Life is for Westerners “machine-made”. It has lost spirit and warmth. True, many material discomforts, deficiencies and difficulties have been overcome and banished by “civilized” devices. But the social life that results shows no evidence of the glory of the spirit of man.
The glaring divisions and dissatisfactions of modern civilization must be patent to the merest dunce. The inventions and discoveries made to ease life and advance civilization fail to ease man’s disillusion and disquiet of mind. Social difficulties and dangerous crises may have been averted, but this has not sufficed to confer happiness and joy on the generality of mankind.
Over and above his varied physical needs, man has a moral urge and a spiritual yearning. The attraction of physical delights is no greater than the pull of ethical impulses and intellectual quests. To confine men’s minds within the four walls of materialism is an unforgivable sin.

“The pursuit of happiness” is rightly included with “life and liberty” among “man’s inalienable rights”. The first step towards happiness involves preoccupation with the perfecting of personality, and not of the material environment alone.
Parallel with his astounding advances in industrial and scientific technology, man must equally advance his inner resources, his spiritual powers and his force of soul. These have been allowed to fall behind. There can be no true human perfection without equilibrium in life’s inner and outer aspects—both. If they are in imbalance, “civilization” offers no base for hundred per cent happiness.
Modern ethical and social shortcomings demonstrate that the factors which produce human perfection have not been allowed the attention they warrant. Humanity has erred in failing to recognize and study the factors of happiness and well-being.
History contains no nation so impregnated with total corruption in every department of its life that no single sound section remained. So it is with the West today. Alongside moral corruption, good qualities still exist. There are many who faithfully follow the precepts of honesty, decency and right. But these virtues do not make up for the sins and wickednesses that abound.
Such virtues may be approached from different angles and practiced on different grounds. The West’s moral capital has been removed from the Bank of Faith where it belongs. Divorced from its source in religion, it depreciates both in intrinsic value and in interest returns. Where the prevailing motive is profit, righteousness and goodness are judged by their material profitability. Small wonder that they decline in the West!
Sex in the West
In sexual conduct the West has stepped outside all moral bounds. In life’s beginnings everyone knew in his heart that purity and continence in sex matters have a moral value of their own, and that transgression leads to moral degradation. But this truth has either been gradually forgotten, or else deliberately obliterated from men’s consciences by subversives.
Purity has lost its esteem, and been discarded by society, while all sanctions for control of morals have been abandoned.
A friend told me that he heard a girl ask for advice on one of Germany’s regional radio stations. saying: “For some years I’ve gone steady with a boy, but in the course of time tired of him and decided to take up with another boy. Can I keep them both? Or should I give up the second relationship and stick to the first?”
The Radio Counselor replied with the guidance (sic!): “Until the age of 28 you are at perfect liberty to enjoy the company of, and have intercourse with, one friend or several, without any ties or conditions, so have no scruples or worries in doing what you like!”
Where are we when the media, and other authorities, whose duty it is to protect public morals and ban pollution, themselves recommend fornication, and under the pseudonym of “a special relationship before marriage” promote promiscuity ; or posing as “champions of freedom” cast off morality and preach revolt against decency and self-esteem and proper pride?
Will Durant, the sociologist, wrote in his “Pleasures of Philosophy”: “City life prevents men from observing the seasons, while sexual passions increase and conditions make indulgence easier. A civilization which makes marriage economically impossible before the age of 30 drives a man to sexual deviation, weakens continence, and reduces purity from its original esteem as a virtue to distant lip-service as an impractical dream. Art enhances human beauties. Men cease to count their sins. Women, claiming equality with men, fall prey to passions. Love affairs unlimited and premarital cohabitation become the rule rather than the exception. The streets may be free of prostitutes—but not through fear of the police! It is because women have bankrupted prostitutes by taking over their business for free!”
Human nature is made to desire control of its powers, so that they are employed justifiably. To trespass on ground abhorrent to humanity’s essence cannot fail to raise a crop of undesirable growths. To trample the laws of his own being underfoot in the name of freedom can never yield the peace of heart and joy of mind men seek.
Western permissiveness has made licence public. Has this unbridled riot of wantonness subsided? Crime, rape, neurasthenia, riots, strikes— what generates all these but this same sexual “liberty” and licence?
Sweden has given total sexual freedom for a quarter of a century. Such savagery now prevails amongst its youth that professors and responsible authorities suffer from it. A Parliamentary commission was set up to study this outbreak of savagery and its insurrectionary perils. The Swedish Prime Minister frankly said: “We shall need at least a generation to redress the disasters caused by an error lasting twenty years.”
Freud examined man’s animal nature and traced all human actions to font-family: “Bookman Old the sex urge. He thus divorced sex from ethics. Chastity went by the board. No one could think up a frontier to stop its downward rush. In its train it dragged many human values. Thus, “The Reader’s Digest” reports : “West German statistics show that occupying troops of the victor nations have fathered 200,000 bastards, 5,000 of them black, on German women, all now in care at the German government’s charges. And this is 10% of the total number of illegitimate children now a charge on the government, not to speak of the unknown number unborn through contraceptives or abortions. Of East Germany we have no facts, but it is more than probable that the problem there, if not worse, is no better. Nor do other Western nations lag far behind Germany. Most painful is a report from Northampton, in Mid-England, that illegitimate births are of all living births, and that this started when Northampton went over from agricultural to industrial employment.” 6
The psychologist, Dale Carnegie, writes in his “Mirror of Success”: “Statistics published by an American foundation show that husbands who were known to be unfaithful to their wives were of all classes and all ages. Some 50% of all husbands are unfaithful, some regularly. Most of those who remain faithful do so perforce, through fear of disease or lack of opportunity. Telephone-tapping in New York over a short period revealed that New York wives are equally promiscuous.”