Leaders Without A True Compass Don't Inspire Greatness
by Michael D. Hume, M.S.
When I was nineteen, I decided to take on a project I hoped would become an awesome best-selling book called "Morality In America's Youth." I was a rising-star Army journalist whose big aspiration was to become a non-Army journalist, and detriot #35 jersey writing a meaningful book seemed like a good start. So I enlisted help from people my age (late teens and early twenties) from around the country, and got as far as cranking out a couple of now-embarrassing newsletters about the qualitative research I was going to conduct.
I got sidetracked by such things as getting out of the Army, getting married and starting a family, and beginning to earn something of a living... "Morality In America's Youth" never got done - by me. So imagine my intrigue when I turned on the news the other day and saw pretty-much those exact words under the face of a pundit
Read the researchers' book - or the volumes written about it recently in the New York Times - if you want the details. But the upshot is this: as I had suspected thirty years ago, America's youth have a changing sense of morality which continues to progress away from a standard set of moral rules ("values," if you will) to a blend of individualism and relativism. In other words, as one of the study's participants says, "I don't really deal with right and wrong that often," and when I do, as a young person in America, my sense of what's right is what feels right, to me, at the time.
The effect of this is obvious. Doing the right thing continues to be a moving target. Something that was "wrong" when someone else did it some other time might not be as wrong when I do it now... and, in fact, it might even be right. If it feels right to me, it must be.
This is not new, of course. People grow up and have to learn, somehow, what is right and wrong. Then they have kids, and to varying degrees, they try to teach them the moral compass they learned. The kids, as they start to grow up, have to distance themselves from their parents, and one easy way is to challenge those values. As one writer to the New York Times said in response to a recent editorial about the morality study: "It's not that we don't have a shared vocabulary to address moral issues - we just don't have theirs."
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