Values ‘in crisis’. Really?

On the same day, I chanced on two passages written about a quarter-century apart at opposite ends of Europe.

In the first, a duo of Italian writers mocks the portentous phrase “crisis of values”:

“The point of values is precisely to be in crisis, in peril, to be constantly threatened, eroded, battered, trampled on. If they were above discussion, if it did not occur to anyone to question them, they would no longer be values. Their significance, their very nature as constructs, lie precisely in this fragility, in the tragically schizophrenic existence they lead between the absolute and the relative, struggling desperately against numerous enemies, knowing full well that without these enemies they would die, and seeking to impose themselves once and for all while being convinced they are above the fray.”

(Fruttero & Lucentini, Il Ritorno del critino, 1992)

The author of the second passage is a Scandinavian statistician:

“Values change all the time.

Take my lovely home country, Sweden. We Swedes are known for being quite liberal and open about sex and contraception, aren’t we? Yet this hasn’t always been our culture. These haven’t always been our values.

In my own living memory, Swedish values around sex were extremely conservative. My father’s father, Gustav, for example… was, I believe, a quite typical Swedish man of his generation. He was extremely proud of his large family of seven children; he never changed a diaper, cooked food, or cleaned the house; and he absolutely would not talk about sex or contraception. His oldest daughter supported the brave feminists who illegally started advocating the use of condoms in the 1930s. But when she approached her father after the birth of his seventh child, wanting to discuss contraception, this kind, calm man got very angry and refused to talk. His values were traditional and patriarchal. But they were not adopted by the next generation. Swedish culture changed. (By the way, he also disliked books and refused to use a telephone.)

A woman’s right to an abortion is supported by just about everyone in Sweden today. Strong support for women’s rights in general has become part of our culture. My students’ jaws drop when I tell them how different things were when I was a student in the 1960s. Abortion in Sweden was still, except on very limited grounds, illegal. At the university, we ran a secret fund to pay for women to travel abroad to get safe abortions. Jaws drop even further when I tell the students where these young pregnant students traveled to: Poland. Catholic Poland. Five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it. The flow of young women started to go the other way. The point is, it was not always so. The cultures changed.”

(Hans Rosling, Factfulness, 2018)