Sunday, April 5, 1987
THE SOCIETAL DISEASE of our time, I am convinced, is AmericaÛªs obsession with short-term success, its fixation with the proverbial bottom-line. ÛÏGive me a profit statement this quarter larger than the last, and everything else be damned!Û That is todayÛªs predominant business ethic. It took root in the business community but has since spread beyond business and insinuated itself into the rest of our culture. In this climate, a quiet revolution in values has occurred, and it has not been for the better.</br></br>Short-term thinking, corrosive individualism, fixating on ÛÏeconomic manÛ at the expense of the human spirit, has taken an alarming toll. I focus on the business community for starters, not to make it a scapegoatÛÓbut because I believe business has become a fountainhead of values in our society. If the church was the focal point for personal values and public mores in medieval times, that role in our time has</br></br>Norman Lear is a television producer and chairman of Act III Communications, a multi-media company. This article was adapted from remarks made at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.</br></br>For better or worse, traditional institutions such as the family, the churches and education are no longer as influential in molding moral-cultural values. There are, I suppose, dozens of reasons one could find: the disruptions of ur- ' banization; the alarming increase of single-parent households; the rise of the mass media, es- 1 pecially television; the dizzy mobility of our car.' -culture; the telecommunications revolution and' < the altered sense of time and distance it has ; created. As traditional families have come un- -der stress and splintered, as education has come under siege, as churches and synagogues have become less influential in daily life, the modern corporation with help of the media has stepped into the breach.</br></br>Mythologist Joseph Campbell has said that in medieval times, when one approached a city, one saw the cathedral and the castle. Now one sees the soaring tower of commerce. People build their lives around these towers. Comma-, . nities take shape. Work skills are learned. So-.r./. -cial relationships are formed. Attitudes and jr,. aspirations are molded. A dense matrix of val- *4 ues grow up around the towers of commerce^, and spread beyond.	-