Ossorio: This is sort of borderline as to whether one could answer it to good effect or not. Let me read it. "Are there significant changes in our culture that lead to less moral sensitivity of a positive set of ways of living to develop character?"

The fast answer is "No." Period. The explanation is this: Character is character, and people will develop a character almost no matter what. So the notion that there are ways of living or cultural influences that make for less character development is almost incoherent. No matter what the influences are, almost no matter what the influences are, people are going to develop some kind of character. And that’s why the fast answer is "No."

Now what’s implicit here is the notion of a good character.

Audience: Yeah.

Audience: Right.

Ossorio: And that’s a different kettle of fish. If you think of good character, my inclination would be to say "Yes". I’m not sure I would fight for that to the bitter end but I can give you some reasons for going that route.

If you think of some of the developments in the culture in the last say, 40 years, 20 years, one of the main things that you think of is sort of a cultural relativity and the whole social reconstruction or the social construction movement, which connects to relativity. If there’s a lot of that in the culture, then you lose the criteria for a good character, and you lose a lot of the kind of influences that would have made for a good character had you had a good criteria for it.

And so on those grounds I would way "Yeah. We have lost something. It is harder to develop a good character now than it was 40 years ago." On the other hand it’s nowhere near impossible. But I think it is harder.

Audience: I think a lot of novelists have spoken to this issue. The Lord of the Flies springs to mind as a negative example, of not developing good character. And I think probably I can think of a few science fiction stories where people tried to go the other way and think of an environment in which things went better and good character was developed.

Audience: But there’s a cyclical... I read quotes from 100 years ago, 500 years ago, and Roman times, and Greek times.

Ossorio: No.

Audience: And it sounded just like they were describing today. It’s periods of changing times, transition times.

Ossorio: Well, you have to sort of parcel out that sort of thing. The world is always going to hell in a hand basket. The younger generation is never good enough. That’s kind of constant. That’s a generational difference.

Audience: And it’s true. [laughter]

Ossorio: And you can expect that routinely. I’m thinking of something over and above that, and the kind of differences in the direction of relativism are something over and above that. It’s not just generational differences.

Audience: I think the notion of a person has changed in ways that are harmful. Like Jim Holmes talked about in his paper about science and how it -- to put it simply and crassly -- a person can be viewed as a bundle of chemicals, etc., etc. The notion of a person has been debased in many quarters. Do you think that’s a significant trend?

Ossorio: Yeah. That’s part of the trend that I was talking about this afternoon when I talked about the humanities being demoralized. They didn’t know how to defend their ground.

Audience: Technology can move with no limit on its speed, and cultural change to adapt to what happens from technology doesn’t move much faster than it ever did, so that this warp speed technology does seem to create an impossible situation.

Ossorio: Yeah. And it’s not just technology. It’s knowledge also. Knowledge has become institutionalized. It’s not just a figure of speech to speak of universities as "knowledge factories". And the more there is of something, usually the less it’s valued. That’s an old principle of economics -- supply and demand.

But I think it’s the vision of what a human being is that has suffered the debasement. That’s where the rubber meets the road. The others are influences in this direction or that, but where the payoff is is "What is your picture of what a person is?" And if it’s that a person is an organism or a person is a pile of chemicals that are cleverly put together, it’s not worth much.

And why that’s an almost inevitable result of the ascendancy of science is that science as we have it today is based on a metaphysics of determinism and materialism and naturalism. In none of those is there a place for a human being. From the very beginning there is no place for a human being. So it’s not surprising that in the end there is no place for a human being in any of that.