U.S. traditional, survival values are shifting

Amid hot dogs and fireworks, annual July festivities celebrate cultural values that during the rest of the year are lamented as endangered.

Worries about the country's values frequently take three forms, and all are sure to be displayed — if not brayed — in the upcoming clashes over a successor to U.S. Supreme Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

First, it is said that the country is losing its standards of right and wrong, its belief in God, respect for authority, taste for hard work, love of nation and dedication to family.

Second, America is said to be falling behind other nations in regard to such traditional values, or even that the United States is at the forefront of undermining them.

Third, Americans are said to be sharply divided over these values, engaged in a culture war between bitterly opposed camps hewing to irreconcilable moral visions.

Wayne E. Baker, a professor of sociology, management and organization at the University of Michigan, reviews the empirical evidence for these claims in a new book, "America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception" (Princeton University Press, 2005).

His conclusion? None of them are true.

Baker is one of the researchers who has devised and analyzed the World Values Surveys. Since 1981, these vast, highly respected surveys have been measuring cultural variation and change in a growing number of nations — now almost 80 of them — around the world.

These scholars have identified two key dimensions of shifting values. One is a move from traditional values, like the importance of religion and respect for authority, family and nation, to what are termed secular-rational values, like personal autonomy, political independence and ethical relativism on matters like abortion, divorce and euthanasia.

The other dimension is a shift from survival values, like assuring material well-being and physical safety, acceptance of hardship, political caution and wariness toward outsiders, to self-expression values, like political activism, personal fulfillment, intellectual and spiritual exploration and tolerance of outsiders and cultural diversity.

As nations pass from agrarian to industrial societies, they undergo a shift from traditional to secular-rational values. As they grow still wealthier and the postindustrial service sector swells, values shift from survival to self-expression.

America is the great exception. Although it outstrips all but a few other nations in shifting from survival to self-expression values, it still "has one of the world's most traditional value systems," Baker writes, "more traditional than other wealthy societies, with the exception of Ireland, as well as more traditional than almost all other societies covered in the World Values Surveys."