the consumerist society entails psychological decay, an instinctive and thoughtless life for the broad masses of the population, their easymanipulation and the ruin of democracy. A vision of common values beyond individual personae – be it in an image of some deity or some heroic tradition – has always enabled cooperation and cohesion of communities, golden ages and the blooming of cultures. The contemporary world has material means as never before, but it does not have enough moral and psychic energy to distribute and utilize them wisely. Individualism, egoism, and atomization of interests have arrived at a stage where we are not able to act together even when obviously marching toward a catastrophe. We are living in a civilization which is not a culture anymore; it is making use of the achievements of the spirit in the form of technology, but it does not revere anything higher anymore and hence loses the possibility to evolve into something higher in the future. The paramount global problem of today is the absence of any vision of values. Our edifice of knowledge is built up in such way that ethics have dropped out. Knowledge once had a form from which moral incentives naturally resulted. Today it is possible to be a top expert and a bad or morally indifferent person at the same time. It is considered to be an illusion that there are some archetypes of virtues and laws of life objectively inscribed somewhere in the nature of things, or that there is some kind of purpose (a sense of being) and facts about the world that would have some spiritual significance for man. We have knowledge but no wisdom. The sciences surround man with material comfort, but not one of them can advise him existentially on his life decisions. They are silent about virtue, good and bad, justice, love, beauty, and the purpose of life. If they are not silent, like sociobiology, they try to reduce ethical and aesthetical notions darwinistically to mere utility and survival, whereby they are stripped of their intrinsic nature. We continue to improve new generations of machines, yet we have nothing more to say about ennobling ourselves. Knowledge has been narrowed down to the material domain only, and spiritual truth has been pushed aside into the sphere of pure faith. The social sciences and the science of the soul are stuck somewhere halfway. Only psychophysical relations are discussed (e.g. the dependence of mental processes on the physical organs; the climatic, geographic, economic conditions of historical events), while the psychospiritual ones no longer are (e.g. the transformation of the soul through spiritual exercise; the inspiration of spiritual powers in history). Cognitive method distorted by one-sided sensualism renders the world as if no spiritual realities existed or were unknowable. This holds true for science as well as the church, which – though encouraging the belief in the existence of the spiritual world alone – agrees that it is inaccessible to our cognitive faculties. Without conclusive, reliable knowledge there is no responsibility either. If a surgeon cuts a patient’s aorta, he will go straight to prison for total ignorance of anatomy. Yet when politicians and bankers make cuts through legislation, which would bleed national economies to death financially – nobody is convicted. And when delete40 (4) Emil Páleš
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