Honor: what a spiky, uncomfortable thing it can be. I expect the young are wise to be dropping it.
—Rose macaulay—
Each generation looks at its children with mangled pride and horror and thinks they are destroying standards, overturning values, and generally going to wrack and ruin. In Greece, in the fourth century B.C., Plato complained that young people had no morals and that their music was barbaric. What we’ve not understood, for 2500 years and more, is that each new generation simply renames the old truths in the process of making their own. Love , courage, honesty, generosity of the spirit—these values don’t change, although they may turn up in familiar shapes. Virtues may seem spiky and uncomfortable to young people, who need to claim their own experience. But each generation will discover the truth for itself. We needn’t fear that the new will destroy the old; it will simply make it new. I will keep in mind that the young people of each
age seek an identity that set them apart from their elders—without realizing that in this way, too, they resemble them.