Stivers offers an important analysis that proposes an answer to these questions.
American society is experiencing a moral decline, the critics say.
For it is not signaled by a series of discrete moral problems that the conventional morality can no longer control, but by the Very Morality Itself , a morality that encourages, even promotes, cynical and self-serving behavior. A technological civilization is one in which the means absorb the ends. Ethical action has a source other than reality itself, whereas cynicism and idealism both draw their inspiration from reality in the very act of deceiving us about it. They are thus ideological. The ideology is power and the good that is sought is success.