Bulwarks crumbling

On my vacation at the shore I met a medical doctor who works at a Philadelphia hospital. His specialty is infectious diseases, and he was telling me that he was taken aback by a comment he overheard at work from one of the young interns. The doctor in training was saying to his fellow trainee that nowadays HIV is no big deal; it's just another chronic disease that can be treated.

The doctor relating the incident to me was troubled and evidently thought he was hearing from the on-deck generation of physicians more than an innocuous statement on the state of medicine. He was hearing a titanic shift in worldview. He described the comment as "cavalier."

This little generational loss is right on schedule, I suppose. I remember Francis Schaeffer in the early 1970s tracing and predicting the step-by-step decent into pessimism and moral chaos that was inevitable after our forefathers abandoned the universals or absolutes that come with a faith in the God of the Bible. In How Should We Then Live, he wrote that this mass cultural abandonment of God "left isolated a certain group of middle class which still thought in the old ways. Though many in the group had no sufficient base for doing so, nevertheless through inertia they continued to act as though values did exist for them. But as their children were educated, the children were injected with the new thought, and the generation gap came into being. Members of the new generation saw that many of their parents had no base for the values that they said they held. Many of their parents were governed only by a dead tradition; they acted largely out of habit from the past. . . ."

If the cultural bulwark against sexual promiscuity was for decades propped up by the twin buttresses of religious opprobrium and medical impossibilities, the former has been eroding steadily since your great-grandparents' time, and now the latter is taken out of the way.

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