beyond the wreckage of taboos

The Australian 'prison poet' Peter Kocan writes: The ills multiply as we unlearn / The ancient wise humility of men / Who saw, beyond the wreckage of taboos, / Despair and madness, hatred and disease / The promised payment in the promised coin. He gives voice to what many social conservatives feel: that to reject the time-honoured wisdom and experience of the traditional ordering of our culture, and a sense of humility in the face of this shared and profound experience, will ultimately land us in a bad place. They are suspicious of novelty and innovation in most areas of life - less in the technological realm perhaps, definitely more in the moral.  Believers too - although believers do not have to be social conservatives perhaps most of us are are - believers believe that things - ideas and especially actions -  have consequences, specifically that actions considered sinful lead in one unhappy direction. One might say that we believe that human life - our moral, cultural life - is like a fragile ecosystem, delicately balanced, and that we think tampering with this system can have unintended consequences, even disastrous ones.