Spiritual values are attitudes and behavioral norms, standards and moral prohibitions, ideals and assessments, social standards and concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice, beautiful and ugly, proper and unacceptable. Objective values (material wealth, natural resources) act as objects to satisfy the needs of people, and spiritual values are an independent sphere that even shapes the attitude of society to objects and things. Unlike, for example, a natural resource such as water that a person consumes, brotherhood or solidarity forces people who share these principles to act in a certain way. We can say that the sphere of the ideal acts as a behavioral motivation of human actions.
The question arises: how independent and unshakable are spiritual values? On the one hand, religions claim that they are given to us “from above” - in the form of commandments and, therefore, are eternal and unchanging. It was just at a certain stage that the “Hour of Mercy" struck, when these eternal tablets were handed to humanity (or humanity simply "ripened" to the level to accept them). Other voices advocate that spiritual norms evolve with society. For example, in the era of “troglodytic morality” it was not considered shameful to kill the weak, to take away his women and cattle, and now it is classified as murder, rape and robbery. In the days of ancient Greece, owning slaves was not considered shameful, now it is a crime.
Relativists reinforce their arguments with the fact that now, along with universal human values , the spiritual values of social strata and individuals coexist. And, unfortunately, some individuals have the same “troglodytic morality”. Our moral standards are codified in the changing laws of states (we recall, at least, that the death penalty used to be everywhere, but now the list of countries where the death penalty is the highest measure is steadily declining). Our view of the world is changing due to a change in scientific paradigms. A sense of beauty is imposed on us by aesthetic education - after all, there are people who consider the most primitive kitsch to be beautiful.
All this is so: the concept of justice, good, due and the idea of beauty have been modified. Therefore, we say that there were spiritual values of the culture of primitive society, the ancient world, the Middle Ages and the New Age. But is there a substitution of terms here? Do we not take the manifestation and embodiment of ideas and ideals in behavior for these values themselves? For example, we take the sphere fairly - unfairly, lawfully - criminally. Going on a campaign against another tribe, primitive warriors wholeheartedly believed that they were doing the right thing and did it right: they were fighting a war against “strangers”, and not repairing an insult to “their own people”. The feudal lord seized the land from the rival “by the right of conquest” and was confident that he had not one iota committed a sin against the law.
Consequently, we can conclude that justice as such has always caused satisfaction among people, and the violation of justice generated a feeling of resentment, anger, the desire to restore this justice . Aesthetic spiritual values evolved from cave paintings to modern postmodernism, but the attraction of people to the beautiful has always been. Just like aversion to the ugly. Creativity as a process brought and brings torment and joy to both the primitive artist and the contemporary one. The process of learning something new, pushing the horizons of our ideas about the world, has always been inherent in man. Therefore, the search for truth also stands in the line of universal spiritual values. And finally, the sacred realm. Who at all times was considered a saint, led by the Spirit, a priest, a sorcerer, a soothsayer? One who not only theoretically shares spiritual values, but also lives according to them - according to the commandments, according to the law, according to justice and truth.