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From the Winter 1994 issue of Policy Review magazine:
REVOLT AGAINST GOD
America's Spiritual Despair
WILLIAM J. BENNETT
We gather in a spirit of celebration. But tonight I speak out of a
spirit of concern -- for this evening my task is to provide an
assessment of the social and cultural condition of modern American
society. And while many people agree that there is much to be
concerned about these days, I don't think that people fully
appreciate the depth, or even the nature, of what threatens us --
and, therefore, we do not yet have a firm hold on what it will take
to better us. We need to have an honest conversation about these
issues.
A few months ago I had lunch with a friend of mine, a man who has
written for a number of political journals and who now lives in
Asia. During our conversation the topic turned to America --
specifically, America as seen through the eyes of foreigners.
During our conversation, he told me what he had observed during his
travels: that while the world still regards the United States as
the leading economic and military power on earth, this same world
no longer beholds us with the moral respect it once did. When the
rest of the world looks at America, he said, they see no longer a
"shining city on a hill." Instead, they see a society in decline,
with exploding rates of crime and social pathologies. We all know
that foreigners often come here in fear -- and once they are here,
they travel in fear. It is our shame to realize that they have good
reason to fear; a record number of them get killed here.
Today, many who come to America believe they are visiting a
degraded society. Yes, America still offers plenty of jobs,
enormous opportunity, and unmatched material and physical comforts.
But there is a growing sense among many foreigners that when they
come here, they are slumming. I have, like many of us, an
instinctive aversion to foreigners harshly judging my nation; yet
I must concede that much of what they think is true.
"You're Becoming American"
I recently had a conversation with a D.C. cab driver who is doing
graduate work at American University. He told me that once he
receives his masters degree he is going back to Africa. His reason?
His children. He doesn't think they are safe in Washington. He told
me that he didn't want them to grow up in a country where young men
will paw his daughter and expect her to be an "easy target," and
where his son might be a different kind of target -- the target of
violence from the hands of other young males. "It is more civilized
where I come from," said this man from Africa. I urged him to move
outside of Washington; things should improve.
But it is not only violence and urban terror that signal decay. We
see it in many forms. Newsweek columnist Joe Klein recently wrote
about Berenice Belizaire, a young Haitian girl who arrived in New
York in 1987. When she arrived in America she spoke no English and
her family lived in a cramped Brooklyn apartment. Eventually
Berenice enrolled at James Madison High School, where she excelled.
According to Judith Khan, a math teacher at James Madison, "[The
immigrants are] why I love teaching in Brooklyn. They have a drive
in them that we no longer seem to have." And far from New York
City, in the beautiful Berkshire mountains where I went to school,
Philip Kasinitz, an assistant professor of sociology at Williams
College, has observed that Americans have become the object of
ridicule among immigrant students on campus. "There's an
interesting phenomenon. When immigrant kids criticize each other
for getting lazy or loose, they say, `You're becoming American,'"
Kasinitz says. "Those who work hardest to keep American culture at
bay have the best chance of becoming American success stories."
Last year an article was published in the Washington Post which
pointed out how students from other countries adapt to the
lifestyle of most American teens. Paulina, a Polish high school
student studying in the United States, said that when she first
came here she was amazed by the way teens spent their time.
According to Paulina:
In Warsaw, we would talk to friends after school, go home and
eat with our parents and then do four or five hours of homework.
When I first came here, it was like going into a crazy world, but
now I am getting used to it. I'm going to Pizza Hut and watching TV
and doing less work in school. I can tell it is not a good thing to
get used to.
Think long and hard about these words, spoken by a young Polish
girl about America: "When I first came here it was like going into
a crazy world, but now I am getting used to it." And, "I can tell
it is not a good thing to get used to."
Something has gone wrong with us.
Social Regression
This is a conclusion which I come to with great reluctance. During
the late 1960s and 1970s, I was one of those who reacted strongly
to criticisms of America that swept across university campuses. I
believe that many of those criticisms -- "Amerika" as an inherently
repressive, imperialist, and racist society -- were wrong then, and
they are wrong now. But intellectual honesty demands that we accept
facts that we would sometimes like to wish away. Hard truths are
truths nonetheless. And the hard truth is that something has gone
wrong with us.
America is not in danger of becoming a third world country; we are
too rich, too proud and too strong to allow that to happen. It is
not that we live in a society completely devoid of virtue. Many
people live well, decently, even honorably. There are families,
schools, churches and neighborhoods that work. There are places
where virtue is taught and learned. But there is a lot less of this
than there ought to be. And we know it. John Updike put it this
way: "The fact that... we still live well cannot ease the pain of
feeling that we no longer live nobly."
Let me briefly outline some of the empirical evidence that points
to cultural decline, evidence that while we live well materially,
we don't live nobly. Earlier this year I released, through the
auspices of the Heritage Foundation, The Index of Leading Cultural
Indicators, the most comprehensive statistical portrait available
of behavioral trends over the last 30 years. Among the findings:
since 1960, the population has increased 41 percent; the Gross
Domestic Product has nearly tripled; and total social spending by
all levels of government (measured in constant 1990 dollars) has
risen from $142.7 billion to $787 billion -- more than a five-fold
increase.
But during the same thirty-year period, there has been a 560
percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase
in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of
the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than
a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of
75 points in the average S.A.T. scores of high-school students.
These are not good things to get used to.
Today 30 percent of all births and 68 percent of black births are
illegitimate. By the end of the decade, according to the most
reliable projections, 40 percent of all American births and 80
percent of minority births will occur out of wedlock.
These are not good things to get used to.
And then there are the results of an on-going teacher survey. Over
the years teachers have been asked to identify the top problems in
America's schools. In 1940 teachers identified them as talking out
of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the hall; cutting in
line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asked the same
question in 1990, teachers identified drug use; alcohol abuse;
pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault. These are not good
things to get used to, either.
Consider, too, where the United States ranks in comparison with the
rest of the industrialized world. We are at or near the top in
rates of abortions, divorces, and unwed births. We lead the
industrialized world in murder, rape and violent crime. And in
elementary and secondary education, we are at or near the bottom in
achievement scores.
These facts alone are evidence of substantial social regression.
But there are other signs of decay, ones that do not so easily lend
themselves to quantitative analyses (some of which I have already
suggested in my opening anecdotes). What I am talking about is the
moral, spiritual and aesthetic character and habits of a society --
what the ancient Greeks referred to as its ethos. And here, too, we
are facing serious problems. For there is a coarseness, a
callousness, a cynicism, a banality, and a vulgarity to our time.
There are just too many signs of de-civilization -- that is,
civilization gone rotten. And the worst of it has to do with our
children. Apart from the numbers and the specific facts, there is
the on-going, chronic crime against children: the crime of making
them old before their time. We live in a culture which at times
seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young, to assuring
the loss of their innocence before their time.
This may sound overly pessimistic or even alarmist, but I think
this is the way it is. And my worry is that people are not
unsettled enough; I don't think we are angry enough. We have become
inured to the cultural rot that is setting in. Like Paulina, we are
getting used to it, even though it is not a good thing to get used
to. People are experiencing atrocity overload, losing their
capacity for shock, disgust, and outrage. A few weeks ago eleven
people were murdered in New York City within ten hours -- and as
far as I can tell, it barely caused a stir.
Two weeks ago a violent criminal, who mugged and almost killed a
72-year old man and was shot by a police officer while fleeing the
scene of the crime, was awarded $4.3 million. Virtual silence.
And during last year's Los Angeles riots, Damian Williams and Henry
Watson were filmed pulling an innocent man out of a truck, crushing
his skull with a brick, and doing a victory dance over his fallen
body. Their lawyers then built a successful legal defense on the
proposition that people cannot be held accountable for getting
caught up in mob violence. ("They just got caught up in the riot,"
one juror told the New York Times. "I guess maybe they were in the
wrong place at the wrong time.") When the trial was over and these
men were found not guilty on most counts, the sound you heard
throughout the land was relief. We are "defining deviancy down," in
Senator Moynihan's memorable phrase. And in the process we are
losing a once-reliable sense of civic and moral outrage.
Urban Surrender
Listen to this story from former New York City Police Commissioner
Raymond Kelly:
A number of years ago there began to appear, in the windows of
automobiles parked on the streets of American cities, signs which
read: `No radio.' Rather than express outrage, or even annoyance at
the possibility of a car break-in, people tried to communicate with
the potential thief in conciliatory terms. The translation of `no
radio' is: "Please break into someone else's car, there's nothing
in mine." These `no radio' signs are flags of urban surrender. They
are hand-written capitulations. Instead of `no radio,' we need new
signs that say `no surrender.'
And what is so striking today is not simply the increased number of
violent crimes, but the nature of those crimes. It is no longer
"just" murder we see, but murders with a prologue, murders
accompanied by acts of unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity.
From pop culture, with our own ears, we have heard the terrible
debasement of music. Music, harmony and rhythm find their way into
the soul and fasten mightily upon it, Plato's Republic teaches us.
Because music has the capacity to lift us up or to bring us down,
we need to pay more careful attention to it. It is a steep moral
slide from Bach, and even Buddy Holly, to Guns 'n Roses and 2 Live
Crew. This week an indicted murderer, Snoop Doggy Dogg, saw his rap
album, "Doggystyle," debut at number one. It may be useful for you
to read, as I have, some of his lyrics and other lyrics from heavy
metal and rap music, and then ask yourself: how much worse could it
possibly get? And then ask yourself: what will happen when young
boys who grow up on mean streets, without fathers in their lives,
are constantly exposed to music which celebrates the torture and
abuse of women?
There is a lot of criticism directed at television these days --
the casual cruelty, the rampant promiscuity, the mindlessness of
sit-coms and soap operas. Most of the criticisms are justified. But
this is not the worst of it. The worst of television is the
day-time television talk shows, where indecent exposure is
celebrated as a virtue. It is hard to remember now, but there was
once a time when personal failures, subliminal desires, and
perverse taste were accompanied by guilt or embarrassment, at least
by silence.
Today these are a ticket to appear as a guest on the Sally Jessy
Raphael show, or one of the dozens or so shows like it. I asked my
staff to provide me with a list of some of the day-time talk-show
topics from only the last two weeks. They include: cross-dressing
couples; a three-way love affair; a man whose chief aim in life is
to sleep with women and fool them into thinking that he is using a
condom during sex; women who can't say no to cheating; prostitutes
who love their jobs; a former drug dealer; and an interview with a
young girl caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle. These
shows present a two-edged problem to society: the first edge is
that some people want to appear on these shows in order to expose
themselves. The second edge is that lots of people are tuning in to
watch them expose themselves. This is not a good thing to get used
to.
Who's to blame? Here I would caution conservatives against the
tendency to blame liberals for our social disorders. Contemporary
liberalism does have a lot for which to answer; many of its
doctrines have wrought a lot of damage. Universities,
intellectuals, think tanks, and government departments have put a
lot of poison into the reservoirs of national discourse. But to
simply point the finger of blame at liberals and elites is wrong.
The hard fact of the matter is that this was not something done to
us; it is also something we have done to ourselves. Liberals may
have been peddling from an empty wagon, but we were buying.
Much of what I have said is familiar to many of you. Why is this
happening? What is behind all this? Intelligent arguments have been
advanced as to why these things have come to pass. Thoughtful
people have pointed to materialism and consumerism; an overly
permissive society; the writings of Rousseau, Marx, Freud,
Nietzsche; the legacy of the 1960s; and so on. There is truth in
almost all of these accounts. Let me give you mine.
Spiritual Acedia
I submit to you that the real crisis of our time is spiritual.
Specifically, our problem is what the ancients called acedia.
Acedia is the sin of sloth. But acedia, as understood by the saints
of old, is not laziness about life's affairs (which is what we
normally think sloth to be). Acedia is something else; properly
understood, acedia is an aversion to and a negation of spiritual
things. Acedia reveals itself as an undue concern for external
affairs and worldly things. Acedia is spiritual torpor; an absence
of zeal for divine things. And it brings with it, according to the
ancients, "a sadness, a sorrow of the world."
Acedia manifests itself in man's "joyless, ill-tempered, and
self-seeking rejection of the nobility of the children of God." The
slothful man hates the spiritual, and he wants to be free of its
demands. The old theologians taught that acedia arises from a heart
steeped in the worldly and carnal, and from a low esteem of divine
things. It eventually leads to a hatred of the good altogether.
With hatred comes more rejection, more ill-temper, more sadness,
and sorrow.
Spiritual acedia is not a new condition, of course. It is the
seventh capital sin. But today it is in ascendance. In coming to
this conclusion, I have relied on two literary giants -- men born
on vastly different continents, the product of two completely
different worlds, and shaped by wholly different experiences -- yet
writers who possess strikingly similar views, and who have had a
profound impact on my own thinking. It was an unusual and
surprising moment to find their views coincident.
When the late novelist Walker Percy was asked what concerned him
most about the future of America, he answered:
Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great
strength and beauty and freedom... gradually subside into decay
through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement....
but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed and in the
end helplessness before its great problems.
And here are the words of the prophetic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(echoing his 1978 Harvard commencement address in which he warned
of the West's "spiritual exhaustion"):
In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or a
dragon -- not imprisonment, hard labor, death, government
harassment and censorship -- but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness,
indifference. Not the acts of a mighty all-pervading repressive
government but the failure of a listless public to make use of the
freedom that is its birthright.
What afflicts us, then, is a corruption of the heart, a turning
away in the soul. Our aspirations, our affections and our desires
are turned toward the wrong things. And only when we turn them
toward the right things -- toward enduring, noble, spiritual things
-- will things get better.
Lest I leave the impression of bad news on all fronts, I do want to
be clear about the areas where I think we have made enormous gains:
material comforts, economic prosperity and the spread of democracy
around the world. The American people have achieved a standard of
living unimagined 50 years ago. We have seen extraordinary advances
in medicine, science and technology. Life expectancy has increased
more than 20 years during the last six decades. Opportunity and
equality have been extended to those who were once denied them. And
of course America prevailed in our "long, twilight struggle"
against communism. Impressive achievements, all.
Yet even with all of this, the conventional analysis is still that
this nation's major challenges have to do with getting more of the
same: achieving greater economic growth, job creation, increased
trade, health care, or more federal programs. Some of these things
are desirable, such as greater economic growth and increased trade;
some of them are not, such as more federal programs. But to look to
any or all of them as the solution to what ails us is akin to
assigning names to images and shadows, it so widely misses the
mark.
If we have full employment and greater economic growth -- if we
have cities of gold and alabaster -- but our children have not
learned how to walk in goodness, justice, and mercy, then the
American experiment, no matter how gilded, will have failed.
I realize I have laid down strong charges, a tough indictment. Some
may question them. But if I am wrong, if my diagnosis is not right,
then someone must explain to me this: why do Americans feel so bad
when things are economically, militarily and materially so good?
Why amidst this prosperity and security are enormous numbers of
people -- almost 70 percent of the public -- saying that we are off
track? This paradox is described in the Scottish author John
Buchan's work. Writing a half-century ago, he described the "coming
of a too garish age, when life would be lived in the glare of neon
lamps and the spirit would have no solitude." Here is what Buchan
wrote about his nightmare world:
In such a [nightmare] world everyone would have leisure. But
everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual
discipline in life....It would be a feverish, bustling world,
self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous
life there would be death at the heart. In the perpetual hurry of
life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul.... In such a
bagman's paradise, where life would be rationalised and padded with
every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the
immortal part of man.
During the last decade of the twentieth century, many have achieved
this bagman's paradise. And this is not a good thing to get used
to.
In identifying spiritual exhaustion as the central problem, I part
company with many. There is a disturbing reluctance in our time to
talk seriously about matters spiritual and religious. Why? Perhaps
it has to do with the modern sensibility's profound discomfort with
the language and the commandments of God. Along with other bad
habits, we have gotten used to not talking about the things which
matter most -- and so, we don't.
One will often hear that religious faith is a private matter that
does not belong in the public arena. But this analysis does not
hold -- at least on some important points. Whatever your faith --
or even if you have none at all -- it is a fact that when millions
of people stop believing in God, or when their belief is so
attenuated as to be belief in name only, enormous public
consequences follow. And when this is accompanied by an aversion to
spiritual language by the political and intellectual class, the
public consequences are even greater. How could it be otherwise? In
modernity, nothing has been more consequential, or more public in
its consequences, than large segments of American society privately
turning away from God, or considering Him irrelevant, or declaring
Him dead. Dostoyevsky reminded us in Brothers Karamazov that "if
God does not exist, everything is permissible." We are now seeing
"everything." And much of it is not good to get used to.
Social Regeneration
What can be done? First, here are the short answers: do not
surrender; get mad; and get in the fight. Now, let me offer a few,
somewhat longer, prescriptions.
1. At the risk of committing heresy before a Washington audience,
let me suggest that our first task is to recognize that, in
general, we place too much hope in politics. I am certainly not
denying the impact (for good and for ill) of public policies. I
would not have devoted the past decade of my life to public service
-- and I could not work at the Heritage Foundation -- if I believed
that the work with which I was engaged amounted to nothing more
than striving after wind and ashes. But it is foolish, and futile,
to rely primarily on politics to solve moral, cultural, and
spiritual afflictions.
The last quarter-century has taught politicians a hard and humbling
lesson: there are intrinsic limits to what the state can do,
particularly when it comes to imparting virtue, and forming and
forging character, and providing peace to souls. Samuel Johnson
expressed this (deeply conservative and true) sentiment when he
wrote "How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which
laws or kings can cause or cure!"
King Lear was a great king -- sufficient to all his political
responsibilities and obligations. He did well as king, but as a
father and a man, he messed up terribly. The great king was reduced
to the mud and ignominy of the heath, cursing his daughters, his
life, his gods. Politics is a great adventure; it is greatly
important; but its proper place in our lives has been greatly
exaggerated. Politics -- especially inside the Beltway politics --
has too often become the graven image of our time.
2. We must have public policies that once again make the connection
between our deepest beliefs and our legislative agenda. Do we
Americans, for example, believe that man is a spiritual being with
a potential for individual nobility and moral responsibility? Or do
we believe that his ultimate fate is to be merely a soulless cog in
the machine of state? When we teach sex-education courses to
teen-agers, do we treat them as if they are young animals in heat?
Or, do we treat them as children of God?
In terms of public policy, the failure is not so much intellectual;
it is a failure of will and courage. Right now we are playing a
rhetorical game: we say one thing and we do another. Consider the
following:
We say that we desire from our children more civility and
responsibility, but in many of our schools we steadfastly refuse to
teach right and wrong.
We say that we want law and order in the streets, but we
allow criminals, including violent criminals, to return to those
same streets.
We say that we want to stop illegitimacy, but we continue
to subsidize the kind of behavior that virtually guarantees high
rates of illegitimacy.
We say that we want to discourage teenage sexual
activity, but in classrooms all across America educators are more
eager to dispense condoms than moral guidance.
We say that we want more families to stay together, but
we liberalize divorce laws and make divorce easier to attain.
We say that we want to achieve a color blind society and
judge people by the content of their character, but we continue to
count by race, skin and pigment.
We say that we want to encourage virtue and honor among
the young, but it has become a mark of sophistication to shun the
language of morality.
3. We desperately need to recover a sense of the fundamental
purpose of education, which is to provide for the intellectual and
moral education of the young. From the ancient Greeks to the
founding fathers, moral instruction was the central task of
education. "If you ask what is the good of education," Plato said,
"the answer is easy -- that education makes good men, and that good
men act nobly." Jefferson believed that education should aim at
improving one's "morals" and "faculties." And of education, John
Locke said this: "Tis' virtue that we aim at, hard virtue, and not
the subtle arts of shifting." Until a quarter-century or so ago,
this consensus was so deep as to go virtually unchallenged. Having
departed from this time-honored belief, we are now reaping the
whirlwind. And so we talk not about education as the architecture
of souls, but about "skills facilitation" and "self-esteem" and
about being "comfortable with ourselves."
4. As individuals and as a society, we need to return religion to
its proper place. Religion, after all, provides us with moral
bearings. And if I am right and the chief problem we face is
spiritual impoverishment, then the solution depends, finally, on
spiritual renewal. I am not speaking here about coerced spiritual
renewal -- in fact, there is no such thing -- but about renewal
freely taken.
The enervation of strong religious beliefs -- in both our private
lives as well as our public conversations -- has de-moralized
society. We ignore religion and its lessons at our peril. But
instead of according religion its proper place, much of society
ridicules and disdains it, and mocks those who are serious about
their faith. In America today, the only respectable form of bigotry
is bigotry directed against religious people. This antipathy toward
religion cannot be explained by the well-publicized moral failures
and financial excesses of a few leaders or charlatans, or by the
censoriousness of some of their followers. No, the reason for
hatred of religion is because it forces modern man to confront
matters he would prefer to ignore.
Every serious student of American history, familiar with the
writings of the founders, knows the civic case for religion. It
provides society with a moral anchor -- and nothing else has yet
been found to substitute for it. Religion tames our baser
appetites, passions, and impulses. And it helps us to thoughtfully
sort through the "ordo amoris," the order of the loves.
But remember, too, that for those who believe, it is a mistake to
treat religion merely as a useful means to worldly ends. Religion
rightly demands that we take seriously not only the commandments of
the faith, but that we also take seriously the object of the faith.
Those who believe know that although we are pilgrims and sojourners
and wanderers in this earthly kingdom, ultimately we are citizens
of the City of God -- a City which man did not build and cannot
destroy, a City where there is no sadness, where the sorrows of the
world find no haven, and where there is peace the world cannot
give.
Pushing Back
Let me conclude. In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William
Faulkner declared "I decline to accept the end of man." Man will
not merely endure but prevail because, as Faulkner said, he alone
among creatures "has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance."
Today we must in the same way decline to accept the end of moral
man. We must carry on the struggle, for our children. We will push
back hard against an age that is pushing hard against us. When we
do, we will emerge victorious against the trials of our time. When
we do, we will save our children from the decadence of our time.
We have a lot of work to do. Let's get to it.
To reprint more than short quotations, please write or FAX Ben
Morehead, Associate Publisher, Policy Review, 214 Massachusetts
Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002, FAX (202) 675-0291.