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Editor's note:
This article is reprinted from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale
College
I am an inveterate
list maker. I love making lists–of tools and gadgets to buy
at the hardware store, of grocery staples that need restocking,
of New Year’s Resolutions, of the little yet vitally important
details of living of which I often need to be reminded. Many of
the notes I write to myself, especially those on my own shortcomings,
begin with the words, “I must remember to....” When
someone says, “Count your blessings,” I take their advice
literally, by making a written list.
Why
We Are in So Much Trouble
So it is not
surprising that when I recently was asked to reflect on our present
culture and the general state of American society, my immediate
response was to pick up a pen and reach for a pad of paper. At the
top of the first page, I wrote the heading: “America in the
1990s: Why We Are in So Much Trouble.” And here is the list
I composed:
–The
loss of values. Values are the building blocks and mortar that
keep our entire civilization together. They are our priorities;
in other words, they are those things that we put at the top of
every list that we make, no matter what the subject.
But we no longer
seem to think that our values are worth defending. As I wrote several
years ago in a book on higher education, “political correctness,”
or “PC,” dominates the academy and the public square.
This doctrine holds that all differences in ideas, values and lifestyles
are equally valid, and that any attempt to prefer one over the other
is an act of prejudice. Moreover, the differences between people
–between blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor,
Westerners and non-Westerners–are more important than the
qualities and values that they share in common. According to PC
advocates, questions of race, gender, class, and power are the only
real issues that govern human events.
If you think
this kind of thinking is confined to our college campuses and our
intellectual elites, just consider the L.A. riots, the O.J. Simpson
trial, or any number of recent events that demonstrate how values
have been destroyed by political correctness. Philosopher Jacques
Barzun had it right when he said that political correctness does
not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
–The
loss of truth. PC advocates also tell us that truth really
isn’t objective at all; it depends on our point of view. One
person’s truth is supposed to be just as good (or, more to
the point, just as unreliable) as another’s. What has been
passed off as “truth” are merely the collective prejudices
of the dominant ruling class and culture. We must be shown how to
“deconstruct”what we think is true.
The only truth
that political correctness will admit is that everything–every
poem, every book, every historical event or person, every emotion,
attitude, or belief, every action–must be viewed in a political
context as an instrument of exclusion, oppression, or liberation.
–The
loss of moral literacy. Honor and virtue are increasingly rare
commodities. Cheating and lying have become acceptable, especially
in school, because our children believe that, with few exceptions,
“everybody’s doing it.” Sadly, they may be right.
In a 1995 article for Reader’s Digest, Daniel R.
Levine notes that Who’s Who Among American High School
Students polled more than three thousand high school juniors
and seniors who were at the top of their class. Seventy-eight percent
admitted cheating and 89 percent admitted cheating was common at
their schools.
In Kansas, Levine
adds, another survey of the same number of college students led
to almost identical results. Emporia State University psychology
professor Stephen F. Davis found that 76 percent had cheated. He
commented, “The numbers alone are disturbing, but even more
alarming is the attitude. There’s no remorse. For students,
cheating is a way of life.”
We are not only
doing a poor job of teaching the three Rs, but we are failing to
teach our children the difference between right and wrong. Observers
have characterized this problem as “a hole in the moral ozone,”
or “moral poverty,” or “moral illiteracy.”
–The
loss of trust. We live in what may be the most cynical age
in history–and the most gullible. For a long time, I thought
that I was the only person who noticed this amazing contradiction,
but in the last several years I have encountered a few writers who
have pointed to it. We Americans are skeptical about many of the
things we should believe, while we blindly accept many of the things
we should question. On the one hand, we distrust politicians, journalists,
and television and filmmakers because we know that they often have
lied to us and deceived us, but, on the other hand, we still look
to them as primary sources of information and as interpreters of
reality.
According to
social scientist Francis Fukuyama, the author of Trust: The
Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, we also seem
to trust our fellow citizens less and less. This “decline
of sociability” dramatically weakens our communities, our
economy, and our civil society, which all depend on the “social
capital” that is created by shared good will, ethical norms,
and expectations. He warns that if we do not revive our trust in
others, we will end up cooperating only under a system of coercion
and regulation.
–The
loss of empathy. A related problem is the loss of empathy.
I am not talking about what President Clinton meant when he recently
said to the nation,“I feel your pain.” By empathy, I
am referring to the ability to transcend our own immediate concerns
to understand other human beings–to see the world from their
perspectives without surrendering our own. Former National Endowment
for the Humanities Chairman Lynne V. Cheney tells of an incident
that occurred in 1994 that provides “a chilling vision of
life” without empathy:
“That
summer Mohammed Jaberipour, 49, was working a route in south Philadelphia
in a Mister Softee ice cream truck when a 16-year-old tried to
extort money. Jaberipour refused, and the youth shot him. As the
father of three lay dying, neighborhood teenagers laughed and
mocked his agony in a rap song they composed on the spot: ‘They
killed Mr. Softee.’
‘It
wasn’t human,’ another ice cream truck driver, a friend
of Jaberipour who came on the scene shortly after the shooting,
told the Philadelphia Daily News. ‘People were
laughing and asking me for ice cream. I was crying....They were
acting as though a cat had died, not a human being.’”
Mrs. Cheney
quotes the conclusion of newspaper columnist Bob Greene: “‘We
have increasingly become a nation of citizens who watch anything
and everything as if it is all a show.’” She adds, “But
however it has come about, people who laugh at a dying man have
no sense that a stranger can suffer as they do.”
–The
loss of independence and confidence. I don’t know the
statistics, but I am willing to bet that there are now more laws
and regulations on the books than there are people living in the
United States. The state dictates how we should educate our children,
earn our living, guard our health, take care of our communities,
and even worship our God. Although there has been a tremendous resurgence
of conservatism in this country, too many of us still look to Washington,
D.C. to provide a vast array of services that would be better left
to the private sector and to assume responsibilities that we once
proudly bore.
The fact is
that we are no longer independent because we have lost confidence–confidence
in ourselves. We have grown accustomed to thinking that there are
some problems that are just so big and complex that only something
else that is big and complex–like government–can tackle
them.
–The
loss of family. The good news is that the vital role of the
traditional family is at long last the subject of national attention.
The breakdown of the family, rather than poverty, or race, or any
other factor once cited by the liberal establishment, is now widely
recognized as the real root cause of rising rates of substance abuse,
teen suicide, abortion, academic failure, welfare dependency, and
violent crime.
But the bad
news is that this time bomb isn’t ticking–it has already
exploded, and we are experiencing the fallout. Here are just two
of the casualty reports:
(1) Nearly
one-third of all children are now born to single mothers. If this
trend continues, in twenty years nearly half of all children born
in our nation will be illegitimate.
(2) The national
crime rate has tripled in the space of thirty years, and observers
like Princeton University Professor John J. Dilulio, Jr., warn
that we are breeding a whole new group of “superpredators”
-youths who commit violent acts with absolutely no sense of remorse
or respect for human life who, according to one prosecutor, “kill
or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive.”
It’s no
wonder that for the first time in decades, almost all the experts
on the right and the left in psychology, sociology, social work,
and law enforcement agree: Our children need capable, responsible
parents who have made a lifelong commitment to each other within
the specific institution of marriage. This is because children need
stability and consistency in their lives. They need the thousands
of little moral and practical lessons that are taught in the context
of daily family life. And, above all, they need the love that only
a mother and father can give.
–The
loss of faith. Although millions of us still attend church
and profess to believe in a Creator, we hold ourselves aloof from
God. He is not, as He should be, the most important, guiding force
in our daily lives. In one way, this is more shocking than if we
had become atheists. Atheists deny God and His authority. We accept
Him, but we refuse to take Him seriously. At school, at work, at
social gatherings, and in public, we are too afraid, reluctant,
or embarrassed–to even mention His name.
And we are constantly
searching for substitutes just as dieters crave fat-free cookies
and ice cream. We want the taste of faith, but not the substance,
and we expect to find it in the trendy new Life Experience Enrichment
movement that peddles its secrets at New Age retreats, on motivational
cassettes, and in glitzy paperbacks and infomercials.
In terms of
sheer numbers, the Judeo-Christian community is still the largest
group of any kind in America, but we have embraced a mainly post-Judeo-Christian
culture in which traditional forms of any religion are relegated
to the “back of the bus.”
The 19th-century
Englishman Matthew Arnold used an even more haunting analogy in
his famous poem, “Dover Beach,” to presage this loss:
The Sea
of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round
earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle
furled
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges
drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Yet
Cheerfulness Will Keep Breaking In
If this list
that I have composed were the only one that described America in
the 1990s, we would be better off to eschew civilization and retreat
to caves. But as the historian and man of letters Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
reminds us,
“We
live in a world that is giving at the seams. Sometimes, indeed–especially
to a man who travels a good deal–there comes an uneasy feeling
that the garment of civilization has already parted and that if
one were to tug even the least bit, a sleeve or a trouser leg
of our social fabric would come away in his hand. In half the
world, the decent draperies of the old order have been burnt altogether,
and King Demos struts naked, like the emperor with his imaginary
new clothes. When the garment of civilization is worn out, we
are confronted by the ugly spectacle of naked power.
“Yet
cheerfulness will keep breaking in....”
Yet cheerfulness
will keep breaking in. What a wonderful and wise sentiment!
We would all do well to remember it; in fact, it would make a great
title for another list–a list of what is right in America.
Despite our troubles, we have many reasons to expect a bright future.
There are literally millions of us who, for the most part, do defend
our values, who do tell the truth, who do live honorably and virtuously,
who do live up to high moral standards, who do exhibit trust, independence,
and empathy, who do build strong families, and who are courageous
witnesses to faith.
For over two
hundred years, we have found ways of overcoming adversity and succeeding
against all odds. Though they may sometimes be threatened, our best
qualities–optimism, resilience, moral imagination, ingenuity,
charity, compassion, and spiritual strength–have a way of
resurfacing when we need them most.
The
Greatest Lists of All
How can we help
our best qualities resurface now, at this moment in time? We can
begin by learning from some of the greatest lists of all.
The Declaration
of Independence and the U.S. Constitution
In 1776, a young
delegate to the Continental Congress named Thomas Jefferson retired
to the upstairs bedroom of a bricklayer’s home in Philadelphia.
He labored for eight days to produce the Declaration of Independence.
This document is essentially a list of indictments against King
George III and the British government. Think of the language:
–He
has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary....
–He
has dissolved Representative Houses....
–He
has obstructed the Administration of Justice....
–He
has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms
of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance....
–He
has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign
to our constitution, and acknowledged by our laws....
Why was such
a list of complaints important? The American colonists knew full
well that the world would condemn them for breaking away from their
mother country unless they could prove that they were not rebelling–they
were fighting to preserve their rights. They knew that what
they were doing was not only unprecedented but was a huge gamble,
so they were determined to let everyone know the reasons for their
course of action.
The Declaration
of Independence also provided a more positive list of reasons for
the creation of the United States. “We hold these truths to
be self-evident,” Jefferson wrote:
–that
all men are created equal,
–that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
–that
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
–That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
–That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new Government....
A decade after
the American colonists fought and won the Revolutionary War, a small
group of the founding fathers met in Philadelphia to lay out the
ground rules for governing the new nation. They decided upon a written
constitution–the first of its kind in the history of the world,
dedicated to the principle of individual liberty. They also decided
that it would be best presented in the form of a list–with
seven articles and twenty-four subsections. Later, ten amendments
known as the “Bill of Rights” were added.
They are short–much
less than the length of a single chapter in an average novel, but
the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are still the best
and soundest basis for our entire political system.
The Ten
Commandments
I know it sounds
awfully corny, but it is true: God likes to make lists, too. Look,
for example, at the Ten Commandments recorded in the Book of Exodus.
I believe that God gave us these commandments in the form of a single
list so that there would be no question about what He wants us to
do or how He wants us to live. Like an ideal list, it is short,
simple, and to the point–we can easily memorize it, we can
easily understand it, and we know exactly what we must do to fulfill
its terms:
–Thou
shalt have no other Gods before me.
–Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image....
–Thou
shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
–Remember
the Sabbath day and keep it holy....
–Honor
thy father and mother....
–Thou
shalt not kill.
–Thou
shalt not commit adultery.
–Thou
shalt not steal.
–Thou
shalt not bear false witness....
–Thou
shalt not covet....
The Pope’s
Message to the United Nations
A more contempory
list is contained in the final paragraph of John Paul II’s
October 1995 speech to the United Nations. The Pope addressed a
series of propositions to all men and women, of all faiths, in all
the nations of the world. As we prepare to leave one century and
enter into another, his list offers a compelling vision of the past
and the future:
–It
is no accident that we are here.
–Each
and every human person has been created in the “image and
likeness” of the One who is the origin of all that is.
–We
have within us the capacities for wisdom and virtue.
–With
these gifts, and with the help of God’s grace, we can build
in the next century and the next millennium a civilization worthy
of the human person, a true culture of freedom. We can and must
do so!
–And
in doing so, we shall see that the tears of this century have
prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit.
Our
National Checklist
Why do we make
lists? We make lists so we will not forget what is important. But
all too often we regard list-making as a trivial task when it should
be our first and most important priority. For if we chronically
forget items like milk and bread unless we make a grocery list,
or nuts and bolts unless we make a hardware store list, isn’t
it also likely that we will forget items like virtue and compassion
unless we make a character list, or freedom and self-reliance unless
we make a citizenship list?
List-making
is the surest and most effective way of identifying our weaknesses
and strengths and prioritizing our needs and desires. But, as we
all know, the best part of the process is checking things off
the list. We experience a tremendous sense of accomplishment
when we achieve our set goals. So making lists is the first step–the
prerequisite, really, of taking action.
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© 2004 Meridian
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