Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian, is best known for her writings on Victorian England, including The Idea of Poverty and The New History and the Old. In 1991 she delivered the Jefferson Lecture, established by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the highest government award for intellectual achievement in the humanities.
Why, we are asked, if things are so good, do we think that they are so bad? The short answer is that we think they are bad because they are bad. Indeed, they may be worse than we think.
We think, for example, and quite rightly, that unemployment is bad. But unemployment, and the state of the economy in general, is only part of the problem, and, perhaps, the least part of it. Most of the unemployed will find employment. They will also find themselves saddled with a host of other problems that may be less immediately, personally urgent, but that are no less serious and troubling because they are more permanent and intractable.
I am not talking about the "malaise" that was bandied about in the Carter Administration, a bit of psychobabble referring to an emotional, inchoate species of discontent - "alienation," "anomie" or whatever other modish term was current at the time. I am talking of the justified discontent of the responsible citizen who discovers that economic and material goods are no compensation for social and moral ills.
A hundred and fifty years ago, while his contemporaries were debating "the standard of living question" - whether the standard of living of the working class had improved or declined in those early decades of industrialism - Thomas Carlyle reformulated the issue to read, "the condition of England question.” That question, he insisted, could not be resolved by citing "figures of arithmetic" about wages, prices, earnings and expenditures. What was important was the "condition" and “deposition" of the poor: their beliefs and feelings, their sense of right and wrong, the attitudes and the habits that would dispose them either to a "wholesome composure, frugality and prosperity," or to an "acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking and gradual ruin."
We do not use such language today to our great loss. We are more comfortable adding up "figures of arithmetic" than analyzing or judging "conditions" and "dispositions.” These figures provide fodder for "pessimists” and "optimists" alike, the former concluding that recessions are an inevitable feature of the economy and that the living standards of the poor, if not of the rich, are in a permanent state of decline; the latter that the present recession is temporary and that in the long run the poor as well as the rich will benefit from a productive, expanding economy. But if the debate were enlarged to include the question of condition and disposition, some of us might find ourselves in the awkward position of being economic optimists and at the same time moral pessimists. Indeed, we might be all the more pessimistic because we would be deprived of comforting view that a sound economy is necessarily conducive to a sound society. We might even be inclined to reverse that formula, to entertain the possibility that a sound society is the precondition for a sound economy.
In fact there are "figures of arithmetic" bearing upon moral and social issues as well as economic and material ones. Victorians called these "social statistics"- statistics relating to religion, education, literacy, pauperism, crime, vagrancy, drunkenness, illegitimacy., These statistics were meant to elucidate the "condition of England question": the moral, spiritual, cultural and intellectual state of the poor in particular and of the country as a whole. We no longer use the term, but we too have social statistics, in a quantity and degree of precision that would have been the envy of the Victorians.
Our social statistics are far more depressing than those produced by the supposedly "dismal science" of economics. There are, to be sure, some brave souls, inveterate optimists, who try to put the best gloss on them. But they are hard put to counteract the overwhelming evidence on the negative side.
It is not much consolation to be informed that the high rate of divorce is partly compensated for by a moderate rate of remarriage, since no degree of remarriage nullifies the fact of divorce, which itself testifies to an unstable marital and family life. Nor is it reassuring to be told that a greater proportion of Americans enjoy a higher education than do most other nationalities, if that higher education is higher in name alone - indeed if it is intellectually lower than ever before, and lower than that of other nationalities. Nor that elementary school children have computer skills that their college-educated parents lack, if they have to use those skills to correct primitive spelling mistakes or to be instructed in the multiplication tables. Nor that more cassettes and CDs are sold than ever before, if more of them spew out hard rock music or soft (or hard) pornographic rap. Nor that heroin addiction may be decreasing, if crack-cocaine addiction is increasing. Nor that the white illegitimacy rate is considerably lower than the black illegitimacy rate, if both rates increasing. Nor that middle-class blacks are faring better, materially and socially, than ever before, if a considerable and growing black "underclass" is faring so much worse than it is becoming a permanent "outcaste" class.
For a long time Americans found it hard to face it up to such depressing facts, even when they appeared in the hard guise of statistics. Instead we expended much ingenuity in “decoding” these statistics - qualifying, modifying, interpreting, explaining them, in the hope that we could explain them away. We could confront them candidly because it was, and is, part of the liberal ethos - the prevailing American ethos - that such disagreeable things should not, and therefore could not, be happening. They violate the idea of progress that is so much a part of that ethos: the idea that material and moral progress are the necessary by-products of a free society, an expanding economy, a mobile social structure, a diverse and highly accessible system of public education and an even more diverse and accessible popular culture.
Those statistics also go against the grain of our ethos, in being so "moralistic." While it is generally assumed that moral progress goes hand in hand with material progress, this assumption is rarely made explicit, because moral concepts, still more moral judgments, are understood to be somehow undemocratic and unseemingly. We pride ourselves on being liberated from such retrograde Victorian notions. And they were, indeed, an important part of the Victorian ethos. In 19th-century America, as in England, morality was not only a natural part of social discourse; it was a conscious part of social policy, the test of any legislative or administrative reform being its effect upon the character as well as material welfare of those affected.
Today, we have so completely rejected that Victorian ethos that we deliberately, systematically, divorce morality from social policy. In the current climate of moral relativism and skepticism, it is thought improper to impose any moral conditions or requirements upon the beneficiaries of the public largesse -not only upon welfare recipients but upon artists and other free spirits seeking grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Such conditions are regarded as infringements of freedom (even, some have argued, of the First Amendment), an arrogant usurpation of authority (who are we to decide what is moral and what is not?) and as an intolerable imposition of bourgeois, patriarchic, archaic "values."
We are now confronting the consequences of this policy of moral "neutrality." Having made the most valiant attempt to "objectify" the problems of poverty, criminality, illiteracy, illegitimacy and the like, (The National Center on Health Statistics informs us that “illegitimacy" is no longer acceptable, being derogatory and old fashioned. The preferred term is “nonmarital childbearing.") we are discovering that the economic and social aspects of these problems are inseparable from the moral and psychological ones. And having made the most determined effort to devise remedies that are "valuefree," we find that these policies imperil the material, as well as the moral, well-being of their intended beneficiaries-and not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We have, in short, so succeeded in "de-moralizing," as the Victorians would say, social policy - divorcing it from any moral criteria, requirements, even expectations - that we have "demoralized," in the more familiar sense, society itself.
This is our present "malaise." There is nothing sentimental or utopian about it; it is not the product of an exacerbated sensibility, or romantic aspiration, or yearning for personal "fulfillment.” Nor is there anything fanciful about our fears and grievances; indeed, there is something fanciful in the attempts to deny them. We have, in fact, as individuals and as a society, good reason for alarm.
It is this "condition" of society, this "disposition" of the people, as Carlyle would have said, that liberal intellectuals cannot credit or appreciate. They can sympathize with the sentimental idea of "malaise," but not with the realistic one. They do not understand the anxieties of those who believe that the "social order" (the very term seems to them archaic) is in an acute state of disorder, that the "moral order" (another archaic term) is de-moralized, or that the "legal order" has abdicated responsibility for law and order. They are contemptuous of "philistines," as they see them, who are less than respectful of an "art community" that flaunts its contempt for ordinary people while demanding to be subsidized by them. They have no misgivings about a "sexual revolution" that has legitimized every form of sexual behavior and has made all "lifestyles" equal before the law, before society, even, some claim, before God. They have, in short, divorced themselves not only from conventional morality but also from all those conventional people who still adhere to that morality.
The moral divide has become a class divide: the "common people," as they are invidiously called, versus the "new class." The new class - no longer new, indeed firmly established in the media, the academy and the professions - is, in a curious way, the mirror image of the underclass. One might almost say that the two classes have a symbiotic relationship. In its contempt for "bourgeois values," its misguided notions of "compassion" and its advocacy of social policies reflecting such "enlightened" attitudes, the new class has contributed, if not to the enlargement and perpetuation of the underclass, at least to its legitimization. By the same token, the new class is in an irreconcilably adversarial relationship to the working and middle classes, who are still committed to bourgeois values, the puritan ethic and other such benighted ideas.
By now this "liberated" ethos no longer seems so liberated; "political correctness" is the last refuge of old revolutionaries who have lost their nerve. It is also so dramatically at variance with the social realities that even some liberals are beginning to have second thoughts. After decades of silence and denial, it is now finally respectable to speak of the need for "traditional values"- moral values, family values, social values. It is even respectable (although this is still resisted by many liberals) to suggest weakening of these values, partly as a result of de-moralization of social policy, has contributed to our present ills. It is not, however, at all clear that the traditional remedies will now suffice.
Conservatives have always looked to “intermediate" institutions to sustain and disseminate these values - to family, church, neighborhood, occupation, interest group. The difficulty is that these very institutions have become so enfeebled that they are hardly capable of sustaining and disseminating received values, let alone reviving dormant ones, without considerable assistance from the state. Yet conservatives has little confidence in the state, and with good reason. It is the state, after all, that has not only abdicated responsibility for these values but has actually subverted them - by shifting responsibility from individuals and private associations to the state, by transferring power from local to federal government, by enacting a welfare program that emasculates the family, by legalizing pornography in the name of the Constitution, by permitting educational institutions to be perverted for political purposes, by creating legal system more solicitous of the rights of criminals than of law-abiding citizens.
This is the challenge that confronts us. Families, churches, communities cannot operate in isolation, cannot long maintain values at odds with those endorsed by the state and popularized by the culture. The task is critical and difficult. It is to restore a polity that reflects and supports the values implicit in the very idea of a social, a legal and a moral "order" - a federalist polity in which local and state governments assume responsibility for some of the controversial issues that confront us. And it is to encourage a "counter-counterculture" that will resist the now entrenched "counterculture."
No counterrevolution is complete, and this is likely to be less so than most, for culture are more resistant to change than polities. But even a modest restoration would be significant - a return not, as some fear, to a long-since discarded Puritanism but only to the status quo ante - ante the excesses and excrescences of the most recent decades. Only then can we hope to overcome our present state of "acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin” and attain that "wholesome composure, frugality and prosperity" that Carlyle understood to be the disposition of a healthy society.
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