Disordered Liberty
Don Eberly May/June 2000
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Prior to my comments before the House Judiciary Committee (May 13, 1999) on the role of popular mass culture in producing youth alienation and school violence, a panel of students gave their observations. They were led by an articulate twelfth grader from a large suburban high school. What distinguished her high school, she said, was that "no one was in charge." Not the teachers, not the parents, not even the security guards. She added that in the midst of this chaos the school kept adding more and more rules, even though the rules that did exist were never enforced.
I dispensed with my planned remarks and merely urged the 35-plus representatives to reflect long and hard on the vivid portrayal they had just witnessed of institutions with their most basic authority hollowed out. Here, in this one public high school, was a microcosm of the entire society.
Radical Autonomy
Welcome to the "Republic of the Autonomous Self," where the individual is the only real sovereign, where "mediating" structures have been leveled, and where rules proliferate while lacking legitimacy. Those who point to legitimate social authority as an essential ingredient in a well?ordered society and who would prefer less individualism and more community often have the charge of nostalgia leveled against them. But the rise of what Robert Bellah called a "radically unencumbered and improvisional self"(1) and the resulting social collapse produce the ugly tensions, discord, and national disharmony we must now endure everywhere we turn. The results of this radically emancipated self are anything but progressive or pleasant.
One consequence is that we are transformed from "one nation, indivisible" to what historian Arthur Schlesinger aptly describes as "the fragmentation, resegregation, and tribalization of American life."(2) A related result is that people become more self?centered. Social analyst and pollster Daniel Yankelovich has spent his entire adult life studying the shifting sands of American moral attitudes, and has concluded that the vast changes in our society can be explained by one underlying seismic shift. We have moved, he says, from a sense of "duty to others" to a "duty to self."
Collapsing under this weight of radical autonomy is any notion of the common good. Yankelovich's observation tracks with what I found in extensive research on citizen attitudes for a recent book on the state of American civil society. In surveying the description of society by citizens themselves, I repeatedly found them using words such as: fraying, fracturing, and fragmenting to describe the world around them. Citizens were saying essentially that too many people are out for themselves. "What chills me about the future," wrote one, "is a general sense of the transformation of our society from one that strengthens the bonds between people to one that is, at best, indifferent to them." There is "a sense of an inevitable fraying of the net of connections between people at many critical intersections, of which the marital knot is only one. Each fraying accelerates another. A break in one connection, such as attachment between parents and children, puts pressure on other connections such as marriage." With enough fraying, individuals lose "that sense of membership in the larger community which grows best when it is grounded in membership in the small one."
Fraying communities, fractured families, a fragmenting nation-journalists, scholars, and citizens alike seem to agree that American society is, in too many ways, pulling apart at the seams. Public surveys likewise reveal a precipitous decline in social trust. Where does the citizen come by the capacity to be helpful, respectful, and trustful toward others? Mostly through involvement in functioning social institutions, especially the family. The fact that only 35 percent of the American people indicate that they can trust most people most of the time is a function of more than flawed democratic institutions; it is a function of social breakdown. It is hard to imagine how children who have been betrayed by the persons in whom they thought they could put their intimate trust-namely, their own parents-are ever going to become public trust-builders.
Democracy on the Skids
The result is an increasingly self-centered, litigious, and arbitrary society. The social space where decisions are made on the basis of self?interest, competition, and the struggle for power expands, while the space that is truly voluntary and consensual, where people of good will and civilized values can join together in rational deliberation, shrinks. The handshake gives way to the omnipresence of the law. The law, in turn, becomes overworked and arbitrary. Society feels like an engine running low on oil-things heat up.
When cultural reformers are not being accused of nostalgia, they are being lectured on how culture is a private sphere in which we make thousands of individual choices, operating safely beyond the scope of public concern. After all, we are reminded, if we object to our 10-year-old being subjected to soft porn on prime time, we can just "change the channel." Any other approach would be a direct assault on the First Amendment. But culture affects democracy in hundreds of ways, large and small. As Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard put it: "If history teaches us anything, it is that democracy cannot be taken for granted. There are social and cultural conditions that are more or less favorable to its success."(3) Democracy requires a capacity for trust and collaboration, at least on the small scale of face-to-face community. America's founders talked about the ingredients of civic virtue, such things as sentiments, affections, manners, and duty to the common good. These core qualities are the first link in a long series of steps whereby, as Edmond Burke put it, "we develop our love for mankind" generally. In other words, the outer order of society is directly linked to the inner order of our souls.
Most democratic reforms today, however, are directed toward fixing the procedural state (outer order) without addressing the underlying cultural and social crisis (inner order). The problems of money, declining participation, and the uneven distribution of power are indeed serious problems, but democracy is fragile in a way that no campaign finance reform and no amount of increased voter participation can cure. The more serious problems of American democracy have to do with the erosion of democratic character and habit. A society in which men and women are morally adrift and intent chiefly on gratifying their appetites will be a disordered society no matter how many people vote. We must recover the democratic citizen through restored communities, functioning social institutions, and a renewed culture.
To thrive, democracy needs the help of nongovernmental sectors, including strong social institutions and a healthy culture. Can anyone doubt that today's toxic culture of crass consumerism, cynicism, and utilitarian values is cheapening our respect for the human person and eroding the foundations of democracy? Cultural excess awakens an appetite for things that no viable democracy can offer-the simultaneous expansion of the law and a widening search for freedom from the abuses of the law. The law is forced to enter where gentler forms of governance such as manners and social norms retreat, ultimately eroding human dignity and freedom.
This restless search for human progress through legal reforms creates a politicized society and a state that expands radically even as its competence and legitimacy ebb. The law degenerates into an arbitrary tool of the politically organized. A right conferred upon one group becomes an obligation imposed on another. One person's gain is another's loss. The legal system is forced to find ever?finer balances and boundaries between conflicting parties and claims. People expect the law simultaneously to confer the light of sexual freedom as well as freedom from sexual assault; to guarantee gender and racial advantages for some and the protections against reverse discrimination for others; to protect the rights of criminal offenders and the rights of their victims; to guard the rights of free speech while initiating new rights against the insult of hateful speech; to defend the rights of both individuals and communities; and so on.
Never before has the law been called upon to split conflicting demands with such exasperating precision. The justice system begins to resemble a harried referee who has the impossible task of policing a sport that is both choked by rules and overwhelmed by infractions. The pursuit of a just society is reduced to a perpetual fight over what the rules should be.
The first cousin of rights?based individualism is the pernicious idea that "the personal is political," which was brought to the American debate first by the feminist movement and since by any number of "identity politics" factions. Recently a libertarian friend described how a homosexual associate of his decided to inform his office colleagues of his sexual orientation and to use a staff meeting to boldly announce his exit from the closet. Apparently expecting his colleagues' approval as a matter of right, the person instead got a range of mixed opinion, including some firmly stated disapproval. After a contentious struggle ensued inside the organization over the handling of the matter, the disgruntled staffer left. My response to this story was to inform my friend that his homosexual colleague, by demanding that others suspend their deeply held moral and religious beliefs in order to guarantee an approving atmosphere for his lifestyle, demonstrated that he was not a libertarian but a totalitarian. At issue was not his constitutional protection, which few would argue against, but his explicit attempt to coerce a change in the moral beliefs of his office peers.
The story illustrates powerfully the extent of America's cultural transformation; the ramifications for our public order and constitutional system could not be more profound. Ironically, those who most ardently advocate the right to conduct themselves freely in private have no concept of the meaning of private as distinct from public space, even when the most intimate aspects of life are involved. What they want is simultaneous protection from intrusion into the bedroom while being assured broad public validation for what takes place there. The most private aspects of one's life become the grounds for one's public identification. When only the law and politics arbitrate human affairs, everything becomes politicized-even the most basic and private forms of human association and action, such as one's sexual practices. The private, sacred, and mystical aspects of life become the basis for social and political agitation.
What we see round about us is the steady replacement of an ordered liberty with the libertarianism of John Stuart Mill, in which freedom is absolute, the self is unbounded by even private morality and convention, and one's actions are protected even from social disapproval. Whereas liberty was once conceived of as having properties beyond the self, bound by morality and religion and tied to the interests of the commonwealth, today "the individual is the sole repository and arbiter of all values," as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb put it, and is thus in "an adversarial relationship to society and the state." This is a liberty, says Himmelfarb, which "is a grave peril to liberalism itself."(4)
Undermining Authority
What must be acknowledged is that many of the most corrupting viruses are now being borne along not by sinister politicians but by an entertainment and information media culture, and that this omnipresent culture is displacing the core social institutions that once shaped and molded the democratic citizen. Whereas parents, pastors, and pedagogues once presided over the socialization of the young, now television, film, music, cyberspace, and the celebrity culture of sports and entertainment dominate this process of shaping youthful attitudes and beliefs. It is popular mass culture that largely informs our most basic understanding of society, our public life, our obligations to each other, and even the nature of the American experiment.
The culture naturally both reflects and influences what people think is right and proper. American culture has usually stressed moral rectitude but has always permitted latitude for abnormal beliefs and behavior to operate freely at the margins of society, as long as it stayed there. We had "red light districts," for example, in which one was free to frequent, albeit at the risk of exposure and public shame. But even these mild social constraints crumble when everybody is electronically hardwired and what is marginal becomes mainstream at the flip of a TV remote or the click of a computer mouse.
Much of what passes for culture today is, in fact, anticulture. Its chief aim is to emancipate, not restrain, to give free rein to human appetite, not to moderate it. The role of entertainment, we are frequently told by entertainers themselves, is to challenge and stretch standards. "Break the rules!" "Have no fear!" "Be yourself!" are the common themes within mainstream cultural programming, and they are designed to discredit traditional forms of authority.
Which takes us back to the congressional hearings on school violence. Without a healthy culture maintaining the conditions for human flourishing, we evolve steadily into a custodial democracy, mildly authoritarian, in which more and more transactions are supervised by the state. The anarchy of the school is but a passing phase that creates the desire for more laws and restrictions. This is how social conflict erodes freedom. People are ruled by either character and civility or cops and lawyers. Anarchy produces injury, which produces lawsuits followed by a thickening layer of defensive measures. Not many years ago parents from small towns would have recoiled in horror to think that electronic surveillance would become commonplace in our schools, much less that uniformed police would one day roam the halls. "These are schools," they would probably have said, "not prisons." Today, by contrast, polls show that most parents now embrace these symbols of a police state.
Such is the course of freedom's erosion. Gone is freedom of the most precious kind: the freedom of parents to send their children to schools where safety and order are maintained through instruction in the gentle virtues of respect and civility, not the chilling presence of weapons detectors and armed police. Gone is the freedom of children to proceed through life unharassed and unhurried, enjoying the innocence of youth as long as it should be theirs to enjoy.
This is the delusion of the modern libertine. When social institutions and authority collapse and the capacity to govern human affairs through voluntary, consensual means erodes, all roads lead to the state-especially the courts and innumerable social agencies forced by default to become the caretakers of fragile families and poorly socialized individuals, the unruly children of the underclass, and the spoiled and dysfunctional suburban latchkey kids. The fragmentation round about us, which libertarians of all stripes tend to view benignly, is leading inevitably and ironically to the very statism they claim to oppose-a society in which atomized and poorly socialized individuals continually organize to use the state against each other is a society in which the individual and the state are advancing, but civil society, a place of consensual and voluntary action, is in rapid retreat.
The Christian Responsibility
As proponents of civil society, the responsibility of the Christian community is not to retreat from the political square altogether (spiritual isolation), nor is it to accept the status quo (moral toleration). The debate should not focus on methods of retreat, but on new models for engagement and new strategies that focus more on culture than on politics in the decades to come. The issue is not that politics is unimportant. It is that even if one succeeds in building working majorities, the lawmaking process can at best suppress the symptoms of cultural disorder; it can do very little about the underlying causes. The most one can hope for in politics is to ensure that government "do no harm," an objective that will keep many good people busy in politics for a long time to come, to be sure.
But politics cannot begin to put the "connecting tissue" back in society. It is ill?equipped to reconstruct traditional moral beliefs. The best policies cannot recover courtship or marriage, make fathers responsible for their children, restore shock or shame where it once existed, or recover legitimate social authority to institutions that have been hollowed out by a pervasive ideology of individual autonomy. The vast majority of moral problems that trouble us cannot be eradicated by law.
Some imagine the nation in a state of political crisis and long for a Churchill figure to set things right. But our crisis is cultural. Even in the unlikely event that such a figure were to emerge, politics cannot confront a debauched culture in the same fashion that it can offer bold action in the midst of war or depression. In a disordered society, a heavy reliance on political authority to renew the nonauthoritative sector of culture can quickly become more disease than cure. The problem has not been expecting too little of politics, but far too much.
True conservatism brings a natural skepticism to the reforming possibilities of politics. It sees as its first job the long?term cultivation of character, culture, and community. It views politics as "downstream" from culture, more reflecting it than shaping it. Conservatism avoids excessively politicizing religion or religionizing politics because genuine religious faith stirs allegiances that transcend nation and ideology. The Scriptures would counsel even more skepticism about both the possibilities of politics and the form in which it should be practiced.
Until recently the mainstream of evangelical opinion looked askance at the now common practice of uniting or fusing biblical faith with American ideologies of the Left or Right. The greatest fallacy that has emerged in recent years is the expectation that national politicians and other civil authorities should take the lead in restoring biblical righteousness or, worse, using political power to create a "Christian America." This smacks of the idolatry of Constantinianism and is guaranteed to fail on the American scene, as even seventeenth?century Puritans discovered. Public statesmen today should imagine themselves as called to serve, not in a predominantly Christian nation, but one that more resembles the conditions Paul encountered in Athens, where he invoked the literature and philosophy of the times to make his point without imagining a large sympathetic majority standing behind him.
The appeal to create a "Christian America" represents a misreading of our times, American history, and, I would argue, the Scripture itself. The late English historian Christopher Dawson said that the idea "that the spiritual life of the society should be ruled by a political party would have appeared to our ancestors as a monstrous absurdity." This perspective is not only theologically sound, it is where the people are. The American people have registered stratospheric levels of concern about moral values, but they don't see moral renewal coming predominantly from politics. In fact, when moral renewal becomes completely synonymous with political takeovers and legislative agendas, it awakens an intense fear of state intervention in people's private lives.
Religious conservatives, in other words, have put their stock in a model for moral renewal that awakens a deep, native resistance. If individual behavior is to be regulated, it should be regulated through the reestablishment of real social and moral norms in communities. There are many exceptions to this, of course, as opponents of this argument will quickly point out-for example, the current battle over legalized gambling.
Christians are understandably dismayed that the culture has become unhitched from its Judeo?Christian roots. What many refuse to acknowledge is that, in a thousand ways, this unhitching was produced by a massive retreat by Christians from the intellectual, cultural, and philanthropic life of the nation. While Evangelicals count millions of members among their grassroots political groups and are now, if anything, overrepresented in the legislative arena, the number of Evangelicals at the top of America's powerful culture-shaping institutions could be seated in a single school bus! The watching world is understandably chagrined by the interest Evangelicals have shown in power while simultaneously showing so little interest in the noncoercive arenas of society where one's only weapon is persuasion.
More than anything, Christians need a model for engagement that combines the above principles. Perhaps the most helpful historical model is that of the British statesman William Wilberforce, a politician who ultimately succeeded in outlawing the slave trade, but who did so by first acknowledging the limits of the law absent the reform of manners and morals. Over the course of 40-plus years, Wilberforce created 67 councils and commissions to bring about social and moral reform, some religious, some secular. His model had all of the above ingredients in perspective, especially the subordinate relationship of politics to the culture. Wilberforce organized grassroots as well as "gatekeeper" reform movements operating in intellectual and influential professions and fields. He saw the need to transcend ideology-anyone who was useful on a particular issue was enlisted, whatever their religious or political creed.
This approach happens also to be deeply American. Any American movement that starts with the law, not culture, will fail. In the past, when citizens have reacted to the general disregard for social standards and obligations, they organized society?wide social movements that effectively moved people toward restraint and social obligation. At various times in history America witnessed an explosion of new voluntary aid and moral?reform movements aimed at improving cultural conditions.
Finally, what is needed within the Christian community right now is a debate, deep and wide, regarding cultural and policy matters. Too many have behaved as though politics is on a par with the church in the life of the Christian, placing matters that are filled with practical considerations on a par with biblical doctrine. The Christian community cannot avoid this debate, and it will have to be accompanied by a profound outpouring of understanding, wisdom, and grace in order to be effective.
Don Eberly is a nationally read author, commentator, and speaker. He has held several staff positions in Congress, the Reagan White House, and with Jack Kemp. He is the founder of The Civil Society Project.
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FOOTNOTES:
(1) Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 83.
(2) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of American Reflections on the Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992), p. 17.
(3) Mary Ann Glendon, in Seedbeds of Virtue: Sources of Competence, Character, and Citizenship in American Society, ed. Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1995), p. 2.
(4) Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 106.