Targeting a Threat to Democracy: Moral Decay As appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on May 31, 1998 by David Boldt What kind of people are we? A lot of deep thinkers believe that Americans have come loose from their  moral underpinnings, and that our basic institutions - government,  neighborhoods, civic associations, schools, and, most important, our families -  are coming apart as a result. This is, admittedly, not a nice thing to be saying when things, in so many ways, seem to be going so swimmingly. The economy is humming along like a  well-regulated nuclear reactor; most social indicators show at least small signs  of improvement, and we may even have a cure for cancer on the horizon. Where on earth do these social scientists get the idea that things are going so wrong? Well, in large part they get it from listening to Americans, 87 percent of whom in one recent poll said they fear there is something fundamentally wrong  with America's moral condition. And this is no short-term blip triggered by President Clinton's extramarital adventures. According to Daniel Yankelovich, an icon of American public opinion polling, huge majorities of Americans have for some time believed that the nation is ``in a long-term moral decline." A widely held belief has emerged that this decline threatens democracy itself, since freedom without morality quickly deteriorates into a society filled with violence and perversion, which increasingly seems to be what we  have. In response to this perception, at least a half-dozen councils, commissions, projects and programs have been formed to revive both the state of  our civic morality and the ``mediating institutions"' such as families, schools  and religious organizations that once taught and enforced that morality. These institutions have come to be known collectively as ``civil  society," but this can be a somewhat slippery category. To some, the decline of  ``civil society" seems to mean little more than the rise of ``incivility," and  the problem one of bad manners in public places, such as highways. Others define civil society as institutions not created by the state, such as families, neighborhood associations, religious institutions, the Elks, the PTA, Boy Scouts, and so on. More frequently, though, schools, universities, and at least local government get added in. But whatever civil society is, we are about to hear a lot more about it. The Council on Civil Society, an all-star lineup of social policy heavy hitters, issued its report, A Call to Civil Society - Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths, in New York last week. Next month, the National Commission on Civic Renewal, cochaired by former Sen. Sam Nunn and ex-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, will sound its call. The council's Call called for making divorces harder to get, giving  benefits to parents who stay home with their children, making it easier for  ``faith-based" organizations to provide social services, allowing tax credits  for donations to social service agencies, ending state-sponsored gambling,  providing more education about the arts and more choices for parents in  selecting schools, not to mention curtailing sex and violence on television. But it also illustrated why the debate about civil society has thus far remained largely bottled up in the world of wonks. James Q. Wilson of UCLA, who is frequently referred to as the preeminent social scientist in America today, said he signed the Call in part because it is  so sweeping and complex that it would defy easy summarization in the press. ``There's not a soundbite in it," he declared in a tone of mock triumph. ``If  you're here from a TV station, you can go home now." There's much in what he says. The Call's argument that freedom without  morality inevitably becomes merely the liberty to perpetrate evil is complex and subtle. (For a copy of the 30-page document, call the Institute for American Values at 212-246-3942.) Perhaps the most effective way to explain it is to trace the history of the current concern. The situation was brought into sharp relief in a 1985 book, Habits of the Heart, written by Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah and others. It was  acclaimed by one critic as a ``brilliant analysis" that would provide a ``benchmark" for further inquiries about American character, and it has been  exactly that. More than a dozen other books have explored its central conclusion, which  was that America was losing what Alexis de Tocqueville had called ``the habits  of the heart" that once protected the nation against the wretched excesses  democracy might normally entail, such as the atomization of society into  hedonistic individualism, or the tyranny of the majorities. But Americans, de Tocqueville reported, were avid joiners of  organizations that linked them across ethnic and social lines. Their national  character seemed imbued with openness and trust. And most important, the  Frenchman said, their politics was illuminated by a shared moral vision. All of  this reduced those theoretical dangers. To be sure, that openness was not extended to black Americans; the spirit  of equality stopped short of letting women vote; and some of those organizations  may have exacerbated (rather than smoothed) relations among ethnic groups. But by and large, de Tocqueville found democracy in America to be working better  than he had expected. Bellah's contention that today we may be forgetting those protective  habits fits a lot of available evidence of civic and social decline, such as the  drop in voter participation, the rise in divorce, and the surge in youth  violence. Perhaps the most important subsequent contribution to the debate was a short article by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam that appeared in the  little-known Journal of Democracy in 1995 titled ``Bowling Alone.'' The title comes from Putnam's discovery that while more Americans were  bowling more, they were less likely to be bowling in leagues. However, that was  one of his more trivial findings. Overall, he found that Americans were doing less of just about everything  together, and were, quite possibly as a result, becoming more distrustful of their government - and one another. In short, he backed Bellah's suppositions with numbers, defined the value  created by people coming together in community endeavors as ``social capital," and expressed the fear that Americans were depleting their large supply of it. Even among those who agree that America's civil society is in decline, there is a large degree of disagreement about how much alarm is in order. Former Judge Robert Bork takes perhaps the darkest view in Slouching Toward Gomorrah, contending that America's slide into the moral abyss is probably irreversible, and questioning the optimistic premise about the basic goodness of human beings on which the nation was founded. Boston University professor Alan Wolfe's recently published One Nation After All reaches a somewhat more upbeat conclusion, namely that the situation, while quite possibly hopeless, is not necessarily serious. The two hundred middle-class Americans he talked to recognize that  American morality has gone to hell in a handbasket but think the nation will muddle through. ``There are morals, and then there are morals," one woman told him, apparently speaking for many. Several hours at the Council on Civil Society's conclave in New York were devoted to a genteel debate between Wolfe and Yankelovich, with Wolfe maintaining that Americans have not lost their belief that morality is  important, they simply believe that other people's morality - such as, say, President Clinton's - is none of their business. Yankelovich responded that while Wolfe provides an accurate ``snapshot" of where public opinion is today, he fails to take into account the tidal shift now underway from an anything-goes ``expressive individualism" of the 1970s and 1980s, to a slow realization that this attitude often entails heavy costs and  great pain, particularly for children. The great conundrum for people concerned about the decline of civil  society is that they tend to be experts in government policy, and civil society is, by definition, largely outside government control. However, as the recommendations in A Call to Civil Society show, this is  not an insurmountable handicap. Government can at least encourage behaviors that  are in the common interest and discourage those that are not, the two dozen signatories are saying. But at least one of the signatories actually reordered his life to  reflect his belief that the decline of civil society was America's primary  problem. Don Eberly was a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan in the  mid-1980s, but left Washington to return to his home in Lancaster, Pa., where he  founded the National Fatherhood Initiative, among other activities. ``We had some good ideas in the White House," he says, ``and every week, President Reagan said something important about families and the dangers of  illegitimacy, but all the indicators of social health continued to decline. I  looked back and saw that they had been declining for thirty years or more, no  matter what the economy was doing or who was president. ``Today, I tell my friends in both parties that if they think the most  important problems in this country can be solved by getting more votes for their  party, they are simply wrong." Back to Top | Previous