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Seedbeds of Virtue represents the joint efforts of a group of observers of American family life to initiate the development of more comprehensive, coherent, and useful ways of thinking, speaking, and acting on family issues. It is widely recognized that the deteriorating circumstances of child-raising households in the United States amount to a major national crisis, and that the country as a whole cannot remain unaffected by the fact that record proportions of children are being raised in fatherless homes under conditions of social and material deprivation. But what, precisely, is the nature of that crisis? The standard responses to that question across the political spectrum, are that many of the nation's children will never have a chance to develop their full potential as human beings, that the quality of the nation's work force will suffer (with adverse consequences for our social security system and our competitive position in the world economy), and that crime and delinquency will spiral ever more wildly out of control. Those responses are accurate, but incomplete. For the state of the nation's child-raising families is also importantly linked to the fate of the American experiment in liberal democracy. Americans, though, have tended to forget that their version of democracy is an experiment, one that requires (as the authors of The Federalist Papers put it) a higher degree of virtue in its citizens than any other form of government. As a result, we have neglected a basic problem of politics - how to foster in the nation's citizens the skills and virtues that are essential to the maintenance of our democratic regime. Seedbeds of Virtue aims to place that forgotten problem at the front and center of American public deliberation. If history teaches us anything, it is that liberal democracy cannot be taken for granted. There are conditions that are more, or less favorable to liberty, equality, and self- government; and those conditions involve the character and competence of citizens and public servants. But character and competence, too, have conditions, residing in nurture and education. The American version of the democratic experiment leaves it primarily up to families, local governments, schools, religious and workplace associations, and a host of other voluntary groups to teach and transmit republican virtues and skills from one generation to the next. First and foremost among these "seedbeds of virtue" is the family. Thus, impairment of the family's capacity to develop in its members the qualities of self-restraint, respect for others, and sturdy independence of mind cannot help but impair the prospects for a regime of ordered liberty. The stakes are high, for as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, if democratic actions should fail in "imparting to all citizens those ideas and sentiments which first prepare them for freedom and then allow them to enjoy it, there will be no independence left for anybody." Tocqueville took for granted that, in America, many of the requisite habits and beliefs would be taught and transmitted with families - chiefly by women, who were the main teachers of children and the "keepers of orderly peaceful homes." Like many of his contemporaries, he regarded the family as one of the few remaining institutions that could effectively moderate individual greed, selfishness, and ambition. James Madison, though, had already cautioned in "The Federalist Papers" that no one could foresee what changes might take place in the "political character of Americans with the passage of years and with increases in the size and diversity of the population. Madison's prudence was justified. Enormous strains were placed on families and their surrounding networks of small scale institutions by geographic mobility, the rise and decay of great cities, the atrophy of local government, and the dependence of most of the population on wage work and governmental largesse. Family life has been transformed in ways that neither the Founders nor Tocqueville could have anticipated. The family farms and businesses where parents and children once cooperated in common enterprises have been almost totally replaced by wage-work outside the home. Beginning in the 1960s, divorce rates, births outside of marriage, and the labor force participation of mothers of young children rose steeply. At about the same time that demographic indicators began to give warnings of acute trouble in family life, there were similar signs of disturbance in schools, neighborhoods, churches, local governments, and workplace associations - institutions that have traditionally depended on families for their support, and that in turn have served as important resources for families - especially in times of stress. The authors of Seedbeds of Virtue are in accord that the simultaneous weakening of child-raising families and their surrounding and supporting institutions constitutes our culture's most serious long-term problem. They are united, too, in the belief that the country's social resources, like its natural resources, can no longer be taken for granted. As in the case of natural resources, America in its early years was blessed with abundance. Now, as a mature nation, we are beginning to realize that we cannot indefinitely consume our social capital without replenishing it. What lends particular poignancy to the present situation, though, is that - as with the natural environment - many threats to the social environment are the by-products of genuine improvements in the general standard of living - technological advances, social welfare programs and increased opportunities for individual self-determination. The crucial question is: How can we preserve and pursue the social, economic, and political goods of a liberal regime without eroding or destroying its cultural foundations? From the Introduction, ``Forgotten Questions" by Mary Ann Glendon
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Institute for American Values |
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