Society

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 10:  Society

• Realize that society is a living thing that can be nurtured or killed.  Societies are living organisms.  They’re born and grow up.  The best of them mature.  But none continue to live, and live well, unless they’re cared for.

The great ones are the product of great ideas, magnanimous people, and a heavy dose of widespread human decency.  Wise members understand the value of a great society and are vigilant about socially destructive forces.  Great Societies can be destroyed in a flash, but more often are drained of life over several poorly lived generations when too few people are paying attention.

This means, in part, that it’s very important to convey the best of a great society’s DNA to young people.  But according to a recent long-term study, “Young people today are less concerned about social approval and society’s standards than their peers of generations past…62% of college students say they pay little attention to social conventions…Among ages 9-12…76% [paid little attention] in 1999, compared with an average of 50% in 1963.”[i]  In another study, “Almost 70% of U. S. adults believe people are ruder now than 20 or 30 years ago, with 93% blaming parents for not teaching kids manners.”[ii]

For too long now, American society has over-welcomed and over-valued those who break traditions and defy conventions.  There should always be a strong element of this rebellious spirit in any healthy society because some traditions and conventions are wrong or have outlived their usefulness.  But to throw out a tradition just because it’s a tradition, regardless of its value, is stupid.

• Make a personal commitment to elevate society.  It’s very easy, as societies decline and crudity and demeaning behavior escalate, for people to give up.  We can spend our time complaining to each other even as the downward pull tears away our own decency and respect for others.  If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves tolerating what we would have considered to be despicable just a short time ago, and treating others in ways that would have horrified our grandparents.

Americans have always treasured a society that is both free and good.  We can and should respect freedom and diversity.  But we should speak out and take action against the ongoing rush of grubbiness and selfishness.  We can use our freedom to protest the anything-goes mindset that can turn a civil society into a non-society.  And we can start right where we are – watching out for other people, practicing kindness to strangers (like not slamming doors in hotels or talking loudly on cell phones), encouraging parents to control and really develop their children, resisting cursing or honking at the inevitable bad drivers.

We who are older can rise above the cultural love affair with youth and represent the best of who we were.  We who are younger can listen to it and respect it.  We want to avoid Plato’s “state of democratic anarchy,” in which “the master fears and flatters his scholars and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word and deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loath to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.”[iii]

We who have families can transmit our values if we have them, and search for them if we don’t.  We can insist that government stay within its bounds, that schools teach content and the American Ideas, and that churches teach truth and application.  Our cultural institutions can point out evil for what it is and describe its consequences.  They can point out virtue and emphasize its rewards.  They can teach that there really is something higher than temporary and immediate satisfaction.  They can stress that all people, all families and all societies are finally judged by future generations based on their response to the call of that something higher.

They should drive home the deep truth that there’s no place like home – before there really is no place like home.

• Hate the corruption of society.  Anyone paying attention knows that American society is deteriorating.  For example, in a survey reported in USA Today in January 2011, 72 percent of Americans said that corruption over the previous three years had increased in America.[iv]

But we have to do more than be aware of this decline.  Moaning won’t be enough.  We have to hate it for what it is and for what it is doing to us and our children and grandchildren.

Four hundred years of social decency being lost in one or two generations?  Now, that’s worth hating.

• Make society the servant of the individual rather than her master.  Historically, societies are focused on the community first and the individual second (or more often, not at all).  But if the society doesn’t build up the individual – if the individual would be better off on their own – then the society has greatly missed the mark, as well as its main reason for existence.

This doesn’t mean that people should stop working to preserve and improve society.  Of course they should work and work hard.  But not for its own sake.  When society becomes the main thing, it is ripe for tyrants and demagogues to exercise their mad fantasies in the name of the society (the People).

Societies that push community over the individual create communitarians, people who “emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities…should trump individual rights.”[v]  We should make no mistake – we can have a focus on the individual and still have solid community.  But we can’t have a focus on the community and still have the sanctity of the individual.  Societies always start from one of these two beginnings.  An attempt to convert America to a communitarian society will have the sure result of making it not America.

The Latin expression e pluribus unum (out of the many, one) could have two meanings.  It may mean the usual, that all of us are added together to form one powerful whole.  As in a marriage, there’s a new thing, a new “one” – but wonderfully, two “ones” are still there.  In the American Idea, this expression could also mean that out of the many, one – the individual – emerges.  Because in this Idea, in the truly Great Society, in America, there are no faceless crowds.

• Remember that society has obligations but not rights.  We should expect a lot from our society.  We should expect it to lift us up from the slime rather than covering us with it.  We should expect it to work with parents and loved ones to take raw human potential and turn it into something special.  We should expect it to make society civil, a good place to live and relate.

But the society itself isn’t a person.  It has no rights, unalienable or otherwise.  There are no debts to society, but only debts to other human beings.  When people start talking about a society’s rights, they usually mean they are about to tax or restrict or regulate the rest of us – in the name of a being that doesn’t really exist.

• Resist letting freedom be used to degrade society.  Freedom is, of course, a wonderful thing.  But it isn’t the only thing.  Faith is a crucial component.  Things like dignity and decency are nice to have as well.

Even an extremely liberal commentator can note that “The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs…is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U. S.  The liberals’ defense of abortion beyond the first trimester has no moral rational unless the life of the mother is at risk.  Their full-throated embrace of freedom of speech ignores the social pollution caused by the arrant commercialization of the culture.”[vi]

Freedom as an unalienable right is an incomparable treasure, but freedom as a god can and will become a destructive tyrant.

• Refuse to let “appropriate” be defined by those who use government to gut society.  For centuries, “appropriate” was defined by society, not by government.  In fact, few would have thought the government capable of even knowing what “appropriate” was, and wouldn’t have trusted government’s definition even if it made one.  Government is a sledgehammer, well-designed to deal with aggressors and criminals, but not designed at all to know what’s appropriate for a twelve-year-old to watch or do.

Only citizens in their social roles can determine what is or isn’t appropriate. They know that no twelve-year-old can watch hard-core pornography without being polluted, or make sense of sexual relationships, or know what to do with an unborn baby.  They believe that the public sphere belongs to everyone, and because of that it can’t be shredded by anyone, or made to dance to the tune of a twisted few.  Society’s members have a right – and an obligation to each other and to future generations – to set and enforce boundaries.

This, of course, led to some things that went too far – like prohibition, for example, or like married couples in the movies sleeping in separate beds.  But perhaps at least the intention was right.  How so?  Thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers every year, with government doing almost nothing to stop the slaughter.  It could and should adopt a modified version of prohibition, and prohibit the ability of drunks to drive recklessly and keep their license, or to maim someone and keep their freedom, or to kill someone and keep their life.

And we now have a study which shows that regularly watching explicit sexual material on television increases the likelihood of teens having sex and getting pregnant (even as government allows everything to be seen by everyone, no matter how young and impressionable).  “By age 16, teens who watched a lot of sexually charged TV were more than twice as likely to be pregnant or father an out-of-wedlock baby as teens who watched very little…The gap holds steady through age 20…’over time I start to think, “That’s what people do.  That’s the norm.”’”[vii]   Perhaps the two-bed idea was the better alternative.

In recent decades, government has more and more become the decider of what is appropriate.  It is usually decided by lawyers and then put into the form of laws, which are at one and the same time both too loose and too restrictive.  More and more, they allow every form of perversity while severely restricting anyone fighting for decency.

For example, “Public libraries cannot be forced to use Internet filters designed to block pornography, three federal judges said…in overturning a new federal law.”[viii]  The problem?  Filters could inadvertently block protected speech.  So the law is all or nothing at all.  The protection has to be perfect (which, as defined by judges, means not filtering anything they deem to be protected), which no human attempt or invention can ever be.

So the law is finicky about protecting speech and nonchalant about damning innocents.

Government would do better to stay out of the appropriateness debate, only writing laws here or there to support what society has previously determined to be right and proper.  We can and should expect limited government, but it’s folly to expect moral government – a fantasy that requires of powerful human beings a level of virtue, and an absence of vice, that will not be found in anyone on this side of heaven.

• Defend marriage and family with wisdom, care and caution, not regulation.  Marriage is one of society’s crucial institutions, perhaps the most important one.  It is worth defending as a key element in providing stability for the society, families and children, and for giving people a chance in the relational pursuit of happiness.

But marriage is no magic elixir.  Even in religious homes, half of marriages fail.  Many of the remaining half range from deadening to deadly.  Potential marriage should come with warning signs: “Proceed with Caution” and “Stop” (and, possibly, “Blasting Ahead”).

The best way to defend marriage starts with a realization of how serious it is and how difficult it is to do it well.  As individuals we should take a lot of time to think and reflect.  We should project what this relationship might do for – and to – us down the road.  We need to remember that there are worse things than being alone.

With family and friends, we need to escape from the ga-ga response to potential marriages, the “Aren’t they a perfect couple?” glossy comments that make it easier for people to get married, and harder to stop the train because it will disappoint others.  Our support needs to start with insight, warnings, and encouraging patience.

Churches need to stop being marriage factories.  Instead of worrying about how easy it is to get a divorce, they should worry about how easy it is to get married.  They shouldn’t think that a few pre-marital counseling sessions is sufficient either to stop the drive toward a bad marriage or to absolve the church of its part in ugliness and failure.

Even the live-together, no-ceremony-or-license, lower-level version of marriage offers no escape from the need for wisdom, care and caution – or from potential disaster.  These are even more likely to break up than traditional marriages.  They are often presented as a way to have the advantages of traditional marriage (companionship, help, sex) without the disadvantages (lifetime commitment, legal entanglements, often children).  What they deliver is often the disadvantages of traditional marriage (conflicting goals, frustration, annoyance, interests that change and diverge over time) without its advantages (lifetime commitment, legal entanglements, often children).

This all has to start with Americans and American society, not government.  One reason is that “…when moral renewal becomes synonymous with political takeovers and legislative agendas, it awakens an intense fear of state intervention in people’s private lives.  One can either see this as more evidence of America’s moral corruption, or one can see it as an impulse as old as America itself…[we shouldn’t commit to] a model for moral renewal that awakens a deep, native resistance…Any American movement that starts with the law, not culture, will fail.”[ix]

When we look for the quick fix, the hired gun that can clean up our town in a flash, we’ll always end up with the gunslinger with the biggest gun and the fastest draw – the government, the hired gun who never leaves.

• Stop allowing people under 18 to get a free pass on reprehensible behavior.  “He’s only a child,” we hear so often about some 16- or 17-year-old who has committed cold-blooded murder or rape.  “They’re only children,” we hear about 15-year-olds having sex and babies.  “We can’t blame them,” we hear about teens and pre-teens using drugs or abusing alcohol.

Who created this arbitrary age shield against responsibility and consequences?  If we allow a 17-year-old boy to have sex with dozens of young girls with no legal or social consequences, we have created a moral hazard of monumental proportions.  It’s as though society is telling anyone under 18, “If you’re going to do something heinous, do it before you turn 18.”

Instead of offering a no-responsibility zone, shouldn’t we make the time before 18 an opportunity to learn about responsibility, obligations, duties, consequences?  This should be the opposite of a free-pass phase of life – a time when the character can be molded into something decent, social understanding can be developed, and most lessons can be learned by smaller-scale discipline and punishment.

• Recognize that the long-standing War on Drugs is working just as well as prohibition.  With anything that many people want to have, societies have choices:

1. They can take draconian steps to prohibit it, including relentless and severe punishment of those who buy and sell
2. They can allow but tightly regulate it (as has been done with alcohol and tobacco) and eliminate organized crime, high prices that drive disorganized crime, and disrespect for the law
3. They can try a messy path driven by conflicting desires – a distaste for having narcotics available along with a distaste for draconian measures to eliminate them.

Right now, America has made the third choice.  We lock a lot of people up because we don’t like drugs or druggies, but we don’t destroy the system that makes the drugs both available and extremely expensive.  As with prohibition, we have the worst of all worlds.

Unless we’re ready for choice one, to fight and win a real war (where, for example, we shoot drug dealers, our enemies, on sight), the lesson of prohibition is that choice two – legal availability with tight regulation – is much, much better than choice three.

The longest war in America, by far, is the War on Drugs.  After so many decades, it’s time to change our strategy.  We haven’t eliminated the problems caused by the drugs themselves – but we have added violence, and lawlessness, and untold human and financial loss.

• Put the slime in the sewer and keep it there.  There has always been slime.  But American society has, until very recent times, kept the slime in the sewer where it belongs.  Americans believed that people who wanted slime should have to go to the sewer to find it.  But now the slime gets piped into almost every home, business, and library.

No society worth of the name, or deserving of the title “civilized,” can allow itself – and especially its young – to be so polluted by what they can see and hear.  For example, we can’t expect our youth to watch intense, brutally specific scenes of sexual activity, orgies, and perversions and still have a solid sense of decency or respect for the souls and bodies of other human beings.  People just don’t work that way.

We can’t only put the burden on parents and guardians, because there are too many options, too many avenues, too many leaks in the ship.  In a recent report in The Atlantic, it was noted that a new porn movie is made every 39 minutes, $380 is spent on pornography each second, and – most contrary to this American Idea – that 89 percent of porn websites are produced in the United States.[x]   We have the ability to shut it down.  If only we had the decency and the will.

Families need society’s help to win the battle for the health of future society.  “The family is the nucleus of civilization,” wrote historians Will and Ariel Durant.[xi]  If that nucleus is left disrespected and unprotected, the civilization that stands by while that nucleus is being destroyed will be watching the first phase of its own destruction.

Certainly things can be blocked.  China does it with good things, like freedom and democracy.  Shouldn’t we do it with bad things, and protect the innocence of our young – and frankly, ourselves?  Surely we can block sick things that have no redeeming value, things that have a massively negative inherent worth.  Every thinking person knows the difference between art and pornography – it really isn’t fuzzy.  There would be no real disagreement on 95 percent of it – so let’s start there.  Let’s at least clean out those sewers.

Some might say, “This pornographic material really isn’t that harmful.”  But some of these same people attack violence in movies and television because they believe this will corrupt those who watch it.  They agree with the principle that we are what we immerse ourselves in – but just want to be selective about which forces are destructive.  This pornographic material does have a tremendously negative impact as it works its way into minds and souls.  For someone to say it doesn’t, that hours and days and weeks of immersion don’t have a lasting effect, leaves us wondering why companies will spend millions of dollars for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl.

When everything is permitted, when nothing is sacred, when wonderful concepts like freedom of speech are used to justify the spread of things that would overwhelmingly appall our founders and forebears, we’re not far from losing a big part of what it means to be American.  Americans are smart enough to know the difference between free speech and slime – although their judges generally are not.

You can’t cry “fire!” in a crowded room.  You shouldn’t be able to cry “slime!” in one either.