The Soul of America

I am compelled to comment on the soul of America, and about the future of America; I want to comment on our responsibilities as custodians of this great nation. It is usual to spurn such old fogeyism as I am about to exhibit with a knowing nod and a patronizing smile. For, as we draw near the close of the twentieth century, who can deny that mankind is farther advanced in practically all the arts and certainly all the sciences than we ever have been? Why not be gleefully optimistic?

I can tell you why. Human progress has never been certain. The pathway of history is littered with the bones of dead states and fallen empires. Through the ages, many civilizations have sprung forth and prospered only to fail and shrink and die. And they were not, in most cases, promptly replaced by something better. Nearly a thousand years passed between the fall of Western Rome and the rise of the Renaissance, and in between we had the Dark Ages. I, for one, don't want my children's children to go through a couple of centuries of darkness before the sun comes up again.

So the Jeremiahs weren't so wrong after all. It is sad to watch the beginnings of decay. It is sad to see an Age of Pericles replaced by the drunken riots of Alcibiades. There was, indeed, just cause for gloom when into the palaces of the Caesars went Nero and Calicular, and when the once‑noble Praetorian Guard became a gang of assassins willing to sell the throne to the top bidder.

Alaric's Goths surged over the walls of Rome, not that the walls were low, but because Rome, itself, was low. The rank and file of Rome became locked in a bitter conflict that permeated every level of society. Rome experienced a conflict of ideals, a battle between the Appollonian and the Dionysiac precepts. The Appollonian life‑value, symbolized by structure, order, and control, languished and was replaced by the Dionysiac value where morality and ethics gave way to riot, impulse, and ecstasy.

The hedonistic life-style of Pompeii, the orgies on Lake Traisimene, the gradually weakened character of a once responsible society that reduced them at last to seeking safety in mercenaries and the payment of tribute‑‑all these brought Rome down. She went down too soon. She had much to teach the world.

And so I look upon our own country and much I see disturbs me. For we are locked in a civil war of life values, too. The struggle now is for the hearts and minds of the people. Again, it is a war of ideals. And, someday soon, I believe, the winner will emerge and the loser will fade from memory. For now, the outcome is much in doubt. But, we are a great people. We have a noble tradition. We have much to teach the world, and if America should ever go down, it would be too soon.

One thing is certain. We shall be given no centuries for a slow and easy decline. The United States is quickly evolving into a nation of immoral illiterates. We have watched juvenile delinquency climb steadily. Seventy‑five percent of our high school students have tried drugs, 50% on a regular basis; 80% have had sexual encounters, "children having children" has become a real problem. And, nearly thirty percent of the children who enter first grade never graduate from high school. How strong can a nation be when one person in three is a high school dropout?

We are now reaping the results of the national insanity known as "progressive education." This is the education where everybody passes, where the report cards are noncommittal lest the failure be faced with the fact of their failure, where all move at a snail's pace so the slowest is not left behind, and all march toward adulthood in the goose‑step of "togetherness." Thus the competition that breeds excellence is to be relinquished for the benefit of something called "life adjustment."

With what results? While more children now are attending school than any other time in our history, the two‑thirds that do graduate come out of school knowing less. We have produced tens of thousands of high school graduates who move their lips as they read and cannot write a coherent paragraph. Our educational system is graduating high school seniors without the ability to perform even the simplest mathematical problems, and their knowledge of history, government, and geography is zilch. But, in fact, most students regularly pass tests in these subjects. So, why don't they know them? We have been engaged in the wholesale production of mediocrity.

So what to do?

When was the last time you examined the curricula of your local schools? How do your schools rank on the standardized tests? For that matter, have you seen the standardized tests? When have you looked at your school's report cards and the philosophy behind their grading systems? Have you asked to examine any senior English themes? Have you offered any recognition to your school's best scholars to compare to the recognition you accord your school's best football players?

The funny thing about "progressive educators" is that theory vanishes when the referee's whistle blows for the kickoff. In the classroom they pretend to grade subjectively, against the student's supposed capacity, lest he be humiliated by natural inadequacy. But on the football field they never put in a one‑legged halfback on the theory that, considering his disability, he's a great halfback. They put in the best halfback they've got, period. The "ungifted" sit on the bench or back in the stands even though they, too, might thirst for glory. Did you know that a major university even graduated a football player that was illiterate? If our schools were as anxious to turn out scholars as they are to turn out winning football teams this strange contradiction wouldn't exist.

Having precluded discipline in education, it follows that we also debauch discipline in art. Some great painters and sculptors of the past studied anatomy so diligently that they often indulged in body‑snatching. And today, after many centuries we still stare at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and marvel at its beauty.
But this commitment is of little concern to the modern non‑objective painter. All he needs is pigment and a press agent. He can fling colors at a canvas and the art world will discover him. He can stick bits of glass, old rags, and quids of used chewing tobacco on a board and he is a social critic. He can drive a car back and forth in puddles of paint and a national magazine will write him up. He can place a religious symbol inverted in a container of urine and receive world renown.

Talent and craftsmanship is for old fogies. If you undertake to paint a cow it must look something like a cow. That takes at least a sign‑painter's ability. But, you can claim to paint a picture of your psyche and no matter what the result, who is to say what your psyche looks like? So our art galleries, museums, and bank lobbies are filled with daubs being stared at by confused peoples who haven't the guts to admit they are confused.

But the age of pseudo art is a balsa cross that American civilization bears. Much more serious are our crumbling moral standards and the dulling of our capacity for righteous wrath.

Our Puritan ancestors were preoccupied with sin. They were too preoccupied with it. They were silence‑ridden and guilt‑ridden, and theirs was a repressed and neurotic society. But, they did have certain redeeming qualities. They were able to work and study and discipline themselves; they had stamina and gumption. They wrested livings from rocky land, built our earliest colleges, started our literature, caused our industrial revolution, and found time in between to fight the Indians, the French, and the British, to bawl for abolition, women's suffrage, and prison reform, and to experiment with graham crackers and flight.

And for all their exaggerated attention to sin, their philosophy rested on a great granite rock: man was the master of his soul. You didn't have to be bad. You could and should be better. And if you wanted to escape the eternal fires you'd better be.

This has changed in America. We have accepted sin as largely illusory. We have become enamored with "behavioristic psychology." This holds that a man is a product of his heredity and his environment, and his behavior to a large degree is foreordained by both. He is either a product of a happy combination of genes and chromosomes or an unhappy combination. He moves in an environment that will tend to make him evil. He is simply a stream pebble rolled helplessly by forces beyond his control and, therefore, not responsible.

Well, the theory that anti‑social misbehavior can be cured by demolishing inner‑city slums and building in their places elaborate public housing is not sound. The crime rates continue to rise along with our spending for social services. We speak of the underprivileged. Yet the young men who swagger up and down the streets, boldly flaunting their gang symbols, are far more blessed in creature comforts, opportunities for advancement, and freedom from drudgery than 90 per cent of the children of the world. We have sown the dragon's teeth in pseudo‑scientific sentimentality, and out of the ground has sprung the legion bearing guns, knives, and bicycle chains. Clearly something is wrong.

Welfare relief is becoming an honorable career in America. It is a pretty fair life, if you have neither conscience nor pride. The politicians will weep over you. The state will give a mother a bonus for her illegitimate children, and if she neglects them sufficiently she can save enough out of her payments to keep herself and her boyfriend in joints and gin. Nothing is your fault. And when the city fathers of a distressed community suggest that able‑bodied welfare recipients might sweep the streets, the "liberals" arise and denounce them for their medieval cruelty. Isn't it time we stopped this elaborate pretense that there is no difference between the genuinely unfortunate and the mobs of reliefers who start throwing bottles and bricks every time the cops try to make a legitimate arrest?

I don't know how long Americans can stand this erosion of principle. But I believe that many of my starry‑eyed friends are kidding themselves when they pretend that every planeload of immigrants that puts down in the United States is equivalent in potential to every shipload of Pilgrims that put into Plymouth. Nations are built by people capable of great energy and self‑discipline. I never heard of one put together by welfare payments funding neer‑do‑wells and do‑nothings, or by making heroes out of free‑loaders and jack‑legs.

Finally, there is the status of our entertainment and our literature. Can anyone deny that movies are more obscene than ever? But those in the industry don't call it dirt. They call it "realism." Why do we let them fool us? Why do we nod owlishly when they tell us that filth is merely a daring art form, that licentiousness is really social comment? Isn't it time we recognized the quest for the fast buck for what it is? Isn't it plain that the financially‑harassed movie industry is putting gobs of sex in the darkened theaters and distributing salacious VCR tapes to lure curious teenagers into the sphere of spending? The entertainment industry conventionally accepts that perversion and homosexuality are no longer barred from the screen, provided the subjects are handled with "delicacy and taste." Good grief!

The national media are a party to the crime, too. The movie ads are now so sexually suggestive that standards are needed. The media is supplied with several different ads for each movie. If the publishers and the networks accept the most suggestive ones, those are what they get. But if they squawk, the cleaner ads are sent down. Isn't it time we all squawked?

It's time we quit giving the lead story to the extra‑marital junkets of celebrities. It is time we stopped treating as glamorous and exciting the brazen antics of crooners. It is time we asked our Broadway and Hollywood columnists if they can't find something decent and inspiring going on along their beats.

Oh, yes. We have lots of "realism." Incestuous Americans. Perverted Americans. Degenerate Americans. Murderous Americans. How many of these "realistic" Americans do you know?

We are smothering our youngsters with violence, cynicism, and sadism piped into the living room and even the nursery. The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because The Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn't beaten, raped, and thrown kicking and screaming into a fire.

And there's our literature. The old eye-poppers of the past, which tourists used to smuggle back from Paris in their dirty clothes, are now tame stuff. Compared to some of our modern slush, "Ulysses" reads like the minutes of the Epworth League. Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," which resembles a collection of inscriptions taken from privy walls, is now on sale to your high‑school‑age son or daughter. The quick-buck boys have apparently convinced some bumfuzzled judges that there is no difference between a peep show and a moral lecture.

And, of course, we have our historical novels in which the romance of man's upward progress from savagery is lost in a confused wallow of bundlings and tumblings. The foreign reader of one of these epics on the development of the American West must marvel that our forefathers found time to quell the Indians, plow up half the country, and build the transcontinental railroad while spending practically all their time rolling in the hay.

The media should simply quit advertising scatological literature. Of course, some will call this censorship. They will denounce this for tampering with the facts. After all, we are a free society, in addition to being a capitalistic one. And people generally like smut, so it sells. I would like to raise a somewhat larger question. Who is tampering with the soul of America?

For nations do have souls. They have collective personalities. People who think well of themselves, collectively exhibit spirit and enthusiasm and morale. When nations cease believing in themselves, when they regard their government with cynicism and their traditions with flippancy, they will not long remain great nations. When they seek learning without effort and wages without work they are beginning to stagger. Where they become hedonistic and pleasure‑oriented, when their Boy Scouts on hikes start to hitch rides, there's trouble ahead. Where business fraud becomes a way of life, expense account cheating expected, and union goonery a fiercely defended "right," that nation is in danger. And where police departments try to control burglary by the novel method of making it a department monopoly, then the chasm gapes.

I don't want to overdraw the picture. The United States of America is still a great, powerful, vibrant, able nation. Most Americans do believe in themselves and in their country. But there is blight and there is decay to be cleared away if we are to survive the hammer blows which quite plainly are in store for us all.

We have reached the stomach‑turning point. The point where we should re‑examine the debilitating philosophy of permissiveness. Let this not be confused with the philosophy of liberty. The school system that permits our children to develop a quarter of their natural talents is not a champion of our liberties. The healthy man who chooses to loaf on unemployment compensation is not a defender of human freedom. The playwright and author who would profit from pandering to the worst that's in us, are no friends of ours.

It is time we revived the idea that there is such a thing as sin‑‑just plain old willful wrong. It is time we brought self‑discipline back into style.

Let's look to our educational institutions at the local level, and if Johnny can't read by the time he's ready to get married, let's find out why.

Let's look at the distribution of public largesse and if, far from alleviating human misery, it is producing the sloth and irresponsibility that intensifies it, let's get it fixed.

Let's quit being bulldozed and bedazzled by self‑appointed crusaders. Let's have the guts to say that a book is dirt if that's what we think of it, or a painting may well be a daub if you can't figure out which way to hang it. And if some artist welds together a collection of rusty cogwheels and old corset stays and claims it compares to Michelangelo's "David," let's have the courage to say that it looks like junk and probably is.

Let's close the curtain on plays and movies that would bring blushes to Marines at a stag party. Let's not be awed by actors or politicians with barnyard morals even if some of them have climbed aboard the Presidential yacht. Let us pay more attention in our news commentaries to the decent people everywhere who are trying to do something for the good of others. In short, let's cover up the cesspool and start planting some flowers.

I am fed up with the educationists and pseudo‑social scientists who have underrated our potential as a people. I am fed up with the critics and promoters who try to pass off pretense for art and prurience for literature. I am tired of seeing America debased and low‑rated in the eyes of foreigners. And I am genuinely disturbed that to idealistic youth in many countries the deceit of the Middle East appears synonymous with morality, while we, the chief repository of freedom, are regarded as being in the last stages of decay.

We can learn a lesson from history. Twice before, our British cousins appeared heading into a collapse of principle, and twice they drew themselves back. The British court reached an advanced stage of corruption under the Stuarts. But the people rebelled. And in the wild days of George IV and William IV it looked as though Britain was crumbling again. But the people pounded through the reform laws, and, under Victoria, went on to the peak of their power.

In this hour of fear, confusion, and self‑doubt, let this be the story of America. Unless I misread the signs, a great number of our people are ready. You see, the magic of the system we live under is not that the ship of state will sail straight at all times, but that if it begins to list or drives itself head on into a storm, free men can exercise free judgment and try to alter the course. Let there be a fresh breeze, a breeze of new honesty, new idealism, new integrity.