REVOLT AGAINST GOD: America's Spiritual Despair by WILLIAM J. BENNETT

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From the Winter 1994 issue of Policy Review magazine:

REVOLT AGAINST GOD

America's Spiritual Despair

WILLIAM J. BENNETT

We gather in a spirit of celebration. But tonight I speak out of a

spirit of concern -- for this evening my task is to provide an

assessment of the social and cultural condition of modern American

society. And while many people agree that there is much to be

concerned about these days, I don't think that people fully

appreciate the depth, or even the nature, of what threatens us --

and, therefore, we do not yet have a firm hold on what it will take

to better us. We need to have an honest conversation about these

issues.

A few months ago I had lunch with a friend of mine, a man who has

written for a number of political journals and who now lives in

Asia. During our conversation the topic turned to America --

specifically, America as seen through the eyes of foreigners.

During our conversation, he told me what he had observed during his

travels: that while the world still regards the United States as

the leading economic and military power on earth, this same world

no longer beholds us with the moral respect it once did. When the

rest of the world looks at America, he said, they see no longer a

"shining city on a hill." Instead, they see a society in decline,

with exploding rates of crime and social pathologies. We all know

that foreigners often come here in fear -- and once they are here,

they travel in fear. It is our shame to realize that they have good

reason to fear; a record number of them get killed here. 

Today, many who come to America believe they are visiting a

degraded society. Yes, America still offers plenty of jobs,

enormous opportunity, and unmatched material and physical comforts.

But there is a growing sense among many foreigners that when they

come here, they are slumming. I have, like many of us, an

instinctive aversion to foreigners harshly judging my nation; yet

I must concede that much of what they think is true.

"You're Becoming American"

I recently had a conversation with a D.C. cab driver who is doing

graduate work at American University. He told me that once he

receives his masters degree he is going back to Africa. His reason?

His children. He doesn't think they are safe in Washington. He told

me that he didn't want them to grow up in a country where young men

will paw his daughter and expect her to be an "easy target," and

where his son might be a different kind of target -- the target of

violence from the hands of other young males. "It is more civilized

where I come from," said this man from Africa. I urged him to move

outside of Washington; things should improve.

But it is not only violence and urban terror that signal decay. We

see it in many forms. Newsweek columnist Joe Klein recently wrote

about Berenice Belizaire, a young Haitian girl who arrived in New

York in 1987. When she arrived in America she spoke no English and

her family lived in a cramped Brooklyn apartment. Eventually

Berenice enrolled at James Madison High School, where she excelled.

According to Judith Khan, a math teacher at James Madison, "[The

immigrants are] why I love teaching in Brooklyn. They have a drive

in them that we no longer seem to have." And far from New York

City, in the beautiful Berkshire mountains where I went to school,

Philip Kasinitz, an assistant professor of sociology at Williams

College, has observed that Americans have become the object of

ridicule among immigrant students on campus. "There's an

interesting phenomenon. When immigrant kids criticize each other

for getting lazy or loose, they say, `You're becoming American,'"

Kasinitz says. "Those who work hardest to keep American culture at

bay have the best chance of becoming American success stories."

Last year an article was published in the Washington Post which

pointed out how students from other countries adapt to the

lifestyle of most American teens. Paulina, a Polish high school

student studying in the United States, said that when she first

came here she was amazed by the way teens spent their time.

According to Paulina:

     In Warsaw, we would talk to friends after school, go home and

eat with our parents and then do four or five hours of homework.

When I first came here, it was like going into a crazy world, but

now I am getting used to it. I'm going to Pizza Hut and watching TV

and doing less work in school. I can tell it is not a good thing to

get used to. 

Think long and hard about these words, spoken by a young Polish

girl about America: "When I first came here it was like going into

a crazy world, but now I am getting used to it." And, "I can tell

it is not a good thing to get used to."

Something has gone wrong with us.

Social Regression

This is a conclusion which I come to with great reluctance. During

the late 1960s and 1970s, I was one of those who reacted strongly

to criticisms of America that swept across university campuses. I

believe that many of those criticisms -- "Amerika" as an inherently

repressive, imperialist, and racist society -- were wrong then, and

they are wrong now. But intellectual honesty demands that we accept

facts that we would sometimes like to wish away. Hard truths are

truths nonetheless. And the hard truth is that something has gone

wrong with us.

America is not in danger of becoming a third world country; we are

too rich, too proud and too strong to allow that to happen. It is

not that we live in a society completely devoid of virtue. Many

people live well, decently, even honorably. There are families,

schools, churches and neighborhoods that work. There are places

where virtue is taught and learned. But there is a lot less of this

than there ought to be. And we know it. John Updike put it this

way: "The fact that... we still live well cannot ease the pain of

feeling that we no longer live nobly."

Let me briefly outline some of the empirical evidence that points

to cultural decline, evidence that while we live well materially,

we don't live nobly. Earlier this year I released, through the

auspices of the Heritage Foundation, The Index of Leading Cultural

Indicators, the most comprehensive statistical portrait available

of behavioral trends over the last 30 years. Among the findings:

since 1960, the population has increased 41 percent; the Gross

Domestic Product has nearly tripled; and total social spending by

all levels of government (measured in constant 1990 dollars) has

risen from $142.7 billion to $787 billion -- more than a five-fold

increase.

But during the same thirty-year period, there has been a 560

percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase

in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of

the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than

a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of

75 points in the average S.A.T. scores of high-school students.

These are not good things to get used to. 

Today 30 percent of all births and 68 percent of black births are

illegitimate. By the end of the decade, according to the most

reliable projections, 40 percent of all American births and 80

percent of minority births will occur out of wedlock.

These are not good things to get used to. 

And then there are the results of an on-going teacher survey. Over

the years teachers have been asked to identify the top problems in

America's schools. In 1940 teachers identified them as talking out

of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the hall; cutting in

line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asked the same

question in 1990, teachers identified drug use; alcohol abuse;

pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault. These are not good

things to get used to, either.

Consider, too, where the United States ranks in comparison with the

rest of the industrialized world. We are at or near the top in

rates of abortions, divorces, and unwed births. We lead the

industrialized world in murder, rape and violent crime. And in

elementary and secondary education, we are at or near the bottom in

achievement scores.

These facts alone are evidence of substantial social regression.

But there are other signs of decay, ones that do not so easily lend

themselves to quantitative analyses (some of which I have already

suggested in my opening anecdotes). What I am talking about is the

moral, spiritual and aesthetic character and habits of a society --

what the ancient Greeks referred to as its ethos. And here, too, we

are facing serious problems. For there is a coarseness, a

callousness, a cynicism, a banality, and a vulgarity to our time.

There are just too many signs of de-civilization -- that is,

civilization gone rotten. And the worst of it has to do with our

children. Apart from the numbers and the specific facts, there is

the on-going, chronic crime against children: the crime of making

them old before their time. We live in a culture which at times

seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young, to assuring

the loss of their innocence before their time. 

This may sound overly pessimistic or even alarmist, but I think

this is the way it is. And my worry is that people are not

unsettled enough; I don't think we are angry enough. We have become

inured to the cultural rot that is setting in. Like Paulina, we are

getting used to it, even though it is not a good thing to get used

to. People are experiencing atrocity overload, losing their

capacity for shock, disgust, and outrage. A few weeks ago eleven

people were murdered in New York City within ten hours -- and as

far as I can tell, it barely caused a stir.

Two weeks ago a violent criminal, who mugged and almost killed a

72-year old man and was shot by a police officer while fleeing the

scene of the crime, was awarded $4.3 million. Virtual silence.

And during last year's Los Angeles riots, Damian Williams and Henry

Watson were filmed pulling an innocent man out of a truck, crushing

his skull with a brick, and doing a victory dance over his fallen

body. Their lawyers then built a successful legal defense on the

proposition that people cannot be held accountable for getting

caught up in mob violence. ("They just got caught up in the riot,"

one juror told the New York Times. "I guess maybe they were in the

wrong place at the wrong time.") When the trial was over and these

men were found not guilty on most counts, the sound you heard

throughout the land was relief. We are "defining deviancy down," in

Senator Moynihan's memorable phrase. And in the process we are

losing a once-reliable sense of civic and moral outrage.

Urban Surrender 

Listen to this story from former New York City Police Commissioner

Raymond Kelly:

     A number of years ago there began to appear, in the windows of

automobiles parked on the streets of American cities, signs which

read: `No radio.' Rather than express outrage, or even annoyance at

the possibility of a car break-in, people tried to communicate with

the potential thief in conciliatory terms. The translation of `no

radio' is: "Please break into someone else's car, there's nothing

in mine." These `no radio' signs are flags of urban surrender. They

are hand-written capitulations. Instead of `no radio,' we need new

signs that say `no surrender.' 

And what is so striking today is not simply the increased number of

violent crimes, but the nature of those crimes. It is no longer

"just" murder we see, but murders with a prologue, murders

accompanied by acts of unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity. 

From pop culture, with our own ears, we have heard the terrible

debasement of music. Music, harmony and rhythm find their way into

the soul and fasten mightily upon it, Plato's Republic teaches us.

Because music has the capacity to lift us up or to bring us down,

we need to pay more careful attention to it. It is a steep moral

slide from Bach, and even Buddy Holly, to Guns 'n Roses and 2 Live

Crew. This week an indicted murderer, Snoop Doggy Dogg, saw his rap

album, "Doggystyle," debut at number one. It may be useful for you

to read, as I have, some of his lyrics and other lyrics from heavy

metal and rap music, and then ask yourself: how much worse could it

possibly get? And then ask yourself: what will happen when young

boys who grow up on mean streets, without fathers in their lives,

are constantly exposed to music which celebrates the torture and

abuse of women? 

There is a lot of criticism directed at television these days --

the casual cruelty, the rampant promiscuity, the mindlessness of

sit-coms and soap operas. Most of the criticisms are justified. But

this is not the worst of it. The worst of television is the

day-time television talk shows, where indecent exposure is

celebrated as a virtue. It is hard to remember now, but there was

once a time when personal failures, subliminal desires, and

perverse taste were accompanied by guilt or embarrassment, at least

by silence.

 Today these are a ticket to appear as a guest on the Sally Jessy

Raphael show, or one of the dozens or so shows like it. I asked my

staff to provide me with a list of some of the day-time talk-show

topics from only the last two weeks. They include: cross-dressing

couples; a three-way love affair; a man whose chief aim in life is

to sleep with women and fool them into thinking that he is using a

condom during sex; women who can't say no to cheating; prostitutes

who love their jobs; a former drug dealer; and an interview with a

young girl caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle. These

shows present a two-edged problem to society: the first edge is

that some people want to appear on these shows in order to expose

themselves. The second edge is that lots of people are tuning in to

watch them expose themselves. This is not a good thing to get used

to. 

Who's to blame? Here I would caution conservatives against the

tendency to blame liberals for our social disorders. Contemporary

liberalism does have a lot for which to answer; many of its

doctrines have wrought a lot of damage. Universities,

intellectuals, think tanks, and government departments have put a

lot of poison into the reservoirs of national discourse. But to

simply point the finger of blame at liberals and elites is wrong.

The hard fact of the matter is that this was not something done to

us; it is also something we have done to ourselves. Liberals may

have been peddling from an empty wagon, but we were buying. 

Much of what I have said is familiar to many of you. Why is this

happening? What is behind all this? Intelligent arguments have been

advanced as to why these things have come to pass. Thoughtful

people have pointed to materialism and consumerism; an overly

permissive society; the writings of Rousseau, Marx, Freud,

Nietzsche; the legacy of the 1960s; and so on. There is truth in

almost all of these accounts. Let me give you mine.

Spiritual Acedia

I submit to you that the real crisis of our time is spiritual.

Specifically, our problem is what the ancients called acedia.

Acedia is the sin of sloth. But acedia, as understood by the saints

of old, is not laziness about life's affairs (which is what we

normally think sloth to be). Acedia is something else; properly

understood, acedia is an aversion to and a negation of spiritual

things. Acedia reveals itself as an undue concern for external

affairs and worldly things. Acedia is spiritual torpor; an absence

of zeal for divine things. And it brings with it, according to the

ancients, "a sadness, a sorrow of the world." 

Acedia manifests itself in man's "joyless, ill-tempered, and

self-seeking rejection of the nobility of the children of God." The

slothful man hates the spiritual, and he wants to be free of its

demands. The old theologians taught that acedia arises from a heart

steeped in the worldly and carnal, and from a low esteem of divine

things. It eventually leads to a hatred of the good altogether.

With hatred comes more rejection, more ill-temper, more sadness,

and sorrow.

Spiritual acedia is not a new condition, of course. It is the

seventh capital sin. But today it is in ascendance. In coming to

this conclusion, I have relied on two literary giants -- men born

on vastly different continents, the product of two completely

different worlds, and shaped by wholly different experiences -- yet

writers who possess strikingly similar views, and who have had a

profound impact on my own thinking. It was an unusual and

surprising moment to find their views coincident.

When the late novelist Walker Percy was asked what concerned him

most about the future of America, he answered:

     Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great

strength and beauty and freedom... gradually subside into decay

through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement....

but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed and in the

end helplessness before its great problems.

And here are the words of the prophetic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

(echoing his 1978 Harvard commencement address in which he warned

of the West's "spiritual exhaustion"):

     In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or a

dragon -- not imprisonment, hard labor, death, government

harassment and censorship -- but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness,

indifference. Not the acts of a mighty all-pervading repressive

government but the failure of a listless public to make use of the

freedom that is its birthright.

What afflicts us, then, is a corruption of the heart, a turning

away in the soul. Our aspirations, our affections and our desires

are turned toward the wrong things. And only when we turn them

toward the right things -- toward enduring, noble, spiritual things

-- will things get better. 

Lest I leave the impression of bad news on all fronts, I do want to

be clear about the areas where I think we have made enormous gains:

material comforts, economic prosperity and the spread of democracy

around the world. The American people have achieved a standard of

living unimagined 50 years ago. We have seen extraordinary advances

in medicine, science and technology. Life expectancy has increased

more than 20 years during the last six decades. Opportunity and

equality have been extended to those who were once denied them. And

of course America prevailed in our "long, twilight struggle"

against communism. Impressive achievements, all.

Yet even with all of this, the conventional analysis is still that

this nation's major challenges have to do with getting more of the

same: achieving greater economic growth, job creation, increased

trade, health care, or more federal programs. Some of these things

are desirable, such as greater economic growth and increased trade;

some of them are not, such as more federal programs. But to look to

any or all of them as the solution to what ails us is akin to

assigning names to images and shadows, it so widely misses the

mark.

If we have full employment and greater economic growth -- if we

have cities of gold and alabaster -- but our children have not

learned how to walk in goodness, justice, and mercy, then the

American experiment, no matter how gilded, will have failed. 

I realize I have laid down strong charges, a tough indictment. Some

may question them. But if I am wrong, if my diagnosis is not right,

then someone must explain to me this: why do Americans feel so bad

when things are economically, militarily and materially so good?

Why amidst this prosperity and security are enormous numbers of

people -- almost 70 percent of the public -- saying that we are off

track? This paradox is described in the Scottish author John

Buchan's work. Writing a half-century ago, he described the "coming

of a too garish age, when life would be lived in the glare of neon

lamps and the spirit would have no solitude." Here is what Buchan

wrote about his nightmare world:

     In such a [nightmare] world everyone would have leisure. But

everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual

discipline in life....It would be a feverish, bustling world,

self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous

life there would be death at the heart. In the perpetual hurry of

life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul.... In such a

bagman's paradise, where life would be rationalised and padded with

every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the

immortal part of man. 

During the last decade of the twentieth century, many have achieved

this bagman's paradise. And this is not a good thing to get used

to.

In identifying spiritual exhaustion as the central problem, I part

company with many. There is a disturbing reluctance in our time to

talk seriously about matters spiritual and religious. Why? Perhaps

it has to do with the modern sensibility's profound discomfort with

the language and the commandments of God. Along with other bad

habits, we have gotten used to not talking about the things which

matter most -- and so, we don't. 

One will often hear that religious faith is a private matter that

does not belong in the public arena. But this analysis does not

hold -- at least on some important points. Whatever your faith --

or even if you have none at all -- it is a fact that when millions

of people stop believing in God, or when their belief is so

attenuated as to be belief in name only, enormous public

consequences follow. And when this is accompanied by an aversion to

spiritual language by the political and intellectual class, the

public consequences are even greater. How could it be otherwise? In

modernity, nothing has been more consequential, or more public in

its consequences, than large segments of American society privately

turning away from God, or considering Him irrelevant, or declaring

Him dead. Dostoyevsky reminded us in Brothers Karamazov that "if

God does not exist, everything is permissible." We are now seeing

"everything." And much of it is not good to get used to.

Social Regeneration

What can be done? First, here are the short answers: do not

surrender; get mad; and get in the fight. Now, let me offer a few,

somewhat longer, prescriptions.

1. At the risk of committing heresy before a Washington audience,

let me suggest that our first task is to recognize that, in

general, we place too much hope in politics. I am certainly not

denying the impact (for good and for ill) of public policies. I

would not have devoted the past decade of my life to public service

-- and I could not work at the Heritage Foundation -- if I believed

that the work with which I was engaged amounted to nothing more

than striving after wind and ashes. But it is foolish, and futile,

to rely primarily on politics to solve moral, cultural, and

spiritual afflictions.

The last quarter-century has taught politicians a hard and humbling

lesson: there are intrinsic limits to what the state can do,

particularly when it comes to imparting virtue, and forming and

forging character, and providing peace to souls. Samuel Johnson

expressed this (deeply conservative and true) sentiment when he

wrote "How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which

laws or kings can cause or cure!"

King Lear was a great king -- sufficient to all his political

responsibilities and obligations. He did well as king, but as a

father and a man, he messed up terribly. The great king was reduced

to the mud and ignominy of the heath, cursing his daughters, his

life, his gods. Politics is a great adventure; it is greatly

important; but its proper place in our lives has been greatly

exaggerated. Politics -- especially inside the Beltway politics --

has too often become the graven image of our time.  

2. We must have public policies that once again make the connection

between our deepest beliefs and our legislative agenda. Do we

Americans, for example, believe that man is a spiritual being with

a potential for individual nobility and moral responsibility? Or do

we believe that his ultimate fate is to be merely a soulless cog in

the machine of state? When we teach sex-education courses to

teen-agers, do we treat them as if they are young animals in heat?

Or, do we treat them as children of God?

In terms of public policy, the failure is not so much intellectual;

it is a failure of will and courage. Right now we are playing a

rhetorical game: we say one thing and we do another. Consider the

following:

We say that we desire from our children more civility and

responsibility, but in many of our schools we steadfastly refuse to

teach right and wrong.

We say that we want law and order in the streets, but we

allow criminals, including violent criminals, to return to those

same streets.

We say that we want to stop illegitimacy, but we continue

to subsidize the kind of behavior that virtually guarantees high

rates of illegitimacy.

We say that we want to discourage teenage sexual

activity, but in classrooms all across America educators are more

eager to dispense condoms than moral guidance. 

We say that we want more families to stay together, but

we liberalize divorce laws and make divorce easier to attain.

We say that we want to achieve a color blind society and

judge people by the content of their character, but we continue to

count by race, skin and pigment.

We say that we want to encourage virtue and honor among

the young, but it has become a mark of sophistication to shun the

language of morality. 

3. We desperately need to recover a sense of the fundamental

purpose of education, which is to provide for the intellectual and

moral education of the young. From the ancient Greeks to the

founding fathers, moral instruction was the central task of

education. "If you ask what is the good of education," Plato said,

"the answer is easy -- that education makes good men, and that good

men act nobly." Jefferson believed that education should aim at

improving one's "morals" and "faculties." And of education, John

Locke said this: "Tis' virtue that we aim at, hard virtue, and not

the subtle arts of shifting." Until a quarter-century or so ago,

this consensus was so deep as to go virtually unchallenged. Having

departed from this time-honored belief, we are now reaping the

whirlwind. And so we talk not about education as the architecture

of souls, but about "skills facilitation" and "self-esteem" and

about being "comfortable with ourselves." 

4. As individuals and as a society, we need to return religion to

its proper place. Religion, after all, provides us with moral

bearings. And if I am right and the chief problem we face is

spiritual impoverishment, then the solution depends, finally, on

spiritual renewal. I am not speaking here about coerced spiritual

renewal -- in fact, there is no such thing -- but about renewal

freely taken.

 The enervation of strong religious beliefs -- in both our private

lives as well as our public conversations -- has de-moralized

society. We ignore religion and its lessons at our peril. But

instead of according religion its proper place, much of society

ridicules and disdains it, and mocks those who are serious about

their faith. In America today, the only respectable form of bigotry

is bigotry directed against religious people. This antipathy toward

religion cannot be explained by the well-publicized moral failures

and financial excesses of a few leaders or charlatans, or by the

censoriousness of some of their followers. No, the reason for

hatred of religion is because it forces modern man to confront

matters he would prefer to ignore.

Every serious student of American history, familiar with the

writings of the founders, knows the civic case for religion. It

provides society with a moral anchor -- and nothing else has yet

been found to substitute for it. Religion tames our baser

appetites, passions, and impulses. And it helps us to thoughtfully

sort through the "ordo amoris," the order of the loves.

But remember, too, that for those who believe, it is a mistake to

treat religion merely as a useful means to worldly ends. Religion

rightly demands that we take seriously not only the commandments of

the faith, but that we also take seriously the object of the faith.

Those who believe know that although we are pilgrims and sojourners

and wanderers in this earthly kingdom, ultimately we are citizens

of the City of God -- a City which man did not build and cannot

destroy, a City where there is no sadness, where the sorrows of the

world find no haven, and where there is peace the world cannot

give.

Pushing Back

Let me conclude. In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William

Faulkner declared "I decline to accept the end of man." Man will

not merely endure but prevail because, as Faulkner said, he alone

among creatures "has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and

sacrifice and endurance."

Today we must in the same way decline to accept the end of moral

man. We must carry on the struggle, for our children. We will push

back hard against an age that is pushing hard against us. When we

do, we will emerge victorious against the trials of our time. When

we do, we will save our children from the decadence of our time.

We have a lot of work to do. Let's get to it.

To reprint more than short quotations, please write or FAX Ben

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