Shaping Americans Values Debate

(Archived document, may contain errors)

The W.H. Brady Series on Defining Conservatism

SHATING A:MERICA-S- VALUESDEBATE

Panel 1: Midge Doctor, Karl Zinsmolster William J. Bennett, moderator Panel II: Michael Schwartz, Vin Weber I Kate O'Beirne, moderator Panel III: Dlnesh D'Souza, David Horowitz Elizabeth Wright, Michael Joyce Stuart Butler, moderator

The Lehrman Auditorium The Heritage Foundation Washington, D.C. September 1S, 1992

Shaping America's Values Debate

Edwin J. Feulner, Jr.:' 'Welcome toThe Heritage Foundation. I am Ed Feulner, President of The Heritage Foundation and it is a great pleasure -to welcome you to the initial program in our W.H. Brady Lecture Series on Defining Conservatism. This series, made possible by a grant from the W.H. Brady Foundation of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, will continue through next April. All of the lectures in the series will work toward defining conservative ideas on a broad range of cul- tural public policy issues. They also will explore conservative strategies to move beyond the nar- rowly defined Washington policy agenda and to recaptu're'o-ur-cultuie iKd Society from the dominant liberal establishment.

Some of the media have called the 1990s the Values Decade. There seems to be a real surge in the discussion of the moral fiber of the country and the causes of our current social breakdown. We as conservatives have pointed to the moral dimension of social welfare problems and other public policy issues for many years. We should be pleased that this election year has made the values crisis a part of the political debate. Traditional values-hard work, personal responsibil- ity, the importance of family, respect for proper authority, a general need to reinforce right from wrong in the young-are being recognized as crucial to the future strength of our country. If these are properly communicated and properly understood, I think there is a tremendous opportu- nity to gain converts to our side of the cultural battles. I think one of the crucial conservative achievements has been identifying the link between moral relativism and our social breakdown. We have on our panel several of America's leading experts, who have done excellent work in this area. They will be discussing the link of culture to public policy, and of course, to higher edu- cation. Family values is an area where economic and social conservatives should find much common ground, since the free market works best in a society of good citizens; and from the other perspective, economic freedom advances some values. Our panelists today will discuss the values that have made America strong, what government should or should not do to reinforce them, and what we can do to restore these values to our culture. I will now turn the program over to my distinguished colleague, the Honorable William J. Ben- nett. Secretary Bennett holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Texas; he also holds a law degree from Harvard. He has been in Washington now for more than ton years. He was appointed Chairmen of the National Endowment for the Humanities by President Reagan, where he brought his academic background to public service. In 1985 he was appointed Secretary of Education, where he used the post as a bully pulpit to press for sweeping reform, such as parental choice in education. He realized that malaise in pub- lic education was not the result of too little money being spent, but rather the problem was the content of what the public schools were teaching and the lack of choices available to parents. Under President Bush he served as Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, where he emphasized prevention, personal responsibility, and tougher, penalties for drug dealers. Bill Bennett, in his federal posts, has shown that so many of our public policy dilemmas are fun- damentally cultural problems, moral problems, and that the solutions to these problems require a deeper examination of the human nature. We are very proud, indeed, that he is the Distinguished Fellow in Cultural Policy Studies here at The Heritage Foundation. He is, as you laiow, a political commentator for ABC television and radio. He recently wrote a book, which has been selling quite well, entitled, The Devaluing of

America: The Fightfor Our Culture and Our Children. So, ladies and gentlemen, without any further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce my good friend, Bill Bennett.

William Bennett: Midge Decter is an author and editor whose essays and reviews, mostly in the field of social conservatism, over the past two decades have appeared in a number of periodicals, including Harper's, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Saturday Review. She has been a regular and fre- quent contributor to Commentary. She has written three books: The Liberated Woman and Other Americans, The New Chastity, and Liberal'Parents:Radical-Children. She was one of the founders of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, of which she is past National Chairman, and Co-Chairman of the Advisory Committee on European Democracy and Security, a member of the board of the Committee on the Present Danger, of the Council on For- eign Relations, the National News Council, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She also serves on the board of The Heritage Foundation. Midge Decter appears frequently on radio and television, and lectures frequently on a wide range of subjects, from the family to American foreign policy. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Religion and Public Life in New York City. Karl Zinsmeister specializes in social and demographic issues and is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research here in Washington. His articles have appeared in many publications, The Atlantic, Wilson Quarterly, Reader's Digest, Commentary, and so on. Zinsmeister is a contributing editor of Reason, and he authors the Demographic Re- port. Let me begin my presentation by saying that I hope Ed Feulner is right, that we win begin to have a serious discussion about values-what is often referred to as family values, traditional values, or more appropriately, republican virtue-in the campaign in which we are now en- gaged. I am not convinced we will have that discussion. So far I don't see much evidence of a serious and substantive discussion of these matters. I read recently in the Washington Post that advisors to the President have decided to veer away from these issues because they are tricky and because they are politically dangerous and because they make some people uneasy and uncomfortable. All of these things are true. They are tricky and they are politically dangerous, and they do make some people uncomfortable. But they are also of utmost importance, as political philosophers from Aristotle on have under- stood. There are, obviously, other issues to be taken up in the course of a campaign, matters of the economy and the budget, health care, and education-very serious and consequential issues. But, the issues raised by the phrase "family values" are very consequential and very important, and I hope the advisors to the President do not veer too far from a serious discussion of them. It would be good to engage in that conversation. To be very specific, I heard the President's speech to the Christian Coalition a few days ago, and the whole issue of family values got about two minutes. I couldn't understand what the President's speech writer meant when he wrote, "We cannot go back to Ozzie and Harriet. It might be wrong to do so." We are all not going back to Ozzie and Harriet, that is for sure, but is there something wrong with the notion of Ozzie and Harriet? This needs to be straightened out. I think that line in the speech was an attempt to reassure people who had been un-reassured by ear- lier comments. But, as earlier comments have perhaps gone too far in one direction, these

comments went too far in the other direction. So, we are not clear on what the view of the cam- paign is. Many Republicans don't talk about these issues in a serious and substantial way. I don't think many Democrats will. So we will probably not have a discussion of these critical issues, and that will be too bad.

One of the charges that is made about these issues is that they are not as real as the "real" ques- tions facing us, such as the deficit and the economy. The truth is, they are very real. They are all too real. Because of the absence of republican virtue there is the absence of what we call "val- ues" in the lives of many.people. We have lots of problems and dai@y catastrophes in American society precisely because of the absence of these things. What am I talking about when I talk about these values? Charles Krautharnmer wrote a col- umn last week that will serve as a good introduction. He said that these values-he also referred to them as republican virtues-include, but are not limited to: discipline, meaning self-discipl- ine; a certain measure of civic-mindedness-that is, a concern or regard for others and a recognition that others exist in the universe, and that some attention is to be paid to them, their rights, their property and their freedoms; the capacity for deferral of gratification; and respect for legitimate authority. These are four of the values that I think most Americans believe are import- ant and have been believed to be important by most of civilization. It is only in the last 20 or 25 years that supposedly sophisticated people have raised serious doubts about the ascendancy of these virtues. Why do I say they are real? Let's be very straightforward and even simple about it. Because millions of children in America are not taught civic-mindedness, because they are not taught de- ferral of gratification, because they are not taught respect for legitimate authority, there is catastrophe every day. Because of the failure to teach these things to children, we have tremen- dous problems. Consider the well-publicized carjacking case in the Washington area where two men grabbed the car and took off with it, paying no regard to the woman tangled in the seat belt, perhaps still holding on to the car in order to stay with her baby. These two men drove a mile or so, and then crashed into walls and fences, threw the baby out, and so on. One does not need a social worker to do an in-depth profile to be able to show that these young men were not raised in families that stress the values that we just talked about: civic-mindedness, respect for legitimate authority, de- ferral of gratification, and the like. There is a serious values deficit in this story, and it has very real consequences. The mother is dead. This is not the only example. I came across a lot of examples in the jobs I had in government. I will never forget a story I was told by my Deputy at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Reggie Walton, who was a judge of the Superior Court here in Washington before he came to work for me. He told me about police officers who went to an apartment and found a four-year-old child and a one-year-old child who had been left in there alone for several days. The mother was not there to care for the children. No father was present, in sight or in memory. It turned out that the mother was out on the street hustling for crack and had left the one-year-old in the care of the four-year-old. When the police came upon the children the four-year-old little boy was manfully trying to do his best to comfort his one-year-old sister, but he was not doing a very good job- four-year-olds aren't any good at that. This is, at its core, a problem of values; it is a problem of responsibility.

Lest anybody think I am talking just about the poor or the underclass, I am not. An illustration of our problem, I think, can be seen many places and many situations and among all social classes. I was watching the Oprah show not long ago, and the topic was about single moms who -date. During the course of the discussion,-a woman was-talking about how she went out two or three times a week and stayed out late and got baby-sitters and so on, and she was scolded by someone in the audience who said, "Well, isn't that a little too much? After all, your child needs you." And the woman answered with a very contemporary response, saying, "Well, the child has needs, but I have needs too, and my needs are as important as my child's needs." Half of the audience applauded this comment that her needs were as important as her child's needs. The other half did not-The -half-that did-not -applaud-represented 2,000 years of civiliza- tion, which would say simply that when you have a child the issue of whose needs are more important is settled-the child's needs are more important. Of course, it wasn't her "needs" that she was talking about, it was her desires that she was talking about. They are very different things. A parenthetical comment. When I went to the National Endowment for the Humanities, my first job in Washington, and read the description of the budget proposal that is to go to Congress, it was all about the humanities community-the research community, the teaching community, the television community. All the comments were about the "needs" of the humanities commu- nity. And a rigorous examination of the argument disclosed that these- weren't about needs, these were about desires. It is an important distinction, I think. For almost all of the history of our civilization, I think it has been conceded that when one has children, one looks first to the needs of children and sacrifices one's own interest from time to time, and quite often for the sake of those children. It is fact that in our tradition and our history we can find, I think, no examples of any successful society that decides to raise its children with- out families and decides to raise its children, at least in the early years-, without attention to the priority of needs of the child. Just to indicate the general nature of these problems, I remember visiting a very wealthy subur- ban school district in the Midwest when I was Secretary of Education. This was a school district that was spending around $7,000 per year, per child to educate kids. It was a fine campus, with every facility you can imagine, every piece of technology available. I commented to the princi- pal that this was a great place and I assumed they had everything money could buy. He said, "Yes, well we do have everything money can buy. It is a very wealthy community. The parents are willing to pay the taxes, they are willing to contribute more money, and we do great." I asked, "How is the drug problem?" He said, "It is thriving, too. We have everything money can buy. 99 So it is clear that this problem of family values, if you will, is not limited to inner cities. It is a real problem and a very serious problem that needs to be discussed. Now, having heard that, people say, "Fine, it is serious, but what does government have to do with it?" We are going to leave it to our later panel to talk about exactly what the federal govern- ment can be doing about these things. But, apart from serious concern about loss of a sense of responsibility about our children and fraying of the social fabric, is there really anything here for people who are interested in public policy? I believe there is a lot here. First of all, as you can tell from my presentation, I think this whole issue of the values debate and the family values debate centers on children and the well-being of children, and I suggest that is where we put the focus.

Second, there is the issue of education. Many of us believe that one of the arguments for paren- tal choice in education is to give kids a chance to go into an environment where they will be taught virtue. Consider the case of a child who is growing up without a father and whose mom cares a whole lot about these things but is not terribly knowledgeable. This child. goes to a public school which has decided that it cannot say anything in regard to values or character, that it can- not teach anything about these particular things. And the neighborhood, moreover, is dominated by street gangs like the Bloods and the Crips. Where will the instruction occur? Is it any wonder that a lot of kids have not internalized these values? Where would they have been taught these values if these institutions aren't working? Parents should be able to send their children to a school that affirms their most deeply held values. So, I think this.is a very serious matter. Related to this in a fundamental way, I think the breakdown of the family and other matters raises the possibility of the resurrection of two kinds of institutions which I suppose we thought we had seen the last of. One is the reform school, which I think we probably need to have. Does it make more sense for New York City to spend $30 million for metal detectors, or should it have a couple of very good, tough schools for very tough kids? The other kids are given a chance to learn in the absence of those people who don't want to learn in school, and the very tough kids are given a chance to be saved from themselves by a very tough course of instruction and discipl- ine. The orphanage is another institution that we might have to bring back. The classic Hollywood scenario for custody cases is where husband and wife are probably fighting over custody. The problem with a lot of our custody cases in America is that nobody shows up, nobody wants the child. What can we do in that case? I believe we need to look seriously at the question of orphan- ages; and with Professor James Q. Wilson, I agree that somewhere between orphanages and school choice, we probably need to be thinking about giving parents a choice of sending their children to residential schools where they will be free from the kinds of problems that they face daily. I think crime is central to these debates. Crime is in some ways fundamental to the present problems of America and indicative of the breakdown of values in our society and in our coun- try. Peggy Noonan has an excellent essay in the September 14 issue of Forbe's magazine in which she says, "It is a cliche to say it, but it can't be said enough: We didn't lock the doors at night in the old America. We slept with the windows open!" Fear is a large part of the American scene right now. It is not just fear in the inner city or the cities, it is fear in lots of places. I do not know the average number of locks per house in my suburban Washington, D.C, neighborhood of Chevy Chase, but it is pretty substantial. Other public policy questions related to the values question bring us to the whole issue of multiculturalism. I have been in discussions where I have talked about such things as civic-mind- edness, the deferral of gratification, and the capacity for hard work, and I have been accused of a Western bias. "Maybe that is not the way to live," people tell me. "Maybe you are just seeing that through your lens, in the same way that you were biased toward mothers and fathers being at home with children." I was at a seminar this summer at the Aspen Institute-not a conservative think tank at all- and there were about five of us conservatives and about a dozen liberals. After four days most ev- erybody was prepared to concede that the major cause of the difficulties of children in America had to do with the dissolution of the family. I think that is progress that that fact was acknowl- edged. I am not sure it would have been acknowledged fifteen years ago.

But then, as soon as it was acknowledged, the group had to add, "Well, that is just from this perspective of this society and this culture. Maybe there is a cultural bias there." We need to take up that question, and we need to take up the related issue of how we react to the whole question. of race. Race, I think, is still something that a lot of people want to step around, quite timidly dance around. Some people will say, "Well, these are values that maybe are appropriate for white people, but maybe not for black people or 11ispanic people." I think we need to say what we know-that these values are the values that will help all children, and these are the kinds of things we should teach to all children. And the final question is the place and role of religion in public life. To my mind, it is a fact that for most Americans their values-that is,-their morality@are anchored by religion. When they look at their moral beliefs and the values they pass on to their children, they take much in- struction and inspiration, literally and figuratively, fiom their religious commitment and belief. The status of religion in American life and the status of the public square-Father Neuhaus has written well about this-is a critical question of public policy. I guess it was illustrated most dra- matically in the Supreme Court's Lee v. Weisman decision on that graduation exercise in Providence, Rhode Island. It turns up in other contexts as well. We are trying to extinguish reli- gion from modem American life, and it is having devastating consequences. This, too, is a serious question of public policy. Let me close by saying that I think as we carry on the values debate it is important not only that we recognize its complexity, but that we not be afraid of it. Second, we must know that we are talking about children primarily. Third, we must indicate these are not just matters of opin- ion, or not just matters of how one feels as opposed to how another feels. We must try to illustrate that these issues have important institutional and public policy implications. And fi- nally, we must carry on the discussion in a certain way and in a certain tone. Recently I spoke at a meeting of the Christian Coalition. I was very pleased with the audience. I thought we talked well, in a serious way about serious things-things which I have discussed this morning. But I said to them what I will end with this morning. It is from the Epistle to the Ephesians, and about how we should converse. "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." My point here is to suggest that we should be reminded in talking about such serious things that we don't want to get in the way of important and substantial issues by being hateful or by being a clamorer. These things are far too important to simply stand and posture. These are funda- mental matters of public policy upon which a great deal of our future, and the future of this Republic, rests.

Midge Decter: Coming on a program after Bill Bennett does incline one somewhat to being a clamorer, because there is not a whole lot left to do when he gets through. So, I am going to begin by expressing one disagreement with him-which shocks me, because I never disagree with him. He said that these difficulties took root 25 years ago. I wish it were true; that would make them a lot easier to deal with. But I am afraid they go a lot farther back. Certainly their seeds go a lot farther back, and they are going to be a lot more difficult to extirpate. The very fact that we have come together today to talk about values is not the least evidence that we feel ourselves to be, and indeed are, a society in a lot of trouble, as was so brilliantly out- lined just before.

What are values anyway? To the extent that we don't mean something trivial or dangerous by the use of the terrn@as_in, my values are what I happen to like-and -your values are what you happen to like-values are what result from an effort to articulate something that precisely should not have to be-articulated. Take the example put to use by- the Republican Presidential campaign, namely, family values. Here, once more, I have a slight disagreement with Bill Bennett. He regrets that they have disap- peared from the campaign. I am not sure that that is to be regretted, given the level on which the issue of family was being discussed in the first place. At least one's teeth are not going to be set on edge for the remainder of the campaign. Imagine talking about the value of families as if it were something open to discussion, like tak- ing an aspirin a day, or establishing the balance between good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Families can't be assigned a worth. They are, the way rocks are and clouds and rainfall are-- sometimes welcomed and even beautiful, and sometimes, truth be told, a major inconvenience. For instance, no matter how old you are, or rich in experience, or even distinguished, your fam- ily are the people who always knew you "when." If you are full of dreams and aspirations, they can just as easily be the people trying to smother you and hold you back as the ones offering help and encouragement. They are the people who can just as easily leave you with a lifetime's worth of fears and anxieties as with the courage to meet life's challenges and difficulties. The story is told of Jimmy Carter's mother-and just from looking at pictures of her, I believe it: When her son came to her and told her he was running for President, she said, "President of what?" That, too, is a story about families. Because like many phenomena of nature, the acceptance of which has been corrupted in our time-take gender, or for that matter, take death itself-the family is simply not a voluntary mat- ter. It is the term on which human existence is founded. Just as no amount of feminist demagogy will ever make it possible for women to be anything other than what they ineluctably are, with the result that the recent effort to help them "re-define" themselves has left them little more than a bellyful of bitterness, so the fantasy that we can arrange the nature of family connection to suit our preferences has pushed the real flesh and blood families to the edge of a very steep precipice. And at this place there is to be found not only bitterness, but, as Bill was discussing before in great and grisly detail, danger unto death. A family may in the end come to include a lot of people-siblings, grandparents, aunts, un- cles, cousins-but at its core is the fact that each human being who arrives in this world is the product of two people-one male, one female; one mother, one father-and needs both the male and the female kind of protection and nurture. Does this guarantee that each new life will be a happy and healthy one? By no means. But it is the necessary ground on which someone becomes a fully human person. This is what people are fooling around with when they try to bring all the institutions of this society, including our schools, under the sway of the idea that any kind of ar- rangement is a family if its participants say it is. An alteration of the meaning of human existence is what such people are up to. And bear it in mind, if you are intrigued by the idea of the end of history, that what we have here aspires to be no less than the end of nature. All of us have come to live at a dangerous and alienating distance from nature. An ordinary American kid-let's not discuss the underclass for a change-living an ordinary, American life, nowadays grows up almost unconscious of the bedrock of living and dying. Births and deaths take place out of kids' view in places called hospitals. Pain, far from being taken for granted, is considered an offense to be preemptively obliterated. Sex has become. something literally incon- sequential. Even many of the inevitabilities of old age are cosmetically or medically disguised. We are people who live in unproblematic intimacy with such advanced forms of technology as

the automobile, or all those products of the micro-chip, and on the other hand take courses of in- struction in how to give birth to a baby. . Technology, that great treasure of wonders yielded up to human intelligence from out of na- ture, has paradoxically served to sever us from that nature. This is not intended to be a complaint against technology. I am no Luddite, nor, as you can plainly see, am I some 1960s flower child inveighing against the modem world. Technology is a God-given blessing to mankind. I say this fully mindful of the fact that had I, a grandmother of ten, been speaking to you from this plat- form a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, I would have been an old crone, bent over and toothless-that is, if I had survived even to speak at all. Thus those of us who live under the sway of technology are blessed people. And-we in this room -are-doubly-blessed, for we not only live with all the ease and comforts heaped upon us by human ingenuity, we also live under a sys- tem of government created out of the belief in our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Still, they have proven to be a combination, this technology and this freedom, that seduces us into certain bad spiritual habits. It has tempted us to dream that we can break out of, surpass, the human condition itself. We are forever talking about revolution in this society-I do not mean political revolution-but something in its way as dangerous. There was, of course, the sexual rev- olution. There was the end-of-nationalism revolution, an idea that might nowadays amuse the Serbs. There was the civil-rights revolution, followed by the counterculture revolution. I have for- gotten some of the others, but if I had time, I could probably figure out a few more. We had a 44revolution" every five years-and a new generation to go with it. The point is, in a whole variety of ways, people were taking it upon themselves to refuse the limits of existence. And they still are. And we still are-I don't know why I said "they." The idea that we can define things-the natural relations between men and women or parents and children or teachers and students or intellectual achievement-in short, that we can define exis- tence and its reality any way we choose, is the idea that bedevils our age. You know, if you watch late night television (as I do), and you watch it regularly over time, you could come to believe that with the expenditure of enough money we wouldn't have to die at all. There are commercials about every five minutes advising us that four out of 1,000 Ameri- cans die of this, and one out of a million Americans die of that, and please give money. And behind that is the unholy notion that we are somehow going to be able to overcome the human condition, which is totally conditioned by our mortality. It is true that we are luckier than our ancestors in many, many ways, and we should remind ourselves of that fact and be grateful for it every day. But at the same time, we have everything to learn from them. Those guys back there, they were very smart, they were easily as smart as we, and everything they came to know about human existence they had the kindness to write down in libraries-ful of books, particularly in a book called the Bible. Every single day they learned and left what they learned to us. They learned out of the absolute bedrock of human expe- rience. Since the world in which we live protects us from the very miseries and struggles and strivings that they had to go through, the most important thing we can have-and the most im- portant thing we can give our Idds-is our connection to them. The best thing we have to offer the children at this moment is the understanding that everything they are and everything they know comes as the result of somebody else's struggle, that we are all standing on the shoulders of others.

This was, I think, once upon a time considered to be the function of education. It certainly no longer is. But if we don't return to that understanding that we are the beneficiaries of what our forebears went through, and that therefore what is contained in all those books is something meant to keep us tied to ourown-existence, we are-going to be in.the soup.

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Karl Zinsmelster: 1 want to begin by commending The Heritage Foundation for taking up this davalues" issue in a systematic way. Whenever regular Americans gather around a dinner table today, values qu6stioni'loorn laige. 'The public is woitied about the ways our values are chang- ing. They want to talk about how we can get on a better track. But around board room tables and in committee rooms and at news desks, values are not considered a very reputable topic for pub- lic debate. Talking about moral authority, character, accountability, and so forth can get you into trouble. The middle of American society and the top have different ideas about the importance of values. This is reflected in folk parlance. Take this joke I heard recently: "What's the difference between John Gotti and the current political candidates? Gotti has convictions." If value questions gain more national attention in the future, I'll be encouraged-because per- sonal attitudes and behaviors are extremely important. Healthy values have made most of our society's current successes possible; harmful values are behind most of our central failures. Let me quickly run through a series of propositions outlining some of the specific reasons why val- ues matter, and why they are worth careful guarding. Proposition One is that upholding time-tested values is humane. The favorite media chatter today is that values are a "wedge issue"--that the values debate is being pushed by disingenuous operators whose real agenda is to score political points by bashing and dividing their fellow Americans. Values are just a cudgel for attacking cultural opponents, in this interpretation. I want to argue that that is inaccurate and unfair. Because the truest reason for defending tradi- tional cultural values is that they are the choices likeliest to make people happy and secure in the long run. Let me illustrate this with a story I heard recently. It seems two individuals were driv- ing down a highway in a large truck when they came to a bridge underpass with a big, stem sign in front of it reading "Absolutely no vehicles over I F 3" allowed." They pulled over to the shoulder and got out their measuring tape, and it turned out their truck was 12'4" tall. At this point, the second guy looked to the driver and asked, "So whadya think we should do?" Ile driver glanced both ways, then answered: "Not a cop in sight .... Let's chance it." There are some rules, obviously, that it is futile to flaunt. All we do in ignoring them is endan- ger ourselves and those traveling with us. This is especially true when it is cultural, as opposed to legalistic rules that we are breaking. Most often, those guidelines are there for our own good. The informal laws that traditionally governed family structure are an excellent example of this. The big, yellow "Not Allowed" signs that existed in this area were there not to punish or harass, but to try and save as many people as possible from finding out what can happen when you drive unprepared into the hard rocks or steel girders of reality. How many of the people claiming that traditional values serve no purpose, or are needlessly constricting, or mean-spirited realize that a child's chances of being abused are forty times higher in a non-traditional family than in a traditional one? That children growing up in non-tra- ditional families are three times likelier to end up with emotional or behavioral problems? How many are aware that adults living in natural, intact families experience significantly lower rates of problem drinking, mental disorder, stress, violence, criminality, incarceration, and suicide? That the poverty rate of married, two-parent families is only one-sixth that of non-intact counter-

parts? Traditional values are humane, and their primary beneficiaries are their practitioners. That's my first proposition. Proposition Two is that traditional values are practical. The anti-values crowd often asserts that the values debate is a hollow one, full of empty symbols, raised mostly out of nostalgia. Values renovation, it is often claimed, offers no-solution to today's real social problems. This is badly mistaken. People who believe an emphasis on values is ineffectual should look closely at some careful econometric studies published a few years ago. by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They show that attitudinal factors-like acceptance of the idea of commit- ting an illegal act, for instance-are significant influences on whet.her-an individual will be successful in school and in the labor market. Perhaps most interestingly, these studies show that, all other factors being equal, inner city resi- dents who go to church are far less likely to commit a crime or use drugs or drop out of school, and that they are more likely to hold a job. Religious attendance is a more accurate predictor of these things than whether an individual lived in public housing, or grew up in a single-parent household, or had parents who received welfare. "Churchgoing is associated with substantial dif- ferences in the behavior of youths ... [it] affects allocation of time, school attendance, work activity, and the frequency of socially deviant activity," concludes principal researcher Richard Freeman. Churchgoing, he says, is the background factor that most affects who escapes from inner-city poverty. Likewise, a major 1990 study done for the Girl Scouts of America by Louis Harris and Associ- ates, Robert Coles, and James Davidson Hunter found that religious youngsters are much likelier than the non-religious to avoid anti-social acts and to engage in altruistic activities. Rich kids who are religious and poor kids who are religious "have far more in common with each other in terms of their moral decision-making and their priorities than [religious and non-religious kids] of the same socioeconomic group," summarize the authors. Influencing values is actually a very effective way of heading off and solving social problems -better by far than simply applying Band-Aids and trying to control damage after the fact. I've said in the past that if you're standing on a riverbank and notice a string of folks floating by half- drowned, you of course had better try to fish out as many as possible. But you also had better send someone upstream to see what's pushing them in. Emphasizing values can help you accom- plish both tasks. Take heading off problems: It's a fact that blacks and whites allke have a nine out of ten chance of staying out of poverty if they simply finish high school and avoid having a baby out of wedlock (two fairly elemental disciplines). Or take solving problems: It isn't adequately appreci- ated that far more low-income persons get themselves out of poverty and off welfare by marrying or re-marrying than by any other method. In other words. Marriage and family solidarity work. Self-control, self-improvement, and per- sonal responsibility work. Changing values is a very practical way of changing the world, and public policy ought to acknowledge this. That's Proposition Two. Proposition Three is that strong, healthy values are critical to national prosperity. They are not a frill. The present day is characterized by a declining significance of things material and a great upswing in the importance of capacities of mind and soul. Things like. reserves of ore and inches of topsoil have relatively little bearing on international success and influence anymore. National riches are now measured in human attitudes and aptitudes, in personal behaviors and productive habits.

And the hard truth is, some of our competitors-particularly the highly-disciplined, kin-based societies of Asia-are doing better on the attitudes and aptitudes front today than we are. In pres- ent-day Japan, only one percent of all births are illegitimate, versus well over a quarter in this country. The divorce rate is one-fourth U.S. levels. Some 95 percent of all Japanese children live in a married, two-parent household. The good news is that these family-oriented, strong-values cultures are out there as exemplars and prods to keep us honest, to keep us from collapsing into the conclusion that we can't, or needn't, do any better. The bad news is, should we fail to halt the decay of American values, these people may inherit our mantle. Almost exactly one 'month ago, the dir .ector.of Japan's Eco.nomic Planning Agency was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he believes Japan's GNP will overtake that of the U.S. within the next twenty years, and that this will put officials in Tokyo in a position to "impose fiscal and monetary discipline on the United States." When I read this my first response, as a patriot, was, "See you on the playing field, pal." But then I had a second reaction. I thought to myself, "Well, you know it's true we liberal, modem Americans haven't done such a great job on the discipline front-whether fiscal and monetary or otherwise." And part of me decided that an international values competition might not be such a bad thing. May the best values win. This is, in many ways, the ultimate competitiveness issue. For that reason, I don't think we can even consider accepting our current standards as a given. There is no guarantee we will succeed in reversing our values collapse, but we have no choice other than to try. Proposition Four is a warning about tactics, namely: more money won't do the job. One of the favorite tricks of modem liberalism is to remake ethical and social issues into economic issues. Thus, crime becomes a product of insufficient welfare budgets. Weak parenting and inadequate early nurturing of children are blamed on a lack of daycare subsidies. Soaring illegitimacy is at- tributed to an insufficient number of factory jobs in inner cities. The modem crisis in fatherhood and male responsibility is reduced to a question of collecting child support payments a little more efficiently. And we get the incongruity of the nation's major response to a horrible, murder- ous riot being an aid package for real estate building. Modem liberals hate to discuss values and ethics, cultural and character problems. They want to talk mostly about dollars-which are cool, neutral, and impersonal. They don't want to take on the sticky, uncomfortable task of changing individual life courses, so they pretend that the process of making physical and moral progress can be simplified into a matter of distributing missing funds. That way, no tough personal choices have to be made, and no one's guilt gets tweaked. The problem is, it won't work. Money won't solve today's major social problems. This leads to my fifth proposition, which is that the crucial public work of our era is moral transformation, centered around new public emphasis on family integrity and personal responsi- bility. Society can't stop an unconcerned father from deserting his dependents. We can't stop a pregnant woman from lighting her crack pipe. Straightforward financial and regulatory remedies can't address these pressing problems, because they are, at root, moral disorders. Our best hope is, instead, to persuade men and women to stop doing such things to themselves and each other. As the old evangelical promise relates, if we can take the slums out of people, people will take themselves out of the slums. We must work from the inside out. The problem for policy makers, of course, is that the government is not at all equipped to ac- complish these kinds of transformations. What's really wanted today is more public diplomacy outside government channels-more media debate and conversation, more literary shouts from the rooftops, more moral suasion and advocacy. Elected officials can help by prodding and en- couraging, but the real action must come on the cultural, not political, front.

For maximum effect, these efforts should focus at the level of the family. The family is the only institution that can reliably cultivate the mental capacities and disciplines crucial to personal success. Whether we're talking about education or battling drugs or just reversing social alien- ation, the family-has to be the-main staging ground. One-of the clearest, bitterest lessons of current social science research is that society's capacity to remedy damage done early on in deficient families is extremely limited. You can set up Head- Start centers and WIC outlets and reform schools and mentoring programs on every city block, but so long as families are unhealthy you will still face crippling social problems. The erosion of family loyalties has to be reversed. The other bit of moral transformation that is desperately needed today is a personal responsibil- ity revolution. Beginning in the 1960s, we experienced a rights crusade in this country. The upshot is that "rights" have now become, in George Will's words, "sharp elbows to throw against one another." They have become licenses for self-indulgence, for anti-social behavior, for the flaunting of all cultural norms. The lack of accountability we see so often in today's radically rights-based society is not some inexplicable accident. I'd say we've gotten about what we asked for. We shouldn't be shocked that we're experiencing so much irresponsible divorce, for instance. After all, it's fun to run off with your secretary-and we've made divorce incredibly easy and cost-free. We consciously got rid of all the things that once discouraged it. We've allowed a system to grow up under which anti-social behaviors are profitable, rather than punishing. Unless we launch a responsibility rev- olution to reverse those incentives, we're going to continue to get lots of destructive behavior. This brings me to my last proposition, which is that, contrary to widespread claims, resisting values decay is not a hopeless cause. Personal attitudes and behaviors are mutable, and there are lots of precedents for significant values turnabouts. Ideas about masculinity and femininity, for instance, have been firmly revised in recent years-with the androgynists, who were the anti-tra- ditionalists in this case, getting their clocks cleaned. We've had a sharp and lasting drop in drug use since the late 1970s. There have been dramatic changes in behavior in areas like diet and smoking. Attitudes toward race have shifted enormously. There is a cycle of religious ebbs and revivals in this country going back many decades. Values change is possible. And remember that, as egregious as the values meltdown has been among our chattering class, within the massive middle of American society there remains an enormous reservoir of good sense and traditional habit. I don't believe defenders of traditional American values need to gain 50 percent of the airtime to win the debate, they just need a good minority chunk-because on topics like the family, gender, crime, religion, and morals, popular instincts and experience are basically on their side. A whole lot fewer Americans believe in Madonna than believe in God. What people who care about values really need in order to connect with their natural allies among the infantry is a popular campaign-replete with pamphlets and magazine articles, and videos, and loud music that subverts the smug certainties of reigning elites, and Allan Bloom books and Tom Wolfe novels, and religious activists, and TV commercials showing eggs Erying with a voiceover that warns, "This is your soul listening to an Ice-T album," and tee-shirts say- ing, "I do" on the front and on the back, "Till death do us part." To quote George Gerbner, "If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws." Of course, laws and officeholders are themselves an important influence on private attitudes and morals, so it would be useful to have government leaders play a part in this campaign of cul- tural change. The truth is, we wouldn't have to go very far back in public policy to find better ways of running government programs. I was struck by a little anecdote in Nick Lemann's recent book on the great migration of blacks to Northern cities. One of the families he follows wanted

to get an apartment in a brand new public housing project in Chicago.; However, a rule in effect at that time-and this was only about 25 years ago or so-disqualified unmarried couples from being given public apartments. Guess how these protagonists solved that problem? They got mar- ried the next day. I'm convinced a good deal of this kind of thing would still happen today, given- the right cir- cumstances and the right help and encouragement. Of course we can't overturn human nature. But we can do a much better job of connecting actions with consequences. And when the activ- ists start shouting that we lack compassion, we need to shout back that the most humane path is not necessarily the one of least resistance. My friend Ben Wattenberg recendy argued thaifolio"wing the "" N'ix-on46-C'hina7 model, a theo- retical President Clinton could do the country a huge favor by bringing liberals to heel on the values question. Ben said that if President, Clinton would have an opportunity "to use govern- ment to reform the liberalism that has eroded the American responsibility standard." I say, "Good idea, but I'm not holding my breath." After all, the reaction of the values-free crowd to any values campaign is always a denunciatory hurricane. Ben himself describes the forces against any values restoration as "titanic: feminists, gay rights and civil rights groups, the civil liberty lobby, some unions-each with huge constituencies, each looking for responsibility-free goodies." He point out that "the last time we had a moderate Southern Democratic President- President Jimmy Carter-he got rolled by special-interest, no-fault, free-lunch Democratic liber- 99 als. So, anyone hoping to defend traditional cultural standards today needs to be prepared for a huge fight. If, however, a set of principled, generous-spirited proponents of what could be called natural, time-tested values can connect with their public, this is a very winnable war.

PANELI1 Kate O'Beirne: I am Kate O'Beirne, Vice President for Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation. This panel and our two guests have been asked to talk-about what government should or shouldn't do to promote those values we have just heard talked about so compellingly by our previous panel. We posed a few questions to our two guests this morning: Should the gov- ernment be pursuing certain policies in the area of welfare, education, health care, crime, or tax policy in support of those values we have talked about? Alternatively, are there areas with re- spect to promoting values where one would rather not see the government involved. And how important is -it to -recognize the-inhe m-nt. limitations -of-gove m-ment4n -pro m-oting values-a point Karl Zinsmeister made just a few minutes ago. To address these important issues we couldn't have two more able panelists. Our first speaker is Michael Schwartz, who is Director of the Free Congress Center for Social Policy right here in Washington and a leading pro-family scholar and activist. Michael is the au- thor of three books and co-author of three more as well as hundreds of articles which have appeared in scores of secular and religious publications. He was editor of the quarterly Journal of Family and Culture from 1986 to 1988, and he is a popular lecturer and frequent guest on both radio and television. Active in the pro-life movement for twenty years, Michael is one of the founding Directors of March of Life. During 1987 and 1988 Michael served as a social policy advisor to the presidential campaigns of Jack Kemp, Pete du Pont, and George Bush and he is still frequently consulted by members of Congress and the executive branch on social policy issues. I am one of many who have counted on Michael's wise counsel over the years. Our second guest is Representative Vin Weber. At the age of 28 he was the second-youngest congressmen ever sent to Washington, and currently represents Minnesota's Second Congres- sional District. In 1978, Vin managed the successful Senate campaign of Rudy Boschwitz and in 1979-1980, he served as Senator Boschwitz's senior Minnesota aide, specializing, back in Min- nesota, in areas dealing with the economy, the family, and agricultural issues. Since his election to Congress in 1980, he has continued to focus on these issues. Before the start of the 101st Con- gress, Vin Weber was elected by his Republican colleagues to serve as Secretary to the House Republican Conference, one of eight elected Republican leadership positions, and as a member of the leadership, he helps set legislative strategy and regularly counsels the President. The Wall Street Journal has said of Vin Weber, "If politicians were stock, Vin Weber would be a long-term blue chip." Vin Weber's unique talents will be sorely missed in January when the House recon- venes without him present. But we know that the new challenges Vin has chosen to pursue will provide a different opportunity for him to continue in making the very important contribution we have all come to expect of him. Please join me in welcoming both of our speakers this morning.

Michael Schwartz: In medicine there is an old proverb; in the Latin, primum non nocere-first do no harm. It would be a wise adage for government policy makers to follow when they address family policy. Charles Murray, Alan Carlson, Karl Zinsmeister, and many other conservative and neo-conservative scholars have chronicled the ways in which government policies have had the unintended consequence of destroying the family. Nowhere has this happened more than among the urban underclass, who have been most subject to the beneficent ministrations of the welfare state, and who are suffering a poverty that is greater than any poverty ever known in

American history. This is not a material poverty: cash income, calorie intake, and other related measures of material well-being are certainly better than the conditions of most of the world, and better than the material conditions in which most Americans lived through most of our nation's history. This poverty is far deeper and leaves far more grievous scars than mere material deprivation, for it is the poverty of a destroyed culture, and above all, a poverty characterized by a lack of family formation. When millions of children are growing up in our society, not having a father themselves, not even knowing anyone who has a father, not knowing what a father is for, how can they achieve the responsibility for family formation when they reach adulthood? They don't know how to do,it.1s it any wonder, then,-that-we increasingly --see- a situation in which the pay- off of this condition is simply a black hole in our inner-city communities-or non-communities, I should say? The ethic of community has been taken away from them and replaced by well- meaning, but curiously misguided government policies. We know what went wrong. We know that when the welfare state steps in and takes the role of the father, when jobs for men disappear and are replaced by jobs for women; when men become redundant in a society, they really have nothing else to do except engage in violence and crime, go to jail, and fall into various form s of self-destructive conduct that creates a vicious cycle. That is the worst problem we face, but let's move up a step. Our middle-class families are fall- ing apart, too. Why? Because of a culture of selfishness. Because somewhere after World War 11 the ground shifted from thinking of the first person in the plural to thinking of the first person simply as a singular-from we to me-looking at life as the apple that is going to give me sads- faction. Some people attribute this to the fe miinist movement, but I think the feminist movement is more a symptom of a general trend of selfishness rather than the cause of it. Women can be just as selfish as men, but men are just as selfish as women. Let's look at the feminist movement simply as a case history of how this happened. Betty Friedan diagnosed the situation: affluent, suburban housewives were bored. Well, no wonder! They didn't have to milk cows any more, as their grandmothers had. Now there were plenty of good things affluent suburban women could do, and many of them did good things: they got in- volved in volunteer activities, went to school, or developed various talents. But they found that some of the men in their lives were not particularly respectful of women. In other words, the cul- tural standard that had dominated the relations between men and women had broken down. Why? Because of selfishness. Too many men ceased to be good men. The reaction to that is that many women stopped being good women. This mutual abandonment of a sense of responsibility produced a cultural attitude of selfishness which resulted in the widespread feeling that, "If I am not getting maximum satis- faction out of my life, I have a right to trade it in for a new life." That was the motive force that led to the explosion of divorce. Every year more than a million children in the United States are orphaned by the divorce of their parents. That is a devastating thing psychologically. Once again, the numbers are in, the research is done, and the damaging effects of divorce are conclusively demonstrated. . Making it worse is that the law has done harm to the institution of marriage, which is the foun- dation of families, and therefore the foundation of society. We had a situation, inherited from the whole tradition of Western civilization, in which it was assumed that a marriage was a contract, in a spiritual sense, between a man, a woman, and God; and in a civil sense, a contract between a man, a woman, and society. Marriage has a social purpose-regardless of the individual satisfac- tion people derive from it, regardless of the religious dimension-it has a social function. And the state, therefore, was the guarantor of the marital bond. To eliminate that marriage bond, the

burden of proof was on the person who wanted the marriage dissolved. The state was there to say, "This marriage will stand because it is necessary for the good functioning of society for mar- riages to be stable." Otherwise, everybody's marriage is unstable if the marital bond is not secure. That standard could not survive a generation of selfishness. Beginning in 1970 we saw the in- troduction of "no fault" divorce laws. "No faule'divorce, in principle, says that the state will take no position regarding the just man's claim and the unjust man's claim. Now, if there is any- thing that violates the first principle of justice, that is it: to draw no distinction, no discrimination, between a person who has kept faith and someone who has broken faith. And yet, that is -the condition in which- we find--the fundamental institution -of society. So, all of us, re- gardless of our religious commitments, regardless of how deeply in love we may be, all of us, if we are married,-are civilly in a perfectly tentative arrangement that could end at any minute. The state is no longer the guarantor of the marital bond; it is, in fact, a dissolvent force. So, at the same time that the state is retarding family formation by subsidizing family fragments in which a father is never present, it is also attacking the marriages that do exist. These are fundamental is- sues. We see the state doing harm to marriage. We move on to the next dimension, the functions of families. There is no more solemn obliga- tion for parents than to educate their children. The previous panel dealt with the disaster we have in education, but the essential problem here is that the state, once again, has taken over the func- tions that formerly were fulfilled by families and that ought to be fulfilled by families. Namely, it has removed from parents the control over the education of their children, and above all, re- moved from parents the primary responsibility for the moral formation of children. Government is a moral enterprise in the sense that government can affect the way individuals behave by rewarding virtue and restraining vice. What we see over and over again is government rewarding vice and punishing virtue. We see it in our tax policy: the tax burden has risen most heavily on families supporting children. Right after World War II, when the income tax had to be expanded to pay off the war debt, Congress deliberately designed a pro-family tax policy in such a fashion that the average worker with the average number of children had no federal income tax liability. What has happened since then is that as incomes have grown and inflation has in- creased, and as social status has changed, the tax burden on single people and on married people without children has remained relatively stable, but the tax burden on families with children has gone up astronomically-especially the Social Security tax, which is regressive and brutally bur- densome for working class families. That has made it more difficult for families to survive on a single income-which ought to be taken as a measure of economic justice in society. When I was a child, most working men could support their families and own a home without the necessity of having a second income in the household. That is not the case today. It was barely the case when I was a young man. Most young people, unless they happen to be exceptionally fortunate either in where they live or in the income they are able to make, do not believe they will ever be able to afford their own house and do not believe that they can survive on one income. Therefore, they are discouraged from having children.

Ben Wattenberg has chronicled the birth dearth. One thing he failed to note in his book of that title-he may have noted it elsewhere-is that the birth dearth is a class-directed phenomenon. There is no birth dearth in the lowest one-fifth of the income scale, because government subsi- dizes out-of-wedlock childbearing among the poor. There is not a particular birth dearth at the top end of the income scale, because people who are well off feel less insecure about their future, and therefore more confident in having children. Where children are disappearing is among the working class and the middle class.

Why? Not because working class and middle-class couples don't like children. It is because they are afraid they cannot afford them. We have seen the median age of marriage rise to an all- time high. We have seen people defer childbearing until their late thirties. Having two children is a large family thesedays. One of the contributing factors, in addition to selfishnessand-other moral issues, is a tax structure that discourages family building. Now; why attack those institu- tions that are most valuable to the health of society, namely, middle-class families? Let me mention just one other area o

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