Will The Pendulum Swing?

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

Back in the 1970s, I would frequently sit and shoot the breeze with my pastor at the time, usually after completing work on some parish committee. One of the topics that would come up was my pastor’s conviction that the excesses of the counterculture of that era — the world of drugs, sex, and rock and roll — were going to lead to a “pendulum swing” back toward traditional values.
It never happened. If anything, things have gotten worse. All one has to do is look at what we see on prime-time television every night of the week. There are sexually explicit scenes on some of the popular cable series that could be seen only in stag movies back in the 1970s. My old pastor must be turning in his grave.
But that is not to say a pendulum swing is impossible. There have been times in history when society has recoiled from periods of widespread vulgarity and self-indulgence toward religious revivals and more socially conservative lifestyles. The 19th-century “Great Awakenings” in the United States and the Victorian Era in Great Britain are frequently pointed to as examples.
I don’t want to give anyone false hope that we are on the verge of a great moral revival in the United States. It may be a long time before we hit rock bottom.
Even so, I came across two articles in The New York Times in recent weeks that could be interpreted as signs that the liberal establishment is beginning to wonder if the time has come to challenge the “do your own thing,” “different strokes for different folks” view of life that it has been promoting since the late 1960s.
One was by David Brooks, and the other was by Nicholas Kristof. Brooks’ piece was entitled “Kids: The Cost of Relativism”; Kristof’s was “When Liberals Blew It.” If you didn’t know better, you would think that you were reading columns from a conservative Christian publication, maybe even one of Joseph Sobran’s great columns from The Wanderer from a decade or so back. (Not that Brooks and Kristof come close to Sobran’s powerful and persuasive prose style.)
Brooks centers his column on a new book by Robert Putnam entitled Our Kids, in which Putnam points out what Brooks calls “the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high school-educated America.” In college-educated America “10 percent of the children” grow up “in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do.”
It is a condition that makes a difference. Brooks cites examples given by Putnam: a boy named David who complains all his “mother’s boyfriends have been nuts,” and who has gone on to a life of petty crime and drugs and a pregnant girlfriend; a girl named Kayla who “grew up as one of five half-siblings from three relationships until her parents split again and coupled with others”; a boy named Elijah who “grew up in a violent neighborhood and saw a girl killed in a drive-by shooting when he was four,” and who “burned down a lady’s house when he was 13” and now revels in making people’s “noses bleed and just hurting them and just beating them on the ground.”
Brooks rejects the notion that poverty is to blame: “It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.”
Those things, Brooks says, “were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another.”
To remedy this state of affairs, Brooks calls for an end to the moral relativism that passes as sophistication among the liberal elites. He insists that we must hold “everybody responsible”; face the fact that “social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together, and all at once”; engage in an “organic communal effort, with voices from everywhere saying gently: This we praise. This we don’t.”
Kristof’s position is the same. He deplores the extent to which liberals “brutally denounced” Daniel Patrick Moynihan “as a racist” after he issued his 1965 report on the family breakdown and the rise of single-parent households among African-Americans.
Moynihan pointed out what he called the “one unmistakable lesson in American history. From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles,” a “community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families…never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”
Kristof points to civil rights leader Floyd McKissick, who criticized Moynihan for assuming “that middle-class values are correct values for everyone in America”; to President Lyndon Johnson who “distanced himself from the Moynihan report”; to the scholars, who “fearful of being accused of racism, mostly avoided studying family structure and poverty” after reading Moynihan’s findings. They are the “liberals who blew it.”
As a result, we have what we have today, writes Kristof, an America where “71 percent of black children were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children. Indeed, a single parent is the new norm. At some point before they turn 18, a majority of all American children will likely live with a single mom and no dad.”
The consequences? Writes Kristof, “Children of unmarried moms are roughly five times as likely to live in poverty as children of married couples”; to engage in “antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use.” He calls upon us to reject the fear of being “judgmental” about this situation, to “acknowledge the role of families in fighting poverty. That’s not about being a moralistic scold, but about helping American kids.”
What do you think? Should we see these columns harbingers of a widespread rejection of moral relativism, of a call for objective standards of behavior not just from Brooks and Kristof, but from the liberal elites who read the Times as a source of enlightened thinking on the issues of the day? There is always hope.
But one can’t help but wonder how far Brooks’ and Kristof’s rejection of moral relativism will extend. They are willing to say, “This we praise. This we don’t,” when the issues are single-parent households and deadbeat dads, especially among the poor. For which they should be commended. Anyone who laughed at Dan Quayle for pointing out the deleterious impact on society of the television character “Murphy Brown” normalizing an out-of-wedlock birth, owes the country an apology. Quayle was as right as rain.
Moral relativism is a mistake, say Brooks and Kristof. We need a return to standards. There is right and there is wrong. OK. But does that extend to abortion, pornography, the attack on traditional marriage and the militant homosexual agenda, the recreational drug use favored in Manhattan and Hollywood? Or are we to become judgmental only in those matters where Brooks and Kristof and the editors of the Times think there is a need to return to standards?
Maybe we shouldn’t quibble. Half a loaf is better than none. We have to start somewhere in returning the country to the biblical norms of behavior that were taken for granted not that long ago.
Still, one can’t help wondering what Brooks would say if one of the violent and promiscuous young people he proposes to tell “this we praise, this we don’t” were to respond with a version of Floyd McKissick’s reaction to the Moynihan plan: “Where do you come off telling me that your middle-class values are correct values for everyone in America?”
Look: If we reject moral relativism, that means there is an objective standard for behavior, a natural law, if you will. And you can’t have a natural law without a Supreme Lawgiver.
Is that part of the picture for Brooks and Kristof? If not, they are just making noise.