By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
If you have not yet discovered the writings of Andrew J. Bacevich, you owe it to yourself to look into them. Do an Internet search; you will find dozens of his articles and columns that you will be able to download, in publications as diverse as The American Conservative, Commonweal, and The Nation.
You will not always agree with what you read. Bacevich is an independent thinker, but always informative and thoughtful, worth your while. He is a retired Army officer who served in both the Vietnam War and the Gulf War, the author of several books and numerous articles, also a professor emeritus from Boston University. He identifies himself publicly as a “conservative Catholic.”
Bacevich’s most recent article — entitled “The New Normal: Social Changes That Trump Hasn’t, Won’t, and Can’t Affect” — appeared in the July 7 issue of Commonweal. If you are a supporter of Trump you may be put off by what Bacevich has to say about the president. But my suggestion for Trump’s backers is that they overlook the section of the article that deals with Trump and focus on Bacevich’s central theme.
It is an important one that deserves to be pondered in Catholic circles, including at the Vatican. Seriously: He asks questions that must be factored in whenever a Jesuit instructs us on the process of “moral discernment.” Bear with me: You will see what I mean.
Bacevich calls our attention to “dramatic, fundamental, and probably irreversible changes” that “are transforming American society day by day before our very eyes,” changes that “predate Trump’s entry into politics” and which will continue “all but unaffected by his ascent to the presidency.”
The change he is talking about is the equating of “freedom with maximizing personal autonomy,” particularly in “matters related to race, gender, sex, and sexuality.” It is a view that maintains as “a given that expanding individual choice ultimately advances the common good.”
It is the view, Bacevich continues, that leads The New York Times to label as a “towering milestone” the decision to permit women to complete Army infantry training, since doing so opens to women the “clearest routes to senior leadership” in the Army. Whether the decision will strengthen the Army’s combat readiness is treated by the Times as an irrelevancy. “What counts, and is to be applauded,” writes Bacevich, “is that nothing should impede women hankering to serve in combat from making it to the pinnacle of the military hierarchy.”
It is the view that leads the Times to express disapproval for “anything that inhibits choice,” including the “traditional prohibition on suicide.” Bacevich points to the Times’ “deeply sympathetic coverage, one day after its article on women in combat, of medically assisted suicide, in a story about how John Shields, a former Catholic priest,” was rescued from “suffering from an incurable disease” through physician-assisted suicide.
The Times devoted a “7,000-plus word essay, spread across six pages, including photographs” to Shields’ decision to “take control of his own death” with the help of an “obliging physician” who conceded that “technically I’m killing John.” What took priority was Shields’ choice. Whatever stood in his way — religious-based notions about the sanctity of human life, for example — was depicted by the Times as unfortunate remnants of a benighted past.
Bacevich adds to the mix “a recent New York Times Magazine cover story on non-exclusive coupling — ‘Is Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?’ — along with the attention the newspaper lavishes on all things LGBT and you get the picture.”
He sees this phenomenon as a sign that “American society” is “undergoing a profound moral and cultural revolution,” an “Age of Autonomy” in which “received norms — the basis of freedom as my grandmother understood the term — are losing their authority. This is notably the case with regard to norms that derive from religious tradition. How and whether the forces displacing those norms — science, the market, Big Data, social media — will foster a durable basis for a morally grounded community is at present impossible to foresee.”
Bacevich is showing us why the demands for “inclusion” and “diversity” never let up: for abortion on demand, for an end to restrictions on pornography, for same-sex marriage and transgender bathrooms, for legalized recreational use of narcotics, for an end to vagrancy laws and rules against public urination, for sex-change operations to be paid for by the military and for prisoners.
All these demands are rooted in the premises of Bacevich’s “Age of Autonomy.” Every societal “ought-to” and the ought-not” is now depicted as “repressive,” “judgmental,” “ethnocentric.” “If it feels good, do it,” is the order of the day.
If you are waiting for another few paragraphs from Bacevich, I’m with you. Perhaps they will come in a future article. Or it could be that Bacevich thinks the implications of the moral autonomy he describes are self-evident.
Maybe they are. But it strikes me that the question of how a society can function without the traditional moral convictions that permit a free people to be a moral people needs to be explored in specific terms. Marriages, the military, families, civic associations, youth groups, charitable organizations, businesses, and neighborhoods that function without armed guards and floodlights on every corner — all depend upon a citizenry that has self-discipline, a sense of self-denial, a willingness to put the good or one’s neighbors above personal interests, a citizenry shaped by the moral codes enshrined in our religious beliefs and traditional values, the core of what Bacevich calls a “morally grounded community.”
When there is a power failure, in some neighborhoods, neighbors will band together to help each other with the necessities of life until the lights go back on. They are examples of what Bacevich calls “morally grounded communities.” In other neighborhoods there is widespread looting. Q.E.D.
We all have heard the cliché: “Character is doing the right thing when no one is looking.” Why would anyone behave that way in an “Age of Autonomy”?
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