“Self-centered indulgence, pride, and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the American lifestyle.”
–Billy Graham
“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840)
We live in extraordinary times. Having entered a period of successive and interacting crises, we are challenged to pull together as a people, to clarify our purposes for safeguarding the integrity of our nation as a democratic republic, and to determine effective means for doing so.
I have commented here that we face a range of diverse crises, all emerging into view at virtually the same time. We have reviewed a number of them very briefly on this blog, and several at greater depth.
Some, like the continuing financial crisis, have impending implications. Others, like the unrecognized instability of complexity in today’s digitized world, remain hidden, but may well provide the trigger that sends things into freefall.
(See blog posts: February 6, “Why the Bankers are Trapped”; February 13, “Insolvency and Devaluation”; February 20, “A New Kind of Crisis”; and March 13, “The Hidden Dangers of Complexity.”)
I have placed emphasis on the coming financial storm because it hangs over us now, waiting for a trigger.
The too-big-to-fail banks are now bigger than they were before they helped bring down the economy in 2008. The federal debt has risen by 83% since that time. We see an increase of low-paying service sector jobs while our economy continues to lose higher-paying jobs.
The stock market has shot upward with no foundation in economic reality, and has now reached irrational valuations not seen since just before the 1929 panic and the dotcom crash of 2000.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which is the central banker to the world’s central banks, announced recently that central bankers will be out of options when the next crisis hits.
Essentially confirming my points in the February blog posts referenced above, the BIS suggests that the major central banks have mismanaged the situation to a large extent because they don’t understand it. Previously “unthinkable risks,” they said, are coming to be “perceived as the new normal.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also released a report recently, stating that “key fault lines” are growing across the US financial landscape, and that “new pockets of vulnerabilities have emerged.” The largest and most interconnected banks, the IMF concludes, “dominate the system even more than before.”
As imposing as this unfolding drama appears, in my view there is a more fundamental crisis. And, it is clearly visible behind all the others.
I have written here, (as recently as June 26), of the stunning loss of personal integrity – honesty, trustworthiness, responsibility – we have witnessed in recent years. A profound collapse of moral standards has taken place on a broad, societal scale.
This is the deeper crisis, and it may ultimately be responsible for the general deterioration that is dragging civilization to its knees. I say this because trust and responsibility are the basis for the sound functioning of human affairs, and lack of them has led to crippling disorientation and disorder.
Why has this happened to such a broad extent? Certainly we have lost the ethical and intellectual foundations that have contributed to stability in the past. But, why? We are intelligent people. What happened to good judgment? Where is common sense?
Have we walked away from responsibility believing that honesty and fairness limit our freedom? Has the daily bludgeoning of mass media warped our minds and stunted our capacity to think for ourselves?
Whatever the reasons, we are now reaping the whirlwind. For a world where many young people have grown up with little effective parenting, and many of their elders have lost any meaningful grounding in values or virtues, there will be no guidance available in the chaotic upheavals that lie ahead.
Analyzing and explaining the prospective dangers we face is beyond the scope of this blog and book. Rather, I seek to gather Americans around a constructive response that is rooted in our local communities, irrespective of unpredictable events.
Tests that require us to pull ourselves together and rise to our full potential might actually be the only antidote to the toxic cocktail of partisan negativity that is poisoning the American soul.
Stability requires and integrity demands a rational and compassionate response to the downward spiral of social and economic deterioration.
Tom
Next week: Responsibility, personal and practical
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Goethe
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
Frank Herbert
“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
E. M. Forster
“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
Sartre
Answering questions about what has gone wrong is never comfortable. Some truths are not pretty. But, the renewal of core American values and restoration of the vibrant civic spirit we have had in the past will require recognition of what has been lost, and why.
After an honest appraisal, we are called to affirm the values and principles we have understood, but abandoned.
The present difficulties have developed largely unnoticed over a long period of time. A gradual loss of vision has left us without a collective sense of purpose or the strength of interconnected community relationships. It has left us vulnerable to materialism and the domination of an institutional culture.
Most significantly we have become obsessed with immediacy. We want what we want and we want it now. The weakness of indebtedness seems to be of no concern. And so, we have discovered reality the hard way, neglecting reason and foresight. We have abandoned the future.
We acquired an undisciplined attitude toward almost everything, from parenting to fiscal responsibility. And our attitude infected our government and many institutions.
Our insistence on freedom from institutional and cultural restraints has led to contradictions. For example, our respect for the individual requires that we honor the independent integrity and privacy of each citizen, and yet we have readily abandoned this principle out of fear for our own safety. Similarly, we have failed to see that our very own privacy has been sacrificed to the obscenity and titillation in mass media, lost in a fascination with “the raw stuff of life.” In the words of the iconic conservative philosopher Richard Weaver:
“The extremes of passion and suffering are served up to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost; there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man. Behind the offense lies the repudiation of sentiment in favor of immediacy.” (1948)
Richard Weaver actually wrote these words before the advent of television. And he was not the first to observe this propensity. A quarter century earlier George Bernard Shaw was quoted as saying: “An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.” (1933)
Is it any wonder today that we have sought to indulge our appetites for immediate gratification without consideration of the consequences?
Professor Weaver warned of a self-destructive trend that would ultimately lead to a crisis. He pointed out our fascination with specialization and with the parts of things at the expense of understanding and respecting the whole. He argued that an obsession with fragmentary parts without regard for their function necessarily leads to instability. Such instability is insidious, penetrating all relationships and institutions. In his words, “It is not to be anticipated that rational self-control will flourish in the presence of fixation upon parts.”
This is not the fault of government — except to the extent that government, managed by people like ourselves, has joined wholeheartedly in the party. In a democracy it is tragically easy for government policy to degenerate until it serves the worst inclinations of a self-interested electorate.
And so we have descended steadily into the financial profligacy of the last fifty years, and are now the most indebted nation in history by a wide margin. Ours has been a twisted path but with a clearly visible end. Yet, the outcome was foreseen only by a few who were regarded as crackpots.
If we are to restructure our civil order and economic life following the destruction and confusion of our recent past, it is essential that we recognize the wrong-headed thinking that got us here. Values and principle are not in questioned; only wisdom. The United States Constitution provides a firm foundation. What we are challenged to do now is to reconsider the way we think.
Liberty and the American Idea 