Luctor et Emergo

This is a book review of “One Nation, Two Cultures” by Gertrude Himmelfarb. She published this book in 1995, her next book after “The De-Moralization of Society” which was mainly a study in the history of ideas. “One Nation, Two Cultures” is more a work of social criticism than history. She looks at why and how the Victorian virtues, which were the foundation of a successful civic culture, became discredited. She looks directly at America, and frames her discussion in the context of what many call the culture wars. She isn’t the first writer to identify the American cultural revolution and the continuing culture war, but her book is one of the most penetrating examinations of the origins and consequences of those events.

American Victorian values were close to the British Victorian virtues that she discussed in her preceding book, although there were some differences. One of the founding myths of America was that American democracy caused people to be better. In fact, the American constitution was written at a time when Americans had a virtuous culture. At the end of the 18th century, Americans believed in hard work and personal virtue, and Americans were reinforced in those values by their religious beliefs. The cultural scene was a little different than the British scene. America was mainly a mercantile and agricultural nation, without Europe’s history of a landed aristocracy, but sensitive to Europe’s history or religious warfare. The religious scene was different. The Evangelical movement was a significant force for reform in Victorian England, with many Evangelicals taking their morality into public life. Religion in America was more individualistic, more personal, and yet highly emotional and public. The notable feature of the late 18th century and the 19th century was revivalism – biblical fundamentalism taught by independent preachers who were more inclined to showmanship than to theology or spiritual teaching. The tradition of revivals continued with the fourth revival of the 1960’s starting with the Billy Graham crusades and continuing with television evangelism and the growth of independent fundamentalist churches and Pentecostal movements. The religious culture of America was and is more emotional, demagogic, and anti-intellectual.

The Victorian culture of virtue endured in America until after World War I, started to come apart intellectually in the 1920’s among educated Americans who had absorbed and accepted moral relativism, Marxist social analysis, and Freudian psychology, the fashionable wisdom of the era. American intellectuals, unlike many European intellectuals, were politically engaged and involved in trying to educate and change the poorest underclass in the hope of relieving poverty and crime. What came out of this was a naive faith that all people were good, a reluctance to judge or to coerce, and a faith that the answer to problems was liberating society from bourgeois values.

She also identifies systemic problems in capitalist economics, with some reliance on Schumpeter. Material improvement does not bring about moral improvement. The capitalist system constantly seeks new ways of making money. She sees the convergence of non-judgmentalism, the politics of liberation, and economics of greed and self-advancement in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the American Cultural Revolution. In the 1950’s, parents and educators were liberating themselves from Victorian values and raising and teaching children a new morality of self-actualization and self-fulfillment. In the 1960’s, the children of the gentry liberated themselves from bourgeois morality. In practice, this was little more than the creation of new opportunities for the newly liberated in work, business, politics and sexual experience. The hippies of the 1960’s started new businesses, selling new countercultural products and services or went into industry and the professions. Established businesses started to offering alternative products or to promote their products by more chic and hip advertising. The cultural industries – publishing, movies, and TV – were on the cutting edge of the commercial celebration and exploitation of the new culture and ethics. Capitalism in the cultural sector is oriented to creating and selling vivid experiences. It is intrinsically hedonistic. The message from the commercial industries and advertising is that people are entitled to gratify their impulses and live large. The culture has become contemptuous of self-discipline and restraint.

The central self-image of an American after the Cultural Revolution is talented, destined for success, liberated, sexually fulfilled – and self-sufficient and selfish. Many still display the Victorian virtues of hard work and discipline, but most have lost the Victorian virtues of modesty and compassion. People attribute their success to their innate talents rather than to their hard work in a supportive economic and social system. Many successful people regard less successful people as losers. Unsuccessful people tend to regard themselves as the victims of external forces robbing them of the success and self-esteem they desire, rather than as simply unfortunate in the lotteries of talents, opportunities and life-decisions.
The new values asserted themselves in social policy, with bad results.

The anti-poverty programs of the 1960’s started with the hope of empowering the poor by improved living conditions, but were sabotaged by the new culture of skepticism, greed and hedonism. Policy makers were handicapped by the broad principle that we can’t judge the poor or force them to make moral and responsible choices. It became impossible, with these ethical principles ruling the debate, to lead the poor to the habits of life that would create self-sufficiency. It has made it impossible for families and teachers to teach young people the values of self-reliance and adult behavior, which is transforming middle-class teens into drug addicts and gangsters.
She explores the way the cultural revolution transformed American cultural ideas about civil society, the family, the law , and religion. Her discussion of the history of the idea of civil society is fascinating. She implies that America had managed to maintain a civil society through industrialization, immigration, civil war and urbanization, two World Wars and the Great Depression but lost it. She doubts that it can be easily restored but suggests that it might be restored by promoting the virtues within the all institutions of civil society including the educational system, the healing professions, urban planning, sports, entertainment and the media. She suggests that Americans should lose their reluctance to legislate morality and start rewarding pro-social moral behavior and disenfranchise immoral and selfish behavior. Her prescriptions sound stern, but she correctly points to a great deal evidence to support the view that the present culture fails to support the public good.

Her chapter on religion argues that religious practice, like sound law and a healthy civil society, is a proper part of a healthy public culture. She thinks that while many Americans profess some kind of religious belief, or some kind of spirituality, the cultural revolution has affected religion too. Religious and spiritual people are found on both sides of the culture wars. Many people who profess to be spiritual in a non-religious way basically take a selfish view of ethical issues. There are significant divisions within the Christian Churches between nearly secular modernists and Christians with a more traditional ethical sense. On ethical and public issues, many religious or spiritual people are allied with secular liberals, and militant atheists. The secular liberals are generally tolerant of syncretized New Age religiosity and liberal religious movements, but deeply suspicious that the American religious right intends to govern America on faith-based principles.

She might have said that the religious right has also absorbed the general culture of choice, liberation and personal experience. Members of the now-conventional fundamentalist churches tend to big on worship and god-talk, but often ptherwise indistinguishable from other modern Americans in their personal habits and ethics.

She sees the so-called religious right as a political paper tiger because it is too internally divided, and each group is too involved with internal theological issues and worship. It is too emotional, superstitious, unsophisticated, and fractious to be capable of governing. She points out that the influence of the Moral Majority movement and other such movements was short lived and that these movements fall apart. She points out that the religious right functions more as a counterculture, promoting moral, educational, charitable and self-help initiatives and interventions that seem to work. She supports the intellectual initiatives of the writers and publishers of First Things magazine and other conservative religious intellectuals to establish religion as a legitimate subject for public discourse and to establish morality as the basis for personal and public action.

She sees the key issue, the dividing line in the culture wars, as being a moral one. Liberal, modernists and post-modernists have become averse to personal or public morality. This is corrosive to a free and democratic society, because a free and democratic society only works if people act reasonably and responsibly. If people are not held to a morality of restraint and altruism by culture, a free society becomes a free-for-all.

This is a book review of “The De-moralization of Society, From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values” (1994), by Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian and writer. I have read a couple of her books after reading this review of her latest book “The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments”.

Continue reading “Victorian Virtues”

There is an essay by Jennifer Roback Morse called “Marriage and the Limits of Contract” at the Policy Review Online. The author and the journal have a libertarian perspective, a minimum-government perspective that is usually called conservative in the Canadian, American and British political traditions. I think her ideas are more based in natural law than in libertarian principles, which is why I like her analysis. I agree with her general perspective:

There is enormous room for debate, but there ultimately is no room for compromise. The legal institutions, social expectations and cultural norms will all reflect some view or other about the meaning of human sexuality. We will be happier if we try to discover the truth and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than try to recreate the world according to our wishes.

Her view of marriage is:

Marriage is an organic institution that emerges spontaneously from society. People of the opposite sex are naturally attracted to one another, couple with each other, co-create children, and raise those children. The little society of the family replenishes and sustains itself. Humanity’s natural sociability expresses itself most vibrantly within the family. A minimum-government libertarian can view this self-sustaining system with unadulterated awe.

Government does not create marriage any more than government creates jobs. Just as people have a natural “propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another,��? in Adam Smith’s famous words from the second chapter of The Wealth of Nations, we likewise have a natural propensity to couple, procreate, and rear children. People instinctively create marriage, both as couples and as a culture, without any support from the government whatsoever.

The sexual urge is an engine of human sociability. Our desire for sexual satisfaction draws us out of our natural self-centeredness and into connection with other people. Just as the desire to make money induces business owners to try to please their customers, so too, the desire to copulate induces men to try to please women, and women to try to attract men. The attachment of mothers to their babies and women to their sex partners tends to keep this little society together. The man’s possessiveness of his sexual turf and of his offspring offsets his natural tendency toward promiscuity. These desires and attachments emerge naturally from the very biology of sexual complementarity with no assistance from the state.

I like her perspective on freedom and social norms of behaviour and a passage which says a lot about how people have become afraid to judgmental or critical:

The new idea about marriage claims that no structure should be privileged over any other. The supposedly libertarian subtext of this idea is that people should be as free as possible to make their personal choices. But the very nonlibertarian consequence of this new idea is that it creates a culture that obliterates the informal methods of enforcement. Parents can’t raise their eyebrows and expect children to conform to the socially accepted norms of behavior, because there are no socially accepted norms of behavior. Raised eyebrows and dirty looks no longer operate as sanctions on behavior slightly or even grossly outside the norm. The modern culture of sexual and parental tolerance ruthlessly enforces a code of silence, banishing anything remotely critical of personal choice. A parent, or even a peer, who tries to tell a young person that he or she is about to do something incredibly stupid runs into the brick wall of the non-judgmental social norm.