To Revive Responsibility

By LANCE MORROW

Needed: individual awareness of a new sense of nationhood

Whatever the institutional mechanics of it, the real renovation of America must begin in Americans' minds. It must express itself in their civic morale, their sense of individual responsibility for themselves, for the communities and the nation around them. It is not enough to say that the Government has failed, that the System has failed. That accusation subtly absolves individual citizens of blame but also leaves them feeling like abjectly passive victims of immense conspiracies--bureaucracies, multinational corporations. No society can flourish, or even function, if its people do not feel responsible for it any more.

America will get better only when Americans are convinced that it is up to them to make it better. For a decade or more Americans have tended to behave like submissive passengers aboard a national vehicle that veered unpredictably across the landscape: a succession of distracted presidential drivers kept coming up with the steering wheel loose in their hands. The great enterprise, the distressed passengers began to tell themselves, was probably headed for no good end, but in any case, it was beyond their control.

Larger and darker forces were at work:

inflation, crime, OPEC, the crippling onset of vulnerability and mediocrity, the shame of Watergate, the humiliation of Viet Nam. The grace that historically seemed to have attended American ventures appeared to have been mysteriously withdrawn, and the people fell into an apprehensive gloom, like adolescents suffering the sudden and unexpected disapproval of their fathers: of history.

The loss of American self-confidence was especially shocking because previous generations had seemed so powerful and virtuous. In the spring of 1941, while Hitler was busy extinguishing Europe, William Saroyan wrote a ripely sentimental play for CBS radio called The People with Light Coming Out of Them. Those luminous people were the Americans, heroic with their sappy "gosh," their shy Jimmy Stewart goodness. ("Sentimental? You bet! Say, this is a swell country, and ...") Saroyan's protagonist sent a sweet democratic vision through radio sets across the American night, a period piece:

"Look at the light shining out of those humble houses. That light is the light of a happy nation, a free and growing people, a people without fear, a people who love instead of hate, whose casual everyday humanity is stronger than any other power in the world ... The best in people from all over the world is growing here into the first real nation of the world --the American nation." A few months after the broadcast, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the People of Light went overseas and saved the world.

It has been a while since Americans have felt that way about themselves. All the notorious national wounds left many with a wintry, elegiac view of the country and its future. The nation that was once the world's most famous optimist began to shuffle around in a bathrobe, feeling mediocre and depleted, listening to threnodies by the Club of Rome.

But that moment could not last forever in a land whose central idea from the first Pilgrim landfall onward has been physical and spiritual renewal, the fresh start, the future in which literally anything is possible. Often in their history Americans have returned to that theme of vigorous dawn departures--physically to the frontier, spiritually in the Great Awakening, socially through the immense renovation of the New Deal.

Now, at the beginning of the '80s, Americans may be on the point of another departure. The '80s may witness, for example, a long-overdue transition from an emphasis on feeling--"If it feels good, do it!"--to a keener focus on thought; feelings, at least the transcendent obliterations accomplished with drugs or extravagant sexual experiments, do not solve problems. Nor do the lesser sybaritisms of a hot-tub culture that in the '60s and '70s elaborated the idea of consumer comfort into a supine and giggling version of decadence.

There seems now an awakening will to rescue the future from the bleak descending path, the rather mean history of the recent past. Of course, a rhetoric of optimism is standard for a little while just after the presidency changes hands.

Eras of good feelings and presidential honeymoons generally last roughly until the first daffodils appear on the White House lawn.

AND YET, THE NAtion's psychological atmosphere seems to be changing in a deeper way that may have nothing to do with the new presidency. The paralyzing tone of apology and self-denigration is vanishing from public discourse. Americans find themselves unashamedly eager to be Americans. Samuel Johnson's line ("Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel") was interminably quoted in the old skirmishes between hardhats and the dissident young; but patriotism was never merely that. Love of country must always be rescued from scoundrels (Know Nothing nativists, racists, anti-Semites and other thugs), and Americans seem to know that now, seem briskly capable of loving their country without being nationalistic bullies. In any case it has been years since some Americans went around spelling it "Amerika." Not that Americans have become moronically self-congratulatory; they just seem more realistically self-aware, less given to their previous extremisms, the essentially trifling Manichaeanism that saw it all in black and white.

The way the nation interprets itself is changing. Many believe that some time around the beginning of the New Frontier, the power of explaining America to Americans fell to a liberal, sometimes radical "new class"--academics, elitists, journalists --which, although accurate up to a point, somehow got the story wrong or told it from a vantage point of supercilious and frequently privileged hostility. "We have met the enemy and he is us," they wrote, quoting Pogo. Americans developed a moral inferiority complex of historic proportions: where once they hubristically viewed themselves as the world's best, many came to see America as the worst.

The American spirit will not be revived merely by incantations, of course. Some argue that an improved state of reality produces a better mood, not vice versa, and the world's economic and political realities will not be easily changed. If inflation and high interest rates go down, for example, then Americans, being more secure in their savings and able to buy houses, will assuredly feel better. But morale, the condition of the spirit, is more important than materialist Americans like to admit. If they are to revive their moral energies, Americans will have to begin by devising new ideas of citizenship and community. Electronics, television, air travel, interstate highways--all the bright, glowing circuits of our communications --have made the U.S. an intimately national community. Americans must now adjust their systems of government and ways of thought to the new configurations. This will require individuals to be responsible, effective members of that new national community. A true will to set the place in functioning order would begin to settle old tragic business: it would reach out in new initiatives--new combinations of business, labor unions and government, for example--to turn the poor into productive citizens. Americans must develop levels of knowledge, tolerance, sophistication and citizenship that will transcend merely individual or tribal or regional identities. They must define the common virtues they value and the social behavior they expect from one another.

Americans need to understand how thoroughly they have become a national society. Local issues --busing, for example, or the fate of a specific highway or subway project--can have national significance. National issues --nuclear power, for example, or the location of the MX missile site--assume intense local importance. Great sprawling America, which was built by the exuberant pushing and hauling of multiple constituencies--America the pluralistic--has in a way become an extraordinarily compact society. At the same time, old regionalistic allegiances and customs still exert their considerable divisive pull; in certain respects, energy shortages and other economic factors make that pull even stronger than in the past. And in another, more elusive way, the nation suffers from severe internal fractures.

"We've ended up with what I call tribal solipsism," says University of Chicago Church Historian Martin Marty. "Blacks say if you aren't black and oppressed, you don't have the vision. Women say if you aren't a woman, you don't have the vision. The Moral Majority says if you aren't one of them, you don't have the vision. But I don't think that in the '80s we're going to have the vision. Those days may be past us."

The problem is that tolerance and cosmopolitanism often get lost among the warring tribes. If they had longer national memories, Americans might reflect in then" angry and intransigent moments upon Abraham Lincoln's democratic faith:

"Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice."

The profound psychological density brought to America by its communications works in sometimes contradictory ways. The images of blacks on network TV, for example, can encourage tolerance by overriding local or regional bigotries; for all the talk of a resurrected Ku Klux Klan, it is only a vestige and parody of the huge, white-sheeted army that once lynched with impunity over much of the South. The more profound bigotries, of course, easily manage to survive the weak civilizing influences of an interracial sitcom. At the same tune, the new, closely worked symbolism of American nationality raises expectations, sharpening all social contrasts to the point that any inequality seems an injustice. The new nationality gives all Americans a much higher and detailed description of what they are supposedly entitled to; the basis for comparison is so much more immediate.

AMERICANS NEED TO focus now on a different form of expectation: not what they expect for themselves in the way of entitlements, but what they are entitled to expect from one another in the way of social behavior. Those expectations include civility, literacy, manners, tolerance, even cleanliness. People from around the world are horrified by the heedless way that Americans scatter trash and garbage, as if making a mess were a reassurance of one's freedom.

The past 15 years were centrifugal; no moral center of gravity exerted a restraining force, so that almost any social behavior short of a display of necrophilia in the public parks could lay claim to legitimacy. In the '80s, the trend should be more centripetal: away from the purely individual, toward the community.

The U.S. and Japan, historically and culturally, are almost universes apart, and the U.S. became great through precisely the kind of turbulent freedom that is unthinkable in that other universe.

Nevertheless, Americans might profitably reflect on the social organization --not to mention the business methods--of the extraordinarily cohesive Japanese. A Japanese writer, Michihiro Matsumoto, explains one difference this way: "In the U.S., you say, 'I'm O.K., you're O.K.' In Japan, we say, 'We're O.K., therefore I'm O.K.' " The Japanese tend to identify their own welfare with that of their countrymen.

Almost nothing since the end of World War II has so affected the American spirit as the old story of the traumatic transition from small-town community to big-city anonymity: the spread of an isolation and estrangement that make it impossible for a person to know if the man in the next seat or next apartment is worth getting to know or is a homicidal maniac. In the towns, by God, the fund of common knowledge about nearly everyone was richly and sometimes intrusively detailed. The urban milieu has its advantages--individual privacy and freedom--but it can exact a heavy psychic price. Citizens who become secrets to each other dead-end in narcissism, cut off from the nation's public life.

Not knowing what to expect from the strangers they live with, Americans begin to marinate in paranoia and suppressed rage. Crime combines fatally with inflation to subvert the old American hope, the idea that virtue, saving, obeying the law are rewarded, not punished. Psychologically intensifying the horrific reality of crime, the local TV news teams project it directly into the American fantasy life, the air filled with such vivid playlets of violence and death and fire and gore that children begin to grow up thinking that the world outside the front door is profoundly menacing--not the old America, not the nice America any more.

The spirits of Americans cannot rise unless they see crime much reduced and justice much more effectively dealt out.

The constitutional emphasis on the rights of criminals should be balanced by consideration for the community as a whole.

The number of actual victims has risen disastrously, but the social damage done by crime, the intangible injuries to confidence and hope and citizens' sense of justice, is incalculably higher. As Chief Justice Warren Burger says, crime has created "a reign of terror in American cities." In that sense, the victims and their sufferings receive preposterously little consideration in comparison with those who assault. Somehow the criminal must be persuaded that society despises crime --surely not the impression that the criminal justice system now gives. Tough gun laws are essential. The judicial process should be speeded up. Determinate sentencing--a given crime draws a given sentence--would serve to make the law more predictable, less apparently capricious. The costs of a better justice system will be huge--too large for local jurisdictions to assume. The Federal Government will have to pay much of the expense in order to make crime control broadly effective.

The Moral Majority and other religious fundamentalists are components of an ascendant movement, at times primitive and a little scary, that seeks to lay down some rules for a new national cohesion. All members of the Moral Majority--just another minority interest group, for all the self-righteousness of the title --should probably have the Bill of Rights embroidered on their shirt cuffs, lest some of their coercive impulses run away with them. The movement led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell is potentially dangerous to democracy; with a disturbing touch of zealotry and intolerance, it would like to impose by legislation its interpretations of Christian morality upon the rest of the erring populace. Of course the Falwells can argue that they are simply reacting against the liberals' own past attempts to legislate their version of civic virtue. Both sides may have to learn that rights may be guaranteed, but, beyond a certain point, virtue cannot be enforced by law. The Moral Majority's platform--against abortion, ERA, busing, gay rights, sex education and SALT II; in favor of school prayer--does not always square with the opinions that most Americans have registered with Gallup and ABC/Harris. But the Moral Majority's wide attraction is a sign that large numbers of Americans are sick of a society in which so many standards of conduct have collapsed.

IN ITS MILITANT moralism, this army of the aggressively wholesome can rouse other Americans to try to come to grips with difficult and basic ethical issues that should not be left to single-issue politicians--abortion, the quality and direction of education in public schools, and so on. The right-wing insurgency in America today, although much exaggerated as a kind of counterrevolution, may resonate in a certain moral harmony with large numbers of American citizens whose politics are more centrist and whose ethics are more secular.

Conservatism is being called the ideology of ideas just now because it is searching for new practical solutions to economic and social problems (sometimes so old that they merely look new). It is also called that because it is tending toward the firmer, common sense moral ground that radicalism and experimental youth abandoned years ago for more fantastic terrain. The formerly young of the 1960s have helped along the movement toward more civil and sensible behavior.

Many of them have now discovered complexities they had not earlier imagined and the virtues of some behavior they might have previously scorned. They have grown up and started to raise children of their own--an enterprise that, as they did not know when younger, is the most profoundly humanizing and civilizing of all worldly experiences.

A COMMUNAL BIAS TOward sounder roof beams and joists has become more evident, especially in fields like education. It will take immense intelligence and energy to repair and revive public schooling in America, but at least industriousness and literacy are beginning to be honored again. Religion has reasserted itself amid a gathering conviction that some standards--honor, heroism, courage, kindness, tolerance, decency, sacrifice--really need to be planted somewhere in the vicinity of the absolute.

In a world of mere moral relativism, virtues tend to crumble between one's fingers; they do not get anyone through the hard struggles. All ideas are not equal, despite a circus of moral confusion and hype that has all but destroyed both the courage and the capacity to distinguish the worthwhile from the meretricious. Certain older virtues are being newly discovered, such as the need for hard work and the love of excellence, although they have not totally displaced an obnoxious strain of self-pity and self-indulgence. Certain other virtues need to be cultivated more. One of them is duty, the sense of what the individual owes to his community; Americans have a tendency to forget that in many other cultures, individualism is a pejorative, suggesting an antisocial elevation of one's own welfare above the welfare of everyone else. The French since the age of Balzac have made the useful distinction between individualisme and individualite, the second carrying those genes of personal creativity and drive that made America prosper.

A dull paralysis frequently results from a failure to make distinctions. Too many Americans in the past dozen years have fallen, with a queasy sense of loss, into the idea that progress is both socially malignant and inevitably doomed. But there is good progress and bad progress. It is sometimes hard to decide which is which, but it is preposterous, even superstitious, like a savage seeing an airplane for the first time, to cringe at the idea of progress itself.

Discovering that American success and virtue are not necessarily part of a divine agenda may have been a rather painful loss of innocence--but innocence is always overrated anyway. A wiser nation may now begin to discover the vast creativity available in its possibilities. America must start experimenting again in its institutions, in its science, in its business. "Modern consciousness," in Sociologist Peter Berger's formula, "entails a movement from fate to choice." Armed with the knowledge that they are not fated to succeed, Americans can take up the complicated burden of choosing to succeed, of making their way creatively across the expanses of their possibilities. That venture could be as liberating to the national spirit as the first forays west across the mountains.

--By Lance Morrow

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