THE FALSE POLITICS OF VALUES

By ROBERT WRIGHT

Top 10 (or so) signs that virtue is growing ever more chic: actor Charlie Sheen, who ran up a $50,000 tab with the Heidi Fleiss escort service, has declared himself a born-again Christian. ("There's such a thing as having too much fun," he concluded after years of arduous research.) Geraldo Rivera, who pioneered the craft of filing video dispatches from the primordial ooze, now bemoans the filth of daytime TV and vows to clean up his act. ("I'm sick of the garbage that is on.") A p.r. executive whose past clients include Michael Jackson is leading a campaign to build a "Statue of Responsibility" as counterpoint to the Statue of Liberty--and to build it in Southern California, no less.

And then there are the politicians. The two parties' conventions were virtuefests, four-day parades of people conspicuously devoted to their families. Bob Dole vowed to revive "old values," and Bill Clinton vowed to "protect our values." Even presidential adviser Dick Morris, while drowning in a prostitution scandal, managed the obligatory nod to virtue. His parting statement embraced Clinton's vision of an America of "opportunity and"--yes--"responsibility." (Morris may be a candidate for the Charlie Sheen recovery program.)

Of course, politicians have always been willing to go on the record as firmly pro-morality. But seldom have they done it so relentlessly. And seldom have they had such a wellspring of bigthink to draw on. There's Ben Wattenberg's Values Matter Most, read and admired by Clinton. There's "the politics of meaning," a phrase Hillary Rodham Clinton borrowed from philosopher Michael Lerner, creating a brief buzz that inspired him to make it the title of a recent book. There's Gertrude Himmelfarb's jeremiad The De-Moralization of Society, championed by Newt Gingrich. And there's former professor Bill ("Book of Virtues") Bennett, the Republicans' moralist-intellectual, who has crafted much of the moral language used by Dole.

This being an election year, Democrats and Republicans are highlighting their differences on the values front. (Does it take a village or just a family?) Still, much of the new moralism crosses party lines. Democracy's Discontent, the recent pro-virtue book by liberal scholar Michael Sandel, got a column-long tribute from conservative George Will. The "communitarians," such as Amitai Etzioni, draw praise from the left (Clinton and Al Gore) and the right (Jack Kemp and Bennett). And Bennett's attack on tabloid TV came at the suggestion of a Democrat, Senator Joseph Lieberman.

It's hard to complain about a bipartisan consensus in favor of goodness. Certainly its premises are too grave to dismiss. Rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth are indeed appalling, as are the related rates of child abuse and neglect. Songs celebrating rape and murder are not the hallmark of a healthy culture. Still, it's fair to ask whether something as ideologically jumbled as the new politics of virtue can ultimately prove coherent. Can liberals and conservatives so easily embrace the same ideas without surrendering bedrock beliefs? Or, in fact, might a real moral recovery entail some bitter medicine for both?

One large contradiction facing conservative moralists is the tension between free markets and strict morals. In 1976 the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism that consumer culture fosters a "hedonism" that then weakens the work ethic on which capitalism depends. Further, the economic progress that capitalism hastens has tended to disrupt families and communities--rural families and communities a century ago, urban families and communities half a century ago.

Capitalism thwarts conservative values in other ways. Last year Dole and Bennett heaped shame on captains of industry. Bennett, especially, demanded that big-media CEOS drop their support of gangsta rap and other genres that celebrate violence or predatory sex. Within months he could claim success. Time Warner ended its investment in Interscope Records, distributor for Snoop Doggy Dogg (accused, though later acquitted, of abetting a murder) and vocalist-felon Tupac Shakur. As a result, these musicians, who only a year ago were peddling sex and violence to millions of teenagers, are now...well, peddling sex and violence to millions of teenagers. Finding investors who would take up the slack wasn't a big challenge. There's a vast pool of capital out there, drawn to the prospect of profit like iron filings to a magnet. The free market at work.

Technological change is further complicating life for aspiring national moral leaders. Only a few decades ago, Bennett and Dole's dream world--a place where you can take a few media bigwigs and knock their heads together until they agree to restore the nation's moral fiber--was not quite so far-fetched. Three big broadcasting companies dominated the home-video menu. Moreover, they had to stay in the good graces of the government and the public to retain their broadcast licenses. Moral adventurism was thus not the order of the day. On The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob and Laura Petrie had separate beds (rendering Ritchie's origins something of a mystery).

Bye-bye, Rob and Laura. Hello, narrowcasting. The menu of video options has grown from a few broadcast channels to a few dozen cable channels to more than a hundred direct-broadcast satellite channels. And that is nothing compared with the array that will open up as the Internet goes broad-bandwidth via fiber optics, cable modems or whatever.

The effects on moralists will be doubly frustrating. First, the legal basis for liberal-style government intervention--the finiteness of the broadcast spectrum--will fade away. The FCC initiative touted by Clinton--three hours a week of mandatory children's programming--may be the last such requirement ever. Second, Bennett and Dole's already problematic campaign of supply-side moralizing will become nearly hopeless. Increasingly, you won't have to be a fat corporate target to sell raunchy music or video widely. Tupac Shakur can just set up a Website and charge people for downloading.

Obviously, information technology has many good uses. Desktop publishing, Web pages and E-mail lists can mobilize groups committed to charity and decency. The point is just that modern electronics gives cohesion to lots of other, different groups. Technology is exerting a centrifugal force on America, dividing a culture once clustered around a common core into distant, discrete clumps, making it harder for any one preacher, however high the pulpit, to reach the whole nation. Bennett says America needs a "set of common understandings" about what behavior is acceptable. But commonality is an endangered species in the information age.

Society's centrifugal tendencies don't render the sermonizing of a Bennett or a Dole pointless. Indeed, maybe it's more urgent than ever to resist the outward pull, to reconstruct a national moral core. But here is where the tensions within moral conservativism grow acute: some of the primary means of resistance are hearty liberal perennials. The most obvious is public broadcasting. Say what you will about Barney the Dinosaur, you have to admit that he's: a) a common cultural reference for toddlers of diverse backgrounds; b) unattached to ads for junk cereals and kung-fu toys; c) a reptile of unimpeachable integrity, consistently eschewing violence, illicit sex and, for that matter, licit sex. Is he too gooey? Maybe. Still, for concerned parents, PBS is an oasis.

Bennett opposes federal funding for PBS. When asked why last summer, he said the market alone can sustain virtuous TV shows. "The American people will buy good stuff," he insisted. "I've had some success...in the market with a product, with my book and, I hope, with a TV series." Hope wasn't enough. To air his TV series--a cartoon spinoff of his book, debuting this week--he finally had to resort to PBS.

Another tool for fighting centrifugal cultural pull is public education. It's true, as conservatives charge, that many public schools fail to imbue virtue and that some imbue self-indulgence, self-pity and ersatz self-esteem. It may even be true that mush-minded liberal educators are the reason. Still, moral flabbiness isn't an inherent property of public schools; many of us remember when they were different. And when a Democratic President uses his State of the Union address to embrace the idea of putting students in uniforms, a bipartisan consensus for more spartan schools becomes conceivable. In any event public schools are one of the few remaining vehicles that in theory could help rebuild a moral structure transcending class, ethnicity and religion.

But restoring public schools to their past glory doesn't top the agenda of conservatives such as Dole, Kemp and Bennett. They want to put the market to work--give parents vouchers redeemable at the private school of their choice. This plan, opposed by Clinton, would certainly nourish mainstream denominational schools, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. But as voucher critics have noted, the boon for private schools won't end at the edge of Judeo-Christian thought. One can imagine, say, fundamentalist Islamic schools, some of which might foster alienation from American culture among immigrant children. One can also imagine Afrocentric schools, some of which might reinforce the sense of victimhood that conservatives consider a problem with the modern world.

Vouchers could be divisive in other ways. Political reality will keep them too small to cover a first-rate private education. Middle-class and upper-class parents may amply supplement them, but some poor parents won't. For them the choice will be between public schools and subpar private schools. And the public schools might well be even worse than now, since the migration to private schools will sap support for school taxes.

Reinforcing this sort of cultural balkanization is the growing income inequality lately wrought by capitalism. The landscape is dotted with gated communities whose upscale residents can comfortably ignore moral problems that afflict wider America.

All this would seem to be rhetorical ammunition for liberals. Various of their hobbyhorses--public broadcasting, public schools, maybe even progressive income taxation--can be yoked to widespread concern about family breakdown, violence, general moral decay. The standard liberal grievance against conservatives--they're too enamored of untrammeled markets--thus draws energy from the new politics of virtue.

But, alas for liberals, so does the standard conservative grievance against them--they're too enamored of untrammeled morals. In the conservative view, the problem isn't laissez-faire economics so much as laissez-faire morality--the stereotypically liberal tolerance for all sorts of life-styles, ranging from free love to drug use.

This charge puts many liberals in a pickle. They indeed prize tolerance and loathe the judgmentalism of the Christian right. Yet they admit that America's current problems can't be solved solely through the sort of policy tinkering outlined by Clinton in Chicago. Something does seem to be amiss beyond the reach of government. Virtue does seem in need of restoring. What's a liberal to do?

In recent years many have flirted with the bipartisan communitarian movement. Liberal communitarians say they've amended traditional liberalism, which too often was morally neutral, confining its role in the realm of values to protecting rights such as free speech. The new liberal conception of citizenship stresses moral obligations. Social scientist Etzioni, chief publicist for the communitarians, codified this point with an emphasized conjunction in the subtitle of his journal, The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities. Clinton has adopted this formula. In his acceptance speech he urged that "all Americans take personal responsibility" and endorsed "responsibility from all."

A prime example of a communitarian responsibility is being a good father or mother. Liberal communitarians want to restore the ideal of parental devotion and stem the epidemic of divorce and unwed motherhood. How will they do that? Etzioni favors premarital counseling to spot and discourage the frivolously affianced. He wants couples to take "supervows," which are like traditional vows of eternal devotion except, well, more so. Etzioni also stresses moral exhortation. He wants liberals to shed their reluctance to make public pronouncements about private life. And many are, including the President.

But what exactly are they saying? Are they ready to adopt the thunderous moralizing of Bennett? Paint good and bad in bold relief? Is Etzioni prepared to stigmatize divorce? He says yes, but when you press him to define stigma, its meaning grows elusive. Is he saying you should give the cold shoulder to a neighbor who has left his or her family for a new and improved spouse? Should you not invite such people to parties? Well, he's not sure he'd go that far until we've exhausted other avenues. (Let's give those supervows a few more years to kick in.)

It would certainly be nice if we could restore monogamous marriage without stiff moral sanction. But on this point the history of the world is not encouraging. It is hard to find a society even roughly comparable to ours that has found a painless formula for keeping divorce rare. Japan has a low divorce rate--and divorce is considered so shameful that it actually harms one's career. Victorian England had a divorce rate close to zero long after divorce was legalized--and men who left their families risked being ostracized. In 1950s America, when the divorce rate was still fairly low, Victorian stigma was still half-alive.

Why are such social sanctions necessary? Scholars who specialize in human nature--evolutionary psychologists--have an answer: our species is not monogamous by nature. Neither sex is designed for a lifetime of monogamous devotion, especially men; during human evolution, males, unlike females, could greatly multiply their progeny by having multiple mates. And polygamous dynamics get especially powerful, in this view, amid great income inequality, as rich and powerful men feel their romantic horizons broaden, and women--even married women--find such men attractive. (Liberals take heart: here's another pro-family-values argument against income inequality.) In this view, if monogamy is to flourish, brakes on human nature, especially male nature, are in order.

But such brakes have no place in liberal dogma. The classically liberal take on human nature is that there is no such thing: we are blank slates, innocent at birth; it is only society--capitalism, in the standard indictment--that corrupts us. Thus, Lerner claims, people get divorced because they have "internalized the ethos of the marketplace, and view the other person primarily in terms of what one can get out of the exchange."

Lerner is an easy target--an old-school leftist. But his reluctance to blame people for things is archetypally liberal and persists even among moderate liberals who have jumped on the virtue bandwagon. Just as conservatives think they can restore a moral center without making concessions to government activism, liberals think they can revive the language of morality without being judgmental. In his book The Spirit of Community, Etzioni promises as much. He says we can have a "moral revival" without "busybody meddling into our personal affairs," without "Puritanism or oppression," without "self-righteousness." We should "discourage" divorce yet not "condemn" it.

Sounds great. But it's hard to imagine mounting a successful moral crusade against something without "condemning" it. And once people start condemning divorce, they're going to do the "busybody meddling" that lets them decide which spouse was in the wrong and thus gets the condemnation. Though the result may not be rampant "Puritanism," there will have to be a bit of "oppression" in the air if the crusade is to work. There will be "self-righteousness" too. What else can you call it when married people look askance at divorced people?

In defending their squeamishness about making moral judgments, some liberals say it is a sign of enlightenment. They're right. Any successfully married person should realize that he or she is fundamentally lucky--lucky that his or her parents instilled a sense of commitment, or lucky to have been blessed with a temperament conducive to marriage, or lucky to have found a well-matched mate. Such humble detachment is a hallmark of liberalism; a good liberal can look at anyone--serial killer or serial monogamist--and see how circumstances of birth and upbringing loaded the dice. A guiding insight of modern liberalism is "There but for the grace of God go I."

Still, a guiding insight of pragmatic liberalism is that criminals must nonetheless be punished. Increasingly, pragmatic liberalism may have to deem moral sanction warranted in the same sense. Of course, reasonable liberals can disagree about whether our social ills are really that serious. But they shouldn't talk as if the illness is grave but the cure is painless.

The dirty little secret in the politics of virtue is that conservatives aren't vastly better at taking this sort of bitter medicine. Newt Gingrich, as is well known, left his first wife and their two daughters. Bob Dole left his first wife and their daughter. And both men, in classic male fashion, then married younger women. Does Republican moralist-in-chief Bennett think Dole and Gingrich, in this regard, are good? Does he think they're bad? He has never said. But if a take-no-prisoners crusade to restore the American family doesn't involve heaping shame on this sort of behavior, then just what do conservatives plan to heap shame on?

Oh, homosexuality. Hence this summer's Defense of Marriage Act, which focused not on keeping heterosexuals married but on keeping homosexuals unmarried. This is a familiar pattern among conservatives. They are readier than liberals to dish out real moral sanction but tend to aim at the easy targets, the people they consider creatures from another planet: homosexuals, inner-city mothers, inner-city fathers. The linchpin of a robust moral system, in contrast, is a willingness to stigmatize people close to home, even your friends--even, in a certain theoretical sense, yourself.

Conservative obliviousness to this fact can reach astounding proportions. When Himmelfarb's neo-Victorian book came out, Gingrich had a thunderbolt insight and announced that it was time to restore "Victorian shame." But if Victorian shame truly prevailed in America, his political career would probably not have survived his divorce. Notwithstanding such hypocrisy, it remains true that liberals have a harder time than conservatives taking moral problems seriously. Just look at one of the exceptions to this rule: communitarian William Galston of the University of Maryland, a former Clinton aide and a leader of the antidivorce movement. Galston favors, for example, "cooling-off" periods between separation and divorce. And he would make it harder to get "no-fault" divorces. These are hardly measures of Victorian extremity, and Galston would confine them to couples with children under 18. But they've earned him snide dismissals in various liberal corners.

Etzioni says we need to rethink the parameters of ideology. He suggests thinking of two spectrums: the first reflecting economic issues and the second reflecting moral issues. At one end of each spectrum is raw individualism, unconstrained by community concerns. At the other end is the extreme subordination of individual autonomy to community needs. Traditionally, conservatives have been found near the "individualist" end of the economic spectrum and the "communal" end of the moral spectrum. Liberals have been near the opposite end of both spectrums. Etzioni sees the new politics of virtue as pushing Democrats and Republicans toward the center of both. If he's right, both parties have a ways to go.