If you’ve felt that American society is falling apart, but suspect it’s only a feeling, or maybe the result of too much television, now you can document that uneasy awareness with facts and figures and even charts. All courtesy of William J. Bennett, who was one of George Bush’s men in the culture wars.
It seems a couple of right-wing outfits (the Heritage Foundation and Empower America) have come up with a cultural version of the Index of Leading Economic Indicators. Instead of inventories and prices, this index uses categories like illegitimate births, SAT scores and the crime rate. The contrast between the country’s economic expansion over the past three decades and its social collapse can be dramatic. To quote Bennett:
“Since 1960, the U.S. population has increased 41 percent; the gross domestic product has nearly tripled; and total social spending by all levels of government (measured by constant 1990 dollars) has risen from $143.73 billion to $787 billion-more than a fivefold increase. Inflation-adjusted spending on welfare has increased by 630 percent, spending on education by 225 percent.
“But during the same 30-year period there has been a 560 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorce rates; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of almost 80 points in SAT scores.”
While getting and spending were exploding, the social structure seems to have been collapsing. Apparently the country is going to hell in a limousine. This would scarcely be the first time great wealth was accompanied by moral decline. The phenomenon is called decadence and is not unknown through the ages. It may lie at the root of American society’s social and cultural breakdown, which in turn may explain the entrenched poverty that traps whole segments of the population.
Consider these other figures:
– In 1959, 28 percent of poor families were headed by women. In 1992, that percentage was 52 percent-more than half.
– One of every four new additions to the ranks of the poor during the 1980s was under the age of 18. Increasingly, the poorest among us are children.
– Perhaps most revealing: Only 2 percent of children in two-parent families fall into poverty for seven years or more during their childhood, compared to 22 percent of children in one-parent families.
Can it be that what we have here is not entirely an economic problem? Maybe persistent poverty has social and cultural roots in behavior and beliefs. Maybe poverty is related to the breakdown of the family and sexual mores. Maybe it has something to do with the cultural trends promoted by our bi-coastal elites in Hollywood and New York. (Call it the Condom Culture.) Maybe it has to do with the stylish contempt for old-time values, now derided as reactionary, repressive and otherwise politically incorrect.
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Can this cultural collapse have some connection with the growth of something new in American society, a permanent, dependent underclass? When words like “underclass” become relevant in America, we’re in trouble. Categories like Proletariat and The Masses used to be European concepts.
Maybe it’s not the economy, stupid. Maybe it’s, yes, family values.
Unthinkable thought: Can Dan Quayle, the official national laughingstock for four years and favorite target of our oh-so-advanced elites, have been right?
Maybe it’s not the economy that’s at the center of what a society is about but God and country and motherhood and apple pie. Maybe it’s love and forgiveness and the work ethic-and all those old copybook maxims that kids don’t copy out laboriously any more. Maybe it’s paying the bills and raising the kids and keeping the rules and serving in the Army and keeping promises and telling the truth and saying “sir” and “ma’am.” Maybe it’s going to church once in a while, or at least into the woods or an art gallery.
Maybe all that we’ve dismissed as quaint holdovers from the Eisenhower era are really economic determinants. Maybe they have something to do with the general health, including the economic health, of a society.
Maybe there’s something to the connection historians used to see between the Protestant Ethic and the flourishing of capitalism. Maybe the economy doesn’t so much determine the culture as the culture the economy. And when the culture gets sick, the economy begins to wheeze.
Whenever liberals become cognizant of these problems, they have a reflexive response: government programs. More should be coming down the pike any day now. Even more troubling is the equally programmatic conservative response, which usually consists of some handy-dandy free-market mechanism. After reciting all the signs of a cultural breakdown, William Bennett proposes . . . a largely political and economic agenda. National education standards! A tougher criminal code! School vouchers! Changes in the welfare system!
This society may have political and economic challenges that go deeper than politics and economics. They may be cultural or even-if the word may be permitted in a column of political commentary-spiritual. Bill Bennett does touch on that little problem, but any emphasis on it tends to be overshadowed by his political and economic program. When he bemoans social trends, Bennett sounds like a Jeremiah with a 10-point program.
The crucial battleground in this Kulturkampf may not be Congress or the next election or the tax code but, yes, the culture. The conflict will be fought out in the schools, the community, the churches, the neighborhoods and, most of all, because it is probably the most pervasive and influential of the multitentacled media, television. It is on the little screen that the big values are now hammered out, or hammered to bits.
It is the culture, particularly among the young, that will strengthen or weaken the family. And, as has been noted at least since Confucius, what affects the family shapes the nation. Yes, maybe what matters are family values.