TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

The American Paradox
Spiritual Hunger in
an Age of Plenty
David G. Myers
Yale University Press, $29.95, 414 pp.

The nation's social health, David Myers says, has been harmed, badly. The crisis is unprecedented. The possible toxins include "concentrated poverty, plentiful guns, radical individualism, media portrayals of violence and infidelity, and family collapse." Concentrated poverty a social toxin? Certainly. And plentiful guns, and family ruin. But what is "radical individualism" doing in this lineup? And what is it, anyway?

This is the language of Amitai Etzioni and the communitarians. In the United States, they observe, we have "unrivaled freedom to pursue one's personal bliss." And indeed we have pursued it--hard. Pornography and fantastic depictions of violence please us? We shall have them. (You don't like them? Too bad. It's a free country; don't buy them.) And guns: lots of people enjoy owning them. Who's to say no? Money? The more the better. And affectional freedom? Certainly. A dead marriage shall not be our portion.

But, Myers and other communitarians say, there's no thought in all this of the common good (hence the name, "radical individualism"), and sometimes one's bliss pursued is someone else's harm. Myers thinks pornography and today's enhanced action films make for rape and other violence, and guns lead to Columbine. Sex ad libitum, he says, gives us dead-end teenage mothers, fatherless poor children, and marriages haunted by dissatisfactions and bootless yearnings. Divorce, while respectable, too often damages the children. Studies show that children of divorce on average do much worse in school than those of intact marriages and, poignantly, that remarriage by the custodial mother does not help at all. No-fault divorce has lessened the bizarre litigation--judges having to discern the comparative degrees of blame before allocating property and income in the divorce decree--but, Myers and the communitarians argue, it has improved the civil administration of divorce at the price of making the decision itself to divorce too easy. Divorcing parents of young families make of their personal bliss (however illusory) an absolute at the risk of raising more troubled, less productive youngsters. This imposes a high cost on society.

Society, the communitarians say, has the right to resist this imposition. How? Consider, for instance, making marriages with children at home dissolvable only by mutual agreement or when there has been a substantial wrong, such as physical abuse, desertion, or repeated adultery. Or compel judges to accord more weight to the children's needs than to equity between the divorcing parents when dividing the property of the marriage. Several states now allow couples to choose between no-fault marriage (lovely expression, that) and "covenant marriage" begun with pledges to marry only after serious deliberation, to submit to counseling when the marriage runs into trouble if the other partner requests it, and to seek divorce only on serious grounds (variously defined) and after a two-year waiting period.

Myers's analysis and urgings work well when he is talking about children and divorce and about gun control. On other topics: not so well. He goes on at some length about the media, television especially, but he has come to the subject already convinced that their portrayals of sex and violence without tragic consequence coarsen the audience and cause it to behave brutally itself, to cat around, even sometimes to kill or rape. This proposition is popular these days, but it is not self-evident and it may not be true to any significant degree.

Entertainment has always featured behavior-at-the-margins, and audiences seem to have recognized the difference between fantasy and reality. Certainly, when Myers attempts to prove that the media are substantial polluters, he does not succeed. A psychologist he cites asks eight-year-old children to close their eyes and tell him what comes to mind when he says "Mister Rogers." "Kind," "gentle," and "nice," they say. "Beavis and Butthead"? "Nasty," "mean," "rude," "hurts people." Conclusion? "One important feature of the social toxicity of the environment for children is the nastiness to which they are exposed so early in life...and nastiness is the last thing children need."

Let me suggest an alternative conclusion. Pabulum is a dish for the very young. The eight-year-olds here are sorting it out very nicely, thank you: Mr. Rogers is a sweetheart; "Beavis and Butthead" (latter-day, moronic Katzenjammer Kids) are not. These youngsters have spotted B&B's nastiness for what it is, nasty. And, in time, they will enjoy, most of them, and figure out "The Simpsons," "Saturday Night Live," and, yes, even "South Park." They will traverse their heritage of anarchic comedy and be enriched in imagination and wit. And, along the way, they will be figuring things out.

Myers believes sex belongs "only in committed relationships" (he won't say "only in marriage"--that would maroon gays); if our youth is entranced with "casual sex," fault the entertainment media. He should know better than this, for he says the decline in our sexual morals began around 1960. Has he forgotten that 1960 was the year of "the pill"? And that penicillin became available to the civilian population after 1945? And that in the 1960s women began to enter the workplace not just as secretaries, and at higher wages? In short, between 1945 and 1970 the major material disincentives to sex-outside-marriage evaporated. Simultaneously, the moral proponents of abstinence-outside-marriage lost influence, or equivocated (as does Myers; as do most of us). It seems odd, therefore, to place so much blame on the media, which are largely a reflection of social reality. Better spent is the time Myers devotes to arguing that liberated sex sings only a siren song. The data--Myers is a social psychologist--show happiness finally is found in intimacy, commitment, family, and a job.

On money, Myers is clueless. "Our society has produced a growing underclass," he announces--without argument, citations, or statistics, as though only a fool would argue the point. The inherent voraciousness of economic enterprise gives him the jitters, and he undertakes to curb it with counsel. Business ambition is all right, he allows, but not "exploitative greed" (who gets to draw that line?); a free market, but not an "unrestrained, profit-focused" free market; competition, but not "unfettered" competition. As soon teach lions to sup and not gorge. Myers never addresses the claim that boundless enterprise (and greed, if you like) has created goods, services, and wealth that are widely distributed throughout our society, and that in America today poverty is less likely to be a life sentence. But Myers must engage this claim--this is where good public policy begins. Otherwise, it's only finger-wagging.

American Paradox's best moments come when, as in his discussion of the family, Myers suggests initiatives and legislation that might help institutions and values that are being buffeted; its worst moments when its pages give voice to his wistfulness for a citizenry of modest thought and restrained enterprise, neighborhoods with enduring intergenerational relationships, and entertainment media "featuring nonviolent conflict resolution and committed love." What Myers will not see is that, thanks to antibiotics, contraception, aggressive constitutional litigation, civil rights, technological advance, limited government, pluralism, capitalism, free trade, and wealth, everything is out of its cage in America. Myers wants palpable decent social order--Denmark, I think, or Switzerland, as we imagine them. But these countries are not creating 20 million jobs in a decade, or taking in 10 million immigrants and starting them up the ladder.

Neil Coughlan, a regular contributor, is the author of Young John Dewey.