American Experiment (404 page)

What should good teachers teach? Not what to think but how to think— that is, how to think across a wide span of disciplines, values, institutions, and policies in a highly pluralistic, fragmented culture. Educators based their claim to priority ultimately on the proposition that the products of liberal arts or humanities programs, as exemplified by Rhodes scholars and Phi Betas, had shown such intellectual grasp of a variety of subjects as to equip them as political leaders to deal with the diverse and continually shifting problems they would face as leaders.

But could any group—even an educational elite—cope with the combination of political fragmentation and intellectual disarray that threatened the American future?

The intellectual disorder had manifested itself during the past half century in the loose collection of hazy ideas that passed as the American idea-system; in the flowery platitudes of candidates, whether about communism or the family or the deficit or poverty; in the once famous New York School of art that fractured into several New York schools and later
into an endless succession of styles; in the hopes for a unified social science declining in the face of ever-multiplying subdisciplines and specializations; in the disintegration of the humanities into a “heap or jumble” that reminded Allan Bloom of the old Paris flea market.

A century and a half ago Tocqueville had observed that science could be divided into three parts: the most abstract and theoretical principles; general truths derived from pure theory but leading “by a straight and short road to practical results”; and methods of application and execution. On the practical matters, he noted, “Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind,” but few concerned themselves with the theoretical and abstract. On the other hand, Tocqueville said, American orators and writers were given to speaking in the most inflated, grandiloquent style about vast topics.

The American’s “ideas,” Tocqueville summed up, were either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague: “what lies between is a void.” The idea of freedom was his best example. It is the best example today of the “Tocquevillian void.”

Of all the central ideas in the American experiment the concept of freedom had been the most glorious, compelling, and persistent—and also the most contrarily defined, trivialized, and debased. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was essentially a paean to liberty, a term that has been long used as an equivalent to freedom. Eleven years later the Constitution would secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” and in 1791 the French Constitution, responding to the same Enlightenment values, incorporated a Declaration of Rights asserting that “men are born and live free and equal as regards their rights.” Within seventy-five years “freedom” had become so evocative, and yet so hazy, as to be invoked by Union soldiers “shouting the battle cry of freedom” against slavery, by Confederate troops “shouting the battle cry of freedom” against Yankee oppression, and by a black regiment singing, “We are going out of slavery; we’re bound for freedom’s light.” During the past century speakers and writers across the entire political spectrum, from American communists to the extreme right, have invoked the term. It was rare to hear a major speech by Reagan, or by the Democratic aspirants of 1988, that did not appeal to freedom or liberty or their equivalents. It was even rarer to hear them spell out what they meant, except in more banalities, shibboleths, and stereotypes.

Did it matter that Tocqueville’s void still loomed toward the end of the twentieth century—that orators continued to “bloviate” and millions of
men and women went about their minute, day-to-day decision-making with no linkage between the two? There would be no practical will to action, the philosopher Charles Frankel wrote, unless value judgments were made—and made explicit. If there was to be conversion of social theory into social action on a scale large enough to shape the whole society, a social philosophy that explored “the basic choices available” and offered “an ordered scheme of preferences for dealing with them” was indispensable.

Any one of our animating ideas was complex enough—had to be complex to be so attractive to so many different minds. Liberty was the prime example. A word that appears on our coins, on the marble walls of public monuments like the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, in virtually every stanza of the great national anthems, had to resonate appealingly through many classes, regions, and occupations. But what did it mean, as a guide to action? Only negative liberty—freedom from arbitrary regulation by public or private power wielders? Or also positive liberty—the freedom to take purposeful steps, often in social and economic areas, to realize one’s goals? Both freedoms could be left at first to the private sphere, but as society became more complex and interrelated, the two liberties increasingly impinged on each other and on the public realm. This happened most dramatically with slavery, and led to one of Lincoln’s wisest reflections. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” he declared in 1864, “and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men.…”

Events expanded the concept of liberty, and further complicated it. Franklin Roosevelt not only took the lead in defending the Western democratic definition of freedom against Adolf Hitler’s perversion of it, but in proclaiming the Four Freedoms he nicely balanced the negative liberties of speech and religion from arbitrary public and private action against the positive liberties of national military security and personal economic security. Later, contending that “necessitous men are not free men,” he said, “We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” The President then listed a set of positive economic rights that would constitute the agenda for liberal Democratic Administrations and candidacies in the years ahead.

The struggle over negative liberty—personal protection against
authority—attracted some of the most impressive intellectual leadership in the history of the nation. The philosophical heritage of individual liberty, the Jeffersonian and Lincolnian defenses of this supreme value, the fervent conservative vindication of property rights, the vigilance of the American Civil Liberties Union and like-minded groups, the presence on the High Court of justices with the commitment of Louis Brandeis, Harlan Stone, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, Earl Warren, the zeal for civil liberties on the part of appellate judges such as Learned Hand of New York—all of these had variously combined to establish the federal judiciary as, on the whole, the prime definer as well as protector of civil liberties. The enunciation by the High Court during the 1940s of the “preferred position” doctrine, holding that First Amendment freedoms deserved the highest priority in the hierarchy of constitutional protections and presuming to be unconstitutional any law that on its face limited such freedoms, further insulated individual liberty against arbitrary interference.

Still, civil libertarians could not be complacent as the Bill of Rights bicentennial neared. The judiciary’s record since the founding had been uneven. And when, in 1987, the Chief Justice of the United States, along with the latest Reagan appointee, joined in a minority vote to sustain the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute requiring the teaching in public schools of the creationist theory of human origin, civil libertarians had to assess the implications for the future of appointments by a series of conservative Presidents.

“All men are created equal.” If the Court had helped fill Tocqueville’s void in the area of civil liberty, the same could not be said about the record of the nation’s intellectual and political leadership in meeting the flat commitment that Americans of 1776 had made to the principle of equality except for slaves and women. This failure was understandable in part because the realization of economic and social equality was intellectually an even more daunting venture than the protection of individual liberty. But even the most essential preliminary questions had not been answered: What kind of equality was the issue—political, social, economic, gender, racial, or other? Guaranteed by what private or public agency, if any? Equality for whom—blacks as well as whites? Equality when? This last question was of crucial importance to low-income Americans long assured that their opportunity would come if only they waited long enough. It had taken almost a century for the nation to take the primitive step of making child labor illegal.

The intellectual confusion over equality was sharply reflected in the
ancient debate between equality of condition and equality of opportunity. It was in part a false debate, for very few Americans wanted absolute or even sweeping equality of condition. But even the sides of the debate were mixed up. In part because Herbert Hoover and other enlightened conservatives had contended that inequality of condition was acceptable as long as all the “runners” had the same place at the starting line, many on the left spurned that kind of equality as brutal capitalist competitiveness.

But in fact equality of opportunity was a most radical doctrine. If the nation actually wanted persons to achieve positions for which their basic potentials of intelligence and character fitted them, then government must be more than a referee at the starting line; it must intervene at every point where existing structures of inequality barred people from realizing those potentials. If the nation wanted to open the way for people to realize their “life chance,” then government or some other agency must act early in their lives to help them obtain the motivation, self-assurance, literacy, good health, decent clothes, speech habits, education, job opportunity, self-esteem that would enable them really to compete.

Neither in action nor in analysis did the government fill this Tocquevillian void. Perhaps the political leadership did not wish to, for granting true equality of opportunity would call for innovative social analysis as well as bold and comprehensive governmental action—would call indeed for a program for children’s rights rivaling earlier programs for the poor, women, and minorities. Some presidential candidates in 1988 were cautiously discussing such policies as much-expanded child care and paid leaves for parents of newborns, but no Marshall Plan for children was in sight.

The vital need for a set of findings firmly seated in clear and compelling moral principles and linked in turn to explicit policy choices was met, almost miraculously it seemed, in 1984 by the 120-page first draft of the Roman Catholic bishops’ “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teachings and the U.S. Economy.” The letter was unsparing of American leadership. The level of inequality in income and wealth in the nation was morally unacceptable. “The fulfillment of the basic needs of the poor is of the highest priority. Personal decisions, social policies and power relationships must all be evaluated by their effects on those who lack the minimum necessities of nutrition, housing, education and health care.” Again and again the bishops assailed selfishness, consumerism, privilege, avarice, and other ugly characteristics of American society. Speaking from their hearts trained in compassion and their heads trained in moral reasoning, from their pastoral closeness to the needs of people and their experience with
government programs, the bishops magnificently filled the gap between high moral principle and explicit economic policy.

If an air of old-fashioned morality hung over the bishops’ letter, some of the solutions too sounded old-fashioned to some critics. In calling for help to the needy abroad the bishops appeared to ignore findings that a great deal of American aid, instead of helping the poor in Third World countries, had come under the control of powerful and rich elites who portioned it out among themselves. Thus the American poor to some degree were subsidizing the foreign rich. And when the bishops proposed empowering the poor, at home and abroad, critics noted that it was precisely in power, among other things, that the poor were poor; they might not know how to gain and exert power effectively any more than they were able to gain and spend money. In many other respects too, solving poverty was extraordinarily difficult. But the bishops would hardly have denied this.

In any event, few were listening, or at least acting. Three years later the richest 1 percent of American families were approaching the peak share of the nation’s wealth of 36 percent attained in 1929. For the poorest 20 percent of American families, annual incomes in real dollars were one-third less than in 1972. Almost half of the new jobs created during the decade paid less than a poverty income. The stock market, however, was booming, and millions of middle-class Americans were engaged, like their government in Washington, in a spending spree.

As it turned out, the two-hundredth birthday of the Constitution in 1987 was an occasion much more for celebration than cerebration. Serious debate about the Constitution was minimal, except for one unplanned episode. Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for the High Court provided a classic demonstration of the type of presidential-congressional struggle so carefully planned by the Framers, and provided also a Senate forum for debate over major constitutional issues such as “original intent.” But those who hoped that 1988—the opening, year of the Constitution’s third century—might prove an occasion not only for testing Reagan conservatism at the polls but also for debate over sharply posed constitutional issues were to be disappointed on both counts. Major governmental restructuring occurred that year not in Washington but in the Soviet Union.

The electoral politics of 1988 turned out to be a disgrace to an “advanced democracy.” After spending hundreds of days on the campaign road and millions of dollars before a single vote was cast, two coveys of candidates, Democratic and Republican, underwent a series of primary
elections so rife with opportunism, so repetitious, and finally so anticlimactic as to bore the electorate before the main campaign even started. Two conventions full of fervid oratory but void of dramatic roll-call votes merely ratified the results of the primaries. The campaign that followed was the most scurrilous in recent American history, the most intellectually degrading since the campaign of bias against Al Smith in 1928.