By William J. Bennett
The following is excerpted from Empower America Co-Director William Bennett’s speech at the 20th anniversary celebration of the Heritage Foundation on December 7 in Washington, D.C. Bennett served as U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration.
April 1994 – I recently had a conversation with a D.C. cab driver who is doing graduate work at American University. He told me that once he receives his master’s degree, he is going back to Africa. His reason? His children. He doesn’t think they are safe in Washington.
He told me that he didn’t want them to grow up in a country where young men will paw his daughter and expect her to be an “easy target,” and where his son might be a different kind of target – the target of violence from the hands of other young males. “It is more civilized where I come from,” said this man from Africa.
Last year an article was published in the Washington Post which pointed out how students from other countries adapt to the lifestyle of most American teens. Paulina, a Polish high school student studying in the United States, said that when she first came here she was amazed by the way teens spent their time.
According to Paulina: “In Warsaw, we would talk to friends after school, go home and eat with our parents and then do four or five hours of homework. When I first came here, it was like going into a crazy world, but now I am getting used to it. I’m going to Pizza Hut and watching TV and doing less work in school. I can tell it is not a good thing to get used to.”
Think long and hard about these words, spoken by a young Polish girl about America: “When I first came here it was like going into a crazy world, but now I am getting used to it.” And, “I can tell it is not a good thing to get used to.”
Something has gone wrong with us.
Let me briefly outline some of the empirical evidence that points to cultural decline, evidence that while we live well materially, we don’t live nobly. Earlier this year I released, through the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, the most comprehensive statistical portrait available of behavioral trends over the last 30 years. Among the findings: since 1960, the population has increased 41%; the gross domestic product has nearly tripled; and total social spending by all levels of government (measured in constant 1990 dollars) has risen from $142.73 billion to $787 billion – more than a five-fold increase.
But during the same 30-year period, there has been a 560% increase in violent crime; more than a 400% increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200% increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of high school students.
Today 30% of all births and 68% of black births are illegitimate. By the end of the decade, according to the most reliable projections, 40% of all American births and 80% of minority births will occur out of wedlock.
These are not good things to get used to.
Making Children Lose Innocence
Consider, too, where the United States ranks in comparison with the rest of the industrialized world. We are at or near the top in rates of abortions, divorces and unwed births. We lead the industrialized world in murder, rape and violent crime. And in elementary and secondary education, we are at or near the bottom in achievement scores.
These facts alone are evidence of substantial social regression. But there are other signs of decay, ones that do not so easily lend themselves to quantitative analyses (some of which I have already suggested in my opening anecdotes). What I am talking about is the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic character and habits of a society – what the ancient Greeks referred to as its ethos. And here, too, we are facing serious problems.
For there is a coarseness, a callousness, a cynicism, a banality and a vulgarity to our time. There are just too many signs of de-civilization – that is, civilization gone rotten. And the worst of it has to do with our children. Apart from the numbers and the specific facts, there is the ongoing, chronic crime against children: the crime of making them old before their time. We live in a culture which at times seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young, to assuring the loss of their innocence before their time.
This may sound overly pessimistic or even alarmist, but I think this is the way it is.
Two weeks ago a violent criminal who mugged and almost killed a 77-year-old man and was shot by a police officer while fleeing the scene of the crime, was awarded $4.3 million. Virtual silence.
Perversions Gaining Increased Exposure
It is hard to remember now, but there was once a time when personal failures, subliminal desires and perverse taste were accompanied by guilt or embarrassment, at least by silence. Today these are a ticket to appear as a guest on the Sally Jessy Raphael show, or one of the dozens or so shows like it. I asked my staff to provide me with a list of some of the daytime talk-show topics from only the last two weeks. They include: cross-dressing couples; a three-way love affair; a man whose chief aim in life is to sleep with women and fool them into thinking that he is using a condom during sex; women who can’t say no to cheating; prostitutes who love their jobs; a former drug dealer; and an interview with a young girl caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle.
These shows present a two-edged problem to society. The first edge is that some people want to appear on these shows in order to expose themselves. The second edge is that lots of people are tuning in to watch them expose themselves.
Spiritual Sloth Driving America’s Decline
I submit to you that the real crisis of our time is spiritual. In coming to this conclusion, I have relied on two literary giants – men born on vastly different continents, the products of two completely different worlds and shaped by wholly different experiences – yet writers who possess strikingly similar views and who have had a profound impact on my own thinking. It was an unusual and surprising moment to find their views coincident.
When the late novelist Walker Percy was asked what concerned him most about the future of America, he answered: “Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom . . . gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement . . . but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed and in the end helplessness before its great problems.”
And here are the words of the prophetic Alexander Solzhenitsyn (echoing his 1978 Harvard commencement address in which he warned of the West’s “spiritual exhaustion”): “In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or a dragon—not imprisonment, hard labor, death, government harassment and censorship but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness, indifference. Not the acts of a mighty, all-pervading, repressive government but the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom that is its birthright.”
What afflicts us, then, is a corruption of the heart, a turning away in the soul. Our aspirations, our affections and our desires are turned toward the wrong things. And only when we turn them toward the right things—toward enduring, noble, spiritual things—will things get better.
Regeneration Requires Active Resistance
What can be done? First, here are the short answers: do not surrender; get mad; and get in the fight. Now, let me offer a few, somewhat longer, prescriptions.
■ At the risk of committing heresy before a Washington audience, let me suggest that our first task is to recognize that, in general, we place too much hope in politics. I am certainly not denying the impact (for good and for ill) of public policies. But it is foolish, and futile, to rely primarily on politics to solve moral, cultural, and spiritual afflictions.
The last quarter-century has taught politicians a hard and humbling lesson: There are intrinsic limits to what the state can do, particularly when it comes to imparting virtue, and forming and forging character and providing peace to souls.
■ We must have public policies that once again make the connection between our deepest beliefs and our legislative agenda. Do we Americans, for example, believe that man is a spiritual being with a potential for individual nobility and moral responsibility? Or do we believe that his ultimate fate is to be merely a soulless cog in the machine of state? When we teach sex education courses to teenagers, do we treat them as if they are young animals in heat? Or do we treat them as children of God?
In terms of public policy, the failure is not so much intellectual; it is a failure of will and courage. Right now we are playing a rhetorical game: We say one thing and we do another. Consider the following:
• We say that we desire from our children more civility and responsibility, but in many of our schools we steadfastly refuse to teach right and wrong.
• We say that we want law and order in the streets, but we allow criminals – including violent criminals – to return to those same streets.
•We say that we want to stop illegitimacy, but we continue to subsidize the kind of behavior that virtually guarantees high rates of illegitimacy.
•We say that we want to discourage teenage sexual activity, but in classrooms all across America educators are more eager to dispense condoms than moral guidance.
•We say that we want more families to stay together, but we liberalize divorce laws and make divorce easier to attain.
•We say that we want to achieve a color blind society and judge people by the content of their character, but we continue to count by race, skin and pigment.
•We say that we want to encourage virtue and honor among the young, but it has become a mark of sophistication to shun the language of morality.
■ We desperately need to recover a sense of the fundamental purpose of education, which is to provide for the intellectual and moral education of the young. From the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers, moral instruction was the central task of education.
■ As individuals and as a society, we need to return religion to its proper place. Religion, after all, provides us with moral bearings. And if I am right, and the chief problem we face is spiritual impoverishment, then the solution depends, finally, on spiritual renewal. But instead of according religion its proper place, much of society ridicules and disdains it and mocks those who are serious about their faith.
In America today, the only respectable form of bigotry is bigotry directed against religious people. This antipathy toward religion cannot be explained by the well-publicized moral failures and financial excesses of a few leaders or charlatans, or by the censoriousness of some of their followers. No, the reason for hatred of religion is that it forces modern man to confront matters he would prefer to ignore.
Every serious student of American history, familiar with the writings of the founders, knows the civic case for religion. It provides society with a moral anchor – and nothing else has yet been found to substitute for it. Religion tames our baser appetites, passions and impulses. And it helps us to thoughtfully sort through the ordo amoris, the order of the loves.
But remember, too, that for those who believe, it is a mistake to treat religion merely as a useful means to worldly ends.
Religion rightly demands that we take seriously not only the commandments of the faith, but that we also take seriously the object of the faith. Those who believe know that although we are pilgrims and sojourners and wanderers in this earthly kingdom, ultimately we are citizens of the City of God – a city which man did not build and cannot destroy, a city where there is no sadness, where the sorrows of the world find no haven and where there is peace the world cannot give.
Moral Man Must Not Perish
Let me conclude. In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner declared, “I decline to accept the end of man.” Man will not merely endure but prevail, because, as Faulkner said, he alone among creatures “has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
Today we must in the same way decline to accept the end of moral man. We must carry on the struggle for our children. We will push back hard against an age that is pushing hard against us.
When we do, we will emerge victorious against the trials of our time. When we do, we will save our children from the decadence of our time. And when we do, we will be able to sing confidently again about the country we love, in those beautiful words of old:
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
We have a lot of work to do. Let’s get to it. 
