By Fr. James Thornton, The New American, April 4, 1994
May 1994 – The rate of criminal activity, to a very large degree, is one of the sound measurements of the health of a nation. Since America’s crime problem is extremely grave, we are wise if we look below the surface of events and try to discover how this came to be. The roots of America’s on going crime crisis may be found in the general collapse of the fundamental moral outlook of a significant number of Americans, and, in a closely related event, to the rise of the welfare state.
Unquestionably, some of the fault for present conditions rests with the American people themselves, who have been insufficiently vigilant, tolerating the undermining of their own Constitution and the corruption of politicians who buy the votes of various constituencies and special interest groups by giving away largesse from the public treasury (that is, by giving them the property they have taken from working Americans of all classes). To a much greater extent, however, the blame rests on the door step of the liberal establishment, with those who experiment with and manipulate human lives.
Liberty and Morality
The Spanish philosopher, statesman, and writer, Juan Donoso-Cortes, once said:
“There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of [external] control falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is a law of humanity, a law of history.”
Cortes went on to say that if civilized man allows himself to fall into disbelief and immorality, then “the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense.”
Cortes, as we see, was an astute observer of humankind, and yet his statement is not drawn from some body of esoteric knowledge. As he said, the connection between morality and liberty is a “law of history,” clear to anyone attentive to reality, and indeed others have also written along similar lines.
Political liberty, in any event, requires a high degree of virtue; many great men, including some of America’s Founding Fathers, have written and spoken of this. Moreover, since a society racked by rampant and rising crime is a society afflicted with one or more moral or social ills, it is also a society headed for despotism.
We shall now examine some of these ills, these root causes, the chief symptoms of which are increasing disrespect and disregard for law and for the rights of decent citizens. Though our list is not comprehensive, and indeed many more aspects of these problems might be included if space allowed, those noted here constitute the heart of the matter. They are: (1) the destruction of the family, (2) the sexual and drug revolutions, (3) the influence of the mass media, and (4) the collapse of American education. Obviously, at the same time, these four moral and social ills are not wholly separate from one another but, rather, are closely interrelated and act, either consciously or unconsciously, in concert.
Destroying the Family
Almost from the beginning of civilized life on this planet, the family has been the focal point, the elementary building block, and the fundamental nucleus of civilized society. Sap the foundation of the family, and the result is that society and the national entity are thereby undermined. It is certainly no secret that the integrity of the family in the United States is in decline. One may see this, first, through the examination of statistics on illegitimacy in contemporary America. Looking at the nation as a whole, approximately 30% of all live births take place outside wedlock (that is, 1.2 million children per annum). In 1950, by comparison, such births totaled approximately 12%. For blacks, the figure is now 70% nationally, and in excess of 80% in some inner cities. For whites, it is over 20% and rising.
Charles Murray, writing in the Dallas Morning News for January 9, 1994, states that present-day trends with regard to illegitimacy point to the emergence of a new, vast underclass, made up not only of members of various minority groups, especially blacks, but of whites as well. According to his research, societal problems begin to surface when a population’s illegitimacy rate passes the 25% mark. At that point, a severe disruption of the societal structure becomes more and more evident. Murray writes that once the 25% figure is passed within the white community, the white underclass will begin to show its face in isolated ways. Look for [students in] certain schools in white neighborhoods to get a reputation as unteachable, with large numbers of disruptive students and indifferent parents.... [L]isten for stories about white neighborhoods where the incidence of domestic disputes and casual violence has been shooting up. Look for white neighborhoods with high concentrations of drug activity and large numbers of men who have dropped out of the labor force. As the spatial concentration of illegitimacy reaches critical mass, we should expect the deterioration to be as fast among low-income whites in the 1990s as it was among low-income blacks in the 1960s.
Murray’s solution is significant. He contends that government social policies, beginning in the 1960s, rewarded the breakup of the family structure through, among other things, the subsidizing of illegitimacy. He states that government must “restore the rewards and penalties of marriage” that previously existed. This does not require “social engineering,” he writes, but simply requires that government allow natural forces to reassert themselves. Government, in other words, must stop interfering with these natural processes, which, by themselves, “have done the job quite effectively for millennia.” First and foremost, he argues, government must end all economic support for single women with children. That would immediately send the message that “to have a baby that you cannot care for yourself is profoundly irresponsible, and the government will no longer subsidize it.”
Present government policy encourages the creation of an underclass – be it black, white, or both – and this underclass is becoming the source of greater and greater instability in our society. Furthermore, it feeds upon itself, demanding an ever higher share of tax dollars for the administration of welfare programs, criminal justice, and for the growing bureaucracies requisite to such things. That, in turn, impoverishes ever larger numbers of those marginal members of the lowest stratum of the middle class, stealing their hard-earned dollars through taxation, destroying their jobs by driving small businesses into bankruptcy, sending them finally over the poverty line, and transforming productive citizens into welfare recipients.
Sex and Drugs
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, writing in the mid-1950s in his book The American Sex Revolution, warned Americans that the budding sexual revolution of that time would bring ruinous consequences in its wake, including terrible social dislocations and the spread of mental, physical, and spiritual diseases of various sorts, and that it had a powerful potential even to destroy society. Sorokin first addressed the fact that the sexual revolution is not a neutral, harmless, “live and let live” concept, but something aggressive and ruinous; it is truly a “revolution” in the ugliest sense of that word and aims to pull down the pillars of traditional life. Sorokin comments:
“The sex drive is now declared to be the most vital mainspring of human behavior. In the name of science, its fullest satisfaction is urged as a necessary condition of man’s health and happiness. Sex inhibitions are viewed as the main source of frustrations, mental and physical illnesses and criminality. Sexual chastity is ridiculed as a prudish superstition. Nuptial loyalty is stigmatized as an antiquated hypocrisy. Father is painted as a jealous tyrant desirous of castrating his sons to prevent incest with their mother. Motherhood is interpreted as a “momism,” wrecking the lives of children. Sons and daughters are depicted as filled with the “complexes” of seduction of their mother and father respectively.... The traditional “child of God” created in God’s image is turned into a sexual apparatus powered by sex instinct, preoccupied with sex matters, aspiring for, and dreaming and thinking mainly of, sexual relations.”
Sorokin writes that the disorder brought about by the sexual revolution brings mental diseases, emotional storms and crises, and, most tellingly for Americans living in the dangerous world of the late 20th century, a paralysis of will. In turn, concomitant with such volitional paralysis, Sorokin writes,
“... there is a growing inability of the society to control biological and emotional drives; to resist the temptations of flesh and of material wealth and comfort; to curb the lust for power; to discharge painful duties and to make necessary sacrifices; and to chart and to follow its own historical course. From a self-determining and self-controlling collectivity, the society deteriorates into a passive drifter until it is brought to the brink of an historical Niagara.”
Closely connected to the sexual revolution is the drug revolution, which began roughly simultaneously. Research shows that as late as 1962, only 4% of American high school seniors had ever experimented with marijuana, whereas by 1982 (only 20 years later) that figure had soared to 59%. In the graduating class of 1985, nine out of ten members of that class had used alcohol, one in four had used marijuana within the previous month, one in six had used cocaine, and one in eight had tried hallucinogens.
If the sexual revolution brings paralysis of will, then the drug revolution brings the atrophy of moral conscience. Both clearly comprise major roots of crime. Nations in which individual self-control and responsibility are allowed to disappear, either as a matter of deliberate government policy or through some other means, are nations that are doomed to become bleached bones in the museum of history.
Mass Media
The mass media – television, films, radio, and periodicals – have become, as it were, psychological “weapons of mass destruction.” With very few exceptions, music and entertainment range, insofar as our culture is concerned, from the mind-numbing vapidity of “sitcoms” to the openly devastating lunacy of rock “music” – the funeral march, so to speak, of Western civilization. They have become the very quintessence of the spirit of nihilism.
The term “nihilism” comes from the Latin word “nihil” which means “nothing.” In other words, the media promote the notion that there is no such thing as truth, that nothing is worth believing in, nothing is worth living or doing for, and nothing is sacred. God, religion, patriotism, fidelity, family, beauty, nobility, virtue, goodness, altruism, love, and so on are, in the eyes of the nihilist, all illusions.
It is little wonder that, with the average American child spending 20,000 hours in front of the television by age 18 (as opposed to 11,000 hours in the classroom) and, so, drinking deeply at the poisoned wells of nihilism, crime is out of control.
Classroom Revolution
Liberals are enemies of reality. They live in the dream world of “what we feel ought to be,” rather than what truly is. This view compels them to subvert true education and to try to use education as a tool for social experimentation and to stimulate social revolution. All people, according to the liberal view, should have exactly the same intellectual capabilities. Thus, equality of opportunity is displaced by equality of outcome. Since in the real world – one which the liberal ideologue does not accept – each and every human being does not possess the same intellectual gifts, every standard is brought downward to the lowest common level.
Furthermore, according to the liberal view, all people are not only equally gifted mentally but they are also all equally good. So traditional discipline, they aver, is not only a relic of the wicked authoritarianism of the past, it damages the tender psyches of young miscreants, who would not be miscreants were they not “discriminated against” and were not most of the members of American society so “racist” and “oppressive.” Again, the lowest denominator is the order of the day and so nascent sociopaths are permitted to turn classrooms into veritable bedlams of chaos.
One must not underestimate, too, the baneful influence of the federal government in the destruction of the educational system, a system over which they took effective control beginning in the mid-1950s as a result of Supreme Court decisions. Federal dollars, which began to flow into local school districts in the early 1960s, have come at the cost of federal regulation of local schools, effectively taking control away from the members of the local community and placing it in the hands of bureaucrats thousands of miles away. Here again, social engineering is the prescription, societal demolition is the result.
The social engineers, who see their fellow human beings as laboratory rats and who apparently love nothing better than to observe the distress and agony that result from social experimentation, are mostly upper-crust types. They range from over-paid and under-worked college professors, through warm-talking, cold-hearted politicians, to internationalist-minded executives of multi-national corporations. In virtually every case, their hefty incomes and generous perks allow for their insulation from the hideous results of their experimental schemes. Whatever class hatreds and racial poison they stir up by their rhetoric and ill-begotten legislation, they know in their hearts it will not touch them or their families. Their livelihoods, their social positions, their safety, and their security – all guaranteed by the labors of American taxpayers – are not at risk.
The present liberal elite has pushed this nation to the edge of chaos, and a case may be built that it has all been part of a premeditated plan, so that the same elite may rule where previously they merely “served.” When limited government and freedom are allowed to slip away, this usually results in a “time of troubles,” a period of incessant chaos. But chaos is never a permanent state in human affairs. Chaos, inevitably, must be followed by tyranny.
One Hope
At this late stage, tradition-minded Americans have but one hope and that lies with the restoration of our Constitutional Republic and the demise of the welfare state. Such a restoration would mean the restoration also of local control over schools and police, and that local courts would be free to punish criminals properly. It would mean, as well, the sharp limitation of the ability of federal courts to interfere in the affairs of local communities. Strong, self-reliant local communities would, in turn, rebuild the notion of strong individuals.
It must be emphasized that to achieve our goals, including the demise of the welfare state and a return to personal responsibility, Americans must be impelled towards a heart-felt return to the values, ethics, and morals of our forebears. 
