Reviewing A Chapter From Gertrude Himmelfarb's "One Nation, Two Cultures": Moral Statistics And The Decaying Social Order

All should find the historical paradigm presented in Gertrude Himmelfarb's book “One Nation, Two Cultures”, the long-existing conflicting visions of schemes of morality being in a sort of dialectical motion, to be very interesting. Competing moral visions still clash today, with that which is predominant having changed. But there were two specific parts about a chapter in this book that interested me most.

So few in America's universities and media, and with increasing time in society at large, are still willing to agree that increased sexual freedom undermined the American family. The idea that there is largely a decaying societal order is an important one, regardless of whether professors, entertainers, or media elites recognize it. In fact, they contribute to it. Gertrude Himmelfarb acknowledges the obvious, the great advancements in civil and women’s rights since the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But what she points out is that there has been “bad with the good.” She does a fairly good job of demonstrating some of the costs that have come along with the change in values from the dominant moral class. As Gertrude Himmelfarb shows, there are indisputable “moral statistics” that demonstrate how this “decay” has in fact manifested itself in the societal order with increased crime, violence, out-of-wedlock births, single parenthood, teenage pregnancy, child abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, illiteracy, promiscuity, divorce, and welfare dependency (though some improved in the 1990s). Looking to minority communities, the newer more morally “liberal” order has had effects that are even more devastating. In fact, Justice Clarence Thomas has made similar points in public speeches comparing the segregated black community in Georgia that he remembers growing up in as compared to the problems facing the black community today.

Further, as Himmelfarb points out, these statistics are only half the tale, with social pathologies having taken effect throughout the entirety of the culture (e.g., lack of parental authority, lack of school discipline, violence and vulgarity on TV, readily accessible porn of every sort, increased obscenity in music and entertainment, the culture on college campuses, etc.). For the small minority in the media and academia that recognize a decaying order and threats to family, Himmelfarb greatly helps give voice to that view and back it up with substance. As she writes, the counterculture “also liberated a good many people from those values…that had a stabilizing, socializing, and moralizing effect on society. It is not an accident…that the rapid acceleration of crime, out-of-wedlock births, and welfare dependency started at just the time the counterculture got under way.”

The second part of a chapter in her book that was interesting was the explanation and analysis of the forces behind this continuing decay. First, there was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “defining deviancy down” (what used to be considered deviant is no longer) coupled with Charles Krauthammer’s “defining deviancy up” (what was once considered not deviant is now the worst vice). As but one example of this phenomenon, there is a repeated point made about smoking now taking a position in the culture as the worst of vices while the traditional morality of yesteryear growing ever more extinct (perhaps due to relativistic “absolutophobia” when it comes to making judgments on moral questions). This definitely has more than a ring of truth to it.

A second point made is that the media, but particularly academia, are the elites of this new order with incredible influence on the culture at large. The traditionalist, now “dissident,” culture “cannot begin to match, in numbers of influence, those who occupy the commanding heights of the dominant culture.” Academia has in large measure therefore become a distillery for creating ever increasing supporters of this dominant culture, “educating” the next generation into accepting its assumptions and propositions. The university has in some ways become the secular progressive seminary. The stories in the book of students that have been raised in a culture of “moral relativism” refusing to make any “judgment” even on matters like human sacrifice was absolutely frightful and abhorrent (if I may be so bold as to render a “judgment”).

The real question is whether it should be all that surprising? Some might laud the developments, and see no downsides to the rise of this new dominant class with its pervasive (or perhaps perverted) cultural standards (the “Jersey Shore”ing of the American culture). But if one does take that view, one should be honest in confronting the fact that some of the fruits of sexual liberation coupled with an increasing welfare sate have been poisonous. Tweet