by John A. Howard, Ph.D.

A story is told about a cross-country airline flight some years ago. One of the engines developed a problem and the pilot shut it off. He turned on the speaker system and informed the passengers there was no cause for concern, the plane could fly very well with three engines. Before long, another motor began to act up. Once again, the pilot turned it off, and assured the passengers that two motors could keep the plane aloft. Then a third engine stopped. Silence from the cockpit.

Soon the pilot came into the main cabin. He was wearing a parachute. "Don't anyone panic!" said he, "I'm going for help." Whereupon, he opened an emergency exit and jumped out. The moral to this little anecdote is that help isn't help unless it helps. Announcements that help is on the way are nice to hear, but if the facts of the situation contradict the reassurances, a little panic may be in order.

The time has come, I believe, for Americans to indulge in a little panic. Things are not going well. The glue which used to hold our free society together has lost its sticking power. Until about 1965, Americans could go about their daily activities in the confident expectation that the people around them would behave in a lawful and friendly fashion, or if not friendly, at least with no hostile intent. To be sure there were some individuals who were dishonest or cruel or took advantage of others, but they were so scarce there was no need to be on a round-the-clock alert, suspicious of every stranger.

That fabric of trust has been shredded. Dishonesty, corruption, vandalism, violence, crime, deceit and maliciousness have eaten into all aspects of the American reality. Distinguished universities are found to have been cheating on their government contracts. The New York Times printed a map of an industrial park in Boca Raton, Florida in which ten different firms in this one location were all alleged to be engaged in some form of dishonesty. Twenty-four thousand, seven hundred and three Americans were murdered in 1991. During that same year, there were one million, nine hundred thousand violent crimes in the United States. Foreign tourists, recognized as cash-rich targets by armed bandits in Florida, are skittish about visiting the state. So many weapons are being brought to school that students in some fifty cities must pass through metal detectors as they enter the buildings.

U.S. News & World Report published an in-depth analysis of what happened in the Los Angeles riot. The interviews, court records, police radio transmissions and videotapes "show how several dozen victims were assaulted and robbed. Sometimes the perpetrators raged as they attacked passing motorists and pedestrians. Yet just as often they cheered, laughed and even danced." It isn't just a matter of harming others for one's own benefit. There is increasingly a perverse and vicious joy in causing harm. The attitudes are as alarming as the acts of aggression.

Some analysts suppose that in the economic realm it is possible to live with additional inflation every year. Perhaps that is possible. However, any thoughtful person will recognize that it is not possible for the society to survive more crime, more cruelty and more dishonesty every year. It is beginning to dawn on the citizens that the people in positions of public responsibility really don't know what to do about all this. The remedial plans and activities are not getting the job done. The help isn't helping. We are coming to a point where the citizens are taking matters into their own hands.

Consider a tragic case now being tried in the courts of Rockford Illinois.

Around 4 a.m on May 10 [Peter] Chemello heard what he thought was gunfire in front of his home. Rocks had been thrown from a passing car, striking his daughter's vehicle and setting off the alarm. Chamello went outside and turned the alarm off.

The car was pelted again a few minutes later. Chemello, who did not call the police, was waiting outside when the car reportedly made a third pass. He saw a brick being thrown from the car. After the car passed, Chemello went out into the street and fired at it.

This account from the Chicago Tribune tells of an incident that occurred this past spring. The bullet from Chemello's gun struck and paralyzed 17-year-old Jamie Hart in the fleeing car. The neighborhood where Chemello lives has suffered a great increase in crime recently. Not long before Mr. Chemello's trouble, a friend of his who lives nearby was shot when he chased some young people he believed had vandalized his car.

Many citizens of Rockford sympathize with Peter Chemello. A number of them have donated funds for his legal defense. His attorney said, "I don't want to go back to the days of the wild, wild west, but if citizens had confidence in the police, they'd call 911. But they don't. They have no confidence and they feel that no one can protect them like they can protect themselves."

The city authorities are dismayed. Mayor Charles Box acknowledged, "There's the problem of crack, cocaine, unemployment, gangs and a general feeling of hopelessness. People feel frustrated, but we can't tolerate letting people take the law into their own hands."

Jamie Hart's lawyer expressed his dismay about the public reaction to the shooting. "It's simply appalling to me," he said, "that everybody out there is in support of this guy. People seem to think that Jamie got what he deserved. Jamie's on a respirator, his only form of communication is blinking his eyes, and he'll never have the use of his lower extremities. What a helluva price to pay...for vandalism!"

Vandalism is the intentional and callous destruction of something that belongs to someone else. It reflects the attitude of a savage who does what pleases him without regard for the rights, the feelings or the property of other people and with no sense of obligation to the community. Thievery, embezzlement, cheating, corruption in government, contrived lawsuits, indeed crime and dishonesty of every kind are forms of vandalism. All are intentional and do harm to the general well-being. The support of Rockford citizens for Peter Chemello is generated not because of anger about the damage that was done to his daughter's car, but out of a frustrated and fearful sense that the vandals are taking over and decent citizens are losing out.

Prior to World War II each new generation of Americans was brought up to be a part of civilized society, taught and regularly encouraged to abide by many standards of acceptable conduct. Courtesy, lawfulness, loyalty, morality, kindness, marital fidelity, parental responsibility, patriotism, honesty, and civic pride--such traits that were once cherished ideals of the American ethos--have all been casualties of a culture that is focused on individualism. The glorification of personal fulfillment and the insistence on private choices have freed people from moral and social constraints, but they have severely damaged the essential balance between what the person wants to do and what the person must do in order to protect the common interests of the group. If the streets aren't safe from crime and violence, everyone suffers. If every store-owner is a crook, commerce breaks down.

There can be no society nor any system for accomplishing common goals unless there is some means of persuading people to subordinate their individual desires to what the group requires of them. In the household, the child must learn that he cannot put the stopper down in the washbasin, turn on both faucets full force and let the water run. It makes no difference how much pleasure he gets from seeing the water flowing down the hall, this is a no-no. A non-negotiable no-no. Everyone in the family knows it and helps make sure the young child abide by the requirement. There is no public law against washbasin overflow, it is simply an informal rule of the household and is enforced by common understanding and agreement.

The glue that used to hold the American society together was a vast network of informal codes of conduct voluntarily observed by the American people. These were "do's" and "don't's" that were transmitted to each new generation. They were not laws enforced by police. They were standards of acceptable behavior sustained by public expectation, by praise and gratitude and by stigma, scorn and ostracism.

For example, when I was a little child, I rode my tricycle down the front walkway of our home and out into the street. Mrs. Prindeville, driving up the block, jammed on the brakes, but the car hit me. My parents wouldn't have dreamed of suing Mrs. Prindeville. Civilized people didn't use lawsuits to get rich. Nobody else in our town would have sued Mrs. Prindeville, either. It was simply unthinkable. People in those days were raised with a civic conscience.

Nowadays, for many people a suit against Mrs. Prindeville is simply taken for granted. After all, she has been paying insurance to cover this kind of situation. It doesn't cost her anything extra; and the insurance company may well make some settlement to avoid the expense of a trial. With such attitudes, lawsuits multiply and so do lawyers. The rate for liability insurance goes up a notch and the cost of living does, too. And another piece of territory is lost to the vandals.

In his book, Days of Grace, Arthur Ashe writes of another tragic behavioral change. Concerning the brutality of the Los Angeles riots he says, "I felt sick. That's not us, I thought. That's just not us. It was as if spirits from another planet had come to earth and invaded black bodies. We were once a people of dignity and morality; we wanted the world to be fair to us, and we tried, on the whole, to be fair to the world. Now I was looking at the new order which is based squarely on revenge, not justice, with morality discarded. Instead of settling on what is right, or just, or moral, the idea is to get even."

Conceivably, America could curtail crime, dishonesty, violence and revenge by tougher laws, harsher penalties, greatly increased police forces and more and more jails. The ruthless police state is a possibility for America, but not an attractive one, and not one that most voters would support. The only other option is to try to re-earn that status phrased so poignantly by Arthur Ashe, "a people of dignity and morality."

It is an option that will not be well received in the cultural circles of America, because so many leaders in the opinion-making activities have embraced the supremacy of individualism and the doctrine of private choice.

Morality is a system of fixed principles defining what is right conduct and what is wrong conduct. Those principles apply to everyone and are not subject to change or revocation by popular demand or by an act of Congress. In sharp contrast, values, a concept endorsed by modern culture, are like quick silver. They can squirt off in any direction, or they can simply be rejected, according to individual preference. If each person, or each group decides what is right and what is wrong, that isn't morality at all, it is ethical chaos. It is the recipe for universal vandalism. Arthur Ashe spoke of dignity as well as morality. I believe the dignity he had in mind is the solid self-respect that derives from embracing moral principles and living according to those principles.

It will be useful to consider how an attempt to re-establish morality and dignity may relate to the prevailing orthodoxies of three value-forming institutions-- religion, the family, and education--where public concepts of morality are shaped and judged.

As de Tocqueville noted a century and a half ago, America's remarkably successful experiment in freedom was undergirded by the religious foundation of American life. The strong emphasis which George Washington gave to religion in his public statements had been continued by all his successors. The family Bible was a treasured feature of most homes, and the majority of citizens had some familiarity with it. Until World War II, the ideals of sexual morality that prevailed in America were drawn from the Bible. Both divorce and unwed motherhood were still regarded as great misfortunes and cohabitation was not socially acceptable.

Polls indicate that today a higher percentage of Americans believes in God and attends church than is true of the people in other Western nations. Even so, the authority of the Bible as the source of norms has greatly weakened. The Lord's Prayer is still a "given" in all Christian services, but if you ask a parishioner, or even a pastor, what precisely, are the temptations that the individual is asking God not to lead him into, during the Lord's Prayer, and what is the evil he is praying God to deliver him from the likely response is one of mumbled incoherence or stunned silence.

A few passages will refresh the memory on just how specific and helpful the Bible can be in dealing with the disorders that plague the society today. The Ten Commandments prohibit murder, theft, covetousness and false witness. If that false witness ban were taken seriously, the problem of everybody suing everybody would be resolved. Three of the Ten Commandments also specify that the two-parent, male and female marriage, with intergenerational responsibility is the proper pattern for life. Honor thy father and mother, do not engage in adultery, and men should not covet the neighbor's wife.

The Proverbs also bear some study. The following nine verses are taken from the First Chapter of Proverbs, King James version.

"The proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, King of Israel...
"To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity;
"To give subtlety to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion...
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
"My son, hear the instruction of thy father and forsake not the law of thy mother...
"My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.
"If they say, come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk for the innocent without cause...
"We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil...
"My son, walk not thou in the way with them for their feet run to evil and make haste to shed blood."

Solomon's very name has been equated with wisdom for centuries. Here, right in the very first chapter, he is describing the gangs that are devastating our cities and he says to stay away from them. What they do is evil.

To hold aloft the Bible as the authority for what is right and what is wrong draws the dismay and wrath of the civil libertarians and the great chorus of other advocates of the do-your-own-thing philosophy. "What about the Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims and Native Americans and Zoroastrians? They have rights in America, too! It is unAmerican and unconstitutional for them to have to live in a society governed according to Jewish and Christian concepts of virtue." So goes the attack on biblical standards.

Well we have just witnessed a conclave of the leaders of the many religions of the world assembled in Chicago to spread fellowship and to proclaim a common message of reconciliation. As it turned out, they couldn't even agree to include God in their statement to the world. The highest common denominator that could be achieved in that theological assembly really offers no remedy for America's era of violence and destruction.

With biblical religion excluded, as it has been, from participation in the efforts to deal with public questions, the decision-making is now dominated by non-religious, or anti-religious forces. One of the most powerful of these, the New York Times, has designated itself the arbiter of what is moral and what is not. In an October 4 editorial expressing distress about court decisions which had taken children from lesbian mothers, the Times declared, "Some children grow up in homes where they witness or suffer physical or emotional abuse. That's immoral. A loving relationship between two adults of the same gender is not."

Whereas everyone can sympathize with the agony of mothers who have been separated by judicial action from their children, that sympathy cannot be permitted to suppress the profoundly important question of who or what is to determine the ideals for the society and the standards of behavior judged to best serve the large community. Is the New York Times a wiser and more reliable authority in these matters than Solomon, or God speaking for Himself in the Ten Commandments? The fact is that for some years, the secular forces have been redefining what is moral, eliminating most of the ancient biblical norms. Has the liberation from those standards produced a more livable society? Has that rejection of the Bible produced a nation of wise, stable, confident and friendly people?

Some forceful answers to those rhetorical questions are provided by statistics about the impact of the traditional two-parent family upon the lives of the children. The following is a quotation from a column by Mike McManus last summer. "In 1960, there were only 243,000 children [in America] living with a never-married parent. By 1990, the figure was an eye-popping 5,568,000--a 20-fold hike!...Such children are three times as likely, as those living with both parents, to flunk a grade, 3.5 time more apt to be arrested, and six times more liable to become unmarried parents themselves."

Children in households without a father are also far more likely to use illegal drugs, to have emotional problems and to have difficulty keeping a job. In her book, The Politics of Welfare, Blanche Berstein, the former head of New York City's Human Resources Administration, writes, "One of the most fascinating statistics in New York is the tiny number of intact families receiving welfare...less than one percent of all intact families of three or more persons in the city." In New York City 99% of the families consisting of a father, mother and one or more children were not on welfare. The people who are self-disciplined enough and considerate of others enough to sustain a marriage turn out to be the people who can hold a job and earn a living.

Another of America's major problems resulting from the disintegrating family was set forth by Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Moria Krueger. After listing the circumstances which almost always lead to delinquency, she notes, "There is just one phenomenon I know of that addresses all these needs: the need for a strong identity, for re-enforcement, for structure, for nurturing, for security, for money, for status, for a moral code. All these needs and more can be and often are addressed by membership in a gang." The gang turns out to be a substitute for a proper family. The family or the gang! Civilization or vandals!

These are powerful arguments for re-establishing traditional marriage and the loving family home as ideals for American life. Of course, not all marriages are loving and lasting, nor are all parents affectionate and wise in nurturing their children, but the fact that imperfect human beings can never reach an ideal does not invalidate the importance of having a vision of what is good and striving toward it. There will always be individuals whose personal circumstances or personal preferences make it inappropriate or impossible for them to try to form their lives according to a specific ideal, but those instances should not be permitted to force the cancellation of the ideal.

In my judgment, the one change in society which would do more than any other in pushing back the tide of crime and vandalism and cruelty would be for Americans to reinstate the traditional concept of the family as the norm, the hoped-for pattern for living in the society.

It needs to be remembered that it is impossible to go two directions at once. If cohabitation, single-parenting and homosexuality become legitimized and altogether socially acceptable, then heterosexual, lasting marriage will be phased out. The principles of sexual morality required for enduring stable marriages and for honest, secure family relationships are not easily sustained under the best of circumstances. Premarital chastity and marital fidelity have been greatly undermined by the unzippered mores of the popular culture with the result that the divorce rate, like the crime rate, increases every year. Is that what people really want?

Education's relationship to crime, viciousness and vandalism also needs to be considered. A decade ago, Midge Decter gave a speech entitled, "Is The West in Danger?" She was dismayed by the dwindling concern for standards of integrity and merit, for what is right and what is good. In her concluding comments she spoke of a news photograph of a college student involved in an antiwar protest who carried a placard with the words, "Nothing is worth dying for." Her response to that sign:

"We desperately do not wish for him to die. But his announcement on that placard is an announcement about more than the draft, more than nuclear weapons, more than war. He who says there is nothing worth dying for says there is nothing worth living for.

"We, as a society, have some measure of responsibility for the message on that placard, for the fact that a young American--the healthiest, luckiest, most tenderly treated young man in history- -we have some responsibility for the fact he could find nothing of value to save his own skin: neither mother, nor father, no kith, nor kin, nor country, nor God. Nietsche said that he who values only staying alive has the mind of a slave. Until we take it upon ourselves to make that boy a free man--both: free and a man, the continued survival of our freedom as a nation will not be assured."

Midge Decter and I grew up in an age when it was taken for granted that the central purpose of education was to pass along to each new generation the ideals of their own cultural heritage, to help the students comprehend the grandeur of those ideals and why they were worthy of sacrificing greatly for, or even dying for. The educated person knew that a free society was a rare occurrence in human history, difficult to achieve, difficult to sustain, and greatly to be treasured. The unique blessing of a loving family was also part of the common understanding resulting from the schooling process.

In that era, the literature chosen for student assignments contained many works that elaborated on and reenforced the ideals and the moral standards of the culture. The graduates of that kind of schooling understood, accepted and did not resent the obligations of civic responsibility. It would not have occurred to them to sue Mrs. Prindeville, or throw bricks at the Chemello car, or celebrate the beating of motorists in the Los Angeles riots.

All that has changed. America has produced several generations of cultural orphans, uninformed about, and cut off from those ideals and moral standards. This change has persisted for so long that the college presidents and professors, the school principals and teachers, with few exceptions, have no knowledge of the nature of the educational philosophy which governed America's schools and colleges for the first hundred and fifty years of United States history. They haven't a clue as to the benefits that accrued from that kind of schooling.

It is popularly supposed that you cannot turn back the clock, that social change, like the genie that can't be stuffed back in the bottle, simply cannot be reversed. That may be true, but it is a foolish person, and a foolish society, that would rule out a manner of doing things simply because it used to prevail.

Actually there is a wondrous success story of our time that needs to be told again.

Seven years ago, a remarkable lady was interviewed on television. "We are not a housing project! We are a neighborhood!" she declared. She was Bertha Gilkey who led a successful battle against crime, drugs, vandalism, disrepair, filth and vermin, transforming the Cochran public housing development in St. Louis from a badly deteriorated high-rise slum into a well-kept, safe and lawful, upbeat residential area. The distinction she made between a housing project and a neighborhood is significant. A housing project is a thing of government. It is a group of buildings owned by taxpayers most of whom don't even know its location, much less the condition of the premises. It operates according to policies devised by remote bureaucrats and is managed by a staff that lacks the authority, or perhaps the courage, to safeguard either the buildings or the tenants. It is sort of a warehouse for underprivileged units of population.

A neighborhood refers both to a number of dwelling places and the people who live in them. Neighborhood implies a sense of unity and belonging, a sense of interdependence and continuity, of lasting concern for the common good. A neighborhood usually stirs pride in its inhabitants. It is the concept of home writ a little larger.

What happened there in St. Louis? First the tenants obtained an authorization to manage their own buildings. Then they did a truly remarkable thing. They used their own common sense to write a code of rules to govern the behavior of the people who were to have the privilege of living there. Illegal drugs are not tolerated. All apartments are to be kept in good repair, the tenants take turns cleaning the hallways and grounds, etc.

Elected officers have the responsibility for enforcing the rules and the authority to evict anyone who disobeys the rules, or whose children do. Applicants for an apartment are carefully screened as to whether they meet the standards of upright and neighborly conduct that have been established.

When Bertha Gilkey explained all this on television, the startled interviewer asked how they could evict from public housing someone who uses drugs. "Public housing," she declared, "was not built for criminals and vandals and people who do drugs." This marvel of improvement was not accomplished by a mayor, not a city council, nor even the United States Congress. It was not the product of a plan devised to diminish crime or improve the economy, although both those results occurred. Learned psychiatrists and sociologists had no part in it. It was, instead, a cultural revolt, defying what passes for wisdom among the leaders who formulate policies for social improvements. The neighborhood was achieved by resurrecting that which a neighborhood requires: standards of morality, civility and lawfulness. The territory, which had been captured by savages was reclaimed as a small island of civilization.

My guess is, that if America is to avoid being overwhelmed by crime and corruption and viciousness and self-indulgence, the rescue will be made by small groups and private initiatives working through neighborhoods and churches and school boards and public libraries to retrieve America's forgotten ideals and to resurrect the moral standards of a decent and dignified society.

If this occurs, you will find blacks over-represented in the leadership of the movement, for the blacks have suffered the most from the collapse of civilized behavior. Bertha Gilkey and Arthur Ashe are beacons of clear-thinking about these matters. So are black scholars Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. So is black columnist William Raspberry. So is Robert Woodson, the eloquent champion of inner-city self-help. And so is Dr. Leonard Lawrence, the President of the National Medical Association with a membership of 16,000 black physicians.

The young, also, will, I predict, be in the vanguard of that movement. The high school and college students of today have far more to lose than older generations if the vandals continue to seize more territory year after year after year. The current rates of crime and violence will look like pranks at a Sunday school picnic compared to the carnage twenty-five years from now. You may know that this past summer a group of bright young lawyers, bankers, graduate students, writers and business people formed an organization called Third Millennium. They issued a manifesto demanding fiscal responsibility in government, improved schooling, and accountability for pollution produced by corporations. Perhaps there will arise a comparable thrust for responsible and civilized and neighborly ideals and standards. Or maybe the Third Millennium could broaden its goals to embrace those additional objectives.

The restoration of the family norm, and the revival of moral, courteous, civilized behavior may seem too difficult, many look like hopeless undertakings. That is what Bill Moyers thought in the two-hour CBS television special, "The Vanishing Family-- Crisis in Black America" which he hosted seven years ago.

At the end of the show, he was interviewing a Mrs. Wallace who with her husband runs a community center which serves the troubled people in inner-city Newark, New Jersey. What follows is from that transcript:

Moyers: You're worried about the black family. You think it's precarious.

Mrs. Wallace: It's going to be an endangered species.

Moyers: The messages that kids are getting from the society seem to say, "Do anything you want to." The United States Government, the government of New Jersey, a white man like Moyers can't step in and say to young black kids, "It's not right to have children out of wedlock; welfare needs to be changed; you've got to take responsibility." Who's going to say these things to these kids?

Mrs. Wallace: Why can't you say it?

Moyers: They won't listen to me.

Mrs. Wallace: It doesn't make any difference; you gotta say it anyway. They may not listen to me either. But I'm saying if you say it in your corner and I say it in my corner, and everybody is saying it, it's going to be like a drumbeat. But it's not just for me to talk about, it's for us all to talk about. And it's going to surpass [people's] color. And you're not going to be safe, and I'm not going to be safe unless we send out this drumbeat. What ever happened to civilization? The teachers and the preachers, the story tellers and the playwrights, the philosophers and the statement, the parents and the grandparents, whose job it is to safeguard and transmit the ideals and obligations of civilized living, have failed in that duty. Perhaps the deterioration has reached the point that piety and common sense will reassert themselves. Perhaps there will be a growing chorus of people, each in his own corner, rejecting and refuting sexual liberation and the do-you-own-thing, dog-eat-dog ethic, holding aloft the things worth living for and worth dying for. I hope so.

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U.S. News and World Report, 31 May 1993, p. 37.Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1993, Pages 1, 7. Tim Jones, op. cit. Tracy Dell' Angela, "Teen Files Lawsuit Against Chemello," Rockford Register Star, 25 June, 1993, p. 1. George Vecsey, "Ashe's Strong Talk" The New York Times, 8 June, 1993. "Gay Parents: Living in Fear," editorial, The New York Times, 4 October 1993. Mike McManus, "Men Must Keep Promise," syndicated column, 17 July, 1993. Moria Krueger, "Social Ills Breed Juvenile Court Woes," Guest Column, Wisconsin State Journal 29 April 1993. Midge Decter, "Is The West in Danger?", Occasional Paper, The Rockford Institute, 17 April 1982, p.4.