Nineteen-Ninety-Six! Here we are in another election year. Americans must choose a president, a strong and wise leader for this powerful nation. I think it is safe to say that among all the declared and potential candidates of both parties there is no one who wears the mantle of greatness, who commands the respect of the American people because of proven wisdom and integrity.

Things used to be different. Let's look all the way back to the beginning of the nation. "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." This earnest oath which concludes the Declaration of Independence sounds strange to our ears today. To be sure, we still go through the ritual of making vows in various ceremonies- -the pledge of fidelity in taking the oath of public office, the assertion with a hand on the Bible that we will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in court, and the promise to forsake all others until death do us part in the wedding rites--but the news and social statistics suggest that many people do not take these vows very seriously.

It is, I think, instructive to consider the character of the men who, in signing the document, took the first step in creating our government. To challenge openly one's own government when it is arrogantly authoritarian and has its police troops deployed in the vicinity is not an act to be undertaken lightly. The members of the Continental Congress were men of stature, family men, settled, successful and respected lawyers, merchants and land-owners, who had much to lose and lost much.

T.R. Fahrenbach's book, Greatness to Spare, is a series of biographical sketches of men who signed the Declaration of Independence. The following is the concluding summary of that book:

• Nine signers died of wounds or hardships during the Revolutionary War.

• Five were captured or imprisoned, in some cases with brutal treatment.

• The wives, sons and daughters of others were killed, jailed, mistreated, persecuted or left penniless. One was driven from his wife's deathbed and lost all his children.

• The houses of twelve signers were burned to the ground. Seventeen lost everything they owned.

• Every signer was proscribed as a traitor; every one was hunted. Most were driven into flight; most were at one time or another barred from their families or their homes.

• Most were offered immunity, freedom, rewards, their property or the lives and release of loved ones to break their pledged word or to take the king's protection. Their fortunes were forfeited, but their honor was not. No signer defected, or changed his stand throughout the darkest hours.

  "Greatness to spare!" What a powerfully apt title! The pledge of those men was not a perfunctory assent to a flourish of Thomas Jefferson's pen: it was an earnest commitment entered into by thoughtful, pious, and intrepid men. Of the 56 signers, half of them went on to serve in the new nation as state or national legislators and two of them, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as president.

Where are their equals today? Where are the leaders who can bring unity to this nation of a thousand factions and spread hope among an uneasy populace? What has happened? Has the American bloodline run out of the stuff of greatness? I think not. It is likely that the raw material is still pretty good.

Our people are capable of extraordinary accomplishment. During the Gulf War, the accuracy of the weapons in entering and destroying the targeted buildings in Iraq was breathtaking. The knowledge coming in from the space program about newly discovered planets and galaxies is equally extraordinary. Breakthroughs in medicine and cybernetics and agriculture also testify to American ingenuity, industriousness and brain power. There seems to be no limit to the goods and services we can devise and market and distribute and to the prosperity we can deliver.

When dealing with things, America is the wonder of the world. When it comes to human beings, it is a different story. The percentage of people whose lives are marked by serenity and an abiding sense of fulfillment is pitifully small. The inability of Americans to live amicably and productively with each other is reaching toward the point of anarchy.

Crime, youth gangs, illegal drugs, family disintegration, unwed motherhood, pornography, violent and depraved entertainment, suicide, racial strife, malicious political campaigns, cruelly deficient schooling, corrupt officers of government--all these and other pervasive and seemingly insoluble troubles are warning signals that the nation has taken a wrong turn in its efforts to find a brighter future. America has wondered into a wilderness, and we can't find anyone with a compass. We need leaders who understand what has gone wrong, who know where the path is that leads back to solid ground, and who can help us begin the long difficult task of rebuilding a lawful and decent civil order.

First, what went wrong? How did we get into this mess? Down through the centuries, it has been the priests and teachers, the story tellers and oracles (today we call our oracles commentators) who have transmitted to each new generation the ideals and virtues of their own culture. These opinion-makers have instilled in the minds of the young an understanding of what they must do and what they must not do to be acceptable participants in their own society.

In the last three decades, the professors and the clergy, the authors and the columnists have defaulted on this responsibility. In fact, they not only have failed to perpetuate the moral code, they have engaged in a comprehensive rebellion against the civilizational underpinning of America.

The late James Reston, perhaps the most noted journalist of our time, was asked what he regarded as the truly extraordinary events that occurred during his long life. The item he singled out as the most remarkable was the transformation of America "from Puritanism to hedonism in one generation." He could not believe that over the short span of 25 or 30 years Americans had turned their backs on the ideals and standards of Christendom which, from the days of the first settlers, had shaped the American civilization, and in the place of Christendom, had embraced the do-your-own-thing philosophy as the dominant norm. Pleasuring one's self had supplanted duty to God. Selfishness had become chic. I would note that the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine is emblazoned with the title of the feature article "Looking Out for Number One." Selfishness is not only chic, it is institutionalized.

What was Christendom? Christendom was not a nation or a region wherein everybody was Christian. It was a culture in which the generally accepted rules for getting along together were derived from the Bible. Most of the rules were encompassed by the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Lord's Prayer. Since the source of those rules was religious, that is, they were revealed truths, it took an extreme nonconformist to challenge their validity. People being human didn't always abide by those rules, but when they broke them by common consent they had done wrong. The critical point is that everyone understood the individual was always subordinate to purposes more important than himself. He was not free to live as he chose. He was not free to do his own thing. Marriage was the norm for the whole society. It was a permanent bond. The husband had obligations to the wife. The wife had obligations to the husband, and both had obligations to their parents and children. Lawfulness was taken for granted as the guide for everyday living by everyone. If someone broke the law, it was expected that punishment would follow.

During the late 19th century and through the 20th century, the religious basis and the religious justification for the rules faded within the public consciousness, but the general consensus in support of the norms of Christendom remained fairly solid until the mid-1960s. For example in 1964, when the student revolt erupted at the Berkeley campus, the colleges and universities all across the country still had rules which prohibited men from being in the women's dormitories after a designated hour and vice versa. By policy, the universities were registered four-square in support of heterosexual marriage and the ideal of premarital chastity.

When the colleges canceled those rules in response to student demands, the floodgates were opened for the sexual revolution, for the disintegration of the family and the tremendous, tragic increase in children born to unwed mothers. What the academic community and the media and other key opinion-makers seem incapable of understanding is that the family and sexual liberation are mutually exclusive. The more there is of the one, the less there is of the other. The two cannot co-exist.

Just as the family has been devastated by the opinion-makers in academia, journalism, and entertainment, so has the rule of law. When the student radicals ravaged their campuses vandalizing, burning and bombing buildings, destroying library card catalogues, and shouting down speakers, the press was almost universally sympathetic to, rather than critical of the students, and the college leadership for the most part responded in the same way. Very few of the destroyers were caught and punished, and if they were, neither the universities nor the media publicized that consequence.

As a key stratagem in their plan to undermine the American political system, the student radicals decided to enlist America's young people in the use of marijuana because it was an illegal drug, in effect, making outlaws of the college students. The campaign was successful beyond their wildest dreams. And what did the universities do about it? In most cases, nothing. The usage of the illegal drug became commonplace in the dormitories and elsewhere on campus. The odor of marijuana is so distinctive that it would have been a relatively simple thing to nip this practice in the bud, if it had occurred to university officials that obeying the law was important.

That did not happen. The drug culture flourished on the campuses and eventually led to Woodstock, a giant national festival of liberated sexual activity, illegal drug use, and rock music. This was not just a mass offensive against morality and decency; it was, in fact, an insurrection, an open, celebrational defiance of public law. In my judgment, the inaction of law enforcement officers on that occasion made it inevitable that the use of illegal drugs, thereafter would be uncontrollable. Furthermore, the government's approval-by-default of that lawless conduct contributed greatly to an unprecedented increase in the crime rate. Just as sexual liberation and marriage cannot co-exist, so the toleration of law-breaking and civil order are mutually exclusive.

Does anyone doubt that Woodstock was the seed bed for the gangs of lawless youth that have turned cities into battlegrounds? Does anyone doubt that Woodstock set the stage for the Los Angeles riots of 1992? About those riots, U.S. News and World Report told of videotapes which "show how several dozen victims were assaulted and robbed. Sometimes the perpetrators raged as they attacked passing motorists and pedestrians. Yet, as often, they cheered, laughed, and even danced." Think of that! Laughing and dancing to celebrate the brutalizing of innocent people!

Arthur Ashe, one of the noble spirits of our age, in his remarkable book Days of Grace told of his own reaction to the wanton savagery in Los Angeles: "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."

As Arthur Ashe noted, Americans were a people of dignity and morality. Those of us old enough to have lived when there was no need to be fearful of going into the inner city at night, and when nobody sued the neighbors to get rich, yearn for leaders who can help America reestablish the decency and the helpfulness that used to characterize life in this nation.

What is it that such leaders need most? Let's start with a story. It is the tale of a medieval knight returning to the castle at the end of a hard day. He was a mess. He armor was dented, the plume on his helmet had been broken off, he was bloody and sitting skewgee in the saddle. The lord of the castle saw him coming and ran out to ask, "What hath befallen you, Sir Knight?" "Oh, sire," said he, "I have been robbing and pillaging and burning your enemies to the west." "You've been doing WHAT?" exclaimed the lord of the castle. The knight repeated his statement. "But I haven't any enemies to the west!" was the reply. "Oh!" said the knight. And then, after a pause, "Well, I think you do now."

There is a moral to this study. Enthusiasm is not enough. You have to have a sense of direction. James Reston said the direction we have been going was toward hedonism. Robert Maynard Hutchins, the former president of the University of Chicago, put it another way. In 1976, he wrote an essay about the state of the nation in its bicentennial year. His title was "Is Democracy Possible?" His response was "Probably not." He observed that democracy, by its nature, produces individualism among the citizenry and individualism has a way of turning into selfishness. Hutchins thought that process was rather far advanced and perhaps irreversible. Andrew Hacker wrote a whole book about this trend. His summary: "Only a few decades remain to complete the era America will have known as a nation. For the United States has embarked on its decline since the closing days of World War II... It is too late in our history to restore order or reestablish authority: the American temperament has passed the point where self-interest can subordinate itself to citizenship."

Hacker has, I believe, accurately phrased the paramount issue of our time, but it's not too late to change course. Americans aren't quitters.

The focus of concern must be directed away from rights and benefits and entitlements and privileges and self-indulgence and toward resurrecting those virtuous norms of Christendom. That is the direction in which our leaders must take us. It will not be easy. Persuading people to do what they ought to do instead of what they like to do is an uphill effort. And there are many dimensions to such a change. It will require the participation of the opinion-making forces of the culture. It will require the involvement of enlightened politicians. And the specific goals must be articulated with a clarity of thought and a precision of vocabulary seldom encountered in our time.

Let me offer a few examples of the muddled thinking that makes it difficult to develop effective remedies. Probably the highest priority should be given to reestablishing the family, that is, heterosexual permanent marriage as the norm for living in this society. A recent item in the Wall Street Journal stated: "America's divorce revolution has failed. The evidence of failure is overwhelming. The divorce revolution--by which we mean the steady displacement of a marriage culture by a culture of divorce and unwed parenthood--has created terrible hardships for children... It has failed to deliver on its promise of greater adult happiness... "The truth is that every child needs and deserves the love and provisions of a mother and father... As the institution which most effectively teaches the civic virtues of honesty, loyalty, trust, self-sacrifice, personal responsibility, and respect for others, the family is an irreplaceable foundation for long-term social efficiency and responsibility."

More and more public statements are made about the need to strengthen the family and the buzzword on this topic is "family values." People of varied political views endorse family values to prove they are on the right side of this issue. That phrase needs to be cancelled. It only muddies the waters. It has no useful meaning. A family can value a potato. Or group sex. The type of thing that needs to be advocated is premarital chastity, marital fidelity, reintegrating grandparents into family life, and mutual responsibilities of parents and children.

In like manner, the efforts to deal with illegal drug usage are usually self-defeating because the phrase, "drug abuse," is employed by virtually everyone in discussions of the matter. "Drug abuse," implies that some use is all right, that only excessive use is the problem. If the drug is illegal, no amount of use is acceptable. As one who served on the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse and has had an active interest in the matter ever since, I have the impression that the inappropriate phrase is often intentional, rather than a reflection of sloppy thinking. In this era of the do-your-own-thing philosophy, there is a general unwillingness to make judgments about what is right and what is wrong for anyone else, particularly with regard to matters like the use of illegal drugs which have been designated victimless crimes. "Drug abuse" conveniently bypasses the illegality and avoids passing judgment on another person's conduct.

And that leads into one other area: education, where the thinking of the professionals conflicts with the beliefs of much of the general public. As I indicated earlier, the clergy and the teachers used to imbue each new generation of young people with the ideals of their own society and with a commitment to the rules of behavior which sustained those ideals and made the students acceptable members of society. This process is called acculturation.

Acculturation has largely been phased out of American schooling. The justification for the change is complicated, but at its heart is the genuine and valuable principle of the First Amendment. Everyone has a right to his own ideas and to proclaim and advocate his own ideas. Therefore, it is wrong, according to current educational orthodoxy, for an individual or an educational institution to assert that certain ideas are right and other ideas are wrong. That, it is believed, is a rejection of free speech. Therefore, citizenship education, character education and acculturation have been rather thoroughly phased out of the schooling of America's students.

In this cleansing process, nobody seemed to notice that the education principle, which is every bit as genuine and important to the free society as the principle of free speech, was rejected and rendered inoperative.

The educational principle, based on the premise that knowledge has something to teach ignorance, and experience has something to teach inexperience, assumes that the teacher will transmit to the student the most complete and advanced information available on the subject at hand. In the sciences, the student is not encouraged to believe whatever comes into his mind about the principles. The student learns them. Over in the fields of study that deal with how people live their lives and how they get along with each other, the advanced knowledge is known as wisdom. In these fields, the First Amendment has been used as a bludgeon to dispose of wisdom. It is no longer tolerated on campus. Actually, we have two generations of cultural orphans who are simply ignorant of the nature and requirements of a good society. We are graduating highly trained people in science and business technology, but our graduates, almost all of them, are moral and ethical pygmies. No wonder the leadership has little to offer concerning the problems of crime, family disintegration, gangs, and the other social pathologies.

One final observation. There will be those who hope that the American civilization can be regenerated without the religious undergirding which Christendom provided for the development of America's free society. I do not believe it can be done. To try to convince people accustomed to self-indulgence that they should become self-disciplined because it's good for the society will take superhuman salesmen.

On the other hand, the individual who takes a religious affiliation seriously, places God above all other considerations. Such a communicant understands that the individual is always subordinate to purposes more important than his own wishes and inclinations. He is not free to live as he chooses. He is not free to do his own thing.

Obviously, a great many church-going Americans are engaged in what has been called Christianity without the thorns. The "Thy will be done" part of the Lord's Prayer is not consciously brought into daily decision-making. It is a rote plea that slips by without grabbing anything in the mind on the way through. The same is true for the "Deliver us from evil" bit. My guess is that all but a few Christians would be struck dumb by a request to define the evil which the person has just prayed to be saved from. In short, the churches and synagogues and mosques, like the schools and colleges, have much to do in the recivilizing process.

Let's put this entire topic into a large perspective. It is bewildering to contemplate the difficulties Russia faces in rebuilding a workable nation. The erroneous economic and political theories of Marxism have penetrated and distorted every aspect of life in that beleaguered country. The United States has suffered comparable damage to the well-being of the nation because of the triumph of the erroneous philosophies of hedonism and unfettered individualism. Looking at these two national failures, Russia's and America's, it appears that Russia has a better chance at reconstruction because most people acknowledge that Marxist Communism was a disaster. In the United States, the ideological struggle between Christendom and individualism is still in its early stages, and the outcome remains uncertain. Many people see no need for change. Probably a majority of the most influential American opinion-makers favor the hedonism/individualism philosophy. The repair work I have described is not for sissies. It will take men and women of courage who understand what sacred honor is and are deeply committed to it.

And finally, a quote from Friedrich von Hayek: "We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage."