GOOD AND PLENTY

The 20th century has been more turbulent. There were labor troubles at the mills starting in 1928; then the Great Depression closed the mills down for a time. Things picked up during World War II. The huge factory in the center of town was converted to make caskets and hospital equipment. When the soldiers returned home, they found a thriving economy. Jobs were waiting at the furniture plant, the rebounding textile mills, the American Standard porcelain plant, and at the nearby defense contractors. I asked some of the older residents whether the cultural upheavals of the 1960s had affected the town much. They didn’t know what I was talking about. They remember the late sixties as a golden age when jobs were plentiful and the factories were buzzing.

The mills began closing in the early eighties. The big factory in the center of town now sits idle and silent, like a 400-yard-long dinosaur slumbering among the stores and houses. American Standard pulled out. Many of the defense jobs disappeared in the nineties. Now the old Victorian houses look shabby, but, given the economic shocks, the town has handled itself well. There’s little sign of outright poverty. People still gather each morning at Rizer’s restaurant to talk about politics and outrageous sports salaries.

This is a place where the social fabric is strong. These are classic working-class Democrats, heirs to the blue-collar social ethic that emphasized hard work, decency, solidarity, and the local parish. There’s also a strong military culture in Plainfield. The most prominent landmark in town is the old tank in the central square next to the monument that commemorates the sons and daughters of Plainfield who gave their lives in this century’s wars. It’s an amazingly long list of casualties for such a small town, a sign of how many local men and women served and continue to serve in the armed forces, right down to the young woman killed in Desert Storm. Every year, the local VFW post puts on the largest V-J day parade in Connecticut.

But last year something strange happened. A businessman from out of town opened a striptease club and porn shop within the city limits. The townsfolk were outraged. Plainfield still has a Town Meeting system of government, and hundreds of people gathered at a series of meetings to vent their anger at the porn invasion. Signs went up on nearby fences, “No Sin, No Topless.” The first selectman, Paul Sweet, tried to come up with zoning regulations and other legal means to prevent the club from opening. After several of his efforts were shot down, he thought of using Megan’s Law to harass the place. The town passed an ordinance saying that every person who walked into the club had to have his name checked against a list of known sex offenders. Needless to say, this sparked a legal challenge, which is pending. But the strip club is open, and the people of Plainfield are still angry. A couple of World War II vets told me that every time they drive by the club they count the number of cars in its parking lot. They’re dismayed to discover that the place does good business. They’re proud to note that many of the plates are out of state.

So far it’s a simple morality tale, a small town invaded by a sleazy pornographer. But American morality tales are never really that simple. In the first place, it should be noted that Plainfield’s economy has rebounded from the plant closings of recent years, and it has done so because of gambling. There’s dog-racing track in town. And just down the highway, local Indian tribes have opened massive casinos, which together have created thousands of local jobs, many of them held by residents of Plainfield. So here we have a town awash in gambling money up in arms because somebody dared open a strip bar. If the place had a tabloid, it might run the headline “Black Jack Dealers Object to Go-Go Girls.”

This is a reminder that American moral standards are multifaceted. There’s been a lot of talk, especially from our heroes on the right, to the effect that America is in cultural decline. In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind described a student culture corroded by easygoing nihilism. In 1996, Robert Bork’s best-selling Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline described a nation depraved by radical egalitarianism. The conservative periodicals ring with lamentations over the state of our culture. In 1995, George Gilder wrote in Commentary, “Bohemian values have come to prevail widely over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery.” This year, William Bennett declared in Hillsdale College’s periodical, Imprimis, “Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos.”

But the fact is, moral standards don’t necessarily rise and fall all at once, in great onslaughts of virtue or vice. The reality is more like mixed trading in the stock market, with standards rising in one area and falling in the next, making it very hard to tell whether the aggregate effect is positive or negative. In Plainfield, for example, the townsfolk are tolerant of gambling and, if anything, more intolerant than ever of indecency. So is the town better off or worse?

And when you look across American society generally, it’s the complicated rise and fall of moral standards that you see. In humor, for example, we have become tolerant of sexual jokes over the past 30 years but extremely intolerant of ethnic jokes. Most would consider that progress, but others disagree. The effects of the 1960s notwithstanding, America has become much less tolerant of drug use over the past few decades. In 1969, drugs were celebrated in song and on screen: “Black and White, A Picture For the Stoned Age” is how one movie was billed. Today that would be unacceptable. And our standards about public drinking are probably more restrictive than at any time since Prohibition. In the fifties, people drank at lunch and got drunk at parties. Now that rarely happens. Reporters used to be hard drinking carousers, if my older colleagues are to be believed. Now we all sip bottled water. On cable, I recently stumbled across an old episode of Match Game 73. Six celebrities were asked to complete the phrase “half-  ,” and the contestant had to guess how they had filled in the blank. He guessed “half-drunk,” which was a good answer because four of the six celebrities chose either “half-drunk” or “half-crocked.” Today if the same Match Game question were asked, the most common answer might be “Half and Half.”

Even an event as powerful as the sexual revolution has not produced a clear-cut shift in standards. On the one hand, sitcoms like Friends have a level of sexual explicitness that would have been unthinkable a quarter century ago. On the other hand, there are signs that attitudes about sexuality and promiscuity are growing more conservative. Twenty-five years ago, the New York Times mixed advertisements for X-rated movies with the ordinary movie ads. You’d have The Sound of Music on the page right next to Deep Throat. Today, the Times doesn’t run any porn advertisements. Twenty-five years ago, there were at least five all-nude musicals on the stages of New York. Last year, Nicole Kidman bared her tush for five seconds and the whole town was titillated. A few decades ago, John Updike was writing chic novels about wife swapping, and Gay Talese was doing a long research project on sexual awareness. Now that kind of stuff is considered juvenile. A generation ago, the upper-middle classes, at least, seemed willing to tolerate adultery to preserve marriages. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, people became more tolerant of divorce. Now, it seems to me, most people regard divorce as a much graver tragedy than they did 15 years ago. The research findings about divorce’s consequences for children have had their effect.

We shouldn’t leap to conclusions about the supposed degradation of our culture. And in making our judgments, we can’t just ignore all the social indicators that are moving in the right direction: abortion rates are declining, crime is down, teenage sexual activity is down, divorce rates are dropping. As the residents of Plainfield demonstrate so plainly, just because people have loosened their standards in one area doesn’t mean they have loosened them across the board.

There’s another complication in the Plainfield morality tale. It has to do with the language the people of Plainfield use in protesting the strip bar: the language isn’t moralistic. When I went around talking to the locals about the bar, I occasionally stumbled on someone who was willing to tackle the issue on moral grounds. One of the World War II veterans complained, “The people who go there are perverts and pedophiles.” But it was clear that most people regarded this way of talking as a faux pas.

In general, the people of Plainfield I spoke to seemed to go out of their way not to appear moralistic. “We’re not trying to infringe on anybody’s rights to do what they want,” first select-man Paul Sweet says defensively. Instead he talks about crime and public safety, “You tell me one good thing that comes out of that industry. It will mean more police overtime costs. It will mean more drinking, more disturbing the peace. It will reduce property values.” Sweet’s language reminded me of New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s largely successful effort to restrict his city’s sex industry. Giuliani never talks about strip clubs and porn theaters in moral terms, even when goaded by an interviewer. Instead he talks about crime, real estate prices, and neighborhoods amenable to upscale business development.

Sweet and Giuliani are taking on an issue that could be cast in moral terms and choosing to discuss it in the most mundane, practical way. In doing this, they are merely replicating the pattern we see across American culture. Today, when we try to teach our kids decent behavior, we don’t come on to them with moralizing, we preach health and safety. We don’t denounce the evils of demon rum, we warn about the danger of drunk driving. Today the mainstream culture does not celebrate chastity as a godly virtue. But you hear a lot about safe sex, and people preach abstinence as the safest form of all. As Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, “The core of the modern sexual code is disease prevention.” All that was once a matter of morals is now profane.

In other words, today we regulate behavior and control carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes. Today in mainstream society, people seldom object to others’ taking the Lord’s name in vain — but watch out if they see a pregnant woman smoking or drinking. Today few Americans mind that stores are open on the Sabbath, but they’d be appalled if they saw a family driving around without seatbelts. Katie Couric would never think of inviting a preacher onto the Today show to praise the virtues of a temperate life. But morning after morning, she hosts health and fitness experts who talk about the need for rigorous exercise, self-disciplined eating, getting a full night’s sleep, and leading a careful, well-regulated life. These physical regimes may encourage moral behavior through the back door. People who follow them are leading lives of discipline and self-restraint, but they’re doing so in the name of their bodies instead of their souls.

Of course, many social critics would say the moral life of the nation is impoverished if issues like pornography are reduced to matters of crime and property values and personal behavior is evaluated primarily on health and safety grounds. Such prosaic discourse ignores the really profound issues: the state of people’s souls, their prospects for salvation, their relationship with God. Morality as mere healthism is meager, superficial.

Nonetheless, it is this modest, prosaic way of setting social standards that prevails in America today, and not just in Plainfield. These are happy, prosperous times. People seem to have decided that they don’t want the status quo roiled with disputes over fundamental principles, with religious controversies and moral crusades. Instead they want a lower-case morality that will not arouse passions or upset the applecart.

Against this backdrop, is America’s non-response to the way Bill Clinton has dishonored the presidency a surprise? The American people have made two separate judgments about Bill Clinton, captured in a USA Today/CNN poll released last week. Does Bill Clinton provide good moral leadership? Seventy-nine percent of Americans said no. Is Bill Clinton honest and trustworthy? Seventy-four percent said no. But do you approve of the way Bill Clinton is handling his job? Sixty-nine percent said yes. Has Bill Clinton’s presidency been a success? Eighty-one percent said yes.

As to which set of concerns is the more salient for Americans, it is not the abstractions like “moral leadership.” Instead, it is the concrete, prosaic factors: the booming economy, the Dow approaching 10,000, the budget surplus, the declining welfare rolls. In an age of peace and prosperity, material facts are more important to people than abstract moralism. You can see this, by the way, in Plainfield. A socially conservative but instinctively Democratic community, the town is split about the president. Paul Sweet, the selectman, when he first heard about the Lewinsky matter, thought Clinton should step aside. But now he is appalled by the way the media continue to humiliate the president, so he is once again a strong Clinton supporter. One of the things everybody I talked to in Plainfield seemed to agree on — whether they loved Clinton or loathed him — was that personal behavior has no connection with public performance. Many people were willing to condemn his perjury, but nobody wanted to moralize about the president’s adulterous affair with a 21-year-old intern.

Some conservatives have argued that this non-judgmentalism is a product of 1960s moral relativism, that the amoralism of the counterculture has seeped into the mainstream of American life. In fact, the counterculture has nothing to do with the attitudes on display in Plainfield and across the country. The counterculture of the 1960s was utopian. It believed in emancipating the individual from repressive social strictures and so elevating him to a more free and natural spiritual realm. It rebelled against bourgeois materialism, always searching for transcendental breakthroughs. Today’s moral attitudes are anti-utopian. They are utilitarian. They are modest. They are, in fact, the values of the class the counterculture hated most. They are the values of the bourgeoisie.

If we are going to blame anybody for today’s dominant morality (if, indeed, blame is what is called for), it’s not Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem we should hold accountable, but Benjamin Franklin, the quintessential bourgeois. The bourgeoisie has always been the social group that preferred the prosaic to the transcendental. Bourgeois man likes to go about his business, his eye fixed on his local concerns — happy family, friendly neighborhood — without bothering himself about grand abstractions or glorious causes. He is uncomfortable with moral crusades and religious enthusiasms. He is never heroic. He has no grandeur. Instead, he is modest, useful, and reliable.

The bourgeoisie has always been the target of vicious ridicule from bohemian radicals for precisely this reason: Its members lead tepid, mediocre lives and are content with sentimental morality, with giving the belly priority over the soul. They never seem to look up from their quotidian concerns to grapple with great truths or profound moral issues. They never seem to get outraged by any injustice or immorality that doesn’t directly affect their own lives. In their hands, Karl Marx noted, “all that is holy is profaned.”

These days, of course, it is not just Marxists and countercultural poets who are offended by the prosaic materialism of the bourgeoisie. It’s also the conservatives. It is conservatives who are urging the American middle classes to rise from their prosperous torpor and get outraged at Bill Clinton. They are the ones exhorting the middle classes to restore the moral climate of the nation, to think about what sort of America we are leaving our children. But for such grand speculative issues the bourgeoisie has no taste, and the mass of Americans are deaf to conservative pleas.

It’s a strange turn of events. For the past thirty years conservatives have been the great defenders of bourgeois values against the assaults of the countercultural radicals. In recent decades, conservatives have praised the businessman, the shopkeeper, the homemaker against the insults hurled by alienated intellectuals. Let us restore bourgeois values and reject the arrogant theories of the elites, the conservatives have said. Well, my fellow right wingers, you wanted bourgeois values? You got’em.

In fact, there’s no cause for alarm. The bourgeoisie may be as dull and morally insensate as the bohemian radicals on the left and the moral activists on the right say it is. But despite all that, the bourgeois has a temperament that almost always leads him to the reasonable path. He may not be heroic, but he is responsible. He has a healthy suspicion of people who radiate certitude. He prefers the familiar to the unknown, the concrete to the abstract, civility and toleration to conflict and turmoil. He has an amazing ability to not react; to just let things slide by that don’t directly affect him. And most of the time it turns out okay. In his own steady, unadventurous way, he has been able to build the country — and sustain its fine communities like Plainfield.