In a recent interview, Daniel Patrick Moynihan compared the United States of 2000 to Rome in its golden age, mere decades before its fall. “Enjoy what joy we have,” said Moynihan, “and expect things to be worse.” The comparison to Rome is apt: America, like Rome, is enjoying a festival of wealth; America, like Rome, is the only world power, spreading its culture and technology around the globe, sometimes for better, often for worse; and America, like Rome, risks the contraction of soul that comes with material ease — what Tocqueville called the reign of “petty desires” and Francis Fukuyama has latterly described as the triumph of the “Last Man” — a morally stunted individual, unconcerned, unaware, self-satisfied, and small.
For now, America’s moral sentiments are not dead. We are still a compassionate people — even if our compassion is often little more than an extension of our self-love to others, a kind of narcissism for everybody. We are still moved by injustice — even if we reject shame and external judgment as affronts to our autonomy, and therefore devalue justice as a moral idea. But American compassion is unfocused and untested; and moral feeling alone cannot replace what Lincoln called “the sober quarry of reason” or what John McCain, in his failed presidential bid, called the “willingness to commit oneself to causes greater than self-interest.”
Just what these “great causes” are and what they would mean for everyday, affluent Americans remains unclear. The result has been an election about mostly “petty desires” — a battle, it often appears, of dueling insurance men arguing the details of their “plans,” rather than would-be presidents who understand the moment in history they would help define. Both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush have articulated the need “to give prosperity a purpose,” as Bush put it, to seek meaning beyond wealth. But neither has clarified the choices that lie ahead — between rival concepts of technological civilization and American power in the post-Cold War age, between American narcissism and American greatness, between an unchallenged ethic of autonomy and an ethic of self-restraint and self-sacrifice, between an unbridled genetic quest to liberate man from the perils of existence and the restoration of a commitment to reverence and virtue grounded in religion or philosophy.
Neither Bush nor Gore has even suggested to the nation — perhaps for fear of offending the sensitivities of Oprah Winfrey’s America — that there may be dangers ahead. Al Gore may believe we are, as he wrote in his book, on the brink of a “civilizational crisis” because of our degradation of the environment — but this theme has taken a back seat in his campaign to a series of citizen-as-consumer policy proposals, such as releasing more oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. And Bush, the man of faith, has repeatedly shared his commitment to the golden rule — but he has retreated from actually trying to change the minds (or more likely, the feelings) of the nation on moral issues like abortion, preferring to say simply that “reasonable people disagree.” And so, our political leaders, like the American public, shrink from hard judgments at the very moment for which American civilization will be ultimately judged.
The battle of trivialities does not imply that a Gore presidency and a Bush presidency would be indistinguishable. But the election does seem to demonstrate either an unwillingness or an inability to reflect seriously on the meaning of the differences between the candidates — the most obvious ones being over abortion, the Supreme Court, and the environment. Policy questions like paying down the national debt, cutting marginal tax rates, and creating a Social Security lockbox have their own importance, and it is the function of politics to deal with them. But they are not by themselves the substance of politics, if politics is to be about the reinvigoration of the American idea. The terms of the debates on these issues have been pragmatic: Which plan will work better? Which will give me more? Such debates are the privilege of those who live in gilded, seamless times — which, history teaches us, do not last forever. And when times change, we will need more than wonkish minds; we will require, instead, what the Greeks called “practical wisdom,” the ability to see just ends and discern just means, which requires in turn a moral philosophy of the just civilization, the good society, and the good life.
But Americans as a whole have only a remote understanding of American civilization. The best and the brightest have no sense of American history. They neither love America nor know her well enough to criticize her wisely — a frightening prospect for a nation at the apex of its power in the world, and at a time when the blazing fire of American invention demands the leadership of statesmen.
What are the ideological and moral questions of our times? What are the rival concepts of civilization? What would a reformation of American politics and a reinvigoration of the American idea look like? What are the dangers ahead? And does America — do its leaders, its people, its culture, its politics — have the wisdom and spiritedness to deal with them?
These big challenges arise in the context of two events, whose significance we are far from having fathomed: the American victory in the Cold War and the technological revolution, notably in genetics and biotechnology, that is only just beginning.
It is routinely said that “we are all capitalists now.” To the extent that this is true, it means that mainstream America is pro-prosperity. There is a new consensus holding that wealth is good, that wealth-creation is not the product of any single ethic, and that technology, trade, and entrepreneurship are the keys to wealth. Democrats are still more willing to use government — and therefore to restrict business — for certain social ends. But no one in the mainstream of American politics — or in liberal democracies around the world — now believes that government control of the economy is more effective than free enterprise at creating wealth. This has, of course, not always been the case; and it is only the American triumph in the Cold War that has killed the appeal of central control of the economy. Today, those who would expand government regulation or social programs want to do so not to direct economic growth but to promote social ends — such as saving the environment, protecting civil rights, or using the welfare state to help the poor.
Modern Republicans, of course, have always been pro-business and pro-enterprise. Throughout the Cold War, conservatives embraced capitalism — some more enthusiastically than others — as the moral alternative to the totalitarian state and as the key to creating the necessary wealth and power to defeat the Soviet Union. But in the aftermath of the Cold War and with the revolutionary emergence of techno-capitalism, conservatives may need to reconsider the meaning of capitalism and the nature of their capitalist sympathies. Does capitalism necessarily promote the dignity and spirit of the free man? Does the marketplace, for all the self-discipline and ingenuity it requires and rewards, necessarily promote virtue? Daniel Bell argued long ago that capitalism’s success undermines its virtues — that generations born to wealth would revolt against the bourgeois ethic that made wealth possible. But what is happening today seems to be something quite different. The prodigal Generation X has embraced capitalism, hard work, ambition, and technological brilliance while rejecting the bourgeois ethic as a general guide to life. Gen-Xers have remade capitalism and society in accordance with the moral idea of liberation. And so it is not a generational rejection of capitalism that should concern us, but rather the strange fruits and new spirit of capitalism itself.
Consider just one example, the recent collapse of Eli Lilly’s stock value when the pharmaceutical giant lost exclusive rights to the anti-depressant Prozac. What happens, we must ask, when wealth depends on the expanding use (“market share”) of a drug which many conservatives believe erodes moral responsibility and dulls human sentiments? What happens when capitalism operates not simply to ease man’s physical estate through creativity and work but to overcome or repeal the human condition itself? Do conservatives have a political philosophy — a moral philosophy of capitalism for the high-tech age — capable of distinguishing between a mercenary capitalism that is blind to human ends and a civilized capitalism tethered to human ends? Have conservatives become so used to criticizing government in the name of freedom that they no longer recognize the need for conservative governance? Can they see that politics may be necessary to rein in not just the economic inequalities of capitalism but the moral revolution at capitalism’s cutting edge?
The political Left suffers from a parallel contradiction — between its commitment to the unchallenged moral autonomy of individuals and its commitment to the humanitarian ends of preserving the environment and taking collective responsibility for those in need. Feminism promised to liberate women from the constraints of family life in the name of “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living,” in the words of the young Hillary Rodham. But the result of women’s liberation has been to leave those most in need — children — less supervised and attended to by their parents, more alone, and more drugged on anti-depressants than at any time in modern history. The “new class” removed the stigma from divorce in the name of the individual’s right to “move on,” “seek love,” and “fulfill basic needs.” The result has been that almost half of new marriages end in divorce, a misfortune for children that has weakened — indeed threatened — the family as an institution. And in no sector of society has the breakup of the family, especially the mass dereliction of the American father, had a more tragic effect than in America’s inner cities, especially among African Americans, nearly 70 percent of whose children are born out of wedlock.
Those whose views derive from the New Left have passionately — and rightly — sought to defend the environment in the name of reverence for the natural world. But with equal passion, they defend a “woman’s right to choose” — apparently willing to throw reverence aside when it is the mystery of human life that is at stake, rather than the mystery of nature, and when reverence demands not large-scale advocacy but personal sacrifice. In short, because they have abandoned allegiance to a moral order independent of their own preferences, the cultural leftists have undermined the taboos and restraints that were once powerful shapers of human behavior — such as fear of society’s judgment, guilt for wrongdoing, responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. They have “defined deviancy down,” again to quote Moynihan, and the ensuing social disruption has most hurt those in greatest need — the poor, those outside the American mainstream, those trapped in bitterness, sadness, misery, and self-destruction.
In the process of creating this cultural transformation, the cultural Left has embraced technological progress of a sort — call it the “new spirit of American capitalism.” This is the idea that hard work and commercial genius do not require adherence to the “bourgeois ethic” in other realms of life; the idea that science and technology can be part of the “adversary culture” because they advance ideals of autonomy, secular self-fulfillment, and equality and happiness for all through pharmacological and genetic therapy. And so the New Left, once the proud enemy of progress in the name of “meaning” — remember Mario Savio standing on top of a car at Berkeley decrying the “modern machine” — has become a new New Left, which promises to be the most reliable defender of technological capitalism as the best means to self-liberation and an end to suffering. The universal right to genetic therapy will be the natural next step after the universal right to prescription drugs. This explains why, for example, it was Clinton and Gore who vigorously defended the recent decision by the National Institutes of Health to move ahead with stem-cell research on “excess” human embryos. This embrace of genetic manipulation of humans is difficult to reconcile with the Left’s doubts about genetically engineered food. Again, it is a moral inversion that is not ultimately sustainable, if understandable in light of the divided soul of American liberalism.
These cultural contradictions within modern conservatism and modern liberalism will eventually lead to a cultural and political realignment — which will demand new moral and political thinking for the bio-tech, post-feminist, post-Cold War age. The key debate will no longer be over the size of government — that, for now, has been decided — but over rival concepts of American civilization.
On the one hand, one can envision a civilization built on the principle of “technology towards autonomy” and secular fulfillment and justice through genetics. This civilization will be brilliant but narcissistic; technologically potent but morally obtuse; divided between Over-Man technologists and Last-Man patients. It will attempt to live beyond nature — its progenitors already toss about the term “post-human” — eliminating the fear of death, the complementarity of the sexes, and the human experience of guilt through perfected, virtual, this-worldly experience. It will be at times a playful civilization, at times a darkly calculating one, weighing the value of life in purely utilitarian terms. If it fails, it will do so because its people will not find it worth defending — or because they will have lost the capacity to restrain the unforeseeable powers it has unleashed.
The alternative is a civilization that redeems modernity through reverence — without recklessly pretending to dismantle modernity wholesale or rejecting the good things modernity has to offer. This civilization will recognize the need to create wealth, but rather than making a god of capitalism, it will try to reconnect capitalism to moral ends. It will embrace compassion — its people will seek to care for one another, for the poor, for the sick — but reject bio-technological manipulation as a corruption of human nature. For America, the world’s greatest power, this civilization of reverence will be outward-looking, willing to defend its ideals abroad when doing so is possible and prudent. This means standing up for “American greatness,” which in turn requires the use of American power, always after a careful weighing of means and ends. It will require the wisdom and tragic sense to balance technological might for the sake of principle with technological humility for the sake of human survival. Above all, this civilization will entertain no illusion that life is easy or pure or mystery-free. It will embrace the mix of tragedy and joy, eternity and history, that is the human condition, and recognize that family, community, and religion are the best ways man knows to redeem the tragedy and celebrate the joy.
It is uncertain whether America’s political, civic, and religious institutions are equal to undertaking such a mass reformation; or whether modern civilization has already gone too far down the path of “technology towards autonomy” to turn back or even pause. This is the riddle confronting American governance. The outcome of the present election will be far from dispositive; neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush can turn the tide alone — and if the campaign is any indication, neither has the right combination of discernment, charisma, and statesmanship for such a fundamental undertaking. A longer-term answer depends on many things — the reinvigoration of political philosophy, the emergence of American leaders of the stature of Washington and Lincoln, and unforeseeable turns of events around the world. But whichever direction our civilization leads, it is America that will be judged, and rightly so, for it is America that has opened up the possibility of a brave new world, and America alone may have the capacity to change course.
Eric Cohen is managing editor of the Public Interest.
