American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Gun and Bible

  At the 1978 Harvard commencement a gaunt and towering figure out of the Russian past denounced not the evils of Soviet communism, as many in the audience had expected, but the American culture in which he had taken refuge. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a powerful attack on the ideas and symbols most Americans held sacred—liberty, liberal democracy, even the pursuit of happiness. “Destructive and irresponsible freedom,” he said, had produced an “abyss of human decadence”—violence, crime, pornography, “TV stupor,” and “intolerable music.” Solzhenitsyn had long been sounding the tocsin against freedom Western style. Civil liberty, he had said almost a decade before, had left the West “crawling on hands and knees,” its will paralyzed, after it had supped “more than its fill of every kind of freedom.” Indeed, to regard freedom “as the object of our existence” was nonsense.

  If the Harvard audience responded to most of Solzhenitsyn’s stinging attack with a measure of composure, it was perhaps in part because the university was by tradition a forum of protest. Graduate student Meldon E. Levine, delivering the English Oration in 1969, at the height of the student protest, in that same Harvard Yard, had challenged his audience of alumni, faculty, and parents to live up to their own standards of equality and justice, courage and trust. The students were “affirming the values which you have instilled in us,” he said, “AND WE HAVE TAKEN YOU SERIOUSLY.” And almost two centuries before, President Samuel Langdon of Harvard had lamented, “Have we not, especially in our Seaports, gone much too far into the pride and luxuries of life?” Was it not a fact that “profaneness, intemperance, unchastity, the love of pleasure, fraud, avarice, and other vices, are increasing among us from year to year?”

  For more than three centuries, indeed, Americans had worried about other Americans’ loss of virtue. Over the years, the definition of virtue— and of vice—had taken many forms. During the twenty years or so following President Langdon’s protest of 1775 the most widely accepted idea of virtue was the subordination of private interests to the public good, demonstrated by direct, day-to-day participation in civic affairs. What were these private interests to be suppressed? Certainly the blasphemy and drinking and carnality and pleasure seeking that Langdon complained of, but even more the commercial avarice and frenzied moneymaking that promoted those vices and ultimately corrupted the republic. Vice and virtue were locked in a never-ending struggle for the soul of America.

  The framers of the Constitution had enjoyed few illusions as to how that struggle might turn out, for their political and military battles in the 1770s and 1780s and their study of political philosophy had left them pessimistic about the nature of man, in contrast to its potential under the right circumstances. They had limited faith in the capacity of their fellow Americans to exhibit the classical virtues of self-discipline, courage, fortitude, and disinterested public service, even less faith in the power of Calvinism’s austere morality to control appetites and passions, and only a faint hope that a benevolent tendency within human nature to sociability and community, as articulated by the Scottish philosophers, would prevail under the raw conditions of American life. Unwilling to pin their hopes on human virtue, they had fashioned rules and institutions—most notably the Constitution—that at the very least would channel and tame the forces of passion and cushion the play of individual and group interest.

  Two centuries later, Americans were more divided than ever as to the cause and cure of vice and the nature and nurture of virtue. Ostensibly these matters were left to the deliberations and preachments of churchmen, but they too were divided in numberless ways, even within their own denominations. Families, schools, the military, the workplace, the tavern added to the variety of ethical codes. And beyond all this, American men and women professed moralities that they did not follow in practice. In the mid-1950s Max Lerner found that the moral code prescribed that “a man must be temperate in drink, prudent in avoiding games of chance, continent in sex, and governed by the values of religion and honor.” A woman must be chaste and modest. But this formal code had been replaced by “an operative code which says that men and women may drink heavily provided they can ‘carry’ their liquor and not become alcoholics; that they may gamble provided they pay their gambling debts, don’t cheat, or let their families starve; that a girl may have premarital sexual relations provided she is discreet enough not to get talked about or smart enough to marry her man in the end; that husband or wife may carry flirtations even into extramarital adventures, provided it is done furtively and does not jeopardize the family; or (if they are serious love affairs) provided that they end in a divorce and a remarriage.”

  Even as the moral code was cloaking “real sex” during the 1950s, unsentimental biologists were ripping aside the shields between sexual pretension and practice. In 1953, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female a few years after their similar study of the human male. In a huge sample of respondents, over 90 percent of the males and over 60 percent of the females had, by their own account, practiced masturbation; about half the men and over a quarter of the women reported having had some homosexual experience; 8 percent of the males and about half that percentage of females admitted some experience with bestiality. Tens of millions of Americans, in short, were sexually “perverse,” according to the moral code. The Kinsey studies recorded the assertion of 71 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women that they had practiced premarital intercourse in their teens; indicated that adultery and illegitimacy were far more common and widespread than commonly supposed; reported that many boys of low-income families claimed to have had intercourse with scores and even hundreds of different girls. So tens of millions of Americans were “immoral” by the standards of the received morality.

  If the practitioners of “vice” found considerable solace in the Kinsey survey, the shock of the findings further fragmented moral attitudes in a society that was already “half Babylonian and half Puritan,” in Lerner’s phrase, further divided a religiosity that had both a “soft,” tolerant side and a “hard,” condemnatory side, in John P. Diggins’s. Now that their worst suspicions had been vindicated as to how people behaved sexually no matter how innocently they talked, media moralists and religious fundamentalists renewed their campaign against permissive laws and standards. Civil libertarians, in turn, sprang to the defense of books, films, plays, television programs, and, above all, magazines such as Playboy and later Penthouse and the raunchier Hustler that depicted and exploited sexual behavior and sexual fantasies.

  Both sides—all sides—appealed to the symbol of Freedom. Sexual liberationists spoke up for the freedom to defy the majority and indulge in deviant forms of sexual behavior in their pursuit of happiness. Moralists pressed for censorship of sexually explicit expression, but they had to deal with libertarians in their midst who opposed the heavy hand of the censor and contended that family, school, and church should do the work of combating sexual “misbehavior” and its depiction.

  The conflict over erotica and its expression cut deep into the bone and tissue of American society. Feminists, united so passionately over so many burning issues, were divided over censorship of pornography. Some argued that the depiction of violent porn should be shorn of its First Amendment protection. Sexual degradation of women, rape, harassment, battering, sadism—the mere depiction of such misbehavior influenced men’s behavior. Others contended that “evil thoughts” did not necessarily lead to evil action, that the problem was the depiction not of sexual violence but of sexual violence, that damage to women could just as well be caused by violence without sex.

  The “experts,” as usual, differed among themselves. A 1970 commission found no evidence that “exposure to explicit sexual materials” played a “significant role” in causing delinquent or criminal behavior among youth or adults, while a 1986 Reagan Administration commission found ample evidence of a causal link between violent pornography and aggressive behavior toward women.

>   Some feminists, conceding that thought did not always lead to action, turned to antidiscrimination laws as the vehicle for curbing the depiction of sexual violence. Antipornography feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon proposed an ordinance granting any woman a cause of action if she had been coerced into a pornographic performance and granting all women the right to bring suit against traffickers in pornography for assault or other harm alleged to be caused by pornography. Others, organized in the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), protested that the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance was vague in its definition of pornography, and it was largely on this and on First Amendment grounds that a federal judge invalidated an enactment of the ordinance in Indianapolis, a decision which the Supreme Court later affirmed. FACT, according to philosophy professor Rosemarie Tong, contended that the antipornography feminists had left the core question begging: “What kinds of sexually explicit acts place a woman in an inferior status? An image of rape? An image of anal intercourse? An image of the traditional heterosexual act in which a man’s body presses down on and into a woman’s?” What worried FACT most, according to Tong, was the refusal of the ordinance “to recognize the degree to which what we see is determined by what we are either told to see or want to see.” The issue was not only content but intent and context.

  Once again a policy issue had ended up—even among friends—as a sharp difference over fundamental values. Feminist antipornographers demanded to be free of masculine domination, “compulsory heterosexuality,” depictions of the degradation of women; they asserted that sexual equality between men and women was integral to equal rights and legal and political equality. The feminist sexual liberationists demanded their own kind of freedom and warned, in Tong’s words, that an antiporn campaign “could usher in another era of sexual suppression” and “give the moralists, the right-wingers, the conservatives a golden opportunity to limit once again human sexual exploration.” Again American values were proving inadequate as guidelines to policy.

  It has long been accepted in international affairs that nation-states are not required to observe the same standards of behavior—of mutual respect, reciprocity, understanding, honor—expected of the relationships of individuals in ordered societies. “If we had done for ourselves what we did for the state,” Cavour said, “what scoundrels we would be.” Niebuhr distinguished sharply between “moral man” and “immoral society.” Kenneth Thompson observed that morality within the nation “can be manageable, convincing and attainable,” while “the international interest is more remote, vague and ill-defined.”

  Religious leaders, however, have not been so willing to let nation-states evade the demands of morality and mutuality. In colonial times Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Shakers spread widely their teachings about peace and nonviolence. During the next century Congregationalists, Unitarians, and leaders in other Protestant denominations set up numerous “nonresistance” societies, culminating in the formation of the League of Universal Brotherhood in 1847. This organization, which after a few years boasted a membership in the tens of thousands, carried on its condemnation of all war in mass publications and at international peace congresses. In the early twentieth century the Catholic Church, preoccupied with efforts to establish itself in sometimes alien or nativist communities, had only the barest involvement in the American peace movement. While some Catholic groups embraced a tradition of social dissent and constituencies of the poor, “a patriotic inclination to celebrate American society; a fear of criticism arising from marginal social status and the general Catholic respect for authority,” in Mel Piehl’s words, dampened Catholic radical social efforts.

  American Catholics, numbering fifty million by the 1980s, were broadening their participation in American politics, higher education, business—and peace movements. No longer did they need to prove their patriotism by uncritically embracing an aggressive foreign and military policy. While Protestant, Jewish, and other religious leaders also stepped up their peace efforts, American Catholic bishops effected an amazingly rapid transition from support of the U.S. effort in Vietnam in 1966 to condemnation in 1971 on the grounds of its “destruction of human life and moral values.”

  The swing of the bishops toward a strong peace stance was expedited by an earlier shift in the Vatican. Even in the face of aggressive cold war behavior by its mortal enemy, Soviet communism, the papacy called increasingly for steps to control the nuclear genies. In his historic 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris, John XXIII, recognizing the “immense suffering” that the use of modern arms would inflict on humanity, declared it “contrary to reason to hold that war is now a suitable way to restore rights which have been violated.” Pressure was exerted within the American church by peace-minded groups, most notably the United States section of the international Catholic organization Pax Christi. After a faltering start, Pax Christi became well organized during the late 1970s and by 1983 had chapters in all fifty states and a powerful corps of leaders, as exemplified by Bishops Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit and Carroll T. Dozier of Memphis. Operating outside the institutional church but stirring Catholic consciences “from the left” were individual militants such as former nun Elizabeth McAlister and priests such as the Berrigan brothers.

  In the spring of 1983, while the Reagan Administration carried on a foreign relations rhetoric that vacillated between the aggressive and the bellicose, the Catholic bishops issued their “Pastoral Letter” entitled “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” The statement was at once traditional and radical, Patricia Hunt-Perry has noted—“traditional in the sense that the bishops grounded their pronouncements solidly in Catholic dogma, Biblical text, and the teachings of Catholic saints such as Augustine and Aquinas,” but radical in its application of traditional doctrines to the urgency of a “whole human race” facing, in the bishops’ words, a “moment of supreme crisis in its advance toward maturity.”

  “We are the first generation since Genesis with the power to virtually destroy God’s creation,” the bishops warned. “We cannot remain silent in the face of such danger.” The letter assigned to Americans the “grave human, moral and political responsibilities” to see that a “conscious choice” was made to save humanity. “We must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945.” The willingness to initiate nuclear war “entails a distinct, weighty moral responsibility; it involves transgressing a fragile barrier—political, psychological and moral.” Striking major military or economic targets “could well involve such massive civilian casualties” as to be “morally disproportionate, even though not intentionally indiscriminate.”

  In general, the bishops underplayed legal, technical, and policy arguments in order to speak all the more powerfully with their collective moral voice. Indeed, the final draft eliminated earlier references in the main body of the text to such specific issues as the MX missile. But the bishops did propose that the “growing interdependence of the nations and peoples of the world, coupled with the extragovernmental presence of multinational corporations, requires new structures of cooperation.” They boldly confronted one of the toughest questions—that of the “just war”—and reviewed the conditions necessary to it: just cause, declaration of war by a competent authority, comparative justice, right intention, last resort, probability of success, and proportionality between destruction inflicted and the aims to be achieved. And they expressed special concern about the impact of the arms race—“one of the greatest curses on the human race”— on the poor.

  In the debate that followed, it was clear at least that the pastoral letter had raised the moral tone and urgency of the nuclear issue. George Kennan called it “the most profound and searching inquiry yet conducted by a responsible collective body into the relations of nuclear weaponry, and indeed of modern war in general, to moral philosophy, to politics and to the conscience of the nation state.”

  A decline in courage was the
most striking feature in the West, Solzhenitsyn had said at Harvard, especially “among the ruling and intellectual elites.” America’s refusal to win the Vietnam War, he added amid un-Harvard-like hisses, was the ultimate evidence of the loss of willpower in the West. Solzhenitsyn could hardly have been pleased by the position of the Catholic bishops—all the more because they were religious leaders who should have stood militantly united against Soviet communism. But Solzhenitsyn could hardly have found the American kaleidoscope of ideas, groups, parties, and leaders anything but baffling. The head of the European Economic Community, Jacques Delors, made a more penetrating observation of American world policy as Reagan neared the end of his first term. He saw an “increasingly aggressive and ideological” Administration carrying “a bible in one hand and a revolver in the other.” In truth, though, Delors could have said this of most presidential Administrations since World War II.

  Washington’s human rights policy exposed the division and confusion about foreign policy in the American mind. In December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly had adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” This elevated document laid out three sets of fundamental rights. First, proclaiming that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” it set forth the historic intellectual and political freedoms—“the right to life, liberty and the security of person” and the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Then a set of procedural guarantees including provisions that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” or “be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

  Finally, a set of basic economic and social rights: “to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment,” the right to equal pay for equal work, “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” the right to free education, at least in the lower grades.