The Nation's Pulse: The Prophylactic Society
Brown, Brian A.
NAT ON' PU LSE by Brian A. Brown The Prophylactic Society A merica seems to be on the mend. A whole range of social pathologies are in retreat. Take, for instance, an announcement by the FBI in...
...But, as the FBI reported in December 1998, the overall crime rate fell by three percent in 1997, making for a 13-percent drop over the past decade...
...The distinction is an important one...
...a tripling in the teenage suicide rate...
...58 February /999 • The American Spectator...
...We should assume the cold view of a pathologist, hope this latest batch of numbers does indicate a renewal, and, in the meantime, maintain faith in the dynamism of the American experiment to confront adversity...
...Abortions, though up in 1996, are down 15 percent from the peak in 1990...
...It was just six years ago that William Bennett's Index of Leading Cultural Indicators reported that from the 1960's to the early 9o's, there was "more than a 500 percent increase in violent crime...
...The twenty-somethings in White-head's focus groups tell her that they feel like "they want to be mothers, but they aren't sure about being wives...
...Are American virtues and the family spontaneously regenerating themselves...
...centage of children living in single parent homes...
...Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine has chastised the right for not recognizing that "conservative values have enjoyed a revival among the young, as divorce and abortion have dropped...
...Citing New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's success, he says "that if an intelligent conservative can get power, where no conservative has been recently, dramatic changes can be made even if most things are not The American Spectator • February 1999 57 deeply moved...
...Chavez first came to Venezuelan and international attention nearly seven years ago, when he participated in an abortive coup and assassination plot against President Carlos Andres Perez...
...The divorce rate dropped in the 9o's, but nearly half of marriages still fail...
...Nothing suggests that a wave of virtue is making young men more law-abiding...
...One reason for the orthodoxy of tolerance is that the 1960's ethic of self-realization required total freedom from the constraints of bourgeois virtues, including the taboo of adultery, and freedom is limited where there is judgment or condemnation...
...Some evidence shows that the recent improvements have less to do with newfound virtue and more to do with demographics and our increasingly efficient containment of social pathologies...
...developed DepoProvera...
...Another such device has been used to reduce crime...
...As long as oil prices were high, this was an almost unique political system—one virtually free of the obligation to make difficult or stressful choices...
...A forgiving mood has taken hold," the Post observed...
...The data may have the apocalypse crowd peeking out of their cellars, but it's premature to announce that America's moral health is on the rebound...
...It's not remoralization, but demographics...
...Two years later, Perez's successor, President Rafael Caldera, convinced that the Chavez threat had passed, pardoned the colonel, in the process restoring to him his civic rights...
...Is this process in retreat...
...Knowing that teenage girls often forget to take their birth control pills—radically reducing effectiveness—and that the implanted birth control device, Norplant, was attacked by Louis Farrakhan as a racistplot to exterminate black people, Pharmacia & Upjohn, Inc...
...Drawing over-confident conclusions about the proximity of a neo-Victorian age does not bring us any closer to it...
...was 645 per 100,000 people in 1997, double the rate of 1985...
...Illegitimacy remains stuck at one-third of all births...
...And teen suicide rates are on the decline as well...
...This is no small matter in a country where 30 percent of the urban population works for the public sector, and where business traditionally has been insulated from competition by sweetheart government deals...
...While it would be best if more of us learned and practiced Aristotelian habits of virtue, "it's important," Mansfield reminds us, "to live in a society or neighborhood where appearances are maintained...
...Thus, when the 8z-year-old Caldera steps down on February 2, his legacy will be an overvalued currency, a huge deficit, and a successor who tried to subvert Venezuela's democratic system —the oldest and most entrenched in South America...
...It reached something of a zenith in the 197o's when two oil shocks sent the price of petroleum sky-high, allowing even household servants to go on shopping expeditions to Miami, and Caracas supermarkets to stock seventy different kinds of pate, imported daily from France...
...For instance, as the number of 15 to 21 year-old males—those most likely to commit crimes—declined in the 1990's, so did the crime rate...
...When morality becomes nothing more than a feeling, it's hardly time to declare the ascendancy ofAmerican character...
...Yet few would suggest that Sally has become more virtuous because she used more effective birth control and didn't get pregnant after scoring with the fumbling football team...
...still leads industrialized countries in a number of these categories...
...When government authorities prohibited the broadcast of a taped jailhouse interview in which he outlined his turgid, contradictory political and economic ideas, the contraband cassette became an instant bestseller at newsstands and cigarette kiosks...
...One thing that any half-competent observer of Western civilization can see for certain is that we are now less able to assert truths, or distinguish right from wrong...
...At the center of the wheel is the president, whose job is essentially to distribute the royalties from oil, the country's number one source of foreign exchange...
...If anything, hyper-individualism is still very strong...
...Between 1996 and 1997, violent crime dropped by five percent...
...a tripling of the perBRIAN A. BROWN is a 1998-99 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow...
...We also have no significant or lasting evidence that the divorce culture we have developed is in retreat...
...Do these statistics suggest that we are learning new habits of constraint, on a path to neo-Victorianism...
...On other critical fronts as well, it seems a bit early for confetti...
...a doubling in the divorce rate...
...He went out to find a job because he was told by governors like Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson to move it or lose it...
...It will be some time before we know more accurately how many of those moving off the rolls are getting jobs and keeping them, or how the system will fare in a recession...
...Devices that limit risk only further reduce the need for responsibility and restraint...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Mark Falcoff The Paratrooper President Caracas T his ugly, sprawling Andean capital — a bad copy of Los Angeles— is the epicenter of Latin America's latest political crisis...
...He was an official observer at the Venezuelan elections as part of a delegation from the International Republican Institute...
...and sentenced to a long prison term, his jail cell became the cynosure of national interest...
...But Mansfield cautions that "appearances are important" too...
...Since 1958 Venezuela had been governed alternately by two political parties, AcciOn Democratica and the Christian Social Party (COPEI), under complicated arrangements which assured that even the loser in any election received a generous share of government patronage...
...The country's vaunted democracy has never been quite what its friends abroad have claimed...
...Although Caldera is a vain, silly, and stupid man—and getting more so with advancing years—he is far from solely responsible for Venezuela's political crisis...
...Divorce is just one example of our new, post-modern habits of rationalizing our way past cultural restraints to enjoy pleasure under the auspices of self-realization...
...The welfare bureaucracy has only begun to fight and in 12 of 14 states where time limits on benefits recently expired, almost 5o percent of recipients were exempted for various reasons, the Washington Post reported recently...
...University of Wisconsin sociologist Larry Bumpass told Newsweek that these relationships last an average of 18 months, which means that "three-quarters of all the children born to cohabitating couples will see their parents split up...
...The shot" is easy to conceal from parents and provides three months of care-free sex...
...A merica's first moral personality prefers tolerance to judgment...
...After just two years, 19 percent of black teens and ten percent of white and Hispanic teens are using it...
...Had Chavez's conviction stood, he would have been ineligible under Venezuela's constitution to run for political office...
...What improvement there has been is not necessarily a sign of greater rectitude...
...Prophylactics aside, what explains the recent improvements is that there have been fewer young people around to engage in these social pathologies...
...Court-martialed MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...On the education front, SAT scores have notched up and the drop-out rate has slowed...
...Commentators have picked up on the trend and begun lecturing nostalgists to wake up and smell the statistics...
...Since 1991 the prison population has grown by more than 6o percent...
...The percentage of out-of-wedlock births has declined slightly...
...There may be a bit of pause," she says, "but I don't see any major shifts taking place...
...Its near loo-percent effectiveness makes it "a driving force behind [the] recent dramatic decline in teen pregnancies in the U.S., especially among blacks," according to the Wall Street Journal...
...It is a snapshot of America's moral schizophrenia...
...Sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who is currently convening focus groups of twenty-somethings to discuss "sex, love and first unions," says that "the Monica Lewinsky-type depersonalized sex—without any sentiment—is increasingly common among kids and that's certainly not a return to Victorian values...
...Many in Clinton's Baby Boom generation are especially susceptible to this schizophrenia because their relativism has come into conflict with their need to provide some absolutes—such as the doctrine that adultery is wrong—to their children...
...Virtue travels from the bottom up, not vice versa...
...In her seminal study, The Divorce Culture, Whitehead showed how divorce went from being shameful to a perceived good over the past 3o years...
...And overall prophylactic use by teenage women for first intercourse rose from 48 percent in the early 8o's to 78 percent today, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute...
...Four million cou44 Devices that limit risk only further reduce the need for responsibility and restraint...
...The incarceration rate in the U.S...
...If the gains can be maintained, the withdrawal of ready welfare —read, the reinstitution of risk—could lead over time to a new ethic of personal responsibility...
...A recent study by the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that the 3o-percent decline in murder coincides with a 53-percent increase in the probability of going to jail for it...
...Over-confidence is premature, especially in light of the country's reaction to President Clinton's alleged felonies—a moral litmus test if ever there was one...
...In National Review, Richard Nadler writes that "the tide is starting to turn in America's culture wars...
...If we are more virtuous, then we need not worry as much about the coming wave of super-predators, about what drug—and its accompanying crime wave —will follow crack, or whether our welfare reform will falter...
...Families are doing better, too...
...Overcome by loyalist forces, then-Lieutenant Colonel Chavez became an instant celebrity by facing the television cameras head-on with the statement, "I am surrendering—for now...
...Take, for instance, an announcement by the FBI in November 1998: Crime is down for the sixth year in a row...
...Unwed teen pregnancies fell 7.5 percent between 1994 and 1996...
...Nor have welfare rolls shrunk because Sam the chronic welfare case was overcome by spasms of responsibility...
...On December 6, 1998, buffeted by nearly 20 years of economic decline, Venezuelans finally turned against their traditional political parties and elected Hugo Chavez Frias, a 44-year-old former paratrooper with no previous political experience, to a five-year presidential term...
...But ultimately government action (or inaction) does not determine whether democratic man is virtuous...
...The divorce rate has dropped, but at the same time more people are living together without marrying...
...We should be cautious about the conclusions we draw from these data, and not just because the U.S...
...1 pies now cohabitate, up from two million in 1978 — a trend that sociologists expect will continue...
...That's what you mean by a good neighborhood, it's not one in which everybody is so moral but it's one in which there are no obvious signs of irresponsibility...
...A recent Washington Post poll found that more than seven in ten said adultery "should not be tolerated," but less than half of those with this opinion said Clinton's adultery was important...
...You'll find that on many fronts the American `character' actually appears to have improved during the Clinton years," Gerald Seib wrote in the Wall Street Journal...
...Philosophers such as Harvey Mansfield and Alasdair Maclntyre (who delineated the descent of morality into emotivism in After Virtue) suggest that we be cautious in drawing conclusions at this point...
...We may have just developed more efficient containment of behaviors without changing the cause of the behavior...
...This view is in conflict with America's second moral personality, the remnants of traditional society...
...The number of families on welfare has dropped by one-third over the last two years...
...56 February 1999 • The American Spectator prison for the crimes they committed...
...If that's the case, it's likely that there's a degree of virtue there too...
...Suzanne Bianchi, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, adds that "the main reason for the decline in divorce—that people are waiting longer to marry—does not necessarily mean we are less focused on the self...
...And criminologists, notably John Dilulio, are anticipating a new kind of "super-predator," more violent than his predecessors...
...more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births...
...For example, teen pregnancy and illegitimacy—the starting points for many social pathologies—have been contained, in part, by a more efficient prophylactic...
...And despite a flood of literature on the topic and vague hopes for religious revivals, no one has convincingly explained how we will return to a pointwhere we are more comfortable acknowledging the existence of certain truths...
...Within a couple of years, however, this age group will again be peaking...
...The success shows there has been an important attitudinal shift among much of our leadership, but it's too early to announce the end of welfare as we know it...
...America's cultural and moral plates move slowly...
...The study also pointed out that criminals are spending more time in The bad news is that the good news is wrong...
...It's deeply woven into the American character...
...The slowing of the crack epidemic, an aging population, and better policing also played a role...
...and a drop of almost 75 points in SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test] scores...
...He'll put a corrupt democracy to its ultimate test...
...The other related reason is the continuing prevalence of the post-modern philosophy of relativism, which makes truth, and therefore judgment, an impossibility...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
