Unchangeable Absolutes

...The first, shaped in her view by corrosive ideas spread in the 1960s, is fatally relativistic, without respect for rules or authority, and therefore all too readily given to deviance and its consequences —everything from violent crime to divorce, drug use, teen pregnancy, and welfare dependency...

...They habitually take refuge," she writes, "in such equivocations as 'Who is to say what is right or wrong?' or 'Personally, I disapprove of abortion, but that is only my own opinion.'" On the other hand, she is aware that the majority "lead lives that, in most respects, most of the time, conform to traditional ideals of morality and propriety...

...In a stemer mood she calls these people "passive, quiescent" and confused...

...They believe in God, but they believe even more in the autonomy of the individual...

...In fact, it could be argued that a better way to start would be with questions—with some acceptance of how differently we I ive now, and how much thornier our moral quandaries often turn out to be...

...Both cut across race, class and geographic lines...

...Himmelfarb's pithy, provocative book celebrates the minority and its ethos as a promising remedy for the many "diseases" afflicting the country...

...But Himmelfarb is too good a historian not to note the other changes at work in the postwar era—changes that also had a transformative effect on American mores...

...Yet, overly simple and certain as her thesis may be, she remains an unusually thoughtful guide to reviving and encouraging a moral sensibility today...

...Yet ultimately, it may not be as dangerous as she believes—a matter not merely of weakness and confusion, but also, more promisingly, of humility and forgiveness...

...more than the New Left, it was the baby boom and the less hierarchical peer culture it created that eroded parental authority...

...The most obvious and effective tools are the family, religion, civil society, and government...

...The challenge is to fashion a moral code that fits the way we live today...

...Doubts about her prescribed remedy arise early on, in the chapter describing how the poison of the '60s "adversary culture" spread through society to create the amoral mindset she now sees as prevalent...

...Thus the consensus that has emerged in recent years about the breakdown of the family, the crisis in education, the need for a stronger civil society and other issues...

...The automobile, TV and the pill have done more to alter America than any ideology...

...The second, a minority that is growing stronger as the '60s fade and in reaction to the dominant trend, is still convinced of the sanctity of traditional strictures...

...Somewhere between half and three-quarters of Americans fall into this unhappy camp...

...for most of us, most of the time, they are still what we aspire to...

...If only it could teach us how to reconcile the family with the increasing "autonomy of the individual," or restore our respect for authority at a time when authority figures no longer hold the power they once did...

...And though she sometimes sounds like an apologist for evangelical religion—insisting, for instance, that it is merely "defensive" and never really tries to convert or coerce others—she also writes thoughtfully about how belief translates into ethics, and increasingly, as it does, sheds sectarianism and intransigence...

...Unfortunately, skilled as she is in marshaling both statistics and moral arguments, in the end Himmelfarb does not persuade...

...It is almost as if her book were good in spite of itself, or in spite of what she perceives to be its central, saving message...

...In a way this is an appealing vision, not only because it is pleasingly schematic— a single, succinct idea that appears to explain so much in the news—but more important because it suggests an easy answer to our moral quandaries...

...But for better or worse the pill has changed all of that, and the right answer is considerably less obvious than it once was...

...For Himmelfarb, anyone who so much as sees the increased difficulty of applying the rules is a shameless relativist— the epitome of evil...

...Despite the author's own austere and often uncompromising values, her book is generally temperate in tone, less alarmist and more nuanced than some other recent jeremiads by social conservatives...

...These are less about what our idea of virtue should be than how, in a democracy, to inculcate and inspire it...

...Traditional values are all we need, it implies, and the backbone to live by them...

...Although a conservative, she is surprisingly willing to wield the power of government, and offers a number of intriguing proposals for doing so with a lighter touch: not through intrusive legislated norms, but by using tax incentives and other inducements that might encourage people to, say, stay married rather than get divorced...

...But we all know, or know about, many more people who don't manage to live by them, and this has inevitably altered our attitudes toward the very idea of a moral code...

...Once upon a time, the decision was easy, mainly because the consequences were potentially so onerous...

...By the end, her passionate concern about the nation's moral state is catching, even if you do not agree with what she sees as the solution...

...Paradoxically, by the end of One Nation, Two Cultures, it is far from clear that the people best suited to helping us are those holding fixedly, without doubts or questions, to the verities of an earlier, more conventional era...

...Once upon a time, most people lived in the same town as their grandparents, no one got divorced, and at least one parent stayed home to take care of the kids—and eventually the older generation...

...Yet surely this is not the same thing as a single twenty-something contemplating sex outside of marriage...

...It is all very well, she argues, to look to mediating institutions like Parent-Teacher Associations, unions and community organizations as alternatives to big government...

...She sees America divided into what she calls "the dominant culture" and "the dissident culture...

...For all her talk of the moral "diseases" that afflict America—an awfully strong word for some of the things, like vulgarity on TV or even divorce, that bother her —Himmelfarb concedes that many in the dominant culture are disturbed by the amorality they observe around them and are, by her lights, coming around on a number of issues...

...The best parts of One Nation, Two Cultures are the least polemical middle chapters...

...Not Himmelfarb, who despite her insight, retreats again and again to her certainty that the only answer is certainty: an unwavering code of unchangeable absolutes...

...On the contrary, the more she makes her case, the more unduly hopeful it seems and the more dauntingly the moral challenges posed by modernity loom in contrast...

...Skilled polemicist that she is...

...Not anymore, and while that does not make family any less important, it makes it a lot harder—especially, in many "blended" situations—to define, let alone maintain the way people used to...

...As much as feminism, it was the shift to a service economy that made it possible for large numbers of women to have careers...

...Besides differing from the majority on a wide range of issues—everything from what should be on television to the role of religion—the group's distinguishing quality is its conviction that there are time-honored, unambiguous, "objective standards about what is good and true...

...The most complex moral and intellectual issues are addressed with winning subtlety and precision...

...Someone else, even someone as concerned about what happened in the '60s as Himmelfarb, might see this as a kind of Marxian synthesis of the '50s and '60s—an attempt to reconcile conventional moral ideals with the freedoms of our era and the questions that inevitably come with them...

...Every now and then Himmelfarb comes close to recognizing this...

...But that won't help very much in fueling a sense of right and wrong unless those bodies offer more than the pleasures of belonging...

...she knows there is a difference between what she calls "the dominant elites"—those in the media, the universities and elsewhere who are the true inheritors of the '60s adversary culture—and ordinary middle-class Americans struggling with some difficulty to find a moral code they can live by...

...Relativism is one word for this changed attitude, and Himmelfarb is right: It is something we as a nation ought to acknowledge and confront...

...Himmelfarb is particularly interesting in discussing how the four different tools of virtue can and should work in concert: how, for example, a democratic polity depends on but then also extends a sense of morality inculcated elsewhere, be it in church or in a neighborhood organization...

...author, "Someone Else's House" When acclaimed historian and social conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb surveys the moral landscape, she comes away with exactly the kind of neat formulation a historian studying a distant period might hit upon...

...If only it were that easy—if only willpower could restore a sense of unquestioned permanence to marriages undermined (and, of course, also enhanced) by the new freedoms many women enjoy...

...Himmelfarb has interesting things to say about all four of them...

...Himmelfarb would never agree, but her book is full of rich, detailed advice about how that considerably more difficult renewal might proceed if it ever got going...

...Scouring the press over the past few years, she has come up with some truly appalling examples of relativism: college students so "understanding" that they can't bring themselves to condemn the horrors of the Holocaust or the practice of human sacrifice...

...It is not that the old rules are wrong...

...Much of what has changed in America in the postwar era cannot be reversed...

...And though it isn't her intention, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for what she describes as their dilemmas: "They find it difficult to transmit their own principles and practices to their children...

...When it comes to civil society—everybody's favorite remedy these days—her tough-minded skepticism serves her admirably...

...Himmelfarb documents these changes, but she does not question how much harder they might make it to apply the moral standards inherited from an earlier and in many ways far less complicated era...

...So, too, with the family...

...Those shifts were first and foremost material: economic, technological, demographic...

...They have to stand for something, and be willing to censure those who don't go along with them...

...If it's part of a person's culture, we are taught not to judge," she quotes one woman saying, "and if it has worked for them...