UP FROM CYNICISM

...As Schwartz puts it in his introduction to the book: It is a consequence of bad ideas about human nature and the proper balance between individual freedom and responsibility that Patrick [the teenager to whom Schwartz addresses his book] and millions of his peers are growing up without their fathers...

...In recent years, this sort of demonstration has been the best weapon in the neoconservative arsenal...

...In A Return to Innocence, Schwartz builds his argument for a moral universe on a medico-mystical premise—that innocence is what the word literally means in its Latin root: an in-nocere, a doing of no harm...

...It's also why, if they're shrewd, conservatives will take for their big-think, social-policy guru in the next presidential election a writer who understands the relation of virtue to effective truth—if not Schwartz himself, with his remarkably cogent primer on the examined life, then someone much like him...

...As a research psychiatrist at UCLA School of Medicine, and the author of Brain Lock, a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder, Schwartz is what might be called the conservative answer to Steven Pinker...

...And who believes in ethical reasoning when the common good is believed to be more a social construct Norah Vincent is a free-lance writer in New York City...

...Schwartz, however, delves deeper into the meaning of the word, and tells us that it actually translates as "action" or "deed...

...But that proves something of an advantage in A Return to Innocence, for Schwartz makes the old moral truth sound almost new...

...You can ask for adherence to traditional values simply because they're traditional, or you can show that virtue is right because it works...

...Do good, and you will do well...

...A surrogate father to a teenage boy, Patrick Buckley, Schwartz addresses the young man's daily concerns about girls, sports, schoolwork, and friendship, giving practical advice on how to handle responsibly the situations teenagers face...

...Good metaphysics turns out to be good physics and, more to the point, good civics...

...As C. S. Lewis once suggested, living sinfully is like running your car on the wrong gasoline: It's not so much bad morals as bad facts...

...Nonetheless, for those who haven't despaired of their times, the advantage is marginally on the side of moral demonstra-tion—a strictly pragmatic take on virtue, an instrumental argument from cause and effect: Actions and ideas have consequences...

...the good works better than the evil...

...Thus, according to Schwartz, Buddhist meditation and "mindfulness" turn out to be successful by empirical demonstration, their efficacy scientifically provable...

...You want to change the world...

...than a social contract...

...And that, in a nutshell, is Jeffrey Schwartz's moral philosophy as he expresses it in his new book, A Return to Innocence...

...Your karma is what you do, and, as Schwartz reminds us, according to a familiar law in physics, every action entails an equal and opposite reaction: Your deeds come back to you and become your fate...

...Indeed, in relating it to public policy, he bolsters the truth of his old religious claims with new hard science...

...The result is a deeply moving book topical and true enough to keep the average adult and the average hungry-minded teen thinking about it long after they finish reading...

...In making his case, Schwartz draws heavily on Buddhist philosophy, using familiar if often misunderstood terms to elucidate his arguments...

...Bear in mind that Schwartz conveys all this as simply as possible, in a series of letters to a sixteen-year-old boy...

...And that makes controlling our cravings easier the next time around...

...It has been most effective at showing the effect of personal responsibility...

...The Buddhist piece of this is, of course, very old information and of uncertain resonance in the West: The Judeo-Christian tradition puts it more familiarly and probably more accurately—or at least with greater sophistication than any Westerner can grasp in Eastern terms...

...Who listens to a nag when tradition is a dirty word...

...If his book's title has you thinking that Schwartz is some sort of neo-Vic-torian—a lightweight version of William Bennett—you'll be pleased to find that he's much more like a non-sectarian Michael Novak (who, as it happens, has just published a similar book with his daughter Jana, entitled Tell Me Why...

...In a world as upside down as ours, neither an appeal to the past nor a demonstration of moral logic is likely to have much effect...

...Show, don't tell...

...To protect ourselves, and to begin to repair the damage to our world, we urgently need to be armed with good ideas—ideas firmly based on true and accurate information about our human nature and the conditions that encourage the best in us to thrive...

...When we use higher functions—willpower, for example—to control lower functions like hunger and the sex drive, we actually lay down fresh neurological tracks in our brains...

...False, seductive, destructive ideas that appeal to the worst in us and flatter it as the best have led to epidemics of drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, crime, and violence...

...If that leaves A Return to Innocence a little bit thin on the intellectual end, it is also what makes it such an affecting book...

...But he can also leave us to ponder the place where the hypothalamus meets the Four Noble Truths, where Buddha meets Edmund Burke...

...The sometimes deep and complicated information comes in bite-sized bits of paternal advice...

...It's quite another to show that virtue is its own reward...

...Then change yourself and, by example, change the people around you...

...The word "karma," for example, is one most of us in the West understand to mean "fate...

...Schwartz's prose has the same gentle, fatherly feel as Novak's, but he permits himself more theological latitude...

...Relying on his expertise about how the brain really works, Schwartz shows that mental discipline can actually change cranial biochemistry...