Antidotes for American Decline

on September 15, 2012

Author and social commentator Os Guinness spoke to the Faith and Law forum for Congressional staffers on Friday, Sept. 7, focusing on topics covered in his new book Free People’s Suicide. Saying that he was born in the era of Winston Churchill and had personally met him, he noted the “gigantic challenges” currently facing the United States. More serious plans to address the future are needed than are now being advanced, he said. He referred to Augustine’s claim that to understand a nation, one must understand what it loves, and America’s love is freedom. Quoting a veteran of the American Revolution, he noted the veteran’s answer to why the war was fought, namely that Americans “always have been free, and must be free always.” Guinness believes that the current “culture war” over traditional authority is really a “second freedom war” after the American Revolution.

While revolutions in France, Russia, China, and elsewhere degenerated into tyranny, the American Revolution produced a free society because it recognized that liberty must be ordered in sustainable institutions. Aware of ancient political philosophy, America’s founders identified three threats to freedom: 1) external enemies (non-existent for the island-continent of America), 2) the corruption of customs in society (they held that even the best constitution cannot save a society from moral decay), and 3) the injuries of time. For the final point, Guinness said that a Christian would add “time and the presence of sin.” In this regard, the “greatest challenge to freedom is freedom.” To properly order freedom, the framers proposed three antidotes to decay, which should for a nation be “habits of the heart”: 1) a commonly held virtue to ground freedom, 2) a grounding of virtue in faith (not necessarily a specifically Christian faith, but the founders were “leery of atheists”), and 3) religious freedom. These “habits of the heart” have been undermined by the Industrial Revolution, which has had the effect of privatizing faith.

One result has been liberal legal theorist John Rawls’ doctrine of “proceduralism,” which relegates faith and character to the private sphere, making the public square a neutral area of secular debate. With moral considerations excluded, public engagement and the results of it tend to become merely an exercise of power, as postmodernist thought emphasizes. Another consequence is that much of the American public neglects America’s heritage of freedom, which was always presented as an American virtue. The exclusion of moral considerations from public discourse and the ignorance that many Americans have of the country’s heritage of freedom results in the alienation of a segment of the intelligentsia, a breakdown in the generational transmission of American values (particularly in the schools), and a breakdown in the transmission of values from natives to naturalized Americans. Referring to nineteenth century painter Thomas Cole’s empire series, Guinness estimated that contemporary America is somewhere between the third painting in the series (Consummation of Empire), and the fourth (Destruction of Empire). Despite having weathered the monumental challenges of Nazis, communists, and terrorists, the greatest danger is that “America will be brought down by Americans.”

Guinness appeared to recognize the challenges of reviving civic virtue in a society that includes both believers and unbelievers, but the path of an apologetic for the old civic virtue of America is one that must be taken if there is any hope of success. Currently there is a collapse of civic education, with too much educational emphasis on science and technology. He noted Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that as “habits of the heart” are lost, more and more laws are needed. And this is in fact happening, as more laws, policies (and lawyers to make them work) are put in place to enforce values not shared in common. But in fact, freedom can only safely depend on voluntary public “obedience to the unenforceable.” One important part of this apologetic is to note how liberal policies have undermined the freedom that liberals value. The state multiculturalism of some European states has resulted in “no-go” areas appearing in those societies, where even the police do not enter. To free something, you need to free it to be what it should be, and that means that character must again be understood as a matter of public knowledge. Guiness concluded by saying that the Greeks recognized three classes of people, idiots, tribesmen, and citizens. Only the last can make a free society.

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