by James A. Bacon
I’m normally not one for sermonizing. Hellfire-and-damnation preachers have been lamenting the moral decline of America for the past, oh, 300 years, and yet we survive. But sometimes I wonder. Could our country be experiencing a moral decline? It certainly feels so.
Let me make one point really clear. I don’t equate “moral” decline with a decline in god-fearing religion. I am, after all, an atheistic-leaning agnostic. But one can be an atheist-agnostic and still lament the disparagement of the old bourgeois virtues as enshrined in the University of Virginia’s honor code — you shall not lie, cheat or steal — and find despair in the normalization of depraved behavior. Let me offer four data points from the headlines of today and yesterday that inspired this jeremiad.
Teachers in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Houston stand accused of boosting standardized test scores by such means as correcting student papers and even helping students cheat themselves. As scary as the cheating itself is the excuse-making that followed. Said one Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, as quoted in the Washington Times: “The teachers and principals who changed test scores did something unethical and probably illegal, [but they were] caught between a rock and a hard place. We’ve created a climate that corrupted the educational process. The sole goal of education … became boosting scores by any mean necessary.”
That’s right — the cheaters are really victims of society’s unreasonable expectations. It comes as little surprise, then, that the American Association of School Administrators decided not to retract the “Superintendent of the Year” award given to Atlanta school superintendent, Beverly Hall, in 2009. “No charges have been brought,” said an AASA official. “There’s no conclusive evidence that she’s been found guilty of any kind of unethical behavior.”
A related phenomenon is the spread of plagiarism, which happens to be the topic of an essay by Thomas Bertonneau, a professor of comparative literature:
Plagiarism is one more index of the long- heralded Decline of the West. More and more students go to college; fewer and fewer of them are actually capable of rising to the higher learning. Colleges and universities, operating by the enrollment economy, actively seek students and bend or ignore admissions criteria to recruit them in numbers. Aggressively cynical and uncivilized, the popular culture promotes crass self-interest and narcissism.
The sitting vice president of the U.S.A. once, when a senator, plagiarized a campaign speech from his British member-of-Parliament counterpart, but he is the sitting vice president of the U.S.A. … Rampant plagiarism is an alarming moral problem. The destruction of shame makes theft and fraud thinkable options for an increasing number of students.
Ah, the destruction of shame. I think Bertonneau is on to something. The trait of being “non-judgmental” is widely deemed a prime virtue today. But when no one judges another’s behavior, shame disappears. When shame disappears, society loses its main sanction against all manner of vice.
Now, let’s move on to the normalization of depravity. The Huffington Post‘s “weird news” carries a story about the arrest of three brothers in a small Minnesota community for allegedly murdering their mother. States the account: “Jacob Cobb, 17, allegedly strangled mom Tamara Lee Mason on the living room floor when she suggested that her sons play the board game [Yahtzee] … last Christmas.” The boys hid their mother’s remains in a garbage can in a shed until the frozen ground softened enough to bury her in the backyard.
“It is very strange,” said Stevens County Sheriff Randy Willis. “She wanted to play Yahtzee and they didn’t. That seemed to be, in their minds, what expedited her sudden demise.”
Weird? Strange? It strikes me that we have raised a generation of sociopaths. These weren’t urban youth raised in a single-family household with a crack whore for a mother, whose despicable behavior would inspire all manner of excuse-making and cries for forgiveness. They were (to all appearances) small-town, middle class kids.
One final story, this one also from the HuffPo: A Southern California woman was arrested for cutting off the penis of her estranged husband. Catherine Kieu Becker allegedly prepared dinner for her husband and drugged him to make him drowsy. While he slept, she tied him to the bed. When he awakened, she cut his penis off with a knife — and here’s the piece de resistance — “threw it into the garbage disposal, turning it on as she did so.”
It has been nearly 20 years since the infamous Lorena Bobbitt chopped off her husband’s penis in a fit of spontaneous rage. A jury found her not guilty due to insanity arising from sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Her husband, Wayne Bobbitt, had his penis surgically reattached and proceeded to take a feature role in two porn movies. His brief porn career lead to a stint on World Wrestling Federation’s Monday Night Raw television program in the company of another porn star who had almost had his penis dismembered.
The Bobbitts gave us a two-fer — (1) a jury could not hold Lorena responsible for her action on the grounds of temporary insanity, and (2) the absence of shame in our culture enabled her violent, philandering husband to trade on his notoriety. After two decades of therapeutic blame avoidance, Ms. Becker’s case has not inspired anywhere near the shock and controversy that the Bobbitts’ did. Indeed, where Lorena threw her husband’s penis out the car window, she at least felt remorseful enough to later retrieve it. By contrast, Ms. Becker, tossed the offending organ in the garbage disposal, flipped the switch and then, when the police arrived, told them that her husband “deserved it.”
In mining the rich vein of dishonesty and corruption, I would be remiss not to mention Wall Street, a moral cesspool if ever there was one. The new ethic in America’s financial sector today: “If it’s not illegal, it’s OK.” Even if it is illegal, serve your time in jail, give a portion of your ill-gotten gains to charity and hire a publicist to get you on television. We are, after all, a country without shame. We will eagerly rehabilitate anyone’s reputation (unless the offender is a politician of the opposing party, in which case the old rules still apply).
What, then, becomes of a country in which educators set the most reprehensible example for our youth, in which the most successful know no bounds in their quest for the accumulation of wealth? What becomes of a society in which no one can be trusted and, therefore, no one trusts one another? What becomes of a country that has not only defined deviance down, but has all but abandoned the idea that deviance even exists? Is there any hope for us?
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