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The soft barbarism of young America

Rod Dreher September 13th, 2011 About the author: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/whats-so-appealingabout-orthodoxy/2011/03/17/ABu3Z6l_blog.html I was thrilled this morning to see the work of one of my favorite academics, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, at the center of David Brookss column today. Smiths latest book, Lost in Transition, sounds like an extension of his earlier academic work on the spiritual lives on young Americans, in which he and his co-author coined the brilliant term Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to describe the religion most young Americans actually practice. Brooks summarizes the new books findings on the moral lives of young American adults: In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured peoples imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now its thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart. Its not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than youd expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. Whats disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues. The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, Lost in Transition, you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just dont have the categories or vocabulary to do so. The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. Its personal, the respondents typically said. Its up to the individual. Who am I to say? Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel. Interestingly, this is precisely what James Arthur and his research team found among urban underclass English youth they surveyed back in 2007. The Muslim peers of these teenagers were different. Heres Prof. Arthur:

We live in a society and both Labour and Conservative governments bear some responsibility for this that provides an environment in which children are much more sensitive about their rights, but less about their duties. So they have a very weak base for the values of civil society. In fact, many of them lack a moral language to discuss moral questions, because they dont have the kinds of traditions, such as religion, in order for them to discuss these matters. So religion becomes less important to them, because through the secularization process, theyre losing touch with the moral traditions of society. No government or other secular tradition, has been able so far to replace the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. Muslim children grow up with the language of morality and virtue provided to them by their religious tradition. They can at least discuss these concepts, because they have the language for it. Many of the white children in my studies throughout England identified themselves as Christian, but what they meant was: Im white and Im English. Theyre using Christianity as a label for something they see as superior. It has nothing to do with real Christianity. Similarly, Smiths earlier work into the spiritual lives of younger Americans (work I was first introduced to via the indispensable Mars Hill Audio Journal, which I cant recommend highly enough) finds that real Christianity is an endangered species, though in a somewhat different way. Christianity doesnt serve young Americans who profess it in the same way it does the English underclass (as a form of weak tribal identity), but rather as what Smith calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism a pseudo-religion in which God is conceived as a cross between a butler and a therapist, always on call to help and to comfort, but making no demands other than that one behave with niceness towards others and does what one needs to do to feel happy and welladjusted. Smith and co-author Melinda Lundquist Denton write that MTD may look like it facilitates tolerance and smooth social relations, but in fact it leaves young people moral cripples, unable to think in moral terms about right and wrong, much less to act according to firm moral principles. Its interesting that Brooks offers no solution to this crisis. Im not faulting him for this in the least. The problem is so huge that it defies a pundits easy prescription. I certainly dont have a clear idea how to solve it. But I have an idea about what we need to be thinking about toward a solution.You may ask: why is it a crisis? After all, these young adults are well-behaved and nice to each other. Whats not to like? The main problem is that the social tranquility is only apparent, a facade masking profound internal weakness. What happens if the conditions that make life in our Yankee consumerist paradise go away? If, say, we have another Great Depression, which we all know is by no means a far-fetched thing? What resources will people have to fall back on to teach them how to think and to act? If all they have are their feelings, then were in very bad shape. You begin to see, perhaps, why Robert Nisbet called the loss of community the towering problem of the age. People learn right and wrong not only from their parents, but from their communities. If they are detached from a strong community (religious or otherwise), they will likewise be detached from the primary source of moral values and reasoning. Notice that Arthur found so striking that Muslim youth, thanks to their strong families and membership in a community that takes its religion seriously, have a vocabulary and a framework for moral engagement. The crucial point here isnt that the Muslim kids believe differently than their nonMuslim peers; its that they can think through moral questions at all.

This is the main takeaway from Brooks column today: not that young Americans arent decent people, but that they are incapable of serious moral engagement with big questions. This is the point of decay to which our pluralistic, secularistic culture has taken us. Interestingly, Nisbet attributes moral decline via the decline of community in part to the final playing out of the logic of Protestantism. From The Quest for Community: When the relations between man and God is subjective, interior (as in Luther) or in timeless acts and logic (as in Calvin) mans utter dependence upon God is not mediated through the concrete facts of historical life, writes Canon Demant. And when it is not so mediated, the relation with God becomes tenuous, amorphous, and insupportable. Mans alienation from man must lead in time to mans alienation from God. The loss of the sense of visible community in Christ will be followed by the loss of the sense of the invisible. The decline of community in the modern world has as its inevitable religious consequence the creation of masses of helpless, bewildered individuals who are unable to find solace in Christianity regarded merely as creed. The stress upon the individuals, at the expense of the churchly community, has led remorselessly to the isolation of the individuals, to the shattering of the man-God relationship, and to the atomization of personality. In Nisbets account, people who start by believing mans relationship to God doesnt need to be mediated by the church (which is to say, the community of believers) end up believing in a religion that is merely propositional, and which, in time, evaporates to nothingness. If a religion is to endure, it has to be embodied in the concrete fact of a community. In a later post, or posts, I will be blogging about Religion in Human Evolution, a terrific and hugely important new book by another great American sociologist of community, Robert Bellah. (Note to David Brooks: Read Bellahs book!). For now, let me mention that Bellah demonstrates how religion has to be embedded within a community to teach morals (and indeed we learn morality from the stories our communities tell and the practices they enact; practice is prior to belief and belief is best understood as an expression of practice, he writes. A religion that becomes disembodied from a community and its ritual practices become a philosophy, at best. This is why I find the rise of the spiritual but not religious crowd among young Americans, as Bob Putnam and David Campbells work has documented, to be so dispiriting. Far from being encouraging (Look, young Americans are still holding on to religion!), it is highly discouraging, because this kind of religion is a ghost that will be dispelled by a gentle breeze. But I digress. As usual. Anyway, todays Brooks column, and, in turn, Smiths work, gets at why I have so much anxiety about community and morals, such that Im overseeing the partial withdrawal of my own children into a community Christian homeschoolers where moral language is thick (as the sociologist Michael Walzer would put it this, as opposed to the thin level of moral discourse general in our society), and the children get a strong moral grounding in the Christian tradition through instruction in and commitment to a religious and moral narrative shared by this particular community. The moral egalitarians call this elitism, and I guess it is, of a sort but I dont apologize for that. My No. 1 mission in this world is to protect and nurture my children,

and that means helping them to become the kind of adults who are faithful to God within our tradition, and who have a strong moral formation with which to make their way through the world. I do not want my children to grow up to be moral cripples of the sort Christian Smith identifies men and women who dont have any idea how to think about right and wrong beyond their own feelings, and a compulsion to be nice. I want my kids to know in their bones the stories of our tradition, and they cannot get that simply from listening to their mother and me. They we need a community to achieve this, and not just any community. Im with Caitlin Flanagan, who wrote: The it takes a village philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it. This and you knew I was going to get to this is the testimony of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose book After Virtue argued that we are now living in a time of moral incoherence. The old stories and symbols no longer work, but we have replaced them with nothing. Every man is his own pope, which means anarchy. We are coasting on the accumulated moral habits of countless generations past, but this cannot hold indefinitely. If right and wrong are seen by society as being simply a matter of personal opinion a stance MacIntyre calls emotivist then society has arrived at a state of barbarism. The condition of barbarism, at least seen philosophically, is one of anarchy and rootlessness, in which one has no direction because one does not know where one comes from, and one does not perceive that there is any particular place to go. MacIntyre argues that traditions live or die by the exercise or lack of exercise of the relevant virtues, in part by sustaining the relationships necessary for those virtues to be lived out. The loss of this community, he argues, is catastrophic for our civilization. In fact, he likens the present day to the last days of the Roman Empire, and says our lack of consciousness of this constitutes part of our predicament. MacIntyre looks forward to a new and very different St. Benedict to appear among us to help establish communities where the virtues can be embodied and embedded amid the darkness. Nisbet, writing in 1953, also likens the atomization of the current age to the fall of Rome, and says: Where there is widespread conviction that community has been lost, there will be a conscious quest for community in the form of association that seems to promise the greatest moral refuge. MacIntyre is correct that a big part of our problem is that people are misled by the niceness (as pleasant as that is) of people into misreading the lack of defenses our society has against anarchy. A smaller but still significant part of the problem is that people imagine that the only alternative is to head for the hills and stockpile tuna and ammo. There is a middle ground. The task of traditionalist conservatives is to think hard about how to form these neo-Benedictine communities (Benedictine not in the literal Roman Catholic monastic sense, but in the MacIntyrean sense), not as utopian communities, but as a practical and sane response to the soft barbarism of contemporary society, to which the Brooks column attests.

Is this a solution? I dont know. Ive been mulling this over for years now, and I cant see how to get from where we are now to where we need to be. If you have any ideas, lets hear them. Or if you have a better idea for forming associations that promise the greatest moral refuge than what I call the Benedict Option, Im all ears. UPDATE: A reader points to this thoughtful comment from James K.A. Smith, who is critical of Smiths position. Excerpt: More importantly, appreciating this pointthat behavior and action (which are surely the most relevant measures if one is talking about morality) are often driven by unconscious habits and desiresgenerates a very different response to the problem. Smith, ever-the-evangelical (despite his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism), still tends to think that what these young people need is more teachingmore religious instruction in doctrines, beliefs, and moral standards. But Brooks own argument in The Social Animal should lead us to suspect that this would be an insufficient response. What is really needed is the education of their loves, and that, as Brooks himself knows, takes practice: it takes the ethos of a community with embodied rituals and practices that inscribe virtuenot just the intellectual capacity to parse some moral dilemma, but the wants that pull us toward ends that are good (see The Social Animal, pp. 111-112). I take James Smiths point, but isnt it also true that if young people arent raised to know what virtue is, they cant be taught to love it? I mean, if these kids believe that the habits and beliefs they endorse are mere preferences, and that theres no way to say why loving A is more or less reasonable than loving not-A, then arent they on just as shaky ground as they would be if their commitment to virtue was only in their heads, not in their habits? I dont think its necessary for a person to have to give an exhaustive account of why lying is wrong in order for that belief to be ingrained in their hearts, and directive of their conduct. But if a person has no sense that the moral law lying is wrong is connected to something beyond personal preference, then his allegiance to that law is tenuous.
Comments:

1. I think that the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism you describe is simply a transitory phase between religious belief and outright worship, if you can call it that, of the physical world. Like in Huxleys Brave New World, the younger generations are coming into this world not just individualistic in such philosophical thinking as they may engage in which is not much, believe me !but not inclined to consider such questions at all. They grow up without experiencing much in the way of any kind of negative consequences or even negative experiences in their own lives. Consider the following: the typical Millennial does not experience much severe (or even non-severe) pain, either physical or emotional. He or she is taught to not think about (judge) the experiences of others, in the name of Sacred Diversity. His life experiences have been largely set at a remove; he watches so much television that vicarious experience is more real to him than real experiences are. His days are deeply structured: preschool, kindergarten that doubles as first grade, play dates, organized activities that leave him unable to plan or do anything for himself.

As an adult, he goes to institutions of higher education that continue, extend and refine this docilization process. When he graduates and enters the real world, he is sent forth into a highly regulated environment, where Rules Are Made To Be Followed, and where his work is followed by endless rounds of brain-numbing television, the Internet and other vicarious experiences. Those who are in charge of society take the resources he generates quietly, through withholding of taxes, so that he does not yell. Reading and other solitary experiences are foreign to him. His churches (assuming he goes, which is increasingly doubtful) tell him more of the same. He goes through pretty much an entire life without personal experience, without doing anything that matters, and is therefore himself inconsequential, until the day he dies. Modern people, I submit, are increasingly becoming less and less of truly Human beings, and more alike to a herd of domesticated animals. Cows That Walk On Two Feet, if you wish to push the analogy that far. Beings that are so perfectly adapted to their environmentan arcology would not be a word out of place here !-that should something disrupt that environment, they would quickly perish. On second thought, perhaps the cow is not a close-enough analogy. A hothouse flower might be better as a descriptive. My solution ? Let the whole thing collapse (which it willmy money is on 15 years and counting), and let such survivors as remain rebuild to avoid a future version of this. The smart ones among us will get ready by remembering and practicing and preserving the basic real-world skills of Manhunting, fishing, reading, dealing with real Human beings-and learning to survive in a world withOUT electronic hypnotics, and WITH real-life experiences. So called Judeo-Christianity is itself a myth, and has nothing to do with Christianity. In fact, the two are like oil and water, and always have been. If the what passes for the intellectual elite in whats left of the Western tradition dont know this, or refuse to acknowledge it out of political correctness, no wonder the youth are so confused and lost. 1. What happens when the distribution system breaks down? Todays Americans mostly rely on others for food production. The American peoples parents and grandparents were farmers. They grew up with cows and chickens. Along with canning vegetables. Todays kids grow up with frozen TV dinners. I think it would be wise if Preachers in communities could be made to understand that the church needs to be more than what it is. It needs to require more participation for the common good of the fellowship. The congregation needs to do more than come to church, listen, donate, shake hands once a week (rinse and repeat). It is time to go back to our agrarian roots.

I think people relying on each other in order to not starve to death would be the most powerful motivation for community along with the sense of belonging, and security. 1. Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel. They may not be the answers to the big questions that you like but they are answers none the less. Kids are rambling and inarticulate, thats part of the package. Its at heart no different then your own answer to the question, I came to Orthodoxy in 2006, a broken man The main reason why Orthodoxy is so attractive to converts, at least to this convert, is its seriousness about sin. I dont mean that its a dour religion it is very far from that! but rather that Orthodoxy takes the brokenness of humankind with appropriate seriousness. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/whats-so-appealing-aboutorthodoxy/2011/03/17/ABu3Z6l_blog.html You felt broken. Orthodoxy took that brokenness seriously. It resonated with your experience. 1. I would certainly echo the worries expressed here about the moral reasoning skills of school-age/university age children. I go into secondary schools on a pretty regular basis to discuss bioethics issues with high school-aged kids. I think that an urgent task is to get students to be willing to accept that better and worse are not subjective concepts, that it is both possible and desirable to view critically their own desires and feelings and actions, as well as those of others, that they do sometimes need to make the dreaded value judgments. My experience in schools is that kids are indoctrinated so relentlessly and cack-handedly with the demand that they not judge or discriminate that they find it very difficult to make appropriate distinctions when the need arises, as it often does. One of the reasons I make my friends crazy with talking about government restrictions on free speech, or the political classes shutting down of particular debates, is that I think it is having a detrimental effect on the critical thinking skills of pupils. When I discuss bioethics problems with pupils, and even with undergraduates (who are at least nominally adults), the most common response is not I dont agree with you. Here are some reasons for my disagreement, but you cant say that! or I find your views offensive or Youre biased. We are raising a generation with the notion that the primary duty of the concerned citizen is not to think well, or to think clearly, or to think critically, but to think correctly in the approved channels.