|
The
Topeka Capital-Journal
Civility
report: Declining morals threaten U.S. democracy
By TIM WHITMIRE, AP
from cjonline.com from the Web, November 2, 2007
Originally published:
May 28, 1998
NEW YORK -- By actions as
diverse as turning off their televisions and reforming the tax code, Americans
can reset the nation's moral compass, according to a report issued Wednesday by
a 24-member nonpartisan panel.
The politicians, clergy, academics and activists who wrote "A Call to Civil
Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths" say Americans must find a way to
agree on a public moral philosophy if democracy is to survive.
"If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power," says the
report. "Such a view of reality is, among other things, antithetical to
the western ideal of human freedom. In the long run, it is likely to prove
fatal to the project of republican self-governance."
Among those who served on the Council on Civil Society, which took two years to
craft the 30-page report, are: U.S. Sens. Dan Coats, R-Ind., and Joseph
Lieberman, D-Conn.; academics Francis Fukuyama, Cornel West and John J. DiIulio;
public opinion analyst Daniel Yankelovich; and Boston pastor Ray Hammond.
The group was chaired by Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago
Divinity School.
The report's recommendations include strengthening obstacles to divorce and
reforming the tax code to provide financial incentives to couples who stay
married.
It calls on television broadcasters to police themselves by readopting the 8-9
p.m. "family hour" and on Americans to turn off their TVs one week a year.
Religious institutions are urged to reassert themselves into American life,
while the Supreme Court is chided for trying to create "a society sanitized of
public religious influence."
Government is urged to embrace charter schools and school choice and end state
sponsorship of lottery games, which "purvey a counter-civics ethic of escapism
and false hope."
Without such changes, America is doomed to continue a long-term moral decline
that 67 percent of the public already believes is well under way, the report
says.
"As our social morality deteriorates, life becomes harsher and less civil for
everyone, social problems multiply and we lose the confidence that we as
Americans are united by shared values," the panel writes.
As evidence of the spread of uncivil behavior, the report cites baseball star
Roberto Alomar spitting in the face of an umpire, pop star Madonna announcing
she wants to have a baby but not a husband and political consultant Dick Morris
going straight from a prostitution scandal to a lucrative book contract.
The head of the Institute for American Values, which issued the report, said the
panel struggled as to how to call for a moral revival.
"Democracy's dependence on moral truth was the single most contentious issue,"
said David Blankenhorn, whose group issued the report with the University of
Chicago Divinity School.
Such a claim, Blankenhorn added, "is almost taboo within the academy," where a
pragmatic, rights-based view of democracy holds sway.
Elshtain said panelists agreed moral truths exist but argued as to whether such
truths are theological or secular.
Ultimately, the panel adopted the "natural theology" of the nation's founding
fathers, who enshrined in the Constitution the belief that, as the report says,
"people possess transcendent human dignity, and that consequently each person
must always be treated as an end, never as a means."
Americans must abandon the belief "that whatever the free market produces must
be valid" and that people "are autonomous units of desires, rights and
legitimate values of our own choosing," the report says.
"Only through connectedness can we approach authentic self-realization," the
authors write.
The report is just one of several coming out on the subject. In June, the
Commission on Civic Renewal, chaired by Republican William Bennett and Democrat
Sam Nunn, will finish its report. The Brookings Institution, a
Washington-based think tank, is scheduled to release a book this month on civil
society.
Copyright 1998 The
Topeka Capital-Journal
|
