Dr. John A. Howard is a counselor at the Rockford Institute. His remarks were delivered at the 40th anniversary of the Discussion Club of St. Louis on March 2, 1995. (Titles and organizational affiliations listed here are current as of the date of the presentation.)

At this 40th anniversary it is fitting for us to pay tribute to Harry Langenberg who has served as the midwife, wet nurse, program chairman and impresario of this respected forum. To its platform he has brought wise and talented analysts to speak about the nature of the free society, what the free society requires of its citizens and why the free society is worthy of great sacrifice. The grandeur of that purpose is matched by the magnanimity and persistence of the man who has devoted himself to implementing it. On behalf of countless people, Harry, I offer applause and gratitude.

Let us begin with a story. The family was driving home from church and the father asked his son about the Sunday school lesson.

"Oh, Dad, it was great!" said the kid. "It was a war story. Moses and the Israelites were leaving Egypt, but the Pharaoh's army was coming after them. The Israelites were blocked by the Red Sea, so Moses got on his walkie-talkie and called for air support and the planes came zooming in and totalled the Egyptian army. And...."

"Whoa! Wait a minute! WAIT A MINUTE!" said the father whose mind had been elsewhere, but suddenly registered on what the boy was saying. "I can't believe this! Is that the way the teacher told the story?"

"Well, no, Dad, not really," said the son. "but if I told it like she did, you'd never believe it."

What follows is a conjecture that has been gnawing at my mind for some time. If what I have to say, like the parting of the Red Sea, confounds the usual beliefs and expectations, at least you have been warned.

I quote a story from the New York Times last December, dateline New Orleans. Violence by young people has grown so severe that the police have ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew for juveniles. The epicenter of that fear is the impoverished public housing projects. Here, boys of 14 shoot grown men in drug deals gone bad, children of 11 tote guns too big for their hands, and old people and mothers with small children sleep under beds because big children fire guns indiscriminately just to hear them go "bang." The most recent trend among the young criminals is to prepay their own funerals because they do not expect to live past sixteen. [Rich Bragg, New York Times, "Where a Child on the Stoop Can Strike Fear," December 2, 1992, p.1]

This from the front page of the New York Times. We glance at reports like this, but the stark truths of those inner city war zones are too horrible for the mind to embrace. We don't actually think about such a text. In the same way we don't grapple with the reality of what life has become throughout the country. Over the last few months, the news has reported that three million crimes are committed each year on or just off the grounds of the nation's schools, that one out of every 5000 young white men commits suicide, that more than a third of the nation's college students drink alcoholic beverages with the intention of getting drunk, and that a quarter of the high school seniors have contracted a sexually transmitted disease. These statistics on America's troubled youth mirror the problems of America's troubled adults. Self-destruction, callousness, deception and crime are prevalent in all communities and all vocations. As the Angel Gabriel said to de Lawd in Green Pastures, "Everything nailed down is comin' loose."

Not long ago, I was interviewed on a Wisconsin public radio talk show. I had mentioned that in a truly civilized nation the people can go about their daily lives trusting each other and not worrying about whether somebody is going to harm them or cheat them. The young host of the show asked, "Have we ever had a civilization like that?"

He startled me. He was perfectly serious. I told him that when I was a child in the 1920s, my younger brother and I would walk half a mile, after dark, through a park and across the railroad track to children's programs at the community house. Our parents had no reason whatever to worry about us. Our family would go into Chicago and leave the car unlocked, often with clothes or packages inside. Even when the keys were left in the ignition, the car and its contents were there when we returned. When we went on vacation, we didn't lock the front door--we didn't need to.

The host of the radio show said, "I can't even imagine such a time."

Unfortunately, several generations of Americans are with him on that. They, too, can't imagine such a time. That skepticism about the possibility of a decent, responsible society makes the task of recivilizing America a difficult one, but it must be attempted.

Consider one of the first things taught to people entering computerland. It's a catchy acronym--GIGO. It stands for "garbage in--garbage out." If what is put into the machine is ill-conceived, useless stuff is what comes out. The same thing is true of the human brain. If we feed it junk food we shouldn't be surprised if the judgments produced by the malnourished brain turn out to be garbage--unwholesome and noxious. GIGO applies to the human information processor as well as to the electronic one.

Actually, our age has delivered a radically unbalanced diet of brain food. The science and technology gray cells are performing brilliantly. We are conquering space. We can transplant body organs and build artificial knees that work. We can send instant pictures via fax to Tokyo and Timbuktu. Dazzling new inventions are commonplace. However, the brain lobes that tell us how to live our lives and how to get along with other people, those are the ones that are diseased. We must discover what caused the change of mental nurture that has transformed the lawful and amicable society of the 1920s into the hostile, disordered turmoil of the 1990s.

Of the various social forces that contributed to that change, two of the most powerful are, I believe, the news media and the academic community. Both of them have aggressively insisted on self-serving priorities that destroy the foundations of an ordered community and block the development of emotional and moral maturity. That is a grave charge. I will elaborate on it so that it is clearly understood. It is my observation that the academic community and the news media are relentless in upholding and imposing principles of their respective professions which they judge essential to their work, but which conflict with principles equally essential to the functioning of a free society and to the development of a disciplined and lawful populace.

On the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, the professional associations of the news media sponsored a national conference focused on The First Amendment. Dan Rather gave the keynote address. There were many speeches and panel presentations. The primary message was that the First Amendment as it applies to the media is the cornerstone of America's government and the ultimate guarantor of America's freedom.

During one session, a representative of MS magazine reported that her publication had been banned from the library of a high school in New England. This, she said, was an outrage not to be tolerated. The First Amendment had been violated. She urged everyone present to assist in forcing the school board to rescind its decision.

As an invited observer, I waited for someone, anyone, to offer a word of support for the school board. It didn't happen. There seemed to be uniform agreement that the school decision was just wrong. There is here a disjuncture, a breakdown of understanding, which is of profound importance. A school board, or a board of trustees of a college, bears the full responsibility--legal, educational and moral--for what takes place in the educational program under its jurisdiction. It sets policies governing the educational services and may specify subjects to be covered within the educational program. It is well within its authority to decide certain things are so antithetical to its policies that they shall be excluded from the educational program. This principle of policy-making responsibility is just as fundamental to effective education as the First Amendment is to sound journalism.

In a properly functioning free society, when principles come into conflict, the partisans on both sides will try to arrive at a reasonable accommodation, taking into account the specific circumstances of the impasse. Both acknowledge the legitimate interest of the other and seek a rational resolution. For the most part the American news media acknowledge no such responsibility. Any organization, any project, or any individual taking a position that would set limits on speech or behavior must be thwarted and condemned as a threat to the American free society.

Turning now to academia, I draw your attention to the text of a bronze plaque on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. It reads: Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state university of Wisconsin should encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found. [Taken from a report of the Board of Regents in 1894.]

The search for truth is an essential and praiseworthy undertaking. However, it describes research and research is not education. The Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language offers the following as definitions of education: "The art of educating, teaching or training; the act or art of developing and cultivating the various physical, intellectual, aesthetic and moral faculties; instruction and discipline; nurture; learning; erudition." Education is a process involving a teacher and a learner. It tries to transmit to the student something judged worthy for him to know.

Until quite recently all societies understood that the young people of each new generation must be taught how to live responsibly in their own society. The citizens must be imbued with the ideals of their cultural heritage. They must come to know why those ideals are important. They must be trained in the obligations and the taboos that support those ideals. Students were not only taught what is right and what is wrong, but they learned what a good life is. For most societies, the good life has been defined by religious precepts. It should be noted that this acculturation of the young was not perceived as a harsh discipline to be imposed on the young, but simply an essential part of growing up, like learning to speak the language. These were moral codes and social skills all children learned so they could participate effectively in the life of the nation.

You will recognize that the foundational principle of research, the shield of academic freedom that protects scholarly study no matter how unpopular the subject matter, is in direct conflict with the ancient purpose of character education. The research scholar can say "I reject the entire set of traditional ideals of the nation." Who is to quarrel with his right as a researcher to do so? However, by that rejection, he disqualifies himself from participation in the crucial educational function of acculturating the young. Unfortunately, in most of American higher education, the research principle has become supreme. It has supplanted and done away with the concept of teaching the young how to live responsibly in their own society.

Because the principle of academic freedom constitutes the foremost concern of the professors, any challenge to it must be scorned and discredited in the same manner as journalists deal with challenges to the First Amendment.

The preeminence of this scholarly concern was documented 30 years ago. Professors Gross and Grambsch of the University of Minnesota conducted a nationwide survey of university administrators and faculty members in a study sponsored by the American Council on Education. [Edward Gross & Paul Grambsch, University Goals and Academic Power, American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., 1968, pp. 28-29.] The questionnaire was designed to determine what were the goals of American universities. Seven-thousand two-hundred responses were received and tallied. The top seven goals in order of preference were:

1. Protect academic freedom;

2. Increase or maintain prestige;

3. Maintain top quality in important programs;

4. Ensure the confidentiality of donors' names;

5. Keep up to date;

6. Train students for scholarship and research; and,

7. Carry on pure research.

Way down the list you discover that the 19th goal in order of importance was "preserve the cultural heritage" and even further down the list was "preparing students for citizenship."

This change of academic priorities has been mirrored by a change in the substance of what academic spokesmen have to say on behalf of their institutions. As an example of what used to be, I quote from a letter Princeton University President Harold Dodds wrote to my family when I enrolled there in 1939: 

We are glad to have your son with us and will do our best to guide him so that he may emerge a useful, responsible member of society... We count on your assistance, believing that the influence of home should not end at the college door... I have called to (the students') attention the facilities provided here for the study of religion... believing as I do, that one's moral code establishes the ultimate values of life toward which all intellectual endeavor moves... In our concern for your son, we are not forgetting his duties to his country or to civilized society generally.

Princeton was not unique in having its primary focus upon developing the character of the student. In 1979 the Hastings Center completed a study of the teaching of ethics in the American undergraduate curriculum. A quotation from that report: "Throughout most of the 19th century, the entire college experience was meant above all to be an education in character development and the moral life... The full significance and centrality of moral philosophy... can only be understood in the light of the assumption held by American leaders that no nation could survive, let alone prosper, without some common moral and social values."

In 1952, a truly remarkable work of educational philosophy was published entitled, The Republic and the Person. The author was Kenyon College President Gordon Chalmers. In his concluding comments, Dr. Chalmers says: "The object of education is moral maturity." That declaration resonates in this era of moral and ethical chaos.

Today's university spokesmen sing a different tune, one that is consonant with the supremacy of non-judgmental academic freedom. The goals which they articulate nowadays usually include excellence, innovation and diversity. Those three staples of academic commentary sound worthy and important. However, they wither under a little scrutiny. Stalin was an excellent practitioner of murderous tyranny. If excellence is not applied with the context of a declared scale of good and bad, it is rhetorical cotton candy. It pleases for a moment, but vanishes when you bite into it. Innovation for the sake of innovation is a fool's errand. If mere change is the intention, the odds are heavily against a favorable outcome. Diversity is also without intrinsic value. A human institution, educational or otherwise, can be so diverse, so weighted with incompatible elements as to be incapable of functioning at all. It is, perhaps, not surprising that the supremacy of academic freedom has reduced the campus spokesmen to making their case with concepts devoid of any moral substance.

Well, since education has jettisoned the functions of character education and citizenship training, to whom do these tasks fall? Who will start provisioning that empty half of the brain with civic nourishment? It is logical to turn to families and churches for this purpose. In times gone by both institutions gave primary attention to the formation of moral character. Both were co-participants with the schools and colleges in this process.

In 1956, our son was baptized. When the clergyman had completed the religious rites, he turned to the baby's family assembled at the baptismal font and said something like this to us: This child is a gift from God, a blessed gift. At this time, he is 100% potential. Whether he will grow up to be trustworthy and kind, imaginative and helpful and a worthy son of God, or something less than that will be greatly influenced by you, his family. The kind of church experience he has under your guidance, the support he receives from you for his schoolwork and his out of class activities, and the learning he experiences in his home through precept and example will shape his destiny. It is a grave responsibility. I beg you to recognize how important it is. I pray that you will discover how rewarding it is to guide your son into the paths of honor and righteousness.

That charge to our family, and the letter from Princeton's President Dodds to my parents 29 years earlier, while perhaps unusually eloquent, were merely articulating the common understanding and expectations of educational and religious leaders of an earlier America. The input into the minds of those generations of young Americans resulted in levels of integrity and responsibility and neighborliness and productivity and lawfulness that made America the envy of the whole world. People wanted to come from other nations to live here where an individual's character and performance, not his pedigree, determined his station in life.

Unfortunately, religion and the family no longer have the depth of understanding nor the self-confidence they once had to support them in the task of character formation, since the precepts they used to convey have been the target of challenge and condemnation.

Neither the family nor religion can be sustained except by the subordination of individual desires to clearly specified codes of behavior. Religion, by definition, involves a Supreme Being. If God is not accepted by the communicants as more important than everything else, then what is involved is not a real god nor a real religion. Furthermore, in Christianity and Judaism, the word of God has been made known and is recorded in holy scriptures so that a primary role of the clergy is to imbue their parishioners with the mandates of their faith. The people must be taught to live according to the rules which God has set forth. Those God-given rules are eternal and not subject to change by popular vote.

Obviously, rules of behavior, especially ones from a Supreme Authority, are unwelcome in the halls of non-judgmentalism. Indeed, they are anathema to the journalistic champions of the First Amendment and the votaries of academic freedom on the campuses. Thus, there is a constant drumbeat in the media insisting that Pope John Paul II is out of touch with the faithful for refusing to change the church canon to accord with asserted popular support for abortion, contraception, the ordination of women and the approval of homosexual marriage. One can assume that God established rules for human conduct because He recognized human inclinations to behave in destructive ways. To fault the Pope for not authorizing what the people want is either a hypocritical ploy of ideological warfare, or a demonstration of basic ignorance about the meaning of deity.

The colleges, too, participate in the campaign to discredit standards of behavior. A particularly forceful example is from a commencement address given by Yale's President, Dr. Giamatti. He was distressed when Education Secretary Bennett exhorted the universities to engage in character education. In his reprimand to Bennett, Giamatti said, "The health of education rests on the need to be mindful of the crucial distinction between education and indoctrination. There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are terrorists of the mind." Doctrine and indoctrination, that is, teaching people the tenets of doctrine, have been rendered by the media and academia about as loathsome as the precepts of Hitler's Naziism.

Many Protestant clergy and some Catholics, too, have yielded under this kind of pressure and have backed away from transmitting the commandments of religious righteousness in favor of a touchy-feely kind of Christianity focused on the single virtue of "caring." As you know, caring is pop psychology lingo for compassionate. It is celebrated by the non-judgmentalists, for it does not in any way condemn or interfere with anything anyone wishes to do. Alas, although caring is a virtue, it is altogether useless in the effort to rebuild a lawful and self disciplined society.

The plight of the family in the Age of Aquarius is far graver than most people understand. I am not referring to statistics about such matters as divorce, and unwed motherhood. The catastrophe, as I see it, is that most Americans do not understand that the irreducible requirement of a stable marriage and of effective child rearing is the self-disciplined, self-sacrificing adult. Such a person is light years removed from the non-judgmental, do-your-own-thing ideal of the media and academia. Joyous self-denial, not synthetically inflated self-esteem, is the binding cement of marriage and of the family.

Human sexual drives are so powerful and so combustible that every society has found it necessary to regulate the relationship between the sexes by norms undergirded by taboos and ostracism, and usually codified into formal laws. When the system for regulating sexual conduct breaks down, the family is no longer a viable institution and its effectiveness as the foremost acculturating and civilizing influence upon the young is destroyed. Without a stable environment, too often the children remain ethical morons, doing whatever they please without limits and without conscience.

In the United States, over several centuries, the traditional family was the seed bed of the self-disciplined, self-reliant, productive populace. The institution of the family was sustained by the ideals of premarital chastity and marital fidelity. We need to be reminded that an ideal is a concept of perfection. It can never be attained by imperfect mortals, but that inevitable shortfall cannot be permitted to be a cause for abolishing ideals. The society must have ideals which it cherishes and toward which the people strive because they understand their critical importance.

All this by way of saying that the family and sexual liberation are mutually exclusive. If one of the two is growing stronger, the other is growing weaker. As one might expect, the non-judgmentalists are powerful advocates of sexual liberation. For some time, both the universities and the media have been prominently engaged in normalizing and legitimizing homosexuality. In 1992, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa were the pioneers in providing health insurance, tuition benefits and university housing to same-sex couples. The authority of the university is now registered on the side of sexual liberation and against the family. As for the media, Cal Thomas devoted a column to a meeting of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association held in September of 1993. Its purpose was to persuade America's news media to hire more homosexual writers. The New York Times provided a grant of $40,000 to pay the costs. Among the co-sponsors of various parts of the program were representatives of Time, USA Today, Newsday, and Knight Rider as well as Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Robert MacNeil and Judy Woodruff.

In this thrust, to reenforce, legalize and normalize homosexuality a new vocabulary is essential. The term "lifestyle," was made popular some years ago. It had the effect of demoting the family from its position of the generally accepted norm for life in America to the level of just one option along with live-in partners, homosexual couples and other sexual arrangements of choice. Of course, the word "choice" is itself a key term of non-judgmental rhetoric. The new phrase is "family values." Like excellence, it sounds as if it means something, but it doesn't. Family values can be endorsed by everybody since all those optional lifestyles have been proclaimed to be families.

The campaign to normalize homosexuality is a particularly effective ploy in the advancement of sexual liberation because the vast majority of Americans commendably do not want to be a party to making life difficult for homosexuals or anyone else. What must be thought through is how to establish a boundary between legal toleration and institutionalized social approval. The latter, in my judgment, will ultimately terminate the traditional family as the dominant living arrangement in America.

This view puts me in flat disagreement with my friend William Bennett who has suggested that the gay rights agenda is not as great a threat to America as the frequency of divorce. Divorce, as tragic and socially damaging as it is, occurs within the framework of legal heterosexual marriage. The divorce rate does not redefine the norms of the good life as the gay rights movement is designed to do.

The British sociologist, Dame Barbara Shenfield, in a speech about the Gay Rights Movement, said, "People are entitled to exercise social, as distinct from legal, sanctions against those whose behavior they disapprove. Indeed they cannot be prevented from doing so in a free society... Those who believe that the family is the cornerstone of a good society and the motive force for endeavor and thrift cannot be forced to fraternize with those who openly preach and practice a sexuality totally at variance with the preservation of the heterosexual family."

Now, 17 years after she made that declaration, federal, state and municipal acts have mandated such fraternization, defying and destroying a basic tenet of the free society. Moreover, the non-judgmental opinion-making forces have become so dominant that few people would dare to say publicly what Mrs. Shenfield said.

It is time to summarize this thesis and suggest a course of remedy. The phenomenal increase in crime, juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, gangs, suicide, divorce, family disintegration and other social pathologies over the last 25 years has been in large part a consequence of the failure to teach new generations of Americans how to live as responsible family members and lawful, conscientious, productive citizens.

Two of the primary forces that caused the discontinuance of character and citizenship education have been the news media and the academic community. Their single-minded devotion to academic freedom and First Amendment Rights has led them to impose a non-judgmental world view on the society. In pursuing this course, they have been blindly indifferent to the need for standards of responsible behavior.

The capacity of religious leaders and parents to do their part in character education has dwindled under pressure from the forces of non-judgmentalism, and the deceptive terminology they use. And, finally, the fundamental building block of any stable society, the traditional heterosexual family, is disintegrating as non-judgmentalism and sexual liberation undermine standards of virtuous behavior.

What is to be done? Two and a half centuries ago one of the true geniuses of Western political philosophy, the Frenchman Charles Montesquieu, published a work that analyzed various forms of government. The republic, he said, was probably the most desirable form of government, but also the most difficult, because it could only be sustained by a virtuous populace. It must have a self-disciplined people who voluntarily subordinate their desires and interests to the requirements of the common good. America is in the process of proving the accuracy of his analysis. The dwindling supply of virtue and integrity is causing the breakdown of all the systems of the society.

To halt that disintegration, America's educational institutions must be reenlisted in transmitting to the youth the ideals of America's cultural heritage, and the traits of character that result in an amicable and productive society. At all levels of education, the policy boards and administrators need to rethink what their responsibility is for the character and performance of their graduates. They must insist on reestablishing moral maturity as a primary purpose of schooling.

University personnel should be asked to ponder the conflict between the requirements of academic freedom and the training of young people for virtuous living. If a university judges that its primary mission must be research and the principles of research will remain supreme, then that decision should be publicly known so that prospective students and their parents, and sources of funding can make informed judgments about their interest in that university.

The news media, too, need to be asked a number of questions. Do they agree with Montesquieu's analysis of the need for a self-disciplined people? Will they acknowledge that there are important and legitimate principles of a free society that conflict with unrestrained speech and behavior, and that they have an obligation not to belittle and suppress those principles?

Finally, an all-out effort must be made to spread understanding that the family and sexual liberation are mutually exclusive.

The sum of all this is that our society needs to rethink a number of concepts about what the free society is, and how the institutions of the free society can best sustain it.

I close with a quotation about equality as a two-edged sword, either destructive or beneficial, which is the final statement of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

"Looking back from the extreme end of my task... I see great dangers which may be warded off and mighty evils which may be avoided or held in check; and I am ever increasingly confirmed in my belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous, it is enough if they will it to be so...

"The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst. But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to servitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness." [Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, NY, pp. 704-5.]