NEW STARTS FOR AMERICA'S THIRD CENTURY

American history shows a kind of ebb and flow in national purpose and social activism. The progressive era was followed by the quiescent, conservative Harding, Coolidge and Hoover regimes. Then came the great frenzy of the New Deal and the war, which were succeeded by the calm Eisenhower years. Kennedy, in his phrase, got "America moving again"--right into the hyperactive Johnson era. During the Nixon years there came another pause, domestically at least (until Watergate spoiled the calm). That pause has continued under Gerald Ford.

These periods of rest may be necessary, yet the feeling usually arises that urgent business is being left unattended, that an idle nation (idle in the sense of ignoring self-improvement and reform) does the devil's work. Indeed, during both the Hoover and Eisenhower presidencies, these pauses were accompanied by ambitious attempts to focus on great and worthy national goals.*

A similar effort, under way since December 1973, is now beginning to bear fruit. In the course of the next year, the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, a group of 42 prominent Americans formed by Nelson A. Rockefeller, will publish twelve volumes of monographs, studies, essays and research papers that attempt to describe our national problems and, in some cases, offer solutions. The commission fell on hard times when, nine months after its creation, its founder moved to Washington to become Vice President. The panels designated to refine the background studies met rarely. Instead, the commission is publishing the background studies themselves, produced at a cost of more than $4 million.

When the commission was created. Rockefeller warned: "We can no longer continue to operate on the basis of reacting to crisis. [We must] take command of the forces that are emerging, to extend our freedom and well-being as citizens and the future of other nations and peoples in the world."

TIME Correspondent John Stacks reviewed the six volumes so far finished (but not all published). His conclusion: the commission, by its own grand standard, failed. But it failed in a fascinating way. In one area of national concern after another --economics, ecology, raw materials, food, health, population, energy, trade, technology, national security--the commission paid some of the best minds in the country to wrestle with the contemporary condition. (Six more studies on various regions of the world will be completed this year.) By and large, the commission, unlike the two predecessor studies, has been able to offer no broad, self-confident program to guide America through its third century, but it has defined our situation. Of all the volumes, the most noteworthy and compelling is The Americans: 1976, edited by Irving Kristol and Paul Weaver. Kristol is Henry Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University and co-editor of the quarterly The Public Interest; Weaver is an associate editor of FORTUNE and a former assistant professor of government at Harvard.

In 16 essays, the book examines our current conceptions of "human nature," of what we regard as "right" and "natural" for people to be and do--and thus of what will work when applied to society. If the commission expected that the book would produce some clear-minded view of man's nature, providing directions of where we should be heading, that hope was dashed. "The purpose," say Kristol and Weaver, "is to make us all aware that we have more theories of human nature than we know what to do with, and that we have a tendency to slide from one to the other in an unthinking way, or to hold incompatible beliefs without facing up to that fact." Add the editors, borrowing some words from Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain: "The sad truth of the matter is that we haven't been talking prose all of our lives; much of the time we have been talking gibberish."

What emerges from these essays is the sense that in nearly every important field, ideas that dominated for half a century or more are giving way. New notions are being pursued and older ideas, discarded earlier in the 20th century, are being reexamined. In area after area, there is a striking lack of consensus. In commenting on that phenomenon, Kristol and Weaver put the best face on it: "To understand our confusion is to achieve a minor but crucial triumph over that confusion. Even to understand our confusion as confusion, rather than as something else, is no negligible achievement."

Herewith a sampling from the Kristol-Weaver volume:

SOCIAL POLICY

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recently resigned U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, former Counsellor to President Nixon on domestic affairs and author of a variety of national policy proposals in three Administrations, discerns a national schizophrenia regarding the basic guideposts for social policy. He points out that earlier in this century, the concept of human nature as essentially rational, responsible and autonomous was dominant. That notion was a fundamental tenet of classical liberalism and thus supported the political view that government's role should be severely limited. Laissez-faire economics was one expression of this philosophy.

That view gave way, especially among Democrats, urban residents and the well-educated, to what Moynihan describes as the "therapeutic ethic." This is the idea that human behavior can be changed and the welfare of a nation improved by "curing" the social ills that provoke uncivilized action. It sounds like an updating of Jean Jacques Rousseau, but Moynihan actually traces the idea to Freud and the view that human behavior is basically shaped by past events, not by anticipation of future rewards or punishments.

Through the 1960s, the extension of this thought led inexorably to the belief that it was not individuals who deserve blame for their actions, but "society" that is the culprit. If society is at fault, then society must be changed. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program was the highest recent expression of that view. But even Johnson, who Moynihan says never thoroughly abandoned his ingrained sense of holding individuals to account, was disappointed with the results; he claimed that "kooks and sociologists" had ruined his plans.

"The difficulty of the new doctrine, as with the old," writes Moynihan, "lies in the uses to which it is put. If man was once seen as too autonomous, the therapeutic ethic depicts him as too dependent. If the tendency was once to exaggerate rationality, it is now the opposite--to exaggerate dependency."

The reaction--spending more and more public money on public programs aimed at alleviating national frustrations--could go too far, Moynihan warns. At the moment, that leaves us with only a vague sense of what we should do, of what direction social policy should take. That implies a lessening of faith in government intervention and suggests a need for caution before engineering new interventions in our lives.

CRIME

Out of a similar philosophical confusion--and a similar experience of devoting great amounts of money and national effort to little avail--comes the muddle over what to do about crime. In earlier days, crime was simply punished. Offenders were locked away or done away with, without much thought of reforming the criminal. In the 1930s the view grew that crime was caused by environmental and personal factors. Notes Harvard's James Q. Wilson: "Since crime was 'caused,' it could not be deterred." But it could be treated, like a case of the measles. There followed programs in rehabilitation, psychotherapy, job training, community halfway houses and probation. Yet crime still rises.

Concludes Wilson: "We have learned, I should think, that there are limits to what government can accomplish in human affairs generally and in criminal affairs particularly. It cannot export democracy, remold human character, revitalize families; nor can it rehabilitate in large number thieves and muggers."

Then what are we to do? Just lock up the offenders, suggests Wilson, as in the old days. There should, he says, be "equal deprivation of liberty for equal offenses."

MENTAL HEALTH

"There is no great wave of self-assurance sweeping this nation," writes Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, "and it is especially hard these days even for psychiatrists to draw a firm line between the sensibly troubled and those beside themselves for utterly irrational reasons."

For generations we were confident that we could distinguish the sane from the insane. Now that confidence is vanishing, and the decade of the '60s did much to erode it. Nations and societies went crazy, as they had in the past, but this time they were collectively judged to be abnormal: society was blamed, not its members or its leaders. British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing took that view a step further, enunciating that in a crazy world even wildly abnormal personal behavior might be considered sane.

Coles rejects Laing's vision of mental illness as mental health. But he concedes that his profession is unsure of itself and of its own definitions. Asks Coles: "Exactly what, if anything, is 'mental health'? Who is 'mentally ill'--as opposed to the rest of us, who make do, if not prosper psychologically? Is the whole subject of 'mental health' a phantom--a means by which different people, possessed of different notions about life and its purposes, turn on one another categorically, morally and even, it can be said, politically: I am 'healthy' (good, saved, favored by God or fate) and you are an outcast of sorts?"

Coles offers no solutions, only more questions. "Under such circumstances, how are the keepers to hold on to their keys with any confidence or make decisive policy decisions, and how is anyone to be sure he is sane--and not a fool, whistling in the dark?"

THE FAMILY

From the founding of the nation and well into the 20th century, the family was seen as the keystone to both personal and social wellbeing. Writes Sociologist Sheila M. Rothman of the Center for Policy Research in New York: "The fundamental assumption was that the good order of society depended finally on the good order of the family, its ability to instill discipline and regularity in its members. Success in this mission augured well for the safety of the republic. Failure jeopardized the experiment that was democracy."

But that view has changed. What Rothman calls the "discovery of personhood" leads often to the notion that happiness rests not with the family unit but, perhaps, in opposition to it. The rapidly changing sense of women's proper roles, the uncertainty over children's rights, doubts about the very worth of having and rearing children, the ever-loosening legal bonds of marriage--all these have brought into question, in Rothman's phrase, "the legitimacy of the family."

To some, the antidote to the dissolving family in America is state intervention. Once the family was seen as sacrosanct and no place for the presence of government. But concern about the weakness of the family has bred demands for state action--such as child-care centers, aid to dependent children and juvenile court systems--to strengthen it. Yet state intervention has meant interference in the lives of poor families, not middle-class families, says Rothman. Such intervention has tended toward coercion, largely through the welfare system. "The challenge confronting social policy toward women, children and the family over the next decades is awesome," she observes. "There is little reason to be confident about the future."

EDUCATION

Through the past two decades, the great American faith in the necessity and efficacy of education has been extended to include universal access to college, virtually regardless of aptitude. That affirmation of the belief in self-improvement, if not human perfectibility, has now fallen on hard times. In its place is a wave of "antischool" feeling and growing questions about the worth of ever-lengthening periods of education for the masses. In no small part, this skepticism stems from the recession and the resulting difficulties young people have in finding jobs. It also grows out of continued failures to improve dramatically the lot of the "disadvantaged," who demanded and are getting, in some measure, "compensatory education."

Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, rejects the antischool trend. But he concedes there may be good reason for the rising disbelief in the ultimate educability of everyone. Undifferentiated schooling, writes Adler, may be "doomed to defeat by differences in the children's economic, social and ethnic backgrounds and especially differences in the homes from which they come."

If our hopes for education were overblown, he asks, does this "require us to abandon the effort to carry out the educational mandate of a democratic society, or does it require a democratic society to undertake economic and social as well as educational reforms to facilitate carrying out that mandate?" In short: one social program has failed, so let's turn to another.

But is there anywhere to turn? In a separate essay, Historian Donald Fleming of Harvard reports on the intellectual war between those who see man as chiefly a product of his environment and those who credit heredity. If, as Fleming maintains, those who credit heredity are growing in influence, that raises some troublesome questions. If the wonderful hope that we can change man by changing his surroundings is fading, what is left but genetic engineering to accomplish what even Adler admits education has not been able to bring about--a thoroughly improved human being?

That prospect may be too bleak. For one thing, a possible, if intangible alternative to education and genetic engineering may lie in spiritual renewal. For another, it may be necessary to decide that human beings are simply not going to be "thoroughly improved," but that we must work with them as they are.

The Kristol-Weaver volume and the other five reports from the Rockefeller Commission offer a few prescriptions for action. But they are either so grandiose as to be suspect (a plan for energy independence, from Physicist Edward Teller, is at least twice as ambitious as Richard Nixon's Project Independence, which was itself unrealistic), or so obvious as to be relatively useless (birth control as the answer to the population problem, more agricultural productivity to solve the food problem). As analyses of the problems confronting the U.S. and of the driving ideas that motivate its people, however, the reports are valuable. They do enable us, as Kristol and Weaver note, to understand our confusion as confusion, and to see ourselves in a state of pause, not collapse. Concludes Moynihan: "There is little we have lost which we ought to seek to regain; nor yet have we lost so much as to assume a further decline is now irreversible."

While Moynihan and others question the size of our government and the extent of its reach into our lives, none suggests undoing the federal, state or local apparatus that runs the country. Nor do they suggest abandoning the compassion and the hopes for improvement that motivated so many of our efforts to help the poor, educate our people, and solve the other problems of our society. They do point out that many of our tools seem no longer appropriate. Many of the commission's reports are saying that the promise of modern rationalism--"hand over human society to the experts and they will devise solutions for all of our problems"--is simply too extravagant and has been recognized as such by the experts themselves. In the wake of an age of bewildering change, the reports imply, a certain modesty of purpose and a period of contemplation might be very beneficial.

By and large, the conclusions to be drawn from the volume seem "conservative" rather than liberal. But the study indicates that people are both simpler and more complex than such a formulation suggests--and than the experts have recently assumed. The message is conservative only in the sense that it dares to invoke the concept of human nature at all--a concept long dismissed and derided. Different though the various views of human nature may be, the very use of the term implies that there is something permanent and irreducible in man and that his resistance to outside manipulation is a kind of triumph. This does not defeat or dismiss the experts, but it does suggest that henceforth they may have to concentrate more on what is permanent in man than on what is changeable. Could it be (though this is not specifically said in the study) that this will have to include a return to the notion of good and evil, and therefore to the value of rules and discipline, and perhaps even to a faith in something outside man? Rutgers Sociologist Peter Berger suggests that what he calls the crisis of modernity requires some very new programs, a fresh start. Needed for this, he believes, is less concern for the abstraction of liberal ideology and a "renewal of respect for the concrete structures that give meaning to the life of the individual--family, church, neighborhood, ethnic group." Theoretically, at least, he believes that this should be possible "within the framework of the American creed, which has shown itself to be very probably the most flexible ideological framework in recent human history."

* Out of the Hoover years came Recent Social Trends, a report published in 1933 by a presidential research committee. The more recent study, Goals for Americans, was published in 1960 by the President's Commission on National Goals. It was partly financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.