A social conservative credo - Thirtieth Anniversary Issue

Public Interest, Fall, 1995 by Charles Krauthammer

Accordingly, they have had to resort to a substitute language: medicine. Medicalized morality has the twin advantages of appearing authoritative and value-free. Liberalism can now address the problem of cultural decay thus. We cannot say what's right or wrong, good or bad, but we can say what is harmful. Hence, sexual promiscuity is to be eschewed not because it is wrong but because it is "risky", a risk to limb and life, as is drug abuse and the like. The right sex is safe sex. Teen violence is a "public health emergency." And the man to lead the fight against teen pregnancy is a doctor, the Surgeon General. He did such a good job with smoking. Why not with sex?

To be sure, some liberals have so rejected the connection between morality and social breakdown that they are reluctant to apply even the smoking model to allegedly immoral behavior. President Clinton's first Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, was so sanguine about teen sex that she wanted it taught. ("We've taught children in driver's ed. what to do in the front seat of a car but not what to do in the back seat of the car.") She was so reconciled to drug use that she spoke favorably of legalization. But she was, at the same time, a ferocious enemy of tobacco. She was quite reconciled to kids having sex in the back seat of a car, it seems, so long as they did not light up afterwards.

But such views are no longer politically sustainable, even in a Democratic administration. Accordingly, in making Dr. Henry Foster his subsequent choice for Surgeon General, Clinton played the neo-liberal, promoting Foster as just the man to fight teen pregnancy.

This is an advance, a recognition that teen pregnancy and illegitimacy are social pathologies in need of a campaign to change behavior and attitudes. But, by assigning the job to doctors, by framing the issue in terms of public health, by confusing morality with hygiene, the point is missed.

Yes, the victims of teen violence, promiscuity, drug abuse, and suicide end up in the emergency room. But so do the victims of hurricanes and war. Hurricanes and war are many things, but they are not medical problems. Neither are teen violence, promiscuity, drug abuse, suicide, and the other indices of social decay. Moreover, when you appeal to the vulnerable young to avoid these behaviors on the purely self-regarding health grounds that they are risking damage to themselves, you are preaching to a constituency that is not apt to buy your cost-benefit calculations.

Virtue's return

The medicalization of vice - the campaigns for safe this and safe that - has gone as far as it can go, and that is not very far. The result is that we are seeing a "remoralization," if not of society, at least of language. Encouraged by such books as William Bennett's The Book of Virtues, Gertrude Himmelfarb's The De-Moralization of Society, and James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense, the frank use of the old-fashioned language of virtue is making a comeback.

Establishment discourse has been forced to readmit moral categories into the debate about social decay and deviancy. The change is visible and rapid. One can almost chart it by comparing the reception accorded Dan Quayle's 1992 assault on Murphy Brown and that given Bob Dole's on Time Warner and Hollywood just three years later. Quayle was pummeled by establishment media. The response to Dole was: Why aren't the Democrats saying this too?