The Moral Compass: Stories for a Life's Journey. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by Terry Teachout

I RECEIVED in the mail a set of galleys of The Moral Compass, William Bennett's new anthology of moral stories, in mid August, at which point The Book of Virtues, Mr. Bennett's previous collection, had been on the New York Times Book Review's best-seller list for 86 straight weeks. O. J. Simpson, Robert McNamara, Greg Louganis, Shirley MacLaine, and Robin Quivers had come and gone, but Bill Bennett, like the Energizer Bunny, was still going strong. This is in and of itself a moral story, captured in the name Mr. Bennett gave the beach house he bought with the royalties from The Book of Virtues: "The House That Virtue Built."

For those who swear by The Book of Virtues, the main point of this review can be summed up in a single sentence: The Moral Compass is to The Book of Virtues as Life with Mother is to Life with Father. Only the order of battle has been changed. Where The Book of Virtues was organized around ten traits of character, The Moral Compass is divided into seven chapters representing the stages of life: "Home and Hearth," "Into the World," "Standing Fast," "Easing the Path," "Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives," "Citizenship and Leadership," and "What We Live By." But architecture notwithstanding, Mr. Bennett and John T. Cribb, his collaborator and co-editor de facto, have gone back to the well and pulled up a bucketful of the mixture as before, right down to the no-longer-surprises: Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilde ("The Happy Prince," not "The Picture of Dorian Gray").

Those who swore at the previous book will doubtless be relieved to learn that its oversights have not been corrected, in particular the lack of adequate biographical information about contributors -- understandable in the case of Wilde, I suppose, but otherwise a real problem for bright children whose interest in a writer has been piqued by his inclusion. Also on display once again is Mr. Bennett's occasional tendency to what might be called reductive naivete. One may take leave to doubt, for example, that Mickey Mantle has any more place in The Moral Compass than, say, Elvis Presley, much less that he should be represented by a ghostwritten selection called "The Bravest Man," which Mr. Bennett introduces as follows: "Here's a hero's hero." Life may be simpler than liberals think, but it is a good deal more complicated than Mr. Bennett lets on, both here and elsewhere in The Moral Compass.

Having said this, I hasten to add that The Moral Compass, like The Book of Virtues, is crammed full of very good things. I like best the biographical stories, which range widely and imaginatively: Dr. Johnson, Beethoven, Jackie Robinson, Louis Braille, Father Damien, Sojourner Truth, St. Augustine. I also like the fact that Mr. Bennett is so completely unapologetic. The Moral Compass makes no bones about the greatness of great men or the centrality of religion; it glorifies marriage, military service, and dead white European males; it even contains a well-chosen excerpt from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the word "nigger" appears six times, a statistic that will surely be used against Mr. Bennett should he ever screw up enough courage to run for President.

It struck me, however, that a 39-year-old father of none might not be the ideal judge of a pair of books whose goal is the moral education of children. So I asked two of my best e-mail friends, both mothers and both conservative, what they thought of The Book of Virtues. The first, a mother of three who lives in a small town in Kansas, responded unhesitatingly: "We own The Book of Virtues, and so do all the families we bought it for as a Christmas present last year. It's good reading and reminding for people who wonder if it's normal to be normal. It isn't usual any more, but I'm convinced it is still normal."

True enough, as far as it goes. But I also heard from a mother of one who teaches Sunday school to a group of black and Hispanic children from a working-class section of Brooklyn, and her reply gave me pause: "I got The Book of Virtues in hopes of some good storytelling material for my class, but didn't find much that seemed right for their curious mix of savvy and ignorance. I once tried explaining to them the location of the Holy Land with a globe, and was getting nothing but blank stares from my sixth-grade New York City public-school students, and finally realized it was the concept of the globe itself that was lost on them."

That is a scary story, and it caused me to think long and hard about what might be the biggest flaw in both The Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass: Could it be that Mr. Bennett is preaching to the choir? Of course choirboys need sermons, too -- but I can't help wondering if Mr. Bennett's next venture into moral education ought to be a bit more challenging. A Book of Virtues for adolescents, say, one that deals frankly with tricky subjects such as sexual temptation. Or a Moral Compass for ghetto children, one that recognizes that those who don't know a globe when they see it are not quite ready for Wordsworth and de la Fontaine. No doubt about it: Bill Bennett's heart is definitely in the right place. Unfortunately, it may be somewhat later than he thinks.