Cacophony About the American Character

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 2, 2004

Byline: Woody West, INSIGHT

It is a principle, or conceit, that intellectuals should "speak truth to power." There is an assumption among the liberal chattering classes that they are especially equipped to define truth in any given context.

There now is a furious cacophony about the essential "truths" of who we are as a people and the basic tenets of our society. The Declaration of Independence expressed brilliantly the ideals of the new republic, of course, and the Constitution defined a profound governing structure that is the envy of the world. But the particular means to achieve these splendid ends have never had the benefit of unanimous agreement. Indeed, during the American Revolution itself, it is estimated that one-third of the population advocated independence, one-third were loyalists, and one-third were neutral or unsure of their allegiance.

Until recently there was no profound disagreement about what "America" represented and espoused. These shared beliefs were expressed popularly in history and national myth, in the songs we sang and the poems and speeches that youngsters committed to memory. The Gettysburg Address, for instance, was memorized and absorbed by generations of youngsters, and the Pledge of Allegiance was routine in school.

Today, however, there is fierce polemic: Has the United States become "one nation, two cultures," as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb worries? Is there a "red and blue America" - as vote-distribution starkly suggests? Is this a multicultural or a pluralistic nation? Has America become poisonously polarized? A study by the Pew Research Institute contends that Americans increasingly are divided between liberals and conservatives, traditionalists and modernists, over race and ethnicity, and in religion between fundamentalist and conventional congregations.

Touchy stuff. We've always been a fractious bunch, to be sure, and it may be the case, and likely is, that these oppositional categories largely are an exercise by academics, pundits and others who clamor for hours every day on radio and television and in the press. The entertainment medium to which "news" has devolved requires a loud "us-and-them" template.

There is, though, another arena of "speaking truth to power" - with power in this instance referring to the many millions who daily do the heavy lifting that keeps America cranking and in whom the final power of governance resides. Those who speak this truth remind us forcefully of the consensus that bonded a diverse population generation after generation.

One of these is Victor Davis Hanson, the fifth generation of those who have worked a family farm in Selma, Calif. He has a solid reputation as a professor, a cofounder of the classics department at California State University-Fresno, and an author of books on the ancient Greeks, the agrarian roots of Western civilization, higher education and, recently, an extended essay, "Mexifornia," about the effects of vast illegal immigration [see the last word, Sept. 30-Oct. 13, 2003]. His book Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (2001) was both a critical and popular success.

In addition to his steady stream of books, Hanson in the last two years especially has become an inspiriting essayist, widely read. He comments regularly in National Review magazine and contributes frequently to its Website; his articles appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Commentary, New Criterion and the Weekly Standard; and he has reviewed books for the Washington Times and other newspapers. Last year, Hanson was visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, and he shortly will become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He may even make house calls. The more his thoughtful voice is heard, the better, as is evident in an interview in the January-February issue of The American Enterprise, published by the American Enterprise Institute.

"Most liberal societies fail when they're unable to transmit their values from one generation to the next," Hanson said. "It's not because of poverty, but due to wealth; not hardship, but leisure. It tells me something that everyone in America is talking about this crisis of faith and spirit right now. We worry that there's something wrong with America, something wrong in us morally. ... Nearly every public issue today, whether illegal immigration or failing schools, boils down to an inability to speak the truth, to act on it, to believe in right and wrong, and use moral judgment. What saves us for the moment is that this country is such a wonderful, powerful, rich society that it can run on the fumes of greatness for probably another century. But I'm not sure it can be quite like it was unless we wake up now and rediscover what this country was all about at its founding."

How, Hanson was asked, do we sustain the values that have underwritten Western achievement? He responded that we rely on education, family and religion. "But when we lose government as a tool ... and lose the universities as an inculcator of strong values - indeed, when they become part of the problem - then we're stuck with only the family and church. That's what the cultural divide is about right now. ... We have so much at stake."