22/12/96 A small house perhaps, but there are precious things
8/12/96 Lilin puts grit into 'soft power'of TV's new genre
10/11/96 For Vincent Van Gogh, work was paramount
27/10/96 My kind of hero- from the Tang dynasty
1/9/96 When an older man is tempted by a young girl
14/7/96 Old world's cracked, but Conard lives on
2/6/96 No winner-take-all society for Singapore
25/2/96 Once, there was a girl, the prettiest in a line
11/2/96 Reading with a pen and ruler by your side
28/1/96 The gravy that was the last five years
7/5/95 Collapse of resiraints and breakdown of family
23/5/87 When writer and man come together again
The Sunday Times: Sunday Review Page 1 and 6
Collapse of resiraints and breakdown of family
THERE IS MUCH TO BE ADMIRED about America, especially in its commitment to liberty and democracy, which has inspired oppressed people everywhere and has continued to attract millions of immigrants each year.
But at a time when it should celebrate its triumph over communism, its more serious thinkers and eminent journalists on both sides of the Atlantic are pointing out that the foundation of its democracy is under severe attack, its social fabric is unravelling, and its civic institutions are in danger of falling apart.
In The Great Reckoning (1992), which he co-authored with his investment consultancy partner William Dale Davidson, the former editor of The Times of London, William Rees-Mogg, goes so far as to suggest that "America is suffering the classic symptoms of a nation in decline: high taxes, high prices, widening gaps between the rich and the poor, strong special-interest groups, failure of motivation, a decline in education and everyday competence, high budget deficits, and more".
"It was common opinion in the Enlightenment that faltering empires suffer moral brcakdown, lose their civic spirit and divert ever more of their energies to non-productive pursuits," he notes, and devotes two whole chapters in his book, which is about how the world will change before the year 2000, to show how American society is rapidly declining, the way the British empire did a century ago, and Spain and Holland before it in the 1 7th century.
In another book that attempts to look into the future, Preparing For The 21st Ccntury (1993), the highly respected British historian, Paul Kennedy, who is based in the United States, asserts that while America may not be a loser in terms of competitiveness in the face of global changes, it could be less than a clear winner.
"While an impressive array of American individuals, companies, banks, investors and think-tanks are scrambling to prepare for the 21st century," he writes, "the United States as a whole is not and indeed cannot, without becoming a different kind of country"ñfor it involves an almost total overhaul of its people's "social priorities, educational system, patterns of consumption and saving, even basic beliefs about the relationship between the individual and society".
He points out that "the most important influence on a nation's responsiveness to change is probably its social attitudes, religious beliefs and culture".
These are precisely the areas where the most serious weaknesses of the American economy lie asserts British financial journaiist Hamish McRae in his book, The World In 2020 (1994). America is a giant in retreat, he suggests.
The latest book to sound the wake-up call is The Revolt Of The Elites, And The Betrayal Of Democracy (1995), the posthumous publication of Christopher Lasch, eminent conservative leftist, and one of America's greatest thinkers, who died last year after finishing this work.
"A lust for immediate gratification pervades American society from top to bottom. There is a universal concern with the self - with "self-fulfilment" and more recently "self-esteem" slogans of a society incapable of generating a sense of civic obligation...
The disinclination to subordinate self-inlerest to the general will comes uncomfortably close to capturing the cssence of Americanism as the 20th century approaches its end," he laments.
Collapse of moral order
ALLAN BLOOM in The Closing Of the American Mind, thc 1987 book that all liberals love to hate, pronounces that the "most important and most astonishing phenomenon of our time, all the more astounding in being almost unnoticed, is that there is now an entirely new language of good and evil, originating in an attempt to get 'beyond good and evil' and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore...
"The new language is that of value relativism, and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism".
Bloom traces this new language right back to the nihilism of Nietzsche who, a century ago, to put it simplistically, declared that modern man's religious beliefs had been displaced by science and rational thought and that meant the decomposition of culture and the loss of human aspiration, unless there was a value revolution.
His influence extended through his protege Heidegger to Freud and Max Weber, who in turn influenced those intellectual emigres who fled from Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany to America.
These emigres and their students made precious scientific and literary contributions to the country, but they also helped weave sex and psychoanalysis into the fabric of American social litfe, and in the 60s, their humanistic psychology literature lent Iegitimacy lo the new counterculture.
So a profound German philosophy of deep pessimism was transplanted in America and transformed into a culture of "free love" and permissiveness, where sickness and mental health replaced guilt, sin and atonement as the dominant concerns.
A therapeutic sensibility was born amidst the day-glo and psychedelic lights, as essential reading went from Abraham Maslow's Towards A Psychology Of Being (1962), where he teaches that man has an inborn drive towards health and actualisation of his fullest potential: to R. D. Laing's The Politics Of Existence (1967). which suggests that society is straitjacket conformity and madness is one way out of it; to finally, Timothy Leary's The Politics Of Ecstasy (1973), which celebrates the joy of the hallucinogenic drug, LSD.
Sacked from Harvard, where he was a professor, for his propagation of the use of the drug, Leary made "rurn on, tune in, drop out" a clarion call to a new postwar generation who had grown up in relative affluence, which helped lead to a widespread abuse of LSD that ended in countless casualties.
(The good professor has these days taken his quest of expanding human consciousness to the ''hyperdimensional'' terrain of outer cyberspace, and has won a new following of computer nerds who fancy themselves cyberians, some of whom flirt with Ecstasy, DMT, and a variety of "smart" drugs.)
It did not take too long for the therapeutic literature to descend from the earlier more earnest works by Maslow, Eric Fromm and Rollo May, just to name a few, to the sorry depths of the "I'm OK, you're OK" variety.
Tyranny of relativism
TODAY'S vogue words in America --- values, lifestyle choice, commitment, identity ñwhich have percolated down from the literate to the illiterate, thanks to television messengers like Oprah Winfrey, can all be traced back to Nietzche and Heidegger, but they no longer bear the burden of their agonised atheism.
"Atheists took religion seriously and recognised that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices," Bloom points out.
"When the word still had some shape and consistency, a difficult choice meant to
accept difficult consequences in the form of suffering, punishment and guilt ... Now when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice and guilt only a neurosis. Political activism and psychiatry can handle it."
"Lifestyle" justifies any way of life, as does "value" any opinion. Lifestyles are accorded rights, so defence of them is a moral cause. The comfortable, unconstrained life is morality.
But Bloom is not so much appalled by the immorality of relativism as the dogmatism with which such relativism is accepted.
Anyone can shop for a lifestyle, which is as good as any othcr, and because he has a lifestyle, he can command his own esteem and that of others.
To say his lifestyle is not a proper one is to be ''judgmental", to hurt his self-esteem, and to make him a "victim".
Individuals are valued not according to their character or achievements, but according to their ethnic identities. No one group can impose its standards on another.
But without a common civic language and a set of common standards - the minimum standards of worksmanship literacy and general competenceñhow can there be a society, let alone a liberal democratic society?
Recent estimates suggest that fully one third of the adult ipopulation cannot perform simple arithmetic calculations.
In its 1983 report, A Nation At Risk, thc National Commission on Excellence in Education said: "For the first time in tbe history of this country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents."
As Lasch points out: "When we speak of democracy today, we refer, more often than not to the democratisation of 'self-esteem'. The current catchwords ñ diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlementñexpress the wishful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by good will and sanitised speech...
"In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities that cannot be softened simply by flattering people's self image ... Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of neighbours and friends, instead of depending on the state."
