This passage comes from The Cheating Culture, and it’s well worth a good read in these times:
We have been living in the age of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the age of family values and zero tolerance. Religious figures and intellectuals and newspaper columnists have talked endlessly in recent years about moral issues large and small: teen pregnancy, school uniforms, violent video games, graffiti, pedophilia, welfare dependency, crime, drug use, and so forth. God, who previously didn’t play much of a role in American politics, has come to be as omnipresent in election campaigns as corporate donors seeking favors.
Yet America’s watchdogs of virtue have been largely silent about the new epidemic of cheating. To be sure, rampant cheating by students has begun to receive attention in the past several years. And the recent corporate scandals induced a media feeding frenzy. There have also been big stories about cheating by athletes, or tax evasion, or plagiarism by journalists. Still, there’s been very little effort to connect all these dots and see them for what they represent: a profound moral crisis that reflects deep economic and social problems in American society.
Concerns about cheating do not jibe easily with the way that Americans have talked about values and personal responsibility since the early 1980s. That conversation has been orchestrated by conservatives and the religious right, while liberals — often uncomfortable talking about values — have largely kept their mouths shut. America’s moral ills were defined in the ’80s and ’90s in terms that reflected traditional conservative worries, with a focus on things like crime, drugs, premarital sex, and divorce. Other concerns — little problems like greed, envy, materialism, and inequality — have been excluded from the values debate.
The first time I read this passage, I felt it to be a stunning indictment of conservative politics over the course of my lifetime. When, as a young man growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I heard about homelessness and its associated hardships from one group of people and the laziness of the poor from another group of people, I knew there was a serious disconnect. Later on, when I worked in the world of software support, it was pretty easy to tell that our office was made up of folks from a variety of backgrounds, and that wild disparities of ability existed between us. My time at Ga. State, however, has been more enlightening, I feel, than any of my previous experiences.
For example, I’ve learned to limit when I say, “the truth lies somewhere between the extremes.” Sometimes loud people and loud groups are simply wrong, no matter how loud and obnoxious they get.
In the case of those who are not so well-off, this is one of those times where it’s appropriate to stop relying on quick rationalizations to justify ineffective silver bullet solutions. (This logic should really be used for the many issues I’ve painfully seen become trivialized this election season, especially terrorism.) Stop and think for a moment how we got where we are at today. Over my lifetime, Reagan’s quip that government is the problem has been preached to me so many times, yet I still don’t buy it — it’s too simple an argument. No matter how forceful the argument is made, or how loud and obnoxious the anti-regulation zealots get, I’m not going to buy it. For me to make the case that the government needs to get off my back requires that I first feel that the government actually is on my back.
I pay my taxes like a good citizen should. They pave me some roads. If they’re smart, they lay down some public transit, too. They provide me with an education. If they’re smart, they’ll fund education to its fullest extent. They support basic research. If they’re smart, they’ll release the results to the public domain and let the private market take over when it becomes more profitable to innovate. They provide police and fire protection. If they’re smart, they’ll pay these folks enough to live in the same region, too. I could go on about the many things my taxes pay for that too many people take for granted these days.
This is precisely where some of our major problems lie. In waxing morality on wedge issues, we forget about some of the things that are so important to our civic lives. Concerns about greed, envy, materialism, and massive inequality get shouted down as socialist concerns. After less than thirty years, it’s becoming easier to see where our society goes when the shouters misdirect the public to ignore them. These are not socialist concerns — my only encounters with socialist knick knacks have revealed to me that socialists are crazy blockheads with an obsession toward utopia, revolution, workers unions, and awful musk-scented oils — not to mention, there is an awful lot of misdirected contempt among them directed toward free enterprise. The more prevalent shouters, meanwhile, have misled much of the public to believe that liberals are socialists.
The shouters, however, believe that free enterprise and religious fundamentalism are the saviors of civilization. There is no concern for civic life, honesty in business, justice, or education. The conservative model is not sustainable. It relies on continuing tax breaks when they are not needed. It relies on a more closed system of government when we need a more open system. It relies on irrational fears such as the fear that social and environmental responsibility lead to economic doom. It relies on greed and materialism as virtues when a more tempered and rational self interest (as defined in my Economics textbooks) would serve as a more sustainable and business-friendly model.
In reading The Cheating Culture, keeping up with the News through a variety of sources, reading magazines, actively applying what I’ve learned in my classes to these situations, and reading a variety of other books, what I’ve come to realize is that we as a society too often focus on the wrong things. This passage gives us a glimpse into what has truly gone wrong and where conservatives have led us astray.
