Delattre was driving away from the cities of Florida, the state with the highest crime and violent crime rates, where most criminals serve only one third of their sentences, and the phrase “juvenile career–criminal” no longer shocks. The contrast between rural South Carolina and urban Florida stirred in Delattre anxieties as old as the Republic anxieties about the compatibility of cities and selfgovernment. But Delattre has darker anxieties than those Jefferson had about what he considered the link between the habits of rural hardihood and the virtues requisite for democracy–independence, selfcontrol. The sociology of virtue is more problematic now than in Jefferson’s day because our society is saturated by promptings to degeneracy.
Driving north, Delattre had paused in Milledgeville, Ga., to honor the memory of the writer Flannery O’Connor,–whose words provided his theme when he later addressed a colloquium back in Boston. She wrote: “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.” Delattre is a philosopher who has immersed himself in the realities of police work. He knows that the age pushes young people into predation not merely with grinding material impoverishment. but also with toxic ideas.
The age that pushes hard against unformed youth is not something that has just befallen us. We made it; are making it. Much of it comes from the top down, a trickle-down culture that begins with the idea that the good life consists in satisfying every impulse. Many intellectuals have helped supplant the moral categories essential to civilized living, replacing them with a thin-gruel vocabulary of “lifestyles” and “values” and “self-esteem.” And now there is the idea of “victimization” which comes with a style of disputation: criticism is met by ad hominem charges that all critics are “phobic” or sociopolitically “centric.” Discourse is smothered beneath the presumption that an opponent’s motives are obvious and obviously contemptible. One result of this is that people despair of affecting behavior with deliberative reasoning, and resort increasingly to litigation, political power, violence or the threat of it.
When a 12-year-old boy turns without a word and shoots dead a 7-year-old girl because she “diss’ed” him by standing on his shadow, he is pushed by the age. He possesses a prickly sensitivity about his self-esteem and is incapable of distinguishing an action from a motive. What made this impulsive child? This age that celebrates unchecked impulses.
We are, Delattre believes, losing the timeless struggle between Socrates and Homer. It is the struggle between philosophy and power, between reason and passion. It is the struggle between, on the one hand, the quest for truth, justice and the improvement of the soul, and, on the other hand, the lust for riches and glory, and the condoning of rash and remorseless assaults. Homeric passions were worthy of epic poetry–“Sing, Goddess, the rage of Achilles, murderous, doomed.” Today’s stunted, twisted notions of heroism are written in graffiti spray-painted on public walls, and in the pounding lyrics of rap music.
The age has obliterated human magnificence by linking a banality with a non sequitur–the observation that everyone has flaws, and the conclusion that therefore no one merits emulation. Having denied the possibility of human excellence, we also have, Delattre says, “obliterated the reality of human depravity by the doctrine of the moral equivalence of all ’lifestyles’.” The idea is abroad that there is no moral heritage worth “imposing” on children, respect for whom requires that their selection of “values” be regarded as a mere matter of taste. Delattre believes this is why so many students never criticize a proposition by saying “I believe You are mistaken for the following reasons. " Instead, they give autobiographical reports such as “I’m not comfortable with that.” Students regard such reports about their “feelings” as final and no more in need of justification than the assertion “I don’t like Brussels sprouts.”
Society has a seamlessness that we disregard at our peril. Academics who blithely assert that “everything is political”–for example, whether, or how, to read Emily Dickinson–are postulating that all decisions are motivated by the desire to acquire power for advantage over others. This idea, common on campuses, expresses, Delattre says, “the ethos and the mentality of the gang reaching deeply into our age, far beyond the most obvious forms of barbarity in the streets.”
Furthermore, if “everything is political,” emotional impoverishment is inevitable because love is impossible, selflessness being unimaginable. Hence sex cannot be expected to transcend biology and egoism. And so there are “nonjudgmental” sex education programs that communicate the judgment that healthy sexuality is separable from love and its preparedness to sacrifice. And there are 1.2 million illegitimate births in a year.
Delattre does not despair, not quite. Regarding the inner city culture of predation, he does say that it is next to impossible to make responsible citizens from young people who have ingrained habits of violent criminality: “Predators, like the rest of us, like the habits they acquire.” But hope dies hard and his thoughts recur to the cheerful young South Carolinians he saw by the dawn’s early light. They had the look of wholesome products of attentive parents who are pushing against the age. Having spent much time on our meanest streets, Delattre has adjusted his manner of hoping: “Even though adulthood has forever worn away my youthful confidence that where there is fife there is hope, I feel hopeful still whenever I see anything better than the worst.” What small signs of civility we do seize upon.
