The question seems especially relevant in communities like Harlem, where (the argument too often goes) antisocial behavior is a consequence of hopelessness–and where Geoff Canada has been cultivating virtue, and hope, in children for the past 10 years. He has done this in a variety of ways, as the president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, but most creatively in a way that might tickle James Q. Wilson: be teaches a karate class. His methods are unrelenting and unpatronizing. He expects, in return for the skills he teaches, a strict standard of moral behavior. His students stay in school. They don’t break the law. They don’t have children out of wedlock (not one in 10 years, he insists).
The penalty for breaking the rules is harsh, and immediate: “I saw it happen once,” says Alex Echevarria, who began the program seven years ago and has now become an instructor. “Two people were caught dealing drugs. Geoff went to their houses, stripped them of their belts and, in front of the rest of us, cut the belts in two with a scissors. These people had invested years in getting those belts. I was maybe 15 at the time. I decided that I could not afford to lose what I was working toward.” What he was working toward, what Canada really teaches, was self-control (a far more practical virtue than “self-esteem”). “You can apply karate to everything else you do in life,” says Alex Francois, another Canada student who has now become an instructor (and, like Echevarria, gone on to college). “It gives you the discipline to follow up on your plans.”
What Canada does is not unique. Time and again, strong authority figures with strict disciplinary regimes have proven that they can inspire kids growing up in the most desperate circumstances. The question is, why do these programs remain isolated, relatively rare-and mostly private? With even most liberals now paying lip service to the importance of personal responsibility, why haven’t these principles become public policy? Why does the stray tough-guy math teacher-whose story inevitably becomes a stirring made-for-TV movie-always wind up in trouble with the authorities? And why will Wilson’s book-posing an idea that most people consider basic common sense-be seen as controversial in academic and policy circles?
Wilson argues that we are paying the price for a century of intellectual wrongheadedness. The legatees of Marx, Freud and Darwin argued that morality was a chimera; it had “no basis in science and logic.” Moralists were forced to flee to the musty backwaters of philosophy and theology; the barbarians took hold of public policy. “It is difficult to say what effects have followed [our] effort to talk ourselves out of having a moral sense,” Wilson writes. “We may have harmed vulnerable children who ought to have received surer guidance from family and neighborhoods; we may have promoted self-indulgence when we thought we were only endorsing freedom.”
It is impossible, of course, to pinpoint the precise moment when moral relativism became acceptable public policy-but in the ’60s, the structures of moral authority were systematically removed from the poorest neighborhoods. A series of legal judgments made it harder for teachers to discipline their students and for housing projects to screen their tenants; the cop on the beat was seen as an occupying force and removed. The moral consequences of programs like welfare were never considered. Instead of nurturing virtue, popular culture celebrated intemperance–and intemperance, as Adam Smith pointed out 200 years ago, may addle the rich, but it devastates the poor.
The effects of virtue-free social policy have been devastating but we don’t seem quite ready to accept the alternative. Few politicians are comfortable about using words like “right” and “wrong,” especially when the subject is sexual irresponsibility (which remains the surest predictor of criminality, ill health and welfare dependency among the poor). Last week’s census report announcing a continuing trend toward out-of-wedlock births across society was greeted by total silence from public figures including the president, who seems to have forgotten about “personal responsibility” since the campaign.
In fact, it isn’t easy. It requires the fortitude to sometimes cast people into the outer darkness–as Canada did when he stripped the belts from the two drug dealers. It has become near impossible for a polity as rights-conscious, and tolerant, as ours to admit that some people who behave badly, if not quite criminally, aren’t worthy of our support–to kick them off welfare, or out of schools and housing projects. But it is inescapable; the system can’t work without sanctions -even if they require the sort of stiff, humorless, un-American propriety that gave morality such a bad name.
