Os Guinness: A Crisis of Cultural Authority

[00:00:16] Speaker A: I'm banker, and I'm pleased to welcome all of you this evening to a very special gathering of friends of Os Guinness. And a few of us who are close to Oz have conspired to make possible this evening. And we're glad that you're part of it and that you'll experience what Oz has to say. What he has to say was described ever so briefly in the invitation that you received. So you have a sense of his new mission, and that is to complete a very important book, the Eagle and the Sun. And he's going to share with us this evening his sense of American culture, or, as he says it, cultural authority in society as it relates to the 20th century, the end of the 20th century. Oz book, we think, will have a profound effect on America. And we're so anxious for him to complete his work. He's an inspiring speaker, as many of you know, and he has an important message that I think will appeal to all of us. I think, if anything could be said of Oz, is that he is a keen interpreter of our times. And of course, this grasps the essence of what he has to share with us this evening. There will be a brief discussion which will follow Oz's talk that will be coordinated by Bob Kramer. And I won't introduce everybody who's been part of this evening. Their names are on the invitation, both the host committee as well as the sponsoring committee. But I would like to introduce two of Oz's closest friends and admirers. His wife, Jenny Guinness, who's in the back, and Christopher. I don't know if he's here or not. And now I'd like to ask Alonzo MacDonald to introduce Oz. Alonzo has lived in Washington, D.C. he's lived in Paris. He's now based in Detroit. He's done many very interesting things, always very successful. And he was chairman of the Williamsburg Charter, Carter, which many of you know was an attempt to grasp the full understanding of the U.S. constitution. And he now speaks at prayer breakfast. And he's really an inspiration to all of us and very close to Oz and Jenny. So at this time, I'd like to introduce Alonzo McDonald. [00:02:59] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Don. It gives me great pleasure to be here tonight and to have an opportunity just to say a word or two about Os Guinness. I think that most of you know Oz, so really, a formal introduction is hardly appropriate. I'll mention just one or two logistical statements, just so they're all back in mind for those who would be refreshed by that. And then I'd like to share just two or three thoughts about the relationship that Oz and I have had together, since that might give more of a feeling than any formal introduction could. Oz, as many of you know, was born in China, the son of medical missionaries there. He escaped literally by the skin of his teeth in 1951 on one of the last boats out and has spent most of his time since that time being shared between residents in England, Switzerland and the United States. We've been fortunate enough to have him here since 1984 with Ginny and with Christopher. And we're very hopeful that in spite of our inadequacies as a colonial institution now reaching for a new level of maturity, that we might still be able to attract him. One of the things that has been interesting to me was that Oz has pursued and has managed balance about as well as anyone I know, an enormous personal faith and a great mental and intellectual capability. He did his undergraduate work at university in London. He got his PhD at Oxford University in the social sciences. And he acts as an interpreter at times between those of the more erudite scholars and those of us who assume to understand some of the theories that they promulgate. With some of us, it takes longer than others. And Oz has now spent almost four years, a full college course, trying to train me. And I'm only now up to sort of the second semester of freshman understanding. But I never like to miss an opportunity to learn from Oz and spend time with him. I am reminded as I see our good friend Doug Ko here in front of a verse in the Bible that I try to relate to between these two individuals and occasionally myself in the middle, and it's from the 22nd book of Matthew when it basically says to love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind. I've killed kidded Doug, whom we are very grateful for him and Roy Cook letting us be here tonight to hear. But I've kidded Doug about the fact, who I love very much, that he speaks from the heart. He speaks so heavily from the heart that it keeps me always challenged to catch up with the mind and the soul part of Doug's discussion. I speak so heavily from the mind that I have trouble with the heart and the soul catching up from that side. And in the middle, I find myself simply worrying about my soul. So that gives me an opportunity to at least identify with two individuals that I think we all know and appreciate very much who are here tonight. But it has been an enormous pleasure for me to work With Oz over the last four some odd years with the Williamsburg Charter Foundation. The work that he and John seale and Tom McWhirter and Bob Kramer and the members of our distinguished board and other volunteers too numerous to mention. Amy, whom some of you have met, et cetera. Sue and Jenny, if we could go down the line, Carol and Don Bonker, et cetera. Jim Slattery has just been enormous, and it's been a rewarding thing for all of us. But the inspiration for much of what we came through conceptually, and the one who we always counted on for another thought, another idea, but never in doubt about where he was coming from, whether it was a public policy question or a question of faith, was a person totally dedicated to try to give his talents and his being for the service of society in general. And one of the most unselfish individuals that I know in the way that he's carried that out. And so it gives me a great pleasure anytime that I can not only be associated with Oz, but anything that I can personally do to support, encourage and learn from him is always my privilege. Gives me great pleasure to welcome Dr. Oz Guinness to the podium. Thank you, Oz. [00:07:55] Speaker C: Thank you. You ought to know that Al has come overnight from Europe last night. And Don has come overnight from the west coast last night in the red eye. So it really gives new definition to the old saying that after dinner, speaking is the art of talking in somebody else's sleep. You have full permission, Al. Sit further back if you prefer. Thank you all for coming. Jenny and I are very moved and deeply grateful to you all. I think as we started the Williamsburg Charter a number of years ago, it's fair to say that Jenny and I only had one doubt as to whether it was right for us to take part. And that was simply the thought. What on earth was an Englishman doing contributing to the celebration of the American Constitution? Well, we thought that through, and the question was actually never raised, to my relief. But among the many answers I'd thought through to myself, and these were not the public answers, two of them were simply this. One was a deep conviction about the urgency and singularity of the times through which the United States is going to. And the other was the simple sense that there are no friends like American friends. I mean that not as a flattery, but as a statement of fact. And they were two of the deepest reasons behind our commitment to all that. The charter became so in a way that's reflected in so many of you coming tonight, but also asking me to speak on something of what I see as the urgency and singularity of the times. So we're both deeply, deeply grateful to you. I realized after the whole evening had been suggested that it's almost an impossible order. And I never, ever speak on anything I've written on once it's published, unlike some authors. And I find the closer you get to the publication, the harder it is to speak because it becomes so huge in your mind. I well remember when Michener's Chesapeake was published. Newsweek did a scathing review, and as an occasional writer, I had a fellow feeling for Michener. But the review went something like this. Our best advice is don't read this book. But our second best advice is never drop it on your toe. Now that, I'm afraid, is the sort of book I am writing. Not quite, Mitch, in a length, but not a book to drop on your toe. Winston Churchill, towards the end of his life, when he was repeatedly asked what was the secret of his leadership, just used to give an offhand remark again and again. All you needed as leaders was to know yourself and know your times. Now, of course, the very times in which we're living are times in which everyone's concerned with knowing themselves and not with knowing their times. And yet my interest all along has been the reverse. Not to care much about knowing oneself, but to really plunge into the question of where we are and what the significance is for responsible, thinking citizens in our day. And that's a little of what I want to share with you tonight. 1989 has been described as the year of the century. At the very least, there's no question that it will join 1917 and 1945 as the three great pivotal years of the 20th century. In 1917, the end of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the great aristocratic empires, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, and so on. And, of course, the United States coming center stage worldwide for the first time. 1945, the end of World War II and the defeat of the 20th century's second great totalitarian regime, Nazism, the exhaustion of the European democracies. And this time, the United States coming center stage and staying there to dominate the world. In 1989, the collapse of the 20th century's first great totalitarian empire, the Soviet Empire. But the question now is, where is the United States this time? And it's a question that many Europeans have been raising. There are three quick entryways into the way I want to tackle this tonight. One simple way would be to look at the various views that are now current in Washington and around the country and abroad as to where the US is in 1989 or after 1989. For example, a while back, much of the discussion was dominated by the so called blamers and boosters, the blame America firsters and so on. And very quickly in the last two years, it shifted to the discussion between the so called declinists and the so called endists. The declinists, those who argue that after 1989 we can see the decline of the American empire, either analyzed in terms of politics and economics, like Paul Kennedy's the Rise and Fall of Great Powers, or analyzed in terms of philosophy and ethics, rather like Alastair MacIntyre's book where he speaks of the barbarians within the camp and the Dark Ages have descended. And there's no doubt, not just at the popular level of pessimism, but the very sophisticated level, there's a strong case made on that side. But last year, the sharp bugle call from Francis Fukuyama set the other extreme. The so called endists, in other words, those who said that the end of the Soviet Union was not just the end of communism, but the end of history. And what we see is the triumph of liberal democracy, the universalization of the Western political system, so that we're now beyond all the contradictions of history and we've arrived at the final form of human government. There are, of course, many in between that it's probably fair to say that the majority would be in a position that could be described either in Republican or Democratic circles, as seeing a cloudless prosperity. In other words, following 1989, liberal democracy led by the United States has less serious opposition than at any time, certainly since 1917, maybe for 150 years. And so we can speak of almost cloudless prospects for the United States, or maybe at a slightly less sanguine level, that the United States will muddle along and muddle through without any serious challenges outside. Now, in terms of those, I'm going to argue somewhat different from both of those as against the optimists like the Endists, that there are very serious problems that they are not looking at. And I'll say why. But equally unlike the pessimists, I would argue that the Dark Ages have not come, the night has not descended, and the characteristic of where we are is there is still an extraordinary open moment to be seized. Or another way into the discussion would be very differently. And that would be to put it in terms of a picture of Peter Burgers where he says, if we see the significance of 1989, we see it best if we see a gigantic laboratory and at the center of it three giant test tubes. And in these test tubes intense chemical reactions of different socio political systems with the agent of modernization. What are the three test tubes? Well, the first test tube is liberal democracy or Western industrialism. Here we have the system which is engaged with modernity earliest and from a Christian and Jewish vantage point, and is deeply committed to going with the flow of modernity, individualism, political pluralism, freedom and so on. In the second test tube we have totalitarian socialism, more than a century after the first, this time Marxist, not Christian, and partly modernizing, but partly counter modernizing. Because in many ways the Marxist system is an attempt to reconstitute traditional society, but in modern form, with modern technology, modern ideology and so on. And so it's going against the flow of modernity and, and individualism and freedom and pluralism in crucial ways. And the third critical test tube is East Asian industrialism, as Berger puts it, Japan and the so called four little dragons, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. So here we have another engagement with modernity, by far the most recent, neither Christian nor Marxist, but in this case largely Buddhist and Confucian, although equally like the Western, committed to modernity. And as Berger says, as we see this fascinating historical chemical reaction, what 1989 means is that modernity has undone totalitarian socialism. When the challenge comes between the Marxist commitment to equality and the lure of modern enterprise and efficiency and many other things, the Marxists have had to make the choice for modernity against pure Marxist ideology. In other words, as they see it, what's happened in Central and Eastern Europe is not just a triumph of free ideas and a faith is not just the triumph of Westerners manning the ramparts of freedom with great courage for a generation. It's also part of the engagement with modernization through which modernity is actually done in totalitarian socialism. And as people like this see it, it's very significant that Raiza Gorbachev uses American Express cards in the Soviet Union, although the Big Mac is there in the world of the Big Brother, or that the students in Tiananmen Square had fax information from Southern California and so on. But again, the question comes if we look at it that way, if so much that's deeply significant in our world flows out of this engagement with modernity and modernization. Where is the United States in 1989? And so we could go on. Let me develop what would be the central part of my argument. It's simply this, that the United States, in confronting modernity as the world's first. First new nation is now herself experiencing a very profound crisis of cultural authority. Now, I don't want in any way to just confuse that with what I just said about the Soviet Union. So it's important to say that to liberal democracy, because liberal democracy goes with the flow of modernity, the challenge is never central or lethal. And because in liberal democracy, there is both a strength of ideas and a flexibility of institutions, there is far greater resilience in handling such challenges, which means that the challenges, when they come, are not challenges to the regime's legitimacy, but they still are challenges to any nation's vitality. And so when the United States experiences a crisis of cultural authority, what's at stake is American vitality as a free republic that would remain free. Now, let me define what I mean by crisis of cultural authority. By a crisis of cultural authority has meant the idea that the beliefs, the traditions, the ideals, whether specifically religious beliefs or openly civic beliefs, the beliefs, the traditions, the ideals, which once, on the one hand, inspired the nation, and on the other hand restrained and disciplined the nation internally, have lost their binding address, have lost their compelling power, have lost the integrity and effectiveness which once made them strong. And it's important to add immediately the point of a crisis of cultural authority is not that there are some out there who no longer believe and attack those who still do believe, or that there are deep divisions over what should be believed. Both of those things are true. But a crisis of cultural authority goes far deeper than that. Even those who say they believe what was once believed no longer show that they do so in ways that they once did or former generations did. Now let me go on to that, to speak of the significance of this for the United States. A crisis of cultural authority is tremendously important for any nation, but very especially for democracy or any society that claims to be free and wants to stay free. Because the notion of cultural authority is a notion that's very complementary to freedom. Because when cultural authority is strong, inspiring and disciplining, few external laws, few external coercions are needed, because the cultural authority inspires and constrains and is solidly in line with internal freedom. And that, of course, is the situation in this country. Now, we could say that in very traditional ways, or we could say it in very modern ways. Traditional way would be to say it like this. The Framers were deeply conscious of America being, as the world's first new nation, the novus ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages. But part of that was what they called the New science of politics. They weren't going to just trust on ideals that was believed to be true. They really wanted to institutions that were seen to have teeth. They wanted to have an idealism about human nature, but a skepticism about human nature. So the new science was a brilliant blend of morals and mechanisms, idealism and skepticism together. But it meant very simply that it's one thing to win freedom. That's only the first stage. It's another thing altogether to order freedom. But that's only the second stage. The real challenge is to sustain freedom, not just over a few years or a few decades, but but over the centuries. And for any nation that wanted not only to win and order, but sustain freedom, the key steps were these. Self government relied on self discipline. Self discipline relied on self virtue. And so there's a direct link between the self government of the republic as a whole and the self virtue of each citizen in that government. And this is what Tocqueville means when he says, looking at the states 50 years after the framers, American prosperity is not the key to her survival. The abundance is extraordinary, but that is not the acid test. Nor even is the genius of the American law supremely in the Constitution, because that too is not the acid test. The acid test are the habits of the heart. When the habits of the heart are strong and the self virtue is strong, and the self discipline is strong, not only privately, but publicly, then self government in the republic is strong. And the Republic has its own cultural authority that is at once commanding without in any way being coercive, because it's so deeply free. Now, we could put the whole thing in a much more modern way. For instance, Daniel Bell, a social scientist from Harvard, puts it like in a modern liberal democracy, there are three realms or orders to be seen. There's the political order, there's the economic order, and there's the moral cultural order. And each of these is quite distinct, but very, very importantly related to. So, for instance, the moral and the cultural order would include things like the churches and synagogues, the schools, the universities, the press and the media, the arts at large, the entertainment world, and the whole world of leisure. And all of that makes up this crucial third realm, the moral cultural order, which along with the political and with the economic, makes up this tripartite system that is the American republic. But when we put it like this, what we're saying is that the crisis of cultural authority is not in the political order, is not primarily in the economic order, but is bitten very deeply into the moral and the cultural order. Now that, of course, I think, is what explains the blind spot of so many of today's analysts who see no problems at all. Because the simple reason is they're only looking at the political or they're only looking at the economic. And in those areas alone, it's certainly hard to see things a long way down the line that are a major problem. And it's only when one sees the interplay between the moral cultural realm touching the economic or touching the political that some of the profound challenges to the American republic come up. Now, there's a number of ways in which that could be stated. For example, stated more positively, we could say, looking around the world systems, that the moral and cultural order in a country is often the leading dynamic behind the political and the economic. In other words, you have many countries which are highly populated, have extraordinary natural and people resources, and yet don't make much of it. Whereas often the crucial variable is in the area of ideals and the commitments which grow out of the moral and the cultural order. And countries in history with rather less natural resources and rather smaller populations have had a freedom and a prosperity that is tied in to the moral and the cultural. Or you could put the other whole thing the other way around and state it negatively by saying even the most committed enthusiasts for capitalism are pointed out the capitalism has one major flaw. The flaw is not in the political area. The flaw is not in the economic area. Those two are magnificent. The flaw is in the moral and the cultural, because capitalism has no natural myth that goes along with it. The irony is that socialism may be unjust and ineffective and repressive and bankrupt in every way. And yet socialism almost always has a very natural myth that goes along with it. A myth of justice, a myth of community, a myth of equality, all sorts of things which give it a potent appeal even when it's not working at all. Whereas capitalism, as even its best friends have pointed out, lacks any natural myth. So you look over 300 years in the west recently, and the strongest company rationale for capitalism has been Protestantism. And yet today Protestantism and the Protestant ethic and so on has been so hollowed out through secularization that it's no longer able either to inspire as it once did, or more importantly, to constrain as it once did. The second myth that has been useful is the myth of progress. But the problem comes if people don't like the direction in which progress is being taken, or if another country overtakes us and goes much faster. The myth of progress begins to look a little jaded. To the countries left behind. The third myth that has gone along with capitalism is the myth of individualism. But one doesn't need to undermine today how much the hyper individualism becomes so self defeating and capitalism as even its closest. And I underlined that people like Peter Burgate's closest supporters would say capitalism is not only liberating, giving enormous freedom and prosperity, capitalism is also what economists have called a creative destructive force. And the dilemma of capitalism is not just that it corrodes and destroys tradition. That is a problem to those who believe traditional virtues and values that they regret seeing destroyed. But the real dilemma at the heart of capitalism for capitalism is it not only destroys traditional values, it destroys the very values necessary to make capitalism work best. In other words, capitalism works best when you have what used to be called bourgeois, that hard work, saving, clean living and all sorts of things often associated with so called bourgeois ways of life. And you can see that easily contrasted with the old aristocratic ways beforehand, or the more modern bohemian or whatever type of ways afterwards. But the problem is not just that the old ways are destroyed, but eventually a type of character and a type of values is produced by which undermines the very dynamism of capitalism itself. Think of everything that Dick Dahmen has been saying recently and so aptly about the so called now nowism at stake in society, even at the time of the conservative revolution. So this crisis of cultural authority may sound intangible, but in going to the heart of what made America and still makes America great, it does pose a very severe challenge. What precedents and parallels do we have in American history? Well, many historians speak of America's great times of testing and times of trial, such as the Civil War and the Depression years, Important though those were supremely important though those were, they were not crises of cultural authority. Equally, there has been one time in American history that has been described by historians as a crisis of cultural authority. But it proved positive. That was the 1830s, when many of the old ideas and traditions of the Framers collapsed in the ferment of Jacksonian democracy in the early 19th century. Populism and the second awakening. It has been described as a time of crisis of cultural authority. But out of that restructuring came something that was profoundly positive and at the heart of the dynamism of the frontier movement, the dynamism of the business enterprise in the 19th century and so on. So the present situation would become very critical if it proved in the long run negative, and if it joined one of the great times of trial, like the others in Other words, looked at in terms of precedence, historians would say this. There have been four great periods in American history round which cultural political issues have clustered. The first period was from the Revolution to 1824, when almost all the issues were constitutional. Obviously the young nation grappling with the institutional arrangements of setting itself up and so on, from 1825 to the closing of the frontier in the 1890s. The second great series of issues nationally was sectional. The north against the south, but not only the Civil War, also the old east against the new West. And in that period, many of the tensions came with territorial, sectional, but dealt with geographical things created by expansion. Then, from the closing of the frontier in the 1890s really through to 1960, the issues were almost always socioeconomic, dealing with all the problems thrown up by industrialism and poverty and so on. But really, since the 60s, while the social and the economic have been extremely important, increasingly in the political world, the cultural issues have come to be extremely important too. Right down to our own time, where we're talking about flag burning or NEA funding. And any of these things immediately becomes one more flashpoint in the current culture wars that are going on over the deep socio cultural challenges that are here today. How is this built up? Well, the intellectual roots go a long way back. And what's fascinating is how many people divide the development of ideas from the development of technical and structural changes. But what's fascinating is that the ideas which go back to the 19th century, people like Nietzsche and Marx, came from men who were grappling with the implications of the structural development in their time. But if you trace the ideas, you can see that European ideas, which were profoundly influential in the 1880s and 1890s in Europe, came into American culture in two critical decades in terms of being culture wide. The first was the small period 1912 to 1917. That tiny period of five years was called the rebellion of the intellectuals. When in a short five years, many of the leading explosive ideas of Europe entered and completely dominated the worlds of the universities and the arts. The crucial year of all was probably 1913. All sorts of things happened that year. Greenwich Village was its height. T.S. eliot discovered a symbol as poetry. J.B. watson launched behaviorism, and above all, the Armory show at the 69th Armory Regiment headquarters in New York. Launched Cubism and Expressionism into the New York art scene, which changed so much of the intellectual world. But what's significant was it entered in that short period and then in the 20s, dominated the universities and the arts. But William was virtually quarantined until the 60s, it was only in the 60s, through the expansion of education, through the GI Bill and many other things, through mass media and television, through a number of particular 60s factors, ideas born in Europe in the 19th century, introduced into the United States 1912-1917, suddenly flowed culture wide and launched the dramatic crisis of cultural authority that the 60s explosion represented. Seen this way, there are currently five crucial decades that make up this crisis. Two that show the build up and the showdown. The build up decade was the 50s, often seen as the golden 50s. But increasingly golden is in inverted commas, because many of the so called strengths and the traditional appearances are now seen with hindsight to have been profoundly hollow. For example, the United States was the only western country that had a religious revival after World War II. But as the toughest critics like Peter Berger pointed out at the time, and as everyone saw later, much of it was no better than a second children's crusade or a Sunday school boom. And when the 60s emerged and exploded, that religious revival faded fast, like a morning mist in the sun. And much of what was solid appearing and traditional looking in the 50s and gives that appearance of the last decade of innocence and intactness went fast. But it was the period in which the forces were building up. The two critical periods were the 60s and the 80s. The 60s, of course, was the liberal revolution, in a way, the seismic decade when the buildup of forces exploded in the culture, although only among an elite minority. I don't need to describe the 60s. For me, the challenges ultimately to God in the God is dead movement, to the presidency and to business and to politics and to every level of authority in a business life, was superbly summed up in one phrase by Elliot Gould. He said, as I know, the 60s, it was the decade of screw, God bless America. The seventies, seen this way, was the decade of second thoughts and consolidation. Interestingly, just as the 60s disappeared, the 60s began in the sense that it was in 1972, when a lot of the smoke and the tear gas and so on finally faded from the scene. But the real damage of the 60s started coming because in the 60s less than a quarter of the students, for example, had ever been involved in any violent protest. The dramatic acceleration of the new values and the new ideas happened from 72 onwards, when many of the changes introduced by the 60s came on into the bloodstream of an unsuspecting middle class. So the 70s in some ways was the second thoughts decade. As people look back over the 60s, for example, the neoconservatives described themselves as liberals, mugged by reality, second thoughts. But equally below the surface there was the deep consolidation and much that went on into the 70s. And then in the 80s was actually the 60s in an 80s form. But if the 60s was the first of the dramatic decades, the 80s obviously moved in the opposite direction as the second, the conservative revolution. And if the 60s was liberal, secular, radical, countercultural, the 80s was the reverse. Conservative, traditional, republican, religious, and so on. But what's intriguing today as we look back, is to see that the conservative revolution, while deeply influential, has been no more successful on its own terms than the liberal revolution was in its time. Both were profoundly influential and yet incomplete and carrying over deep contradictions. Ironically, 1968 was the year the liberals and radicals hailed victory for the first time. For instance, a majority was against Vietnam. But ironically, 1968, with hindsight, was the high point when things slipped away from the liberals and radicals and the tide went the other way, because that majority against Vietnam was actually the beginning of what was called Nixon's emerging new majority. And they were also against the liberals and radicals. And soon they were carrying signs like hard hats, hate hairs. And it was very clear that a very dramatic turnabout had come, but with an ironic parallel. 1986 may be something of the same for the conservative movement in the sense that the high point of the panegyrics for the conservative revolution were at the time of the Statue of Liberty celebrations, but just four years later, whether it's the encomiums to the president given by Time magazine, or many, many tributes to the conservative revolution in the wake of the Iran Contra, in the wake of the HUD scandals, in the wake of the SNL bailout and a number of other things, those claims now look extremely hollow and the contradictions and the incompletenesses are obvious for all to see. Now, that means very simply that if the 50s was the build up, the 60s, the seismic decade of this crisis of cultural authority burst through into the culture. The second thoughts of the 70s led to the opposite of the conservative revolution. We are now not, as some commentators have said, in the year of the revenge of the moderates in the Bush era. There are elements of that which can be seen and cited, but much more importantly, we are now in the years of reckoning, we are now in the showdown era. In other words, the crisis of cultural authority is really coming to its head. And those traditions, those ideals, those beliefs which are to prove decisive publicly and privately will show it by proving so in this next decade. And that's the situation we're in Now. And that, I believe, is the situation. That's why it makes the culture wars so significant. Now, what's obviously moving to all who have faith is that this crisis of cultural authority throws up profound questions that trail back to religious issues of point after point. Basically, three questions are thrown up. First is by what faiths? Again and again, the crisis of cultural authority raises the question not just of economics, but one's challenged to delve deeper down to moral values and eventually down to ideological positions and finally down to religious positions by what faith? For example, in the 60s, economic questions were almost always answered purely economically within an economic framework, and economics in that sense was highly secular as a discipline. But that's not so today. I mentioned Dick Dahmen on the now Nowism. You can find many people writing, say, on the deficit crisis needing to bring in the question of values and faith. As they point out, such a deficit raised in peacetime would have been inconceivable prior to such a shift in values as we've seen. So whether it's public deficits or private debt today, you can see in many ways the permissive debt in the 80s was much the same as permissive sex in the 60s. Both were a profound shift in the platelet's underlying values that had enormous implications in other areas. But my point is simply you can't discuss the deficit purely economically. Today it assumes moral positions that raise other, deeper questions. And what's true there is true in many areas. The second question thrown up today is by what understanding do any faiths relate to each other in the public arena? And it's no accident the crisis of cultural authority has thrown into the mixing pot the question of religion and politics. Because if so many questions assume, trailing off back to faith of one kind or another, and all these faiths want to have their say naturally and perfectly legitimately. But there's a breakdown of the understanding of how they should have their say in the public arena. Religion and politics is going to be a relentlessly recurring issue of the crisis of cultural authority. And of course, from the first school prayer cases back in the early 60s, right down to all the things that are troubling the waters today. That's exactly what we've seen. That not only do we have the question of by what faiths, but again and again we have the question of by what understanding do any faiths relate to each other as they enter the public arena? There's another question, more the theoretician's question, but also the believer's question, which is raised by this, it's a simple question. Is faith in the light of this crisis of cultural authority, is faith any longer a shaper of. Of American culture, or is it today only a shaped factor? In other words, there's no question, in the past, faith, all the different faiths, was the primary shaper in American culture. Shaping personal lives, shaping family lives, shaping communal lives, shaping city lives, shaping national lives, for better or worse, whatever faith it was. But there's equally, almost no question today that in very, very few cases is faith a serious, decisive shaper of national life. And more and more, it's increasingly rarely a shaper, decisively speaking, of personal life. And that's the challenge that's raised by the crisis of cultural authority at the third level. Is faith of any kind still a shaper, or has it become merely one of the shaped? Now, the last thing, in terms of the crisis of cultural authority is to say, how is this likely to come out Again, Let me just follow the sketch outline of the man who in this area is my great mentor for the last 15 years, Peter Berger. Speaking not as a prophet, but as someone just looking at the developments of what we've seen recently, he points out there are only four broad outcomes that are likely. History, of course, never comes with neat labels. But in terms of the broad developments, these are what they might be. As this crisis of authority, cultural authority, develops, and religion is such a key component in its outcome, it clearly will be a very significant part in the way the future goes. These are the four that Peter Berger suggests. The first possibility is that America will move to the first time towards a completely secular public sphere. This notice is a rupture in the American continuities that goes all the way back to the Puritans. In other words, it's radical in the sense that it be for the first time for 300 years, that faith of one sort or another was not decisive in shaping the public sphere. Now, Peter Berger does not mean by this that religion would disappear, or incidentally, that secularism would appeal to all Americans. Both of those extremely unlikely, in fact, impossible. What is meant simply is that in the public sphere, there'd be no religious decisiveness at all. What religion there is, and there might even be more religion than there is today, would be purely private. Now, the serious question as to whether the public could sustain its vitality under those conditions, because the intellectual question then raised is simply, could secularism provide the bedding to nourish traditional American values in the public sphere? Most academics would immediately say, no problem. I think the argument Is with the realists in saying there's a very severe problem. The second possibility, seen in the broad level, is that the republic would. Authoritarianism. In other words, at some moment of deeply perceived crisis, the attempt will be made to bolster the nation through traditional values and bolster traditional values through religion. So religion is used. It's not true. It's merely useful. It's social glue. Now, clearly, each of those three prospects would be either sad or disastrous for those who are followers of Christ. For example, in the first case, it would be one of history's most extraordinary squanderings that so many believers at such a time could be so ineffective that that happened equally. The second would be not only tragic, but disastrous, the third even more so. If the gospel were used for either the left or the right or the center. In the long run, the disillusionment with the gospel would be massive as people disengage from the false alliances that has been made. But Peter Berger and others point out there's a fourth possibility. The fourth possible outcome of the crisis of cultural authority is a revitalization of national life across the board in terms of ideals, in terms of institutions, through genuine spiritual renewal. Now, what's intriguing is that many religious believers almost don't believe in that today. Or if they may say they do, they don't show they do by the desperation of their activism. Whereas very often it's secular scholars who don't believe in God who believe in this as a conceivable possibility in the light of American history and the precedence that we can see in the past. Now, clearly that means that we're in an extraordinary critical moment as we go into the 1990s. And the only other factor that's important to add is that this crisis of cultural authority is, in part, a crisis of faith. In other words, many religious believers comfort themselves with the illusion that it's all out there. The problem is secular humanists or the New Ages or whatever, but actually, the 90s is what one man called pogo time. We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is not out there, although pogo didn't put it that way. In other words, the intriguing thing is today the crisis of cultural authority, it is at heart, a crisis of faith, and it is just as strong in the church as anywhere. Scholars over the last generation have analyzed what's been called the restructuring of American religion. But of the many features of this, one is the dissolution of the old distinctives denominationally, which isn't bad. But along with that, the dissolution of all concern with the theology and truth, which is not exactly good. Or another feature is the break in the link between belief and behavior. Or another is the dissolving of serious faith into either symbolism at the sophisticated liberal level or subjectivism at the more popular fundamentalist level. But maybe the most damaging thing of all is the influence Since World War II of education on serious faith. Never in American history has there been an education gap in the church, although much of the church has been anti intellectual for 150 years. But with the explosion of education in the last generation, you can see since that explosion, the growing permissiveness in all sorts of values is exactly tied to education. The education gap now enters the credibility of faith itself. So increasingly, the more educated people are, the less likely they are to take faith seriously. And it's less credible among serious thinkers in the intellectual world in America, Whereas it's people who are less educated but still take their faith seriously with exceptions. Equally importantly, the modern world is throwing up what's been described as the new class or the knowledge worker class or whatever, who are largely secular and in the day, the knowledge explosion. They are the influential trendsetters, opinion shapers, gatekeepers in our society. And they're secular simply because they follow the education gap that's crept in since the 60s. Christians, taking a pride in their anti intellectualism, have effectively shut themselves off from any serious influence in some of these major areas in national life. But maybe the saddest thing of all of the education gap is this. Statistics show today that education is the single strongest predictor of ideas and values. Faith has almost nothing to do with it. Education has almost everything to do with it. In other words, so deep is the crisis of cultural authority within the church as well as the culture, that education is more decisive on how people think and act and vote and other things than their faith has anything to do with it. Now, you could play that various ways. You could turn that in terms of numbers, for example, in America today, the problem is not, let's say Christians aren't where they should be to have any influence. The problem is simply that they don't have the influence they should have, because they aren't what they should be, right where they are. Ten years ago, some of the Christian right were talking about the sleeping giant being woken up. Today they're almost talking about the poor little whipping boy being beaten around as a persecuted minority. In fact, the numbers haven't changed at all. It's just the psychology that's changed, largely in line with the sense of the culturally threatened position because of factors like a lack of education and a lack of genuine significant cultural engagement. In other words, today the crisis of cultural authority is in part because the place of faith in culture is less than it used to be compared with the past. But the crisis of cultural authority is also in the church, because the influence of the culture on the church is also stronger than it used to be in the past. So this, I believe, is why the present moment I find so stirring. And these are just some of the few of the lines that you could trace to make it so. The crisis of cultural authority which America is challenged by now, and incidentally, I don't mean break down because it could lead to a breakthrough in a positive way if it came out one of those four ways. In this crisis of cultural authority, so many of the lines that touch on the deepest issues of national life and the deepest issues of religious life come together in raising profound intellectual and social questions. Let me just draw this to conclude by laying out three things that I personally would like to see happen in the next 10 years in terms of practical ways of tackling this towards a resolution. In other words, if what I've said is true, the general challenge is that the unfinished experiment needs to go back to what the framers saw as the fundamental first principles. George Mason used to speak of a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. Jefferson used to speak of a revolution every 20 years. Tocqueville used to say that in American democracy, every generation is a new nation. And in this sense, the crisis of cultural authority will be restored and remedied when there is a restoration and a renaissance in the profoundest ways. And these are the three levels in which I think it would be possible to work for us. The first is at the international level. What's striking is at the very moment in 1989 when the Pax Americana is giving way to what might be called the Pax moderna, the post Cold War international reality. At this moment, America has been cautious and silent to a fault in articulating what that pax moderna should be. Compare this with 1945. In 1945, Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, said that what America faced was the greatest single opportunity ever offered to one nation. And that enormous, awesome responsibility was behind the birth of the sense of. Of the American century. The Pax Americana, what they called the Grand Design, the non Communist Manifesto, and eventually flowed out into policies like containment. In other words, the wise men, the Achesons, the Dulles, the Niebuhrs, the Hutchins, the European thinkers like Jacques Maritin had an extraordinary sense of the winds of history blowing, and they were standing above their times and, and they were articulating a strategic vision of the world shaped by America, that they would help move forward. But that's exactly where the world is today. And there's no great Cold War opponent. And yet you have things like the headline from the Economist. Yes, you are a superpower. As many people are saying to America, where is the voice? Where is the will and the wallet to send things forward in these next years? Now, I realize some of the problems. There's much greater realism today about what it means to export democratic ideas. We know today that it's much easier to export democratic institutions like recurring free elections, far much easier to do that than to export democratic ideas, graft them onto countries that don't have them. But some of the other reasons why this is not being done today are less worthy. For example, with brief exceptions such as the Reagan era, America, for much of the world has been seen in terms not of its ideals, but of its images. And the irony was that the world's most materialistic regime, Marxism, sold itself in much of the world as idealistic, whereas what's genuinely the world's most idealistic nation, the United States, often doesn't bother to share its ideals and merely sells its images and is known for Dallas and Dynasty rather than all the things that make American freedom so extraordinary. And then of course, one has to add things like the post Vietnam syndrome, so that for many people today, the idea of sharing democratic ideas is, in Buchanan's famous words, global baloney. For reasons like this, there's clearly a reluctance to the so called vision thing. And yet, if this Pax moderna is on the threshold, America is challenged for her own sake, not just the worlds to articulate the vision for the purpose Pax moderna, for example, I think it'd be perfectly possible, along the precedence of, say, Dean Acheson speeches or George Marshall's speeches a generation ago, for the United States to articulate, over 18 months or two years in a series of speeches, the leading themes that shape the Pax Moderna as America would like to see it unfold. In other words, the overarching vision and some of the fundamental ordering principles. And it's remarkable that people like Lech Waenza are speaking about some of the deep principles that the founders and framers would have engaged with so naturally. And yet American statesmen and leaders are silent at this time. The theme of making the world safe for diversity could be an extraordinary opportunity. On the one hand, to. To articulate America's position in the world, and on the other hand, as it were, to challenge the United States in this crisis of cultural authority, to see a genuine renaissance of its own first principles today, and to challenge the nation to it. That's just one suggestion at the international level, a series of statesmanlike speeches that address not only troop numbers and economic issues and strategic issues, but really put in place some of the first principles that were also discussed a generation ago. The second suggestion, much near our own level, is at the civic level, because the crisis of cultural authority is today continuing in terms of the culture wars. And yet many people, even at the leadership level, are treating it either as a non issue. In other words, they prefer to ignore it because religion and politics, or the cultural issues are so explosive, or as a nuisance factor which they prefer to see disappear, but if it's there, they would only like to exploit politically. In other words, on very few issues at the moment, whether it's the flag issue or many of the other issues that are there, do we have a genuine Lincolnese leadership that sees the profundity of the cultural chasms that are opening up and goes beyond the political potential to really address the urgent national issues that underlie it. And to me, it almost passes belief that we can have some extraordinary strategic issues, such as suggestions of Mars landing in 2019, or, say, the Charlottesville goals for education. And yet these things never address some of the civic issues that are so vital to the republic and absolutely critical to resolving the culture wars. It's staggering that the Charlottesville educational goals had nothing to say about educating for democracy or any of the religious liberty issues in public life that are presently so explosive in the culture wars. And yet anyone who knows the history of the public schools knows that those very issues are at the heart of the rationale of the public school. And if they are not restored properly to the public schools, the public schools, as Ennis Boyer puts it, will have to close their doors. And yet the educational issues can be discussed in all sorts of other ways, which are genuinely urgent problems, with a complete blind spot about this issue, which has incidentally caused considerable embarrassment afterwards. Now, at this level, there is much that can be said practically, because the challenge to the nation can be put very simply in the challenge that the Greeks used to raise. If we're to have a commonwealth, we've got three choices. People can either be tribespeople responding in the public arena according to their tribal solidarities, or they can be idiots, which was the original Greek word for the purely private citizen who has no concerns for public issues, merely for his own private concerns or as citizens, people who recognize the importance of the public life of the Commonwealth and are able to contribute to it. And what's remarkable today is that the best solutions to this go back to the notion of covenant. Incidentally, did you know that the most original scholarship that came out of the constitutional celebrations about the Constitution was were to show that the notion of the Constitution goes back to the notion of the covenant. Scholars used to say the Constitution was almost fresh from the foam, sort of Venus style, unique and irreplaceable, or that it came from various Whig ideas or whatever. They don't today, because they point out that the whole notion of constitutions and charters and compacts goes back to the people. Puritan. On November 20, 1620, the Mayflower Compact was the first political compact in history where a theological compact was transferred to politics. By 1640, there were dozens and scores of them. So long before John Locke or Montesquieu or any of these other boys were even born, American constitutionalism was entirely in place. And all that happened was it developed into a secular national form in the miracle of Philadelphia in 1787. But what is the heart of the notion of covenant? At the heart of the notion is the notion of unity and diversity, independence, commonality, commitment and free consent, and so on. And this notion of covenant, or what was called federal liberty and federal liberty unity, is behind the Constitution and is the secret to many of these problems today. Because an increasingly pluralistic society, where we will not and cannot find unity at the point of religious belief, it's possible we still can have federal unity and federal liberty at the point of an overlapping consensus in terms of a commitment to certain rights, such as religious liberty. So, interestingly, at this crucial moment, when the culture wars continue and the religion and politics debate deepen, the best solution in terms of an answer is actually to go back to something that grows out of the covenant. Yet, ironically, Christians at this present moment are probably the single strongest blockage to such a thing being realistic in the country today. The third level at which we can do something practical, and here we're down to our own lives, is, I think, at the spiritual level. There is extraordinary disarray today. There's no question, if one looks at it denominationally, that the main line has been sidelined. In other words, Protestantism, which was once the. The religious decisive movement in American culture, has lost that decisiveness. And the Catholicism to this point shows no signs of filling the vacuum. And evangelicalism, which in the mid-70s hoped it could, has equally shown itself insufficient to do so. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it means an enormous change in a vacuum at the heart of national life in terms of religious decisiveness. But we're in a situation, I think, where we can say very simply, the culture has changed so much and politics alone can change so little by itself that we're beyond the stage where any mobilization or any communication or any technology can turn things around. And at that point, ultimately what's needed is Reformation revival. But also there are simple things that can be done while people wait and hope and pray for that. And the encouragement is that what's actually missing that gives faith its lack of integrity and effectiveness are some very simple first things that have been lost. For example, in ascending order, one would be the Christian gift of persuasion. The ability to persuade is at the heart of the Christian faith, at the very heart of the Godhead. And yet today, whether it's sharing faith from one to another or it's politics, most Christians in public life are utterly persuasionless. They have picketing, protest, all sorts of things like that, but no persuasion. A very simple thing, but a thing that would change everything if it were recovered. Or a second thing moving higher, the ability to think consistently in a way that is shaped by God's truth. For 150 years we've had Christian anti intellectualism, but only in the last generation has it been such a severe handicap that makes the church hopeless in the public arena without serious thinking. If it were recovered today, things could be turned around fast. But the commitment has to be there. Moving up higher, a sense of calling, the sense that everything people do in every area of their lives is done to the glory of the Lord. That was the dynamic which released the Reformation, the dynamic behind the rise of the Puritans and the early American situation. And yet today, ironically, Catholics teach it better than Protestants. And in the heartland of the communities from which it grew, it's rarely taught at all. But if there's any way to be effective Christian penetration in modern society, it'll be with a recovery of a deep sense of individual calling. And the fourth and the last of the four things is an immediate direction, personal knowledge of God himself. Much of what passes this in parts of the country is a shallow, sentimental, suburban subjectivism. Much of it is an experientialism which is lost without groups. Much of it is fine in the private arena, but disappears in the public arena. But none of that will wash in today's culture. I think those three Things. The international level, the United States articulating its vision for the pax moderna. At the civic level, the recovering of all that it takes for educating for democracy and religious liberty. At the more spiritual level, the recovery of some of the forgotten first things could see in 10 to 15 years a turnaround of many of the things we see now far more effective than the political mobilizations that have been tempted in the last 10 years, in other words, in conclusion, I think we're somewhere between the declinists and the endists. I believe we're an extraordinary critical moment. Physicists speak of what they call a point of criticality. Solzhenitsyn uses, I think, a far better word, the word knots. All the various trends and themes and developments all coming together at a particular historic moment. In the Bible, the word used is the hour that kairos time, when things come to a head and culminate and go one way or the other. But of course, the challenge of this for us, unlike, say, the Soviet Union, is that it's different. It's a challenge to vitality, not to legitimacy, and it's undramatic. But let me just end where I've often ended. Nietzsche pointed out the regimes that would be produced, like Hitler's or Stalin's and Mao's, would be regimes characterized by supermen. In other words, when God dies for a culture, it would take great supermen to raise these titanic cultures that totalitarian socialism became. The Western deliberate democracy would not, in its last days, as he put it, be characterized by supermen. It would be characterized, he said, by last men. And the deepest feature of the last men was that there were people who have no point of view, transcendence. So they can't even despise themselves because they don't even have a vantage point to look down on themselves. And they're just happy with their own little worlds of dieting and jogging and health and happiness. And if you've read Nietzsche and thus spake Zarathustra, it's an extraordinary description of so much of what's on today. In other words, the challenge in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov was in the title of Solzhenitsyn's edited book, to fight out from under the rubble. Whereas our challenge is not that. Our challenge is to fight out from under the cotton candy, where we are smothered with mediocrity, stifled by lack of vision, crippled by banality on all sides. And yet our task is just as great and just as important. G.K. chesterton came here in the 1920s. And in his book, what I Saw in America is the last chapter on democracy. And it's from that the title of my book comes the Eagle and the Sun. And he finishes his book by arguing that America would have to look to the faiths and. And values from which his greatness was derived if it wanted to sustain them, because the American greatness and the American glory, he argues, was not derived from itself and could not be sustained by itself. And if it ever was cut off from its sources, it would decline. And he finishes by referring to the American symbol. And these are his closing words. And you can see where the title of my book comes Freedom is the Eagle whose Glory is Gazing at the Sun. And that's the only outcome of the crisis of cultural authority which will be a genuine restoration. Thank you. [01:15:57] Speaker D: We're going to have a short question and answer and discussion time, but because the hour is already getting late and we've been sitting for a while, please feel free. If those of you who do need to get up because you have babysitters, drives ahead of you, or just simply need to get home, please feel free to, because the hour is getting late. But we would like to have just the time now of both discussion as well as it doesn't. Your comments don't have to be in the form of questions, if you'd just like to make some comments. But we'd like to have some time now for discussion and question and answer on some of the very provocative issues that Oz has raised in his comments here this evening. And again, there are obviously a number of different perspectives from which, just as Oz has addressed in terms of looking at things in terms of the nation, in terms of the international arena and recent events, particularly in 1989, in terms of looking at it from the point of view of civic life and in terms of looking at it in terms of spiritual life. So I just like to open up it up. I have a few questions, but I'd just like to open it up to folks here, if you have some questions. [01:17:21] Speaker C: To articulate the acts of moderna in the international setting on behalf of the United States. If that is not done by the President, Who else can do that? Now, obviously, it's supremely done by the President and the Secretary of State, and I hope in the next two years, that's in fact what we'll see. In other words, part of the reluctance about the vision thing was clearly the last election. And there was a time when, I think, partly in contrast to President Reagan's brilliance at it There were various people. There was one instance, one of the debates went and Bob Dole went all around the place trying to slide out from the so called vision thing. And much of that was a very natural reaction to the brilliance of what Reagan had done and so on. And in the middle of the election they were reluctant to stake themselves out in ways could be attacked by some of their rivals. But I think we're in a situation now where it's just different. And I trust the next two years will see us transcending the reluctance about the division thing. But supremely, the Secretary of State and the President are the two to articulate, I should say incident. That's who the Europeans are listening to, to make it. Let me talk about two or three what ifs, or perhaps these persons might in 1968, what if the campaign had gone on for a couple weeks longer and Humphrey and not mixed with the middle election, what would that have done to the second thoughts of the 70s? Or what about in 1970, in 1980, [01:19:33] Speaker B: had not [01:19:36] Speaker C: Khomeini stopped an American fight now McDonald's philosophy, what would that have done to this research? As David now said, what is not the lack of an American calling out or articulating the intellectual values of this time? Is that a lack of the nation? Sure. The fundamental point, I agree with you. And incidentally, Berger would too. [01:20:15] Speaker D: I know some people, probably in the back room, just maybe the last point in terms of the lack of leaders. [01:20:20] Speaker C: Okay, would you want to repeat the questions? [01:20:23] Speaker A: I wouldn't want to. [01:20:24] Speaker C: I was wanting to dive into it, [01:20:26] Speaker D: but I was just concerned. Can you all hear in the back there? [01:20:30] Speaker C: Can you hear Mike? I think the thing is, Peter Burger is an academic sociologist. So I know he personally deeply believes in individual significance and extraordinary contribution. Personally, he's made it himself, but so often he's only read for his books and he writes as the scholar. So he writes from the sociological framework. And you do get that sense of sort of individual butterflies pinned against the board, the individual against the sociological forces. But that's only because you want one slice of the cake. And as Berger often says in most of his writings, everything that happens is multi causal. Individuals contribute. Psychology is important, economics is important, politics is important. The full picture, which God only sees, takes them all into account. And you're exactly right that the danger of speaking the way I was on some of those is you give us a flat earth view of it. That rules out that absolute significance of individual contribution. Now, when you play it with particular historical examples, that's tricky you and I could sit over whatever until the night was long, saying what if? And you could always do that in history. But you're right. The central point is history undoubtedly would have been dramatically different if Khomeini had done or didn't do what he did. And the same with Humphrey. But who knows what it would be? In other words, that's one of the reasons I'm not looking to the future and saying this is happening. I am a great skeptic about futurology. I think we're going into a time when there's going to be a vogue for what might be called secular premillennialism. The fascination with the year 2000, not just in spiritual things, but sort of John Nesbitt type secular things. And I think much of that is very, very unhealthy. So all that I said to. Not we can only say with hindsight because this has happened, but what if, I don't know, put it the other way around. Today we can make the difference. I brought with me something that means a lot to me. I've shown some of this. Maybe this I could just share at this point. Here's one of my favorite things at home, which is a book sent by William Wilberforce to a young man just getting married. This was sent by Wilberforce just a few months before Wilberforce died in 1833. And in them is a two, three page letter in it. And it means a lot to me to see the heart and the passion that's in that letter of the old man. Here he is after 50 years of fighting abolition. He's almost on his deathbed and he's going to see the victory of that flight against the abolition of slavery and so on. And here's the old man who cares for the things. Now, if ever there was a group, they were never a majority. The people around him. They were a decisive minority. But they were such thinkers, such workers, so strategic and so brilliant in their use of communication that that small group made a decisive difference. By the time he died, they were the single strongest force in what was then the world's number one power. And historians say that his stand against slavery was one of the. The great pivotal acts in all history. We can make the same difference today. There are enough people in this town alone who could make that difference in the next 10 years. That's what moves me in being here. I agree with you utterly. [01:23:49] Speaker B: I just wanted to say, underline that same point. I'm not sure that in the nature of events today we can only count on our president and Secretary of State either having necessarily the vision [01:24:05] Speaker C: that we [01:24:05] Speaker B: get with the nor necessarily is that their necessary role. I think that what we must count on all of us in whatever situation we find ourselves beginning to work in small cellules within themselves give up. How we represent ourselves in whatever situation we find ourselves in may be far more important. As a spokesperson and as an example of a nation, we now see multilateral corporations who operate outside of government. We now see international travel at a level we never saw in previous ages. We were exposed almost daily through what happened with our personal contacts and with visitors here. And if we could in fact begin to see small snow that did have issues that were based on value, my suspicion is that the impact would be far greater than any street geographic. And so I think the challenge of what Oz has said is to think again in our own way. What do we do in terms of making a contribution to a reestablishment of a set of values that is not prejudicial just around belief system which does deal with some of the fundamentals that on which are our society face. I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson's remark in which he said we must reorganize our public school system in terms of how we teach a system of values and understanding that will maintain this society. Oz's teachers going right back to the same philosophy. Jefferson was a little further away from having a belief system based on your relationship with the Creator. But nevertheless the fundamentals are still there. And my suspicions, correct me if I'm wrong. I think we're being watched very much in terms of how we act and how we interrupt. Our individual relationships. In terms of what the world see, we have an unusual opportunity. I just come back yesterday again from Europe. Our position in Eastern Europe has never been stronger than right because as a nation we maintain a certain persistence and accountability in our relationship. Not always articulate, but implicitly incredible. So I think the challenge is not only us as a nation, but us as you individually. So I'm thrilled with what you're doing and with your remarks and I got some a lot of time. [01:27:05] Speaker C: Thank you. Put it like this. When Lipset talked about America as the first new nation, partly what he meant was as a nation by intention, by ideas, from nothing. America had the privilege and the responsibility of grappling with modernity in a way that the European nations coming out of mythical whatever didn't have. Now, one of the key things that America grappled with right from the beginning as a first new nation was pluralism. Most nations didn't have it in, in that extraordinary way. So the challenge of living with deep differences, cultural, religion, linguistic, ethnic and so on, is built into the American experiment from the beginning. Now one never has an answer for all time. So what was once a largely Protestant pluralism, with a few Catholics and a few Jews and the odd atheist and so on, has grown from being Protestant to being Christian to being religious. And today it's a genuine multi faith pluralism that is a very radical diversity. So one third of all the world's immigration is happening today in California. But intriguingly, this problem of pluralism is now a worldwide problem. Sociologists say everyone is now everywhere, which is a little extreme. But what they mean is even a uniform country like England a generation ago has the problem now. The Pakistanis and the West Indians and all the social, educational problems they have, or we've read about the riots in Italy, or the educational problems in France, or even totalitarianism torn apart by its republics and its ethnic things. Yeltsin said to a friend of ours in the Charter, probably the problem of living with our deepest differences is more important to us than economics in the long run. In other words, there is a global problem living with differences, unity and diversity. All this. America could address that from its own experience. Best and the worst, and articulate the American answers, which are very profound at this point. Because America is a 300 year engagement with a problem at the heart of modernity. Our little curriculum on living with our deepest differences gets into some of the tough and thorny things here, but there's an awful lot that can be said. But in each of these, it's because America is so modern that she is prototypical of the problem the rest of the world is now facing for the first time. So it's not that America needs to be triumphalist and preachy, not at all. With considerable humility and showing the worst as well as the best. She can share solutions, practical as well as ideals that really make a difference, because that's one of the most remarkable things about this country. I think the spiritual movement in the Third World, say Latin America, Asia, parts of Africa, and the spiritual movements in the Eastern Europe are extremely significant. In other words, there's something very genuine, very, very vibrant and very remarkable going on in both the Third World and Eastern Europe. The problem comes when Western Christians who look at the lassitude of our church, the decimation of numbers, look to these movements as the answer to us. There's a simple reason why there's no automatic carryover. It's this. Eastern Europe has not been modernized, the Third World's not been modernized. In other words, they're essentially pre modern. The damage done to the church is the damage of modernity. So the Third World is the other side of modernity. The question is, in Singapore and these other countries, what will they be like in the third generation once they've been modernized? Will they be secularized like Europe, or will it be sort of semi hollowed out like much of the church here? So I would thank God for all these movements. They're vibrant, genuine, remarkable. But there are reasons why we can't just automatically look for an easy hope. For example, as the doors open, Eastern Europe is liberalized. We all know it went in first. Not only Western economy style, but also Playboy and you name it, all sorts of other things. So give the third generation and then test the challenge to faith. Modernity is a greater challenge to religious belief, not just the gospel, any type of belief, than any challenge in human history. Modernity has done more damage to the church than any persecutor or opponent in 2000 years. Again, that's why America is so significant. Like Europe, America is modernized. But unlike Europe, America is not so totally secularized and devastated. And so the challenge for the integrity and effectiveness of faith here is critical for faith in any part of the world. So those things are highly significant. I thank God for them. But we shouldn't automatically think it's going to carry over here. Thank you very much. You're putting a question. My wife is laughing. She was always giving a sigh of relief in the back room here. [01:32:55] Speaker A: The back room. [01:32:56] Speaker B: Heard that question. [01:32:57] Speaker C: Thank you. Modernization is a series of developments that's grown out of a constellation of forces. But usually two main revolutions are behind it. The first is the capitalist revolution going back to the 13th century. The second is the industrial technological revolution in the late 18th century. So what's often called modernization, which now includes all that flows out of that urbanization, mass media, you name it, has really come from the marriage of capitalism with the technological industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century. So the first modern country in that sense, where it just took off, was late 18th century England. In the 19th century, the torch was handed to America. So when people say America's the world's lead society, that doesn't mean the number one necessarily, or the best necessarily, but simply that for better or worse, America is the radiating center from which the forces of modernity and modernization are going out. So by modernization, it's not meant a set of ideas. It's meant all the things that the result of the capitalist revolution, the technological industrial revolution. But we experience it in terms of fax machines and televisions and cars and satellites and things like this. That's how it's around us today now that the whole spirit and system of it's often just called modernity. Thank you. In the back here, I wonder if [01:34:33] Speaker D: you could picking up on the comments and the question that Mike asked with regard to certainly one of the greatest challenges now as we look to the developing world, but particularly Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the other nations in Eastern Europe are the tensions created with once the totalitarian rule collapses of all the ethnic and religious groups and the tension spilling over to what how practically might the United States [01:35:03] Speaker C: share some of [01:35:04] Speaker D: what we have learned through our own model? And in doing that, is there some way in which it might also in a sense take us back to first principles? In this day of Bensonhurst and so much going on that is very alarming to many people who are very concerned that the very sorts of things that we've had a certain degree of pride and how well we've handled them and now there seem to be so many things breaking out in terms of our inability to live with our teachers differences. [01:35:32] Speaker C: I think the first thing to say is this whole problem is a desperately real problem and it's one of the main lies why endism is wrong. In other words, the idea of the cloudless horizons and the end of history is foolish partly because when totalitarian disappears, nationalism becomes more important and tribalism of a hundred different types. And we've seen all the things recently like the anti Semitism in Carpentre in France and so on. So I think that's going to be a very, very deep problem. I think if it's not solved constructively here, it'll be more of a problem than people realize in this country. Not at sort of Belfast style levels, but more than it's been to this point. I think the answer though is in terms of two things. One, the genius of the Constitution. But two, the importance of the whole climate of civility that goes along with it. For example, just take a current example. Take say your Maryland debate on abortion or any other place where religion and politics comes up. You notice that unless there's an understanding how religion enters public life and how you engage with people who have different religious positions, what happens is religion is essentially inflammatory. As soon as religion comes in first, the issue is no longer discussed on its own merits. Whatever the issue is, the political merit is lost. Everything that's important is where you're coming from. So you're a humanist, you're a fundamentalist. Immediately, that's all that matters. So the political merits of the issue go to the background, religion comes to the foreground, the inflammatory divisiveness gets deeper and deeper, and eventually the general reaction is a sort of plague on both your houses, and people want to get the whole messy business out. And we see this recurringly. [01:37:38] Speaker B: It.