There have always been two Americas, one, personified by Huck Finn, pulled toward virtue and another, personified by Gatsby, driven, sometimes self destructively, toward success. This division cuts to the very heart of who we are as a people.

I am sure the sports world has been shocked, shocked to find that there are athletes who have used steroids. And we are all shocked, shocked to know that delivering pork remains a major preoccupation of those in Congress. And we are shocked, shocked by Janet Jackson's clothing snafus, the NBA's brawling, commercials that appeal to our most base fantasies. Democrats are shocked, shocked that moral values are a concern of our voters, and Republicans are shocked, shocked that the capitalists they endorse and support play a part in the decline of American culture.

Still, it is worth recalling that this country was conceived in crisis, and the issues we wrestle with today have been a part of this country's intellectual landscape for more than two centuries. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said a genius is someone who can hold two contradictory thoughts in his head simultaneously. If that is so, America is truly ingenious. On the one hand, we go to church, read the Sermon on the Mount and glory in our religious culture; on the other, we idolize Vince Lombardi ("winning isn't everything, it is the only thing") and Leo Durocher ("nice guys finish last.") We celebrate upright characters like George Washington, Honest Abe and Joe DiMaggio, while being equally enthralled by Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde and that basketball player with the funky hairdo. If you think things are bad now, consider this passage:

Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. An acute and candid person in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater…etc…

The author, of course, is not writing about today's cultural and political environment (though some might argue he could be). This is Walt Whitman (America's celebratory poet!), in his essay "Democratic Vistas," lamenting over what he perceived to be the state of post-Civil War America.

The cultural "wars" are nothing new. There have always been two Americas, one, personified by Huck Finn, pulled toward virtue and another, personified by Gatsby, driven, sometimes self destructively, toward success. This battle rages in every neighborhood and, I imagine, in virtually every soul in the country. Well it should. It is important because it cuts to the very heart of who we are as a people.

Count me among those who share the concerns of what, for lack of a better term, I will call cultural conservatives. Without recounting a long litany of by now well-known examples, it is troubling to behold an America that at times challenges the credulity of even our most wicked satirists. What a feast for Will Rogers and Mark Twain: kill your wife — and write a bestseller; give the president a good time in the Oval office and watch the book offers (and big bucks) roll in; scream the most pathetic obscenities and sign a record deal worth millions; push the envelope, often at great cost to our children, and watch the profits soar.

Fearful of being judged by our own imperfections, we have lost the ability to make distinctions that are essential to a functioning Republic. After all (and this is not an original argument) our entire justice system rests upon imperfect people being able to sit in judgment of alleged criminal behavior. You don't have to be a perfect parent to discipline your children. Nor do you need to be a perfect Christian to insist that some kind of moral culture is essential to our long-term liberties. We need more adults in this country and a level of dialogue that does not insult common sense and risk national unity. It has little to do with being perfect but a lot to do with accepting responsibility for what we do as individuals and as communities. When a society scoffs at virtue and celebrates its opposite, it is a good bet that we are headed in the wrong direction. That is the state of America today on many cultural fronts.

What happened? For starters, we have never been as virtuous as some folks pretend. We know the virtues, all seven of them, and most of us are pretty good at finding ways around them when it suits us. That is a given because human beings are flawed and will inevitably stumble. What we have lost, however, is a sense of shame and a healthy respect for the communities in which we live. Adultery is not new, folks, but what is new, and pathetic, is two hours of prime television time being set aside for the meanderings of an air-headed intern — or worse yet the celebration of deceit as a path to success. In days past, you could cheat a partner on a business deal, but if it was discovered you might pay a price in the community in lost business and esteem. Recall Arthur Miller's play, All My Sons. When duplicity was discovered there were dire consequences because ethics mattered, in the long run. A culture or family built upon lies or deception will not endure in any healthy sense. We need communities that rally to protect not the perpetrators of wrong-doing, but the victims. A right path must exist, even if it is never perfectly navigated.

This acknowledgment of right and wrong is missing in the national lexicon, cultural conservatives are arguing. But how we got here is more complex, I would argue, than some of my conservative brethren will concede. The list of culprits is long, but those we choose to cite probably reflect our own political or cultural biases: television, the 1960s, multiculturalism, industrialism, big government, etc. On the most basic level, however, a Newsweek cover story on virtue several years ago contained a vital clue: "An ethics of virtue cannot be learned alone. Nor can it be taught from textbooks. Good character comes from living in communities — family, neighborhood, religious, and civic institutions — where virtue is encouraged and rewarded."

Note well that last word: "rewarded."

Let me dwell for a moment on the case of a man who worked hard all of his life to run a small business. He has labored seven days a week for more than thirty years. At great personal cost, he introduced a health care plan for his employees. He paid taxes dutifully, took care of sick employees, honored commitments to family, church and country. He struggled to survive many of those years. Faced with cancer, he confronted the difficult and emotional prospect of selling his business. Only there was a problem. Having paid so much in taxes already, he was hit again by a capital gains tax that complicated his efforts to live out his life comfortably. Rather than reward him for a life-time of productivity and generosity, the government taxed him another 30 percent. That is called compassion on the Left.

The 18th century British political philosopher Edmund Burke argued that any virtue coerced by force or fear is hardly worthy of the approbation. Implicit in this formulation was the notion that a good society is one that makes making right choices easier. If government has any obligation beyond the common defense, it is to not penalize citizens for honoring commitments to community, family, nation and God. A society that does otherwise runs the risk turning its citizens into characters in Auden's poem, "September 1939:"

Americans who have tried to weave every-day virtues into the fabric of their daily lives are starting to feel adrift in a culture that rewards aggression, greed and exhibitionism while penalizing those who work hard and play fair. Republicans and conservatives have no problem detecting this trend when the culprit is government; Democrats and liberals are equally convinced that the private sector is at fault. Unfortunately, both are right. In government and in the marketplace, Americans, through a million different transactions, demands, votes, policies and financial decisions, reward certain kinds of behavior and conduct. We have collectively helped to create the culture and government we have and yet, as its architects, we are reluctant to accept responsibility for our creation. We know something is missing, but we can't quite put our finger on the problem.

Let me take a shot. Ideas matter a great deal, it turns out, and the way we think about success has everything to do with the world in which we live. Rethinking long-held assumptions is a vital step toward sustaining our communities and our country. The gods of our day — money, power, fame, and beauty — must be reevaluated and understood in this context. They are not evil in themselves, but detached from deeper values they are clanging symbols that cannot nurture us or halt the slide into cultural and spiritual chaos. If conservatives are right that we are running aground as a moral nation, is it possible that we have played a part? We know the flaws in the liberal agenda and they are many, but do we need to rethink our own assumptions about where we have been and where we are headed? In the spirit of engaging this debate, I offer a few thoughts:
 
The Money Culture

In 1988, the Washington-based magazine Regardie's featured a fiction contest on the theme: "Money, Power, Greed," adding "they're the things that made this country great. And they can make for the themes of a great story." Perhaps, but many of us would argue that America was made great by more than money, power and greed. America was made great as well by self-sacrifice, intelligence, ingenuity, honor, honesty, freedom and restraint. Yet, it is money and the glamour that surrounds it that receives disproportionate attention. As "Adam Smith," one of the financial gurus of our age, explains:

It is part of the ethos of this country that you ought to be rich. You ought to be, unless you have taken some specific vow of poverty such as the priesthood, scholarship, teaching or civil service, because money is the way we keep score. This feeling has been a long-time in the making. It goes away sometimes in depressions, when briefly wealth becomes suspect and poverty is not dishonorable. The rest of the time, poverty is very close to criminal.

This poses an obvious ethical dilemma for average Americans who struggle to survive honestly while being subjected to an endless parade of hucksters, con artists, drug dealers, financiers, lawyers, and entertainment and media elites who profit from bending, manipulating or breaking the rules most of us are expected to respect. We are a society increasingly obsessed with lotteries, gambling, sports, lawsuits and celebrities — the bread and circuses of our time. In the process, are we losing sight of values that once tempered, at least to a degree, our most voracious and destructive appetites?

In our better moments, we all know that it is as wrong to judge people by wealth as it is to judge them by their body parts; the temptation remains all the same. We forget at our own peril that there are "permanent things" to be protected as well as immediate desires to be gratified. T.S. Eliot powerfully made the point in his essay, "The Idea of A Christian Society:"

We are being made aware that the organization of a society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to dearly pay…..a wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God….For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

Eliot was a conservative and he touched on an issue that many conservatives – from the Agrarians of the 1920s to James Buckley of the 1970s — concede is thorny for all of us who value free enterprise. Have we wed ourselves so strongly to the Wealth of Nations part of our pedigree that we have lost sight of Smith's equally important tract, A Theory on Moral Sentiments. A society obsessed with consumption straps itself to a dangerous engine, as Henry Adams eloquently argued in his essay, "The Dynamo and the Virgin."

One result is that we have forfeited a piece of holy ground to liberals who will invite the government into our lives — to regulate the environment, plan our neighborhoods and control our property. We can lead the environmental debate in a reasonable direction but first we have to acknowledge that there is a cost to dumping raw sewage in our oceans, destroying forests for short-term profit, and abandoning our wildlife and wetlands to the whims of developers. Our duty to future generations is clear, but do we have the creativity and courage to face it? And what, might I ask, could be more conservative than doing so?

The Disease of Fame

Fame has always been a measure of success in the United States. Most of our founders Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, et. al., longed for it even as they sought to publicly downplay their own ambitions. But even those who openly craved success understood that their fortunes would depend on substantive achievement. Fame was a reward for real accomplishment in politics, business, science and the arts, and it did not come easily or uncritically in most instances.

At times in our history, the desire for fame has become all-consuming. In the modern era, it is interwoven with a consumption-crazed culture. Celebrity has become an end in itself because, at the very least, a celebrity can sell a product. (Forget for a moment that this celebrity, say an NBA star, has fathered children he won't raise, or thrown people through windows — what's that got to do with the price of tickets?) Equally disturbing is the realization of Andy Warhol's dire prediction that the demands of a media-driven culture would one day guarantee every American 15 minutes of fame. Take a look at television these days and you see the result.

No one has better documented this phenomenon and its tragic consequences than the late Christopher Lasch. In his book, The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch suggested that a convergence of forces — statism, the cults of therapy and celebrity, consumerism, mass media — were fraying the fabric of American society. Traditional values, already under assault from industrialism and government, were being overwhelmed by a consumer culture run amok.

Echoing Walter Lippmann's arguments in A Preface to Morals, Lasch dared to challenge the notion that satiating every conceivable desire, be it material or sexual, was the path to fulfillment. In doing so, he argued that Americans were losing sight of what real success is all about: a life well lived.
 
Whither Honor?
 
Honor is an old-fashioned notion that conjures up images of chivalry, knights and silly duels. It also carries the baggage of patriarchal/traditional societies in which family honor became the justification for all kinds of oppression and cruelty against women. Too often, innocent or honestly flawed people were sacrificed on the altar of besmirched honor.

Even so, honor properly understood has a place in a civilized culture. It means being honest at the expense of profit, being faithful at the expense of immediate pleasure, being loyal even when it is inconvenient. Most important, it means respecting commitments and being frank when a commitment cannot be honored.

It might seem a quaint, southern idea, but the notion of "gentlemanly" behavior is relevant. The late Walker Percy, the southern novelist, wrote a book entitled The Last Gentleman. I think of that title when I see what is held up as "manhood" in this day and age. My literary hero as a boy was Atticus Finch, a gentleman of the old-fashioned sort whose traits once earned a man the compliment, "gentleman." In today's cultural climate Atticus would be written off as a loser, perhaps, but he is nevertheless the kind of man who holds families and communities together. Oliver Wendell Holmes, an ideological maverick, also recognized the value of honor during a speech commemorating the Civil War. In it, he describes the bearing of young men he later saw die:

Young and gracious figures, somewhat remote and proud, but with a melancholy and sweet kindness. There is upon their faces the shadow of approaching fate and the glory of generous acceptance of it. I may say of them, as I once heard it said of two Frenchmen, relics of the ancien regime, "They were very gentle. They cared nothing for their lives." High breeding, romantic chivalry — we who have seen these men can never believe that the power of money or the enervation of pleasure has put an end to them. We know that life may still be lifted into poetry and lit with spiritual charm.

The Search for Quality

Quality is an idea that, in the best of worlds, would govern everything we do, say or think. Were our culture imbued with a healthy respect for quality, we would honor and patronize businesses that placed community above profit when circumstances warranted it, and we would respect as heroes fathers and mothers who took care of their children spiritually as well as materially. We would understand, as our craftsmen and artisans used to, that work without soul is unworthy of a free nation or individual.

Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, makes deep, abiding sense on this score. Twenty years ago, Pirsig observed a loss of respect for quality in America for the idea of doing things well. The motorcycle was the metaphor he used to illustrate the broader point. We might love the looks of a shiny new motorcycle, but our experiences on a motorcycle will be far more productive if we understand how it works and how to maintain it.  This knowledge enables us to better determine for ourselves what is and is not essentially "good." Quality is the dialectic that takes place between subject and object, museum visitor and painter, reader and writer, consumer and producer. The more refined one's appreciation of quality, the greater the appreciation of things properly done.

Pirsig believes that quality is the driving moral force in the universe. In my view, at least, he sees quality as a reflection of God. When we do good, honest work, we are sharing the God part of ourselves. When you consider a baseball field, for example, one of the things you cannot help but admire is the underlying form, the classic dimensions. George Will points out that first base is 90 feet from home plate, just long enough to enable a fielder to throw out the fastest men on earth by a few steps if a ground ball is hit within reach. That is quality and it informs everything in our lives. To the extent that it does not, we are less understanding, less excellent, less civilized and more alienated from ourselves and our neighbors. Viewed this way, the absence of quality is the absence of God.

When Pirsig applies this critique to modern-day culture, he strikes familiar yet disturbing chords. Pirsig describes "primary" culture as the mass-produced television shows, pop music, consumer goods and products that in superficial ways bind us together. The more we embrace this "primary" culture, the less we are involved in the real communities around us and the lonelier we become. Pirsig contrasted the loneliness he experienced in urban, crowded environments with the peace he felt when riding his motorcycle through the open fields of the Midwest.

The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small.

Breaking down cubicles of isolation, often self-imposed, is vital to restoring the sense of community and soul in American life. We must care about the people behind the work or, if you will, behind the counter. And they must care about us. And we are mindful that this can be even more difficult in a cyber age in which we all live more and more in a virtual world.
 
Conclusion

Matthew Arnold, the 18th century poet and critic, argued that culture could be saved from anarchy only by cultivating "sweetness and light." The way I read him, he is talking about the need to respect deep, permanent things that enhance the soul. That is why intellectual honesty that transcends partisan wrangling is so important. We all live in glass houses. We can tolerate each other's foibles and sins without celebrating them just as we can condemn destructive behavior without condemning people who are in trouble.

Few Americans have escaped the battles over career, love, and values that rage in the country. The human condition spares none of us. The desire for success properly understood is natural and healthy because it translates into freedom: to spend time with friends and family, to read good books, to help those in need, to shape issues that affect our lives, to share special moments with lovers and spouses, to raise our children in the best of times, to live gracefully, worship thoughtfully and, yes, even to sin discreetly.

As conservatives, we are right to challenge the assumption, increasingly prevalent in some circles, that the government which governs most governs best. We believe, as an article of proven political faith, that Reagan was right: a government strong enough to give you everything is a government strong enough to take it away. Beyond that, I think the fundamental question we must ask is simply this: what is it we, as conservatives, are trying to conserve? It seems to me that our mission has not changed all that much since Bill Buckley and his crew stood athwart history yelling `stop.'

We should work to temper the excesses of government and the market by taking back our schools, neighborhoods and communities from the forces we oppose, and in doing so, continue to shape the national debate. We should unabashedly fight for our God-given liberties, understanding that rights entail obligations that run deeper than profit and worldly success. Every generation hence must do likewise if we are to preserve the permanent, venerable things we cherish.