It's All About to Hit the Fan

America's Suicide?
Suicide as a personal or a social phenomenon is never a comfortable conversation, as tragedy seldom is. When presented on the level of civilization itself, suicide is a challenging subject indeed, particularly when it is your own society at stake. Yet, in his 2012 volume "A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future," this is precisely what Os Guinness invites us - even commands us - as Americans, to think hard on. It is a penetrating read. It is a vital read.
As an Irish descendant of a certain beer magnate and as a self-described "resident alien" in the U. S. A., Guinness brings to his argument the presumed objective detachment of a third party looking in at America. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, is widely published in American social studies, is founder of the Trinity Forum and past member of the Brookings Institute and Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. He is a dedicated and very empathetic observer of the contemporary American scene and is highly informed of the trajectory of American history, the foundations of our political success as an independent nation, our internal struggles to maintain our freedoms and suggests what we might do to halt our suicidal plunge into incoherence.
Guinness comes armed with the full panoply of some 200 of history's observers and participants in the rise and fall of societies, from Thucydides, Sophocles and Xenophon among the ancients, through the Revolutionaries of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison and Adams to the moderns of Keynes, Weber and Wilson. All of this collective "wisdom of the ages" testifies to the hard fact that every civilization known to history has disappeared. While foreign invasions have precipitated many of these social catastrophes, Guinness insists with volumes of evidence that it is the internal decay of societies that universally explains their devolution. It is not the "wolves at the door" that today threaten our survival, but the "termites within" that will inevitably do the job.
The footnotes should not scare off the American reader. The inevitable conclusion should. Guinness' journalistic style is aimed at the concerned citizen, not the PhD.
Guinness first establishes his baseline for understanding the current American condition with a review of the American Founding, the forceful riddance of external control begun in 1776. This was the revolutionary startup of 1776, the first stage of the three-phased cycle of freedom. The second phase was the creation of ordered freedom manifested by the constitutional structure that provided the perimeter fence against any future government tyranny and the internal "checks and balances" to prevent internal anarchy. Here the Founders combined the negative freedom from excessive government intrusion and the equally important positive freedom to believe in what we will and to act on those beliefs. This was history's first attempt at structuring a society from scratch on specific ideas and tenets. This took time, as the Constitution was only ratified in 1787 together with the original Bill of Rights. This Constitution was a "covenant" among freely consenting partners as much as it was a document, a "covenant" that manifested the Founders' understanding of how "freedom" was to be defined and commonly understood.
The third phase of Guinness' freedom is the sustaining of freedom. This has become the critical phase, a continuing one over the decades and is the principle theme of "A Free Peoples' Suicide." Simply put, Guinness pictures an American society that has disintegrated to a level of incoherence and spends most of his pages explaining why. Pick your metaphor: a physician attempting to heal his living patient; a coroner dissecting a carcass looking for clues of the cause of death. The reader might suppose that Guinness himself is unsure which one he represents.
"Freedom" alone, Guinness claims, is not an ultimate value. It is a vacuum into which we import values. Freedom is an identifiable structure, a "golden triangle" consisting of three equilateral corners, freedom, virtue and faith. Removing any one corner and the structure falls to the ground.
The virtue he proclaims is that of "personal restraint," the consensus among mature citizens that there are essential norms of behavior that can be agreed upon. This was the Jeffersonian notion of "reason" and "sentiment," the "aristocracy of virtue" of John Adams and de Tocqueville's "habits of the heart" that together enabled citizens to govern themselves rather than be subjected to the destructive dependancies of "monarchy" and an all-consuming government.
The faith that Guinness proclaims is one essential source of that virtue, an interdependency that results in "morality" itself. This is the Christian/Judeo faith that acknowledges something superior to the individual, something that offers guidelines of behavior that all citizens can agree on voluntarily without government dictat. The loss of this faith in the "invisible" unhappily is the "completest revolution" of the American experience since we also have no faith in anything "visible."
The challenge to the reader of "A Free Peoples' Suicide" is whether to continue with Guinness' excruciating depiction of the collapse of that "golden triangle," of American society itself, or to retreat ignominiously under his security blanket of "I can have it all" at the hands of beneficent and ever-expanding government.
Guinness probes an almost unlimited number of channels into our seemingly sclerotic American society in cataloging the various ways that Americans have contorted "freedom" beyond any semblance of what it was once meant to be:
- The liberal/libertarian insistence on negative freedom alone, where freedom's value
is shortchanged by casual "whatever you want to be" slogans, where it emphasizes
free choice, but neglects "which choice," where we have abandoned "peer pressure"
as a tool for common understanding and restraint - all now being a moral menace
and a "nihilistic" road to disaster;
- The "liberal" insistence on dismantling the "tools of oppression" in the name of
"justice" and liberating "victims" while abandoning the core framework of society;
- By endlessly expanding our claims to "rights and entitlements" which ironically
cedes limitless power to the very government, the dispenser of those rights and
entitlements, that we pretend to oppose. This is the ultimate paradox of freedom for
Guinness, the freedom that becomes the enemy of itself;
- The replacement of self-generated virtue by a stifling regulatory latticework which
refutes the definition of citizenship itself;
- Our obsession with decadence, our abandonment of cultural tradition, our addiction
to change for change sake, all of which has led to a dead end;
- the "progressive" addiction to "relativism" and a fragmenting "diversity" that ends
with the pulverized "pointillist" array of disconnected dots having no relationship
with each other;
- Our relegating of our Founders, together with their ideals, to the morgue of "dead,
white males" which has only ensured our own entombment in that very morgue;
- The grotesque "intolerance" that hypocritically dominates our culture in the name of
"tolerance" resulting in destructive notions such as "hate crimes," sex changes, the
diminution of marriage to a mere experiment with no more value than a "rewritable
DVD" and the turning of the colleges and universities into moral anarchies.
"A Free People's Suicide" can be a tortuous trek for the reader who is optimistic enough to continue searching for whatever Os Guinness might offer in the way of hope and restoration of our society. It is the challenge of "sustaining" the freedom that he charges us with individually as citizens that he asks us to respond to. It is the "regeneration" of the interlocking "golden triangle" of faith, virtue and freedom that only "we the people" can initiate in every legislature, every school, every family, every church and synagogue, in every newspaper and in every community that will matter. It is the freedom that ultimately exists only in the hearts and minds of citizens where no "grand inquisitor, government goon or Google hacker" can invade. It is "freedom" as a living organism that needs revitalizing in every generation including
the resurrection, just maybe, of those tired cliches such as the Burkean diagnosis of evil as the result of "good people doing nothing" old Ben's reminder that "when a people loses its virtue, freedom will be suspended and they will descend into
tyranny."
Lastly, kudos to Rev. Alan R. Crippen, II, previous resident of Colorado Springs and founder and director of the John Jay Institute for Faith, Society and Law (johnjayinstitute.org) for hosting Dr. Os Guiness on behalf of his young American post-graduate leadership program.
Whitney Galbraith
Colorado Springs CO
719-633-2740