c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-From Hillary Rodham Clinton’s”It Takes a Village”to Jim Lichtman’s”The Lone Ranger’s Code of the West”to William J. Bennett’s”The Moral Compass,”books on ethics and values are flooding American bookstores, warning us that society is plummeting to perdition and begging us to mend our ways.

Whether the authors are religious or secular, conservative or liberal, whether their motivations are political, therapeutic or purely financial, the message is the same: We were never a perfect society, but we once were more decent to one another. If we can’t be bothered to understand the best of that past, we are condemned to a Hobbesian future in which crime, callousness and dishonesty reign, and citizens live nasty, brutish, short lives, bereft of warmth, compassion and meaning.

At their most hopeful, the books describe a nation that has strayed but can find its way back with a halfway decent map. At the other extreme, they offer so much evidence of depravity and so few solutions that they take on a repetitive, incantatory tone, like chants to waken a nation that’s already morally dead.

Nebraska therapist Mary Pipher-author of the 1994 bestseller”Reviving Ophelia,”about how consumer culture destroys the egos and bodies of adolescent girls, finds pervasive darkness in American family life. Her new book,”The Shelter of Each Other,”describes a”United States of Advertising”in which Madison Avenue, Hollywood, corporate America and a lumbering, unfeeling government combine to destroy the sanctity and happiness of modern households.

She describes a nation of lost, harried souls who spend more time working or watching TV than they could dream of spending with their families. They live moment to moment, reviling the past and ignoring the future. Children have no childhood, and the very idea of values is denigrated as a sucker’s mirage. “Since my childhood, the world has changed dramatically,”Pipher writes.”When I was a child, my world was about Sunday dinners, relatives, card parties, church, school and farming. Now it’s a world about talk shows, cable television, e-mail, nanoseconds, microwave meals, celebrities and other people far away getting rich. Our children are growing up in a consumption-oriented, electronic community that is teaching them very different values from those we say we value.” Ethics lecturer Jim Lichtman’s”The Lone Ranger’s Code of the West”uses the adventures of the Masked Man to teach lessons in sincerity, decency, honesty and bravery, values the author believes have fallen into disrepute. At one point, the Ranger tells a story of the Old West clearly meant to parallel our own crime-ridden cities:”Local governments were crumbling under the oppression of lawlessness,”the Ranger intones.”Communities were breaking down. It seemed as if there was a plan under way … to subvert the very principles this country was founded on.” All these books express the idea that America was once a sunnier, more family-friendly and hospitable place, even though it has never been a perfect political entity, or even one that allows the majority of its citizens to lead sunny, relaxed, contemplative lives. Our citizens have always suffered in one way or another, either because of race, religion or sex or because their time and place demanded they work 18-hour days to feed their families.

As tempting as it may be for Clinton or Bennett or Pipher to lament the passing of a kinder time (in their generational instance, Eden was the 1950s) they’re not naive enough to claim that everyone lived saner, healthier, more productive lives then. “In reality, our life was not so picture perfect,”writes Clinton.”Ask African-American children who grew up in a segregated society, or immigrants who struggled to survive in sweatshops and tenements, or women whose life choices were circumscribed and whose work was underpaid. Ask those who grew up in the picture-perfect houses about the secrets and desperation they sometimes concealed.” But the injustices, humiliations and moments of uncertainty Americans suffered in the past were mitigated by strong support networks around them-family, friends, neighbors, co-workers-and by the slower pace of society, which allowed moments of calm and reflection, however fleeting.

At least we knew who we were, where we lived, what church we went to, whom we loved and whom to turn to. And the most universal moral ideas-the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule-were transmitted from adults to children and reinforced through churches, schools, the media and implacable public opinion.

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These books are intended to reassert the importance of finding a moral code and sticking to it. Through our beliefs, our words and our deeds, we will recapture what we’ve lost; we will cleave to each other, state by state, city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, like the family we were always meant to be.

Which begs the question: Which virtues, values or principles are we talking about, exactly?

Depends on whom you ask. A scholar might cite the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with their proclamations that all men are created equal and that all have a right to pursue their dreams with a minimum of interference from government or their fellow citizens. There is a reason immigrants flocked here in the past two centuries and continue to do so: This nation, more than any in history, offered individuals the chance to believe what they wished and become whomever they chose.

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The nation’s primal resilience was rooted in its foundation on moral principle. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote,”America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” So-called”revisionist”historians would dispute the first part of that statement: that the country was ever inherently”good.”They have a point. Even the most cursory study of our past reveals a deeply schizoid national character-a tendency to invoke lofty principles while sticking it to as many people as possible. The Bill of Rights did nothing to discourage another hundred years of slavery, a genocidal government-sponsored campaign against American Indians, and countless military adventures to protect the assets of U.S. corporations.

It is not necessary to accept one version of America and reject the other. Nor is it possible. As Mary Pipher points out, nations are like families: Even the worst has some good qualities, and even the best has moments of pettiness, vulgarity and cruelty.

That explains why reading the new crop of values books yields few explicitly partisan solutions-or even partisan readings of history. In”It Takes a Village,”Hillary Clinton, a liberal Democrat, sometimes suggests government intervention to make children’s lives easier, but spends more time urging individuals and communities to do their part.

We live in a world where authors act as moral timesmiths, telling us where we were, where we are and where we’re going. With the tools of words, they strive to put hands back on the face of our emotional watches. But with each word they remind us, sadly, that we once were watchmakers.

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