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IN ITS MILITANT moralism, this army of the aggressively wholesome can rouse other Americans to try to come to grips with difficult and basic ethical issues that should not be left to single-issue politicians—abortion, the quality and direction of education in public schools, and so on. The right-wing insurgency in America today, although much exaggerated as a kind of counterrevolution, may resonate in a certain moral harmony with large numbers of American citizens whose politics are more centrist and whose ethics are more secular.
Conservatism is being called the ideology of ideas just now because it is searching for new practical solutions to economic and social problems (sometimes so old that they merely look new). It is also called that because it is tending toward the firmer, common sense moral ground that radicalism and experimental youth abandoned years ago for more fantastic terrain. The formerly young of the 1960s have helped along the movement toward more civil and sensible behavior.
Many of them have now discovered complexities they had not earlier imagined and the virtues of some behavior they might have previously scorned. They have grown up and started to raise children of their own—an enterprise that, as they did not know when younger, is the most profoundly humanizing and civilizing of all worldly experiences.
A COMMUNAL BIAS TOward sounder roof beams and joists has become more evident, especially in fields like education. It will take immense intelligence and energy to repair and revive public schooling in America, but at least industriousness and literacy are beginning to be honored again. Religion has reasserted itself amid a gathering conviction that some standards—honor, heroism, courage, kindness, tolerance, decency, sacrifice—really need to be planted somewhere in the vicinity of the absolute.
In a world of mere moral relativism, virtues tend to crumble between one's fingers; they do not get anyone through the hard struggles. All ideas are not equal, despite a circus of moral confusion and hype that has all but destroyed both the courage and the capacity to distinguish the worthwhile from the meretricious. Certain older virtues are being newly discovered, such as the need for hard work and the love of excellence, although they have not totally displaced an obnoxious strain of self-pity and self-indulgence. Certain other virtues need to be cultivated more. One of them is duty, the sense of what the individual owes to his community; Americans have a tendency to forget that in many other cultures, individualism is a pejorative, suggesting an antisocial elevation of one's own welfare above the welfare of everyone else. The French since the age of Balzac have made the useful distinction between individualisme and individualité, the second carrying those genes of personal creativity and drive that made America prosper.
A dull paralysis frequently results from a failure to make distinctions. Too many Americans in the past dozen years have fallen, with a queasy sense of loss, into the idea that progress is both socially malignant and inevitably doomed. But there is good progress and bad progress. It is sometimes hard to decide which is which, but it is preposterous, even superstitious, like a savage seeing an airplane for the first time, to cringe at the idea of progress itself.