"Just say no" seems to be the new "Thou shalt not," at least as it's applied to adolescents. I agree with its intention: to get adolescents not to choose things now which will prevent them from freely making choices later. But "just say no" has a severe handicap as moral advice because it can't provide a strong guide for the experimental curiosity that both afflicts and enriches adolescence. It can never answer the questions "Why?" and "Why not?" because, in the end, "Just say no" is simply a societal version of the parent's end-all, "Because I said so."
But simple obedience to an outside authority will never produce a moral life. To me it's truer to say that only by struggling with "why" can an individual earn the authority to make moral choices. Only a vigorous struggle with temptation and the world's imperfections can create the skill and self- discipline needed to produce the goodness we equate with a moral life. Struggling with "why" means that at some point the individual, in one way or another, must give an individual assent, an individual "yes," to whatever code he or she will follow if that code is to exert personal force and depth. How to say that "yes" is what we should be teaching adolescents.
To say "yes," adolescents first need to love themselves, and they can do this only if they feel their lives have meaning in the larger scheme of things. There is so much in our culture that doesn't permit a strong, healthy self-love for adolescents. They have much to stimulate and push them around but very little in the larger society which asks them to risk themselves, which asks them to be trusted and responsible individuals. I'm not sure how that love can be nurtured. But I know that without it, saying "yes" (and therefore also being able to say "no") will be impossible because, unable to love themselves, they will be unable to love much of anything outside themselves.
What values prompt this love? I would recast the question: What process prompts this love? How do people learn to find value in anything (which is only another way of saying "to find love")? And the answer, to me at least, is self-evident: free and open argument about all values, even ones we find abhorrent. It's only in such give-and-take that adolescents will come to find that they have minds they can sharpen, something they will not find if they are cathechized. And in finding they have sharp minds that can make discriminations, they will begin to trust themselves more. And in that self-trust they will find those values which will enhance their love for life and the lives of others, and make choices that will preserve rather than destroy.
Adolescents need more than "no." What kind of "Just say yes" campaign can we run?
Spring
In Praise Of Pleasure