In the January 7 issue of the Union Leader Pat Buchanan intones a favorite conservative mantra: American public education should "transmit to the next generation a moral code"; schools should be in the business of "molding...good men and women."
What does it mean when conservatives talk like this? Buchanan mentions a "moral illiteracy" engendered by the schools, and I assume he means by this an ignorance in students about the tenets of the Golden Rule: a hatred of murder, a disavowal of personal violence, kindness, love, self-discipline, a thirst for learning, the practice of decency.
If this is what Buchanan means by "moral code," then I have no disagreement with him. What we disagree on is how this code is going to be made part of the character of human beings. The conservatives' moral "mold" for young people is based in a vast distrust of modernity and democracy, a distrust so strong that it drives them to yearn for, and work towards, a world purged of ambiguity and quirkiness.
Conservatives equate morality with obedience to authority. They like things neat, and to obtain such neatness, they want the power to control people. Why else would fundamentalist Christians embrace Caesar and Mammon except to mold the world into their own image, into a world they can control? Conservatives don't like all that messy individualism. Better to have people submit to a hierarchy of authorities in ways that are predict able, following jurisdictions set up by custom or prohibition, than to let them sail away to the horizons of their own reason.
Are the conservatives confused? I think so. And they're confused because they ground their moral thinking in a corrupt source - the Bible and the Judeo-Christian myth. Is there a better source? Yes, I believe there is - secular humanism, the devil Buchanan indicts. The Golden Rule, if anyone thinks about it for a second, is simply another name for secular humanism (or just plain humanism), the belief that people, not obscure divinities, shape the ends of human life. The decency between human beings suggested in the Golden Rule needs latitude and tolerance to work; in short, it needs the democratic touch, exactly the kind of touch the conservatives' would disallow.
I disagree with Buchanan - there hasn't been enough of the proper humanism in our schools, which is why schools have failed to work well. And if the conservatives take over the school districts and school boards, then there will be even less moral instruction in the schools than there is now, though there will be plenty of talk about obedience and divine plans. This is not the way things should go.
Getting Angry
Be All That You Can Be