OPINION:
Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is worried about the increasing dysfunction in American society. He decries the deepening negativity of both right and left, the desire to tear down rather than to build up, and he fears that our country has entered a period of decline that has gutted many of the traditional institutions that sustain and reinforce a civil society.
Who can disagree with that?
As the 21st century dawned, he writes in his introduction, many Americans had a sense that we were entering a new age, “a bright and forward-looking era marked by stable economic progress and crowned by technological breakthroughs that might both liberate and unify us. Our country had real problems, of course … but it seemed that something exciting was afoot.”
Actually, I don’t recall many ordinary Americans talking or acting as if the year 2000 marked the dawning of a new Age of Aquarius. Most of us were just glad that the Evil Empire had bit the dust and hoped — groundlessly as it turned out — that after doing most of the heavy lifting during the Cold War, we could now spend less time, money and blood trying to re-mold the outside world in our own image.
The main exception to this calm, level-headed approach to the beginning of the new millennium came from members of a political species that emerged from the primordial academic soup in the latter half of the 20th century. While they shared no common ideology, they all considered themselves members of an intellectual elite, custodians of public discourse, and visionaries who could see beyond the myopic view of mere politicians and citizens without graduate degrees. They call themselves “public intellectuals.”
In many ways, public intellectuals are a sort of upmarket, polysyllabic version of dial-a-psychics and televangelists. They are in the business of selling their dreams and visions to the rest of us as superior wisdom.
There is nothing particularly new about this. The Roman philosopher Seneca never called himself a public intellectual but, in many respects he was the granddaddy of them all. Seneca used his erudition and entrepreneurial skills to make a neat fortune while shaping society behind the scenes. He even managed to become tutor to the heir to the imperial throne. Unfortunately, the name of the heir was Nero, and we all know how that turned out.
Mr. Levin is a public intellectual of the saner sort. Instead of seeking a starring role in an unattainable brave new world, he wants to arrest the decline in what is already good in our way of life at a time when we are in danger of entering what the brilliant sociologist Robert Nisbet described in 1973 as a “twilight age.”
Periodically in Western history, Nisbet argued, “twilight ages make their appearance. Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evident than those of genesis and development. Something like a vacuum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people … Individualism reveals itself less as achievement and enterprise than as egoism and mere performance … There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and of corruption of culture.”
Sound familiar? As Mr. Levin reflects, “It is hard to read these words without taking them as a prescient sketch for our own time.” He devotes the rest of his modest book to examining the problems of the “twilight age” we live in and trying to formulate practical ways of turning back the darkness.
In so doing, he tries to claim a centrist high ground between warring conservatives and radicals under the banner of “institutionalism.” The institutions behind the “ism” include our churches, families, schools, communities and, of course, private, public and humanitarian sectors.
Mr. Levin wants to revitalize them because, “Automation and the rise of e-commerce have made it much easier to be a functional loner in America … Meanwhile, the welfare state has grown to take on many of the tasks previously performed by family, church, and civil society. The institutions it has gradually replaced have become depopulated, and their fundamentally social functions have been left unfulfilled.”
Some things that are broken can be fixed. Others are lost forever. In this earnest, occasionally plodding little book, the author doesn’t come up with any magic cures, but he writes with a sincere conviction, frequent flashes of insight, and an undeniably good heart.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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A TIME TO BUILD: FROM FAMILY AND COMMUNITY TO CONGRESS AND THE CAMPUS, HOW RECOMMITTING TO OUR INSTITUTIONS CAN REVIVE THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Yuval Levin
Basic Books, $28, 241 pages
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