Second of two parts

Not so long ago, if a cop found you behind the wheel after you had a few too many, he would put you in the back of a cruiser and take you home.  Today, however, that second car trip will almost certainly terminate at the local lockup, with a court date given to you as a parting gift.

What changed?  We as a society decided that drunk driving had become a problem, and we consciously set out to change cultural norms surrounding it.  Laws were changed and penalties stiffened, but more importantly it became unacceptable among ordinary Americans to get behind the wheel after you had too much to drink.

It was not an easy process, but we are all better off for it.  In my last post, I spoke of a culture of failure that wide swaths of the American poor are condemned to live in.  Rarely do they get to see an example of things that work well.  Instead, all around them are examples of what a society that has broken down looks like.  To combat all the ills attendant to this culture of failure, we can not simply treat them one by one.  Instead, we need to focus on building up a culture of success to replace it.

This is not an idea foreign to Catholics.  When Blessed Pope John Paul the Great wrote Evangelium Vitae, he did not stop at simply saying that we needed to outlaw abortion or the death penalty.  Recognizing that societal problems can not be fixed by legislative means alone, he spoke frequently and eloquently about the need to build a culture of life to replace the culture of death.

Nicholas Kristof recently summed up the state of poverty in America nicely and added that “a growing body of careful research suggests that the most effective strategy [to combat poverty] is to work early on children and education, and to try to encourage and sustain marriage.” Those are great suggestions and they hint at the answer, but I would argue that they are not sufficient.

It’s not enough to give these kids all the academic knowledge they need to be able to graduate from high school and go on to college.  Any number (but still far too few) of schools have taken kids with every disadvantage and prepared them academically for higher education only to see them drop out after a semester or a year in college.  These kids have the street smarts, and against all odds they got the book smarts, but no one ever taught them, for lack of a better phrase, the campus smarts needed to succeed.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Kids who grow up in the grip of crushing urban poverty have the skills needed to survive a life on the streets instilled in them from very young ages.  These are not skills they learned in the classroom, and I don’t believe that inside the schoolyard gate is the best place to teach them the skills needed to excel in college, or lifem, either.

There is no doubt a teacher standing in front of a blackboard can help to develop qualities like perseverance, self-control, and optimism in her young charges.  Those character traits, and others that are associated with success in life, are learned far more readily in the 18 hours a student spends outside the school, however.  The rub is that compared to changing a culture, changing a school is easy, and no one who has ever tried would say that changing a school is a walk in the park.

Children, and indeed all of us, need to be surrounded by vibrant models of success.  It almost doesn’t matter what it is – a competitive Little League program can be built upon just as well as a community garden, a new library or community center, a piece of public art in a redeveloped park, or a local-boy-made-good can.  Success will build upon success, while pervasive failure will only breed more failure.

Aristotle has described the education of children in moral excellence as teaching them “both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.” In our schools and in our Congress, on our streets and in our boardrooms, and perhaps most importantly in our homes and in our hearts, we need to do a better job of seeking out things that are good and then, as the Philosopher has said, teaching children to delight in them.

It’s not that simple, of course, but it is a start and a necessary one at that.  For my part, I sponsored and got passed a measure in my hometown to create a Public Service Recognition Committee to award individuals for outstanding acts of public service.  We hope to award the first prizes – one to an adult and one to a child – this spring.  It’s a simple thing but, as the Liberty Mutual commercials show, hopefully one good deed will spur another.

At Mirror of Justice, Patrick Brennan reflected on The Economist’s recent take on Traditionalist Catholics saying “Traditionalists wish to correct and transform culture in the image of the incarnate Christ.  Traditionalists are not willing to give up on the culture, because its transformation contributes to the salvation of souls.”  That should not be the goal of only those who prefer their liturgies in Latin, but for all of us.  If we want to lead souls to Heaven, and to improve lives here on Earth, the transformation of a culture of failure into a culture of success must be a priority for all of us.