ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 pictures an American life that is failing. We fail to live peaceably with the natural environment. Instead of respecting nature’s autonomy, we alter her dynamics and upset her balances. We fail to live peaceably with ourselves in stable families. Instead of common, fruitful, and faithful marriage on behalf of children, we tolerate sexual irresponsibility and a variety of lifestyle choices on behalf of personal pleasure. We fail to invest in America’s future. Once a nation of joiners and participators, we are becoming a nation of bystanders and couch potatoes, as civic and social participation decline on almost every count. We fail to nurture a critical intellectual life. Instead of opening young minds to the best thinking about age-old questions of human nature and social justice, we seduce them with the empty allure of fame and fortune, drug them in crassly sensual and banal arts, and justify all of this with a crude and incoherent ideology of equality and freedom. And we fail to keep sex pure and clean and erotic and productive. Instead of providing the discipline needed for healthy and fruitful unions of men and women in stable and secure families, we encourage a corrupt liberality of indiscriminate license, pallid eroticism, sexually transmitted disease, and unhappy “hookups.” All is not well in America.
