Overwhelmed by Culture

Al Sikes

It’s not a money crisis. It’s a character crisis.

Perhaps, just perhaps, reality has caught up with political speechwriters. The texture of current events, the velocity of their mutations, and the uncertainty of responses all point toward an authentic “crossroads” moment. All those public figures, whose political speeches have put them at the helm during an especially crucial moment in history, may now get their wish.

Yet, as each day passes it is clear that conditions are in control. We (and it is a virtually universal we) have reached a real “moment of truth.” The culture has overwhelmed its purported masters; the culmination of systemic wrong-headedness has miniaturized much of the leader class.

The President attempts to calm the nation; markets mock his words. The Treasury Secretary and former head of Goldman Sachs (said to be the most successful investment bank in the world) searches publicly and painfully for answers. And history (although quite recent) now suggests that the revered Alan Greenspan ill-served the nation’s monetary policy coming out of the last boom-and-bust cycle.

I am inclined to believe we are at that moment when the warnings of philosophers and theologians are proving prescient. Philosophically, biblically we have been warned about self-gratification and the inexorability of unrestrained human desires and resulting excess. We have been awash in both. The palpability of personal and collective debt, for example, precludes the need to cite the data.

If the underlying corruption of public and private finance were not so serious, it would be laughable. Today we talk about housing defaults because it is the crisis du jour. When are we going to seriously talk about under-funded pension and health-care programs? And when it comes to day-to-day government operating expenses at the Federal level, we merrily pass debt on to future generations while at the state level we get more and more of our revenue from state-owned or state-sponsored gambling. And as events reveal, Wall Street, aided by the federal government, has been sponsoring an especially toxic form of gambling.

The more pessimistic (or perhaps prescient) philosophers through the ages have predicted that the human condition would undermine government by the governed. We should all be eternally grateful that the U.S. founders understood both cerebrally and spiritually the need for a rigorous system of checks and balances.

So where are we at this moment? Are we in a serious financial crisis that will over time prove seminal? Or are we experiencing a predictive moment in an inexorable decline? Economists forecast that we are in for a deep recession. If they are correct, perhaps this will be an instructive event that will reacquaint us with transcendent truths.

The American founders believed that the people’s faith in God, and the implications of that faithfulness, would underpin a government by the governed that had a mission of assuring “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They knew the overwhelming importance of the nation’s character, which is upstream of business and political decision-making. Notwithstanding, the foundations of faith are unceasingly attacked in the precincts of secular power.

Today’s crisis is said to be about money (too little liquidity); I believe it is about character. Putting people at profound risk as a tool of either public or private greed is morally wrong. Sure, each time a loan is made to an aspiring homeowner or entrepreneur, for example, there is risk, but the risk of highly leveraged purchases of exotic securities is of a different order. And the risk of under-funding pension and health-care promises (yes—promises, not mere programs) is of a different and, I would suggest, more profound order.

In a Darwinian world such conduct is simply in the order of things. After all, there are thousands who now live in lavish comfort as a result of their predation. They are survivors. But those who deal derisively or dismissively with faith and its foundations should pause; this crisis offers a learning moment.

We are on the eve of an election. It is often said that this election will be the most important one in at least a generation. Perhaps. I have no trouble finding admirable traits in both candidates for President, and I am hopeful because that is my temperament. But in parallel, I am convinced that the most important need is not on Pennsylvania Avenue but in the hearts and minds of the governed.

Perhaps both candidates (contemplating their bully pulpit) should spend a few minutes with Václav Havel’s essay, Politics, Morality and Civility. Havel begins: “As ridiculous or Quixotic as it may sound these days, one thing seems certain to me: that it is my responsibility to emphasize, again and again, the moral origin of all genuine politics, to stress the significance of moral values and standards in all spheres of social life, including economics, and to explain that if we don’t try, within ourselves, to discover or rediscover or cultivate what I call ‘higher responsibility,’ things will turn out very badly indeed for our country.”  

Al Sikes is Chairman of The Trinity Forum.

Features, Business, Character and Ethics, Society, Tue 14 Oct 2008