The theory of moral ecology

Review of Politics

Volumn 60, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 629-659

  Hertzke, Allen D ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248107339     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S003467050005083X     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1990).
2. The reference to "downstream effects" is from Gary Bauer, "The Moral Ecosystem," Focus on the Family Citizen newsletter (18 March 1991);
3. TV as a "toxic waste dump" was from a syndicated column by Mona Charon, Daily Oklahoman, 7 July 1993;
4. see Medved's Hollywood Versus America ((New York: HarperCollins, 1992) on his diagnosis of video pollution;
5. Patrick Buchanan was quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 1993, p. 3.
6. See Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);
7. works by Christopher Lasch, including: "Capitalism vs. Cultural Conservatism?" First Things, April 1990, pp. 15-23;
8. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991);
9. Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1991);
10. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1979);
11. and Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
12. See Amatai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community (New York: Crown, 1993);
13. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Free Press, 1991);
14. and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
15. See Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 65-78;
16. and "Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America," PS: Political Science & Politics,28, no.4 (December 1995): 664-683
17. See especially the works of Andrea Dworkin, Pornography. Men Possessing Women (New York: Plume, 1989);
18. and Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
19. See Allen D. Hertzke, Echoes of Discontent (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1993), chap. 3.
20. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, chap. 4, section 38, from Origins 21 (16 May 1991).
21. Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959)
22. and Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1972). Popper stressed the importance of asserting falsifiable hypotheses of a theory, the lack of which doomed certain grand theories. In addition, he stressed that theories are better when they both encompass and surpass prior theories in relatively elegant fashion.
23. David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1971), implicitly criticized timid theorizing that never rises above the middle level.
24. See Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 29.
25. King et al. clarify that the quest for scientific inference involves "using the facts we know to learn about facts we do not know" (p. 46).
26. Dodd argues that biology is a better model for the social sciences because of the complexity of variables and the potential for change. See Lawrence Dodd, "Congress, The Presidency, and the American Experience: A Transformational Perspective," in Divided Democracy, ed. James A. Thurber (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991).
27. Because the interdisciplinary study of ecology cannot bracket human influences, it has direct ecological linkages to human behavior. See Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 228-229, 234.
28. The term moral ecology has been used before but without systematic evaluation. Richard Madsen uses the specific term moral ecology in Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
29. Robert Bellah and his colleagues employed the term in Habits of the Heart, though at various times interchangeably with the term "social ecology," to describe the "subtle ties that bind human beings to one another" (p. 284). In exploring the themes of Habits of the Heart, Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman argue that environmental analogies are pertinent to an understanding of the "civic ecology." See "The Longing for Community: Civic Ecology, Narrative, and Practices," in Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, ed. Reynolds and Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
30. In The Good Community (New York: Knopf, 1991)
31. Bellah et al. asserted that moral ecology was another way to describe effective institutions, a narrower denotation than is captured in this essay. Michael Novak entitles a section of The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993), "Protecting the Moral Ecology." Novak explains Pope John Paul II's warning to American Catholics (that the U.S. media may be undercutting the moral virtues necessary for democracy and capitalism to work) to mean that the media represents "a form of pollution in the moral order even more destructive than the pollution of the physical environment." "There is," he says, "an ecology in morals as well as in the biosphere." Novak also ends a 1997 essay on cultural crisis with a call to recognize the moral ecology, but without specifying what that might mean
32. See Michael Novak, "Truth and Liberty: The Present Crisis in Our Culture," The Review of Politics 59 (Winter 1997): 5-23.1 used the term in Echoes of Discontent (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1993) prior to having read specific passages of Madson, Bellah, and Novak. The fact that several scholars coined the same theoretical construct, apparently independently of one another, provides one kind of corroboration that a genuine empirical phenomenon has been identified.
33. Aldo Leopold, The Sand Country Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), first published in 1949.
34. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons" Science 162 (13 December 1968): 1243-48.
35. See Trevor Hancock, "Health, Human Development, and the Community Ecosystem: Three Ecological Models," Health Promotion International 8, No.1,1993;
36. Kenneth R. McLeroy, Daniel Bibeau, Allan Steckler, and Karen Glanz,"An Ecological Perspective for Health Promotion Programs," Health Education Quarterly, 15 (1988): 351-78;
37. and Daniel Stokols, "Translating Social Ecology Theory into Guidelines for Community Health Promotion, American Journal of Health Promotion 10 (1996): 282-98.
38. Timothy Egan, "From Adolescent Angst to School Killings," The New York Times, 14 June 1998, p. 1.
39. A.C. Huston, E. Donnerstein, H. Fairchild, N.D. Feshback, P.A. Katz, J.P. Murray, E.A. Rubenstein, B. Wilcox, and D. Zukerman, Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992)
40. calculated that the average child sees approximately 12,000 violent acts a year. And levels have risen over the last two decades, as noted by B. Hattemer, "Violence in Media Causes Youth Violence," in Violence: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Scott Barbour and Karin Swisher (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996).
41. In spite of the complexity of human influences, the academic community has produced an uncharacteristically strong consensus about the impact of media violence and behavior. See Big World Small Screen; Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: Its Causes, Consequences, and Control (St. Louis: McGraw-Hill, 1993););
42. National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the 80s, vol.1 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982);
43. John P. Murray, "Children and Television Violence," Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, 4 (1995): 7-14;
44. Brandon. S. Centerwall, "Television Violence: The Scale of the Problem and Where to Go From Here," Journal of the American Medical Association, 267 (10 June 1992): 3059-3063;
45. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Deadly Consequences (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991);
46. and National Television Violence Study Council, "National Television Violence Study, Summary of Findings and Recommendations," Mediascope, 1
47. Cannon, Carl, "Media Violence Increases Violence in Society," in Violence in the Media, ed. Leone Bruno (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1995).
48. Since 1952 numerous congressional hearings and dozens of government reports, including Surgeon General reports in 1972 and 1979, have probed media violence. In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence reported that violent television adversely affected viewers, a finding echoed in "The Attorney General's 1984 Task Force on Family Violence." Report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Publication No. 0-331-948 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969).
49. On the role of media violence in the acquisition of "aggressive scripts," see Berkowitz, Aggression;
50. R.P. Abelson, "Script Processing in Attitude Formation and Decision-Making," in Cognition and Social Behavior, ed. J.S. Carroll and J.W. Payne (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976);
51. and Hattemer, "Violence in the Media."
52. International studies include George Gerbner, "Violence and Terror in the Mass Media," UNESCO report no. 102, Paris, France, 19880.
53. See also L Bogart, "Violence in the Mass Media," Television Quarterly 8 (1969): 36-47;
54. B. Centerwall "Television and Violence"; National Institute of Mental Health, "Television and Behavior," Big World, Small Screen;
55. V. Viemero, "Violence Viewing and Adolescent Aggression: A Longitudinal Study" (Paper presented at the International Television Studies Conference, London, 10-12 April, 1986, ED 294555);
56. C. Kruttschnitt, L. Heath, and D.A. Ward, "Family Violence, Television Viewing Habits, and Other Adolescent Experiences Related to Violent Criminal Behavior," Criminology 24 (1986): 235-67;
57. and L.R. Huesmann and L.D. Eron, eds., Television and the Aggressive Child: A Cross-National Comparison (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986).
58. The National Commission, 1969, concluded that national violence rates rise after a violent newscast or program.
59. The teen school killers of 1996-1998 were all obsessed with violent pop culture and apparently patterned their behavior on such movies as "Natural Born Killers" and "The Basketball Diaries," violent videos such as "Mortal Kombat," and the violent lyrics of "gangsta rap." See Timothy Egan, "From Adolescent Angst," and Mike Pearson, "The Price American Society is Paying for Violent Films," The Washington Times, National Weekly Edition, 20-26 April 1998, p. 36.
60. Murray, "Children and Television Violence."
61. L. Berkowitz, Aggression: A Social-Psychological Analysis (New York: McGraw Hill, 1962).
62. George Gerbner may have been the first to use the term, but others have found the Mean World Syndrome a useful model, including Murray, "Children and Television Violence," and the large research team for Mediascope, which described it as "increased feelings of victimization."
63. Edward Donnerstein, "Pornography: Its Effect on Violence Against Women," in Pornography and Sexual Aggression, ed. Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), p. 40.
64. The District Attorney of Oklahoma County, Bob Macy, cited a dramatic reduction of reported rapes when the city cracked down on the previously thriving sex industry, including porn shops. Interview with author, 1995.
65. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Deadly Consequences (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
66. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, chap. 4, section 39.
67. See Promises to Keep, ed. David Popenoe, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Blankenhorn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996)
68. and William Bennett, Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1993) on evidence for serious decline;
69. and for the opposing position see Judith Stacey, "Good Riddance to 'The Family': A Response to David Popenoe," Journal of Marriage and the Family 55 (August 1993)
70. and Edward Kain, The Myth of Family Decline: Understanding Families in a World of Rapid Social Change (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990).
71. Consider births out-of-wedlock. Those who see disturbing trends cite figures from National Center for Health Statistics, which reported that 32% of all U.S. births in 1996 were out-of-wedlock. Those who are less troubled note that only 8% of children were living with an unwed mother, according to the 1996-1997 Statistical Abstract of the United States. Both figures can be correct because the latter averages new births with the extant population and excludes children born out-of-wedlock whose custodians ultimately marry, or who live with their father, grandparents, or others.
72. Popenoe, in "American Family in Decline."
73. Arland Thornton, "Comparative and Historical Perspectives on Marriage, Divorce, and Family Life" in Promises to Keep.
74. Lawrence Stone is author of Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660-1857 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
75. The quote is from a syndicated column by Kathleen Parker, "Parents Leave Void in Kids' Lives," The Daily Oklahoman, 1997.
76. For the alternative view that family changes have been more gradual over time see Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social history of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988). Though Mintz and Kellogg argue that the family stability of the 1950s was exceptional, their conclusion that families in the future will be "small and fragile" (p. 237) tends to substantiate the concerns of others.
77. David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 18-19.
78. The National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control, "Monthly Vital Statistics Report," 46 N, No.1(S)2 (11 September 1997) reports that of all U.S. births in 1996, 32.4% were out-of-wedlock, with the racial breakdown revealing rates of 25.7% for whites, 40.9% for Hispanics, and 69.8% for blacks.
79. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Miles To Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). In chapter 3 Moynihan draws upon empirical studies of the adverse impact of out-of-wedlock births to coin his celebrated term "defining deviancy down."
80. The National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, in "Teenage Births in the United States: National and State Trends, 1990-1996" (30 April 1998), reports that between 1991 and 1996 teen birth rates declined nationally and among all subgroups. Yet since most of the decline was among married teens, this did not result in a corresponding decline in the rate of out-of-wedlock births. A much publicized later report on declining birth rates among single African American women similarly found no effect on the proportion of births out-of-wedlock. Thus, even apparently successful efforts to increase contraceptive use or sexual abstinence have not reestablished the marital norm.
81. See Steven A. Holmes, "Black Birthrate for Single Women is at 40-Year Low," The New York Times, 1 July 1998, p. 1.
82. Though scholars are somewhat divided, lowering legal barriers apparently did contribute to increased divorce rates. Paul A. Nakonezny, Robert D. Shull, and Joseph Lee Rodgers find that no-fault divorce laws had a "significant positive effect on the divorce rate." See "The Effect of No-Fault Divorce Law on the Divorce Rate Across the 50 States and its Relation to Income, Education, and Religiosity," Journal of Marriage and the Family 57 (May 1995): 477-488
83. Norval D. Glenn, however, contests the data in "A Reconsideration of the Effect of No-Fault Divorce on Divorce Rates," Journal of Marriage and the Family 59 (November 1997): 1023- 1030;
84. and Nakonezny et al. contest his analysis in "The Effect of No-Fault Divorce Legislation on Divorce Rates: A Response to a Reconsideration," 1026-1030.
85. After dramatic increases through the 1970s and 1980s, the divorce rate leveled off to about half the number of marriages. A slight decrease from 1992 (when there were 52 divorces for every 100 marriages) to mid-1997 (when the rate the rate was 48 for every 100), indicates perhaps that a few more people are attempting to avoid divorce's toll. Centers for Disease Control, "Monthly Vital Statistics Report," 45, no.10 (24 April 1997).
86. Popenoe, "American Family Decline, 1960-1990: A Review and Appraisal," Journal of Marriage and the Family 55 (August 1993): 527-544
87. Lenore J. Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1985). Weitzman's research produced the often quoted statistic that divorced men see their standard of living increase by 42% while women and children experience a decline of 73%.
88. Moira Eastman associates divorce with "increased rates of poverty, mental illness, suicide, physical illness, mortality, depression, drug abuse, cigarette smoking, homelessness, juvenile crime, and school failure." Moira Eastman, "Myths of Marriage and Family," in Promises to Keep.
89. See also Barbara Defoe Whitehead, "Dan Quayle Was Right;" The Atlantic Monthly 271, no.4 (April 1993): 47-84;
90. and "The Decline of Marriage as the Social Basis of Childbearing," in Promises to Keep, pp. 3-14.
91. For an alternative view see Andrew J. Cherlin, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Kathleen E. Kiernan, Philip K. Robins, Donna Ruane Morrison, and Julien O. Teitler, "Longitudinal Studies of Effects of Divorce on Children in Great Britain and the United States," Science 252 (7 June 1991), 1386-1389, who suggest that problems in marriages before divorce were already adversely influencing children, especially boys. But their findings did not distinguish generally disfunctional families from those that functioned adequately until divorce, nor do they gainsay the possibility of long-term problems for children of divorce.
92. Whitehead, in "Dan Quayle Was Right," summarizes the drawbacks of step-families: the lack of strong commitments to stepchildren, feelings of isolation from the new stepfamily, increased risk of abuse, and anxiety resulting from both the original change into the stepfamily and possible future family breakups since stepfamilies are far more likely to break up than other families.
93. In Michigan, State Representative Dalman argued that people "must begin to see the connection between divorce and other problems," such as poverty and juvenile delinquency. Dirk Johnson, "No-Fault Divorce Is Under Attack," The New York Times, 8 February 1996, A8.
94. The Louisiana Legislature approved a law providing for a "covenant marriage" option, which is viewed as a cunning way to make couples think anew about the marriage commitment. Kevin Sack, "Louisiana Approves Measure to Tighten Marriage Bonds," The New York Times, 24 June 1997, p. 1.
95. Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio, January-February, 1998, Berea Publications, Charlottesville, VA.
96. Gertrude Himmelfarb documents how the sexual "innovators" of the late nineteenth century viewed themselves as elites and did not wish to change the mores of those beneath them; in contrast, the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s was a real revolution that reached into all strata of society. See Himmelfarb, The Demoralization of Society (New York: Knopf, 1995), 217-218.
97. This view is echoed by Glen Stanton, Why Marriage Matters: Reasons to Believe in Family in Post-Modern Society (Pinon Press, 1997).
98. Whitehead, "Dan Quayle Was Right."
99. See Jane Riblett Wilkie, "Marriage, Family, and Women's Employment," in Marriage and Family in Transition, ed. John N. Edwards and David H. Demo (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991)
100. and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Time Bind (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).
101. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornell West, The War Against Parents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
102. Wilkie, "Marriage, Family, and Women's Employments," p. 155.
103. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Hard Questions: Lost City," The New Republic, 4 November 1996, p. 25.
104. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, especially chapter 4, and Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
105. Dawson found children twice as likely to need professional psychological help and score more poorly on wellness indicators when they did not live with both biological parents, conclusions independently reached by Zill et al. Deborah Dawson, "Family Structure and Children's Health and Well-being: Data from the National Health Interview Survey on Child Health," Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 (1991): 573-584
106. Nicholas Zill, Donna Morrison, and Mary Jo Cairo, "Long-Term Effects of Parental Divorce on Parent-Child Relationships, Adjustment, and Achievement in Young Adulthood," Journal of Family Psychology 7 (1993): 91-103.
107. David Ellwood, Poor Support (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 46.
108. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, "A Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s," Mandate for Change (Berkeley Books, 1993).
109. Edward L. Wells and Joseph H. Rankin, "Families and Delinquency: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Broken Homes," Social Problems 38 (February 1991): 71-89.
110. Wade Horn, Father Facts (Lancaster, PA: The National Fatherhood Institute, 1995), p. 23. The issue is given extensive, if somewhat polemical, treatment by David Blankenhom, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: Basic Books, 1995), who echoes Moynihan's lament in Miles to Go.
111. For a nuanced historical perspective, see Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
112. University of Illinois researchers conclude that "the longer the time spent in a single-parent family, the greater the reduction in educational achievement." See Sheila Krein and Andrea Beller, "Educational Attainment of Children from Single Parent Families: Differences by Exposure, Gender, and Race," Demography 25 (1988): 221-233 Others found lower-income children with "intact" families outscored children from high-income, single-parent families.
113. See Nan Marie Astone and Sarah S. McLanahan, "Family Structure, Parental Practices, and High School Completion," American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 309-320;
114. and Li and Wojtkiewics, "New Look at the Effects of Family Structure on Status Attainment," Social Science Quarterly
115. American Psychological Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disroders (Washington, D.C.: APA, 1980), 291.
116. Joseph Hraba, Waiman Mok, and David Huff, "Tonight's numbers are . . . Lottery Play and Problem Gambling," Journal of Gambling Studies (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1991), p. 178.
117. Wolfe Shenk, "Everyone's A Loser," The Washington Monthly, July/ August 1995.
118. Hraba, Mok, and Huff, "Tonight's Numbers Are . . . , " p. 192.
119. James M. Stearns and Shaheen Borna, "The Ethics of Lottery Advertising: Issues and Evidence," Journal of Business Ethics (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 50.
120. Charles Clotfelter, Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
121. Michael J. Sandel, "Bad Bet," The New Republic, 10 March 1997, p. 27.
122. The idea of social capital as a positive externality is made by Robert Putnam in "The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life," The American Prospect 13 (Spring 1993): 34-42.
123. King et al., in Designing Social Inquiry, suggest that social science research should seek to derive as many observable implications of a theory as possible.
124. On children see Richard Louv, Childhood's Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990);
125. David Blankenhom et al., eds., Rebuilding the Nest (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1990);
126. Victor R. Fuchs and Diane M. Reklis, "America's Children: Economic Perspectives and Policy Options," Science, 3 (January 1992): 41-16;
127. Carnegie Commission Report, Ready to Learn: A Mandate for the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992);
128. and National Commission on Children, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chair, Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda for Children and Families (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991). The quote is from Ernest Boyer, commenting on the findings of the Carnegie report.
129. See Ernest Boyer, "America has Orphaned Its Young," Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1991, M5. While noting economic forces, these reports also cite the family and moral environment.
130. Peter Applebome, "Children Score Low in Adults' Esteem, a Study Finds," The New York Times, 26 June 1997, A12.
131. James Garbarino, Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
132. "1997 Index of Social Health: Monitoring the Social Well-Being of the Nation," Marc L. Miringoff, Director, Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy, Fordham Graduate Center, Tarrytown, New York.
133. James Q. Wilson's ecological analysis of the link between social disorder and crime-the so-called "broken window" thesis-has guided numerous successful community anticrime efforts.
134. See James Q. Wilson George L. Kelling, "Broken Windows," Atlantic Monthly 249, no.3 (March 1982): 29-38.
135. Lawrence Dodd, "A Transformational Perspective."
136. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Vintage, 1996).
137. Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
138. Michael Novak admonishes corporations to avoid promoting messages that undermine sustaining virtues in Toward a Theology of the Corporation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), but there is little evidence they have heeded his exhortation. In The Fire of Invention (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Novak suggests that corporations foster civil society by producing wealth, contributing to civic causes, teaching sturdy virtues, and checking the overweening state, but he does not refute evidence that certain corporate patterns can undermine family cohesion and community vitality.
139. Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, argues that the public philosophy of modern liberalism, which rests on the notion that the state must be neutral about conceptions of the good life, has failed because it cannot address the legitimate moral concerns of citizens. James Q. Wilson, in The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993), argues that the modern attempt to cleanse morality from public discourse has "amputated our public discourse at the knees," and made it impossible to have a serious discussion of the issues perplexing society (p. xi).
140. Theodore Lowi exhibits this tendency in The End of the Republican Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), chap. 6, in which he envisions "statist" local conservatives enforcing a virtual police state on women.
141. This was how Hardin phrased the remedy in "The Tragedy of the Commons."
142. See, for example, Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, 2d ed., edited by Michael Novak (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1996);
143. and Democracy and Mediating Structures: A Theological Inquiry, ed. Michael Novak (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980).
144. Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
145. As argued by Fred L. Smith, Jr, president, Competitive Enterprise Institute (1001 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036), a think tank that challenges the command assumptions of environmental policy.
146. In addition to her syndicated radio program, Laura Schlessenger offered her remedy to moral confusion in How Could You Do That?!: The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience (New York: HarperCollins 1997)
147. and The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life, with Stewart Vogel (New York, HarperCollins, 1998).