COUNTER CULTURE BY ANDREW SULLIVAN
The Assault on Good News
Teen pregnancy rates are plummeting,
the government is flush
and jobs are plentiful. So why do we
insist on being miserable?
I was gamely sitting through the second bone-crunching, blood-gushing
hour of "Fight Club" the other night when I found myself involuntarily wondering
how much damage the movie was doing to society. For most Beltway types, this is a
sadly automatic spasm. A similar thought tends to flit through my mind when watching
a late night rerun of Jerry Springer, or the latex melodrama of cable wrestling.
After Tipper Gore and Bill Bennett, watching mindless violence just isn't any
fun anymore.
In fact, if I hadn't already read that very week that violent crime had just
plummeted to yet another record low, I might even have sustained my
unease. But then I had one of those extremely rare "Hey, wait a minute"
epiphanies and wondered whether I hadn't gotten it exactly the wrong way
around.
Given the free-falling murder and assault rates, could the popularity of cable
wrestling and Jerry Springer and blood-splattered movies actually be helping
to reduce crime? I wondered, for one truly liberating moment, if you took a
1990's chart of Jerry Springer's ratings and turned it upside down, wouldn't
it look exactly the same as a chart of the murder rate in New York City?
It's a thought at least. The fact that you probably think I'm joking suggests
how immune we still are to the good news that keeps bombarding us every
day. The idea that movie violence helps reduce crime is no less plausible on
reflection than the idea that movie violence actually causes it. Maybe venting
violence in the culture helps reduce it in reality. It would certainly jibe more
with what we actually know about the data. Yet we resist this idea as
tenaciously as we resist any number of other reasons to be cheerful at the
end of the millennium. To wit: the pregnancy rate for girls between the ages
of 15 and 17 hits a 40-year low, and yet we still fret frantically about
youngsters accessing porn on the Web. Welfare rolls collapse and
unemployment rates hug the bottom of the y-axis, yet Bill Bradley can still
avow that "the very meaning of America . . . is again under assault. . . . To
allow this kind of poverty to exist in America is simply . . . unconscionable."
Former drug users and binge drinkers turn into agreeable Republican
Presidential candidates, yet the war on drugs and alcohol only intensifies.
Surpluses mount and the national debt declines, and yet the notion of an
incompetent, gridlocked government is still embedded in the national
consciousness.
Pessimism, it seems, is a hard habit to break. Since the early 1970's, bad
news — especially in social indicators — became so common that the
question was simply whom or what to blame. In the last decade, the news
has changed, but the question has remained doggedly the same. David
Whitman, in his book, "The Optimism Gap," asked why Americans, despite
seeing good times ahead for themselves, still tell pollsters they think others
are doomed.
But the resilience of pessimism is not just in economics. To take an almost
comic example, Bill Bennett just brought out a new edition of his former
classic, "Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," as if the premise of the first
edition, that America was speeding toward Gomorrah, still held. But almost
every trend Bennett panicked about in his first edition — from teen
pregnancy to lax law enforcement — has gotten better, not worse, in the
interim. To his credit, even Bennett has beaten at least a partial retreat.
"These are times in which conservatives are going to have to face the fact
that there is some good news on the landscape," he told a crushed
conservative audience two years ago. "We're going to have to live with it."
Bummer.
Nevertheless, bearers of good news can still expect to be punished. Earlier
this year, two scholars, John Donohue III and Steven Levitt, from Stanford
University Law School and the University of Chicago, wrote a paper
positing that falling crime rates in the 1990's might be linked to the
widespread legalization of abortion in the 1970's. Their thesis, buttressed by
solid statistical models, argued that since poor, underprivileged women had
fewer babies from the mid-1970's onward, and since unwanted, poor kids
are disproportionately likely to become criminals in their late teens, the
soaring abortion rates of the 1970's and 1980's might have had a silver
lining. The academics even showed how those states that legalized abortion
first in the early 1970's saw their crime rates also drop first in the 1990's.
The study wasn't a slam-dunk, but it was a legitimate idea worth discussing.
Instead, both anti-abortion and abortion rights activists savaged the report.
The anti-abortion crowd wanted nothing to offset the bleakness of abortion
on demand. Abortion rights advocates saw thinly veiled racism amid the
scholars' good cheer. Donohue and Levitt had to run a gamut of abuse on
the way to publication.
The identical thing happened to a recent study showing far lower rates of
suicide among Vietnam veterans than previously imagined. The author,
Michael Kelley, a Purple Heart Vietnam vet, couldn't get his work published
in veterans' publications, even though he showed that suicide numbers should
be reduced from a widely quoted figure of 150,000 to under 5,000. An
equally sour reception greeted a study published by the American
Psychological Association. Assessing data on effects of child-molestation,
the paper found that lasting psychological trauma among adult survivors of
abuse, particularly for men, was much less than feared. The results from 36
peer-reviewed studies and 23 dissertations showed that victims of child
abuse seemed on average only slightly less well adjusted by the time they got
to college than their peers. A reason for relief? Of course not. Outraged
members of the religious right accused the A.P.A. of tolerating pedophilia
and launched a crusade to punish the organization. The authors stressed that
their findings "do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on the
behaviors currently classified as [child sexual abuse] should be abandoned
or even altered," but the House of Representatives voted 355-0 to condemn
the article anyway. That'll teach them to look on the bright side.
It's not hard to see why optimism gets such a bad rap. It doesn't fit into our
ideological framework. The right won't believe that without reviving religion,
censoring Hollywood, stigmatizing homosexuals and restricting divorce,
people can actually behave more morally or responsibly. The left won't
believe that without hefty government programs and a paleoliberal in the
White House, the lives of most Americans can get better. The good news of
the last decade has proved both sides wrong.
The era of smaller government, welfare reform, free trade and balanced
budgets has seen declining poverty, record employment and lower crime.
The era of Jerry Springer, "South Park," gay marriage and "Fight Club" has
seen less divorce, abortion and crime and fewer teenage pregnancies.
Something is amiss, and it has nothing to do with our vibrant society, and
everything to do with our moribund politics. Which is one reason voting rates
keep falling and cable wrestling's ratings keep rising, a sad fact that, come to
think of it, is oddly cheering.
Table of Contents
November 07, 1999