I am deeply honored to be with you for the 59th annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities and of the St. Vincent De Paul society. My father served for many years with St. Vincent De Paul Society in New York City, and I learned much and loved my work as a member of the Society in Chicago. So, I feel at home at this meeting and with all of you.
You have graciously invited me to speak on “human dignity.” But our country, needs your work more than any speech. Taking up your time with mere talk is almost a sacrilege. I only hope you find some solace in the realization that at least one politician thinks you should be receiving more money and more help and more recognition from your government, -- not less and less with each passing year.
Five thousand years after the Greeks spoke of the inherent dignity of human beings -- two thousand years after Christ died on the cross, -- and almost 200 years after this nation was founded on the concept of individual human dignity and justice for all, human beings are being killed, deprived of liberty, permitted to starve, falsely imprisoned and degraded as never before in history.
Solzhenitsyn and Sakarov cry out from within the Soviet Union; the President of the World Bank Rabert MacNamara eloquently describes the tragic fate of the millions of rural poor in the underdeveloped world; violence erupts everywhere, -- in I.T.&T offices; in airports and in airplanes; in Northern Ireland; in political person camps; in San Francisco and Atlanta. In many countries physical torture of prisoners has become a way of life. Go see the movie “State of Siege” -- or read what the bishops. Of Brazil and Spain and Chile and South Africa say about the inhuman and unjust conditions forced upon people, -- if you minimize, or tend to disbelieve that human dignity is under attack world-wide, you haven’t even read the morning newspapers.
Within our own country the Gallup Polls show, week after week, that a majority of citizens have lost faith in the honesty of our political leaders. No one in Washington believes what any politician says about anything, anymore. Public trust and confidence in the moral rectitude of our national leaders have never been lower. Only the Judiciary -- up to this point -- still seems to have retained a measure of broad, public respect. President Nixon and the U.S. Congress itself rank below garbage collectors in public esteem.
Even the phrase “human dignity” has a nostalgic tone. Whoever heard of “human dignity” in Harlem? or in Bangladesh? or Cambodia? or in Rwanda & Burundi? within Attica? or on a thousand streets in American cities where there are no jobs, no parents, no police, but plenty of narcotics, prostitution and graft. Go see the movie “Serpico” if you want to see and hear the voice of America.
In America, we have lost our belief in any, all-embracing ethical edifice, for our society. We have lost the ethical foundations for American democracy and the moral basis for trust and love. Solzhenitsyn writes about Watergate: “What do you expect from a democracy that has no built-in ethical foundation...”
Solzhenitsyn goes too far with that criticism. He knows more about the USSR than the USA. But a young White House victim of the Watergate disaster has described the American situation very well. I refer to Hugh Sloan, Jr. Do you remember him and what he said? Just to refresh your memories here are the facts: --
Hugh Sloan, Jr. went to Hotchkiss, where he graduated with honors; went on to Princeton, where he graduated with honors; married an attractive girl; worked hard at his job, played well at sports, was blessed with healthy children. He felt no generation gap with his parents. On his father’s 60th birthday, he wrote: “My only regret is that I have known you for only half of your life.” And his father said of him that he was “everything I’ve ever looked for in a son.”
Hugh Sloan seems to have enjoyed a happy married life. His wife agreed when her husband decided to try to get into politics. In 1968, they entered politics part-time as volunteers. Shortly, he was spending most of his time in politics. He was competent, capable and, once again, successful. He became a White House aide and then, Treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
Suddenly, in 1972, the roof fell in on Hugh Sloan, Jr., and on his wife and children. He found himself involved in the Watergate scandal. In disgust and on the verge of disgrace, he resigned. Here is what he says now:
“I feel lousy. I don’t believe I did anything wrong. I went into politics to help my country, but I found out that if you go into politics for a career, sooner or later you have to compromise ... you either compromise or get out. It just sooner or later takes the edge off your values”
Hugh Sloan says that in the White House he had discovered that there was “a separate morality.” To quote him again:
“There was no independent sense of morality there. I mean, if you worked for someone, he was God. Whatever he said, you did.”
Please try to remember those phrases:
- “Politics takes the edge off your values.”
- “A separate morality in the White House.”
- “Whoever you worked for, he was God.”
- “I feel lousy.”
Those four statements or phrases sum up what many Americans believe and felt today. They see that there has been “a separate morality” in the White House. They believe that “polecats takes the edge off your values.” Why else would Spiro Agnew seek a trial managed by politicians versus a trial run by judges?
And “they feel lousy” ... not so much about themselves -- as Hugh Sloan feels about himself -- but about their country, its repetition, about its inability to deal with problems like inflation, or the gas shortage, about the bombing of Cambodia, or spying in the White House. The twists and turnings in the witness chair of men who used to be high government officials. Why does Rose Mary Woods need a lawyer to tell the truth? Why does Nixon need a lawyer to tell the truth? Americans don’t like to read lies.
When the last defense is told humbug -- “everyone does it,” Americans see that we no longer have men in office like Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, or Eisenhower. Moral midgets have replaced moral giants in Washington strikes most Americans as disgraceful. Why does an Attorney General of the United States need help to tell the truth?
Only one thing can make Americans feel good again ... there’s only one thing capable of helping Hugh Sloan get over “feeling lousy” -- and that is the reworking, the reconstruction if need be, of an ethical foundation for American democracy. I know this cannot be done in one day, one year, or one decade -- it cannot be done by one person or one church. I know that many believe ethics should play only a secondary role in the great decisions of government. But I say that the survival of the American dream demands revival of American ethics. National survival is infinitely more important than the personal survival of the Presidency of a man who has contributed so much to the moral morass we are wallowing in.
“Survival in office” appears to be more important than survival for our system. Would that Henry Clay were alive. “I’d rather be right than president,” said Henry Clay. That’s the ethical spirit we must recapture if we are to survive as a nation. We all know the adage that morality has not place in foreign policy. Indeed, we hear many government officials praised for their cold, pragmatic, hard-headed amoral approach. We are told that our policy in Bangladesh was effective diplomacy. We should not mind that millions paid for our diplomacy with their lives.
Perhaps this attitude had its origin in the belief only a few years ago that God, was dead -- that only the problems left are technical or technological -- that ours was a period for equations and cost accounting, scientific rationality and social planning based on economics.
Well, there is more in this world than was ever dreamed of at the Harvard Business School. Richard Nixon, Caspar Weinberger, Roy Ash, and their technocrats may be the world’s greatest administrators, but Americans will never feel good again until their leaders are good men again. We need to hear once more in this land those unforgettable words:
“Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own ...”
Vietnam is the most obvious and painful example of what happens when “technicians with their special skills” make the final decisions without any help from moralists or without any attention to ethical and human values, or without consulting the people. The policy sciences created the bloodless idiom in which the issues of war and peace were debated and decided. Facts were fed to computers. Computers responded with the answer of machines. But no one questioned the faith that led us to Indochina. The Pentagon provided body counts, but there was “no accounting for our national soul.” Our leaders asked how much will it cost; how long will it take; how many casualties will there be -- everything in fact, but the most important question of all: Is it right? And in the end, our policy was not only wrong, it did not work.
It was at times like those, and again today, that our nation needs moral men to ask the philosophical and ethical questions and to help in developing a national ethic based on good, old-fashioned ideas of justice and truth like:
Honesty is the best policy, even in politics -- and even in the White House.
It is of course a fact that the first stirrings of protest about Vietnam ultimately inspired nationwide dissent. But this was after the fact. At the time the critical choices were made, there were no ethical tests sufficient to counter the imposing array of pragmatic arguments ranging from cost-benefit economic analysis to computer simulations of tactics and strategy.
And now the same amoral, pseudo-scientific standards are being more and more applied to domestic affairs: look at the HEW and OEO. Every program or proposal is weighed solely by its cost effectiveness. But can anyone explain how mathematics can measure the “benefit” of falling the stomach of a hungry child? What equation expresses the dignity and satisfaction of an unemployed father who finally lands a job? What formula contains the joy of an unskilled worker who learns to read at last at the age of forty-five? What number tells what it means to him to understand the baseball box score in the morning paper? I recognize that techniques of measurement and policy assessment used by Government are neutral instruments. They are “value-free.” But that is precisely the point. Unless there is an equally intense investigation and discussion of moral implications, these neutral instruments tend to become the only instruments.
Nowhere is this clearer than in economic policy. Because we can celebrate economic growth -- because we can watch it rise or recode -- because it enables us to set a goal and race toward it, the gross national product becomes an end in itself. But the gross national product includes ABMs and oil depletion allowances and tranquilizers to give some chemical meaning to empty lives. It includes napalm and nuclear warheads and cigarette advertising. It counts Arthur Bremer’s pistol and Howard Hunt’s wiretaps. It swells with the destruction of the Redwoods and the strip-mining of the mountains. But the gross national product does not reveal the excitement of our children at play or the happiness of our marriages. It cannot measure the wisdom of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It does not demonstrate our concern for each other or our commitment to justice. In short, the gross national product tells us everything about ourselves except who we really are, and everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.
Now this is not a plea to abandon the GNP or any of the other tools which measure our problems or test our progress. It is a plea to see them for what they are -- incomplete and neutral methods, offering choices which finally must be made by human beings on ethical, rather than pragmatic grounds. Of course, not everyone will agree on the foundation and expression of morality. Human beings have never accepted a single ethic, and government cannot impose one. The morality of policy will always be imprecise, but the process of policymaking is imperfect, too. What is needed is the kind of serious ethical study and ethical analysis that can command the attention of policymakers on a systematic basis. Presidents and the people must be encouraged to comprehend and if possible to foresee the ethical consequences of their choices.
How can this be done?
There is no set formula, but some attempts are being made. The Kennedy Foundation has created an Institute for “Bioethics” at Georgetown University where research is being pursued on the ethical ramifications of our current population policy. Other Foundations are becoming interested in similar ventures, in other fields. The unbelievable sterilization cases in North Carolina and here in Alabama, therapeutic abortion based on amniocentesis, euthanasia, experimentation on human beings -- all are being studied, and in some cases previous practices are being stopped until their ethical implications can be evaluated properly.
No one says we should not have economists to calculate fiscal policy and generals to play war games. But we also need moralists and wise men to develop and apply standards of justice to all our choices. This is increasingly important because increasingly decisions in our society are moral decisions. Most questions or problems which reach the President’s desk are ethical questions. Not just issues of war or peace, but decisions on budgetary policy involve “questions of conscience.” And this is true in every part of government and commerce, and at every level. For example, when the Supreme Court rules on abortion, it makes a moral choice -- and it creates other moral choices for other institutions and for other men and women. Already a hospital committee in Washington has been asked: since the fetus is not a human being, at least for the first six months, according to the Supreme Court, is it permissible legally to perform medical experiments on the live remnant of an abortion?
Different but similar questions are coming to the forefront of public policy:
- Can the United States with 6% of the World’s population continue to consume 30% of the world’s energy resources, thereby condemning the reset of mankind to a permanently inferior standard of living?
- Should localities be allowed to adopt land use policies in the name of environmental protection, if their real purpose is racial or social exclusion?
- Can we permit the property tax to remain the principal support for public schools, when its effect is to require the poor to pay more for less?
Asking these questions, or the more obvious ones about issues such as defense policy, is sometimes considered soft-headed. That has always been immoral society’s answer to moral men. But what could be more soft-headed than to fight and fail to win a war that was wrong, or to enflame social discontent by denying social justice?
I believe America must be a moral country, or it will have no meaning beyond mere existence. I do not expect that here or anywhere, the city of man will become the city of God.
