America’s liberal and conservative elites disagree about
everything under the sun. from the role of God in the constitution to John
Bolton’s table manners. Yet on one issue they are as one: the country is going
to hell in a hand-basket. 41. __________. For liberals,
Americans are suffering from epidemics of "traumas" and "syndromes". The left
has always worried about the effects of rapacious capitalism on the American
psyche. Listen to Mary Pipher, a bestselling clinical psychologist, on girls:
"Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda
Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn" Or
compare William Pollak. a Harvard psychologist, on boys: "Our nation is
home to millions of boys who...are cast out to sea in separate lifeboats, and
feel that they are drowning in isolation, depression. loneliness and despair."
Half an hour listening to "Oprah" or browsing in a bookshop could produce a
dozen equally depressing theses, expressed in equally dismal metaphors, about
every, sort of American. 42. __________. This literature is
built on one huge assumption: that Americans are a fragile bunch. Forget about
the flinty Pilgrims who built a hyperpower out of a wilderness. Today’s
Americans are so vulnerable they need to be shielded from competition. In their
excellent new book. "One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is
Eroding Self-Reliance" (St. Martin’s Press). Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally
Satel. of the American Enterprise Institute, detail the rise of an
ever-proliferating profession of grief counsellors, trauma therapists, syndrome
specialists, stress-reducers and assorted degree-bearing charlatans. 43.
__________. This book has naturally garnered favourable reviews
from fellow conservatives. Yet the right is equally prey to its own variety of
crisis-mongering. Conservatives blame sin. rather than syndromes, and cultural
decline, rather than economic dislocation. But many share the left’s sense of
human vulnerability, and a surprising number have a weakness for psychobabble.
It is no accident that the most powerful man in the Christian right. James
Dobson. the head of Focus on the Family, is both a child psychologist and a
veritable fountain of social’ science statistics. 44. __________.
For conservatives, the family is being battered by pop culture, gay rights
and feminism. Rebecca Hagelin of the Heritage Foundation argues that, thanks in
pan to the ubiquity of the porn culture, America has gone "stark raving
mad" (to use the subtitle of her new book). Gloomy conservative groups
issue toe-curling warnings about the "inexorable grip of homosexual lust" and
"feminism’s love affair with abortion, and lesbianism". 45.
___________. Is this really true Take a look at most of the
recent cultural indicators, and it is hard to know where to start with the good
news. The proportion of black children living with married parents is
increasing. The proportion of women with infants in the. workforce (the women
that is, not the infants) is declining, meaning that more mothers are staying at
home. Both teenage pregnancy rates and teenage abortion rates have declined by
about a third over the past 15 years. For all the talk of "hooking up", a
growing proportion of schoolchildren are waiting to have sex until they are
older. The good news is not confined to sex. Child poverty is
down substantially from its high in 1993 (whatever happened to the "disastrous
consequences" of welfare reform). So is juvenile crime. Alcohol and drug use
are lower. The idea that young America is tossing about on a sea of misery
hardly tallies with academic evidence, which shows 73% of teenagers to be
"hopeful and optimistic, in thinking about the future" (a Horatio Alger study in
2002-03 ), a mere 7.5% of college students feeling frequently depressed
(UCLA. 2003 ) and the teen-suicide rate down by a quarter (the Centres for
Disease Control. 2004). [A] The literature assumes that Americans are
vulnerable. [B] The conservatives’ opinions of Americans’ psychological
problems [C] The conservatives think that Americans are fragile. [D] The
liberals’ opinions about the American psyche [E] The conservatives regard the
social problems as the cause of the American’s psychological problems. [F]
The recent data indicates that Americans have an improvement in many social
problems.