BRIK McDILL: Our damaging role models: Examples of rich and famous
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Brik McDill
"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos." -- Will Durant (1885-1981)
When you reach an age at which two generations of retrospect is possible, certain things can be seen more clearly and no longer through a glass darkly. One of those things are the examples set by our role models and the standards they shape, and, by their example, teach. Sports and entertainment are the two areas where their teaching touches the hearts and souls of our children most deeply. And therein lies a risk. When role models exhibit exemplary behavior, all is good. But if they exhibit something less, we enter perilous territory.
From Feuerbach to Carlyle, we find that hero worship and the work of apotheosis (turning things into gods) are as much a part of human nature as self-protection and social affiliation. As things become our gods, they exert a grip over us that is as much unseen as unarticulated. And we cannot escape that grip anymore than we can escape the force of gravity. We find our grounding in what we admire, and we seek the same light that illumines whom we esteem.
So what's the problem?
The spouses of servicemen sent far from home and the troops who came back from our world wars paid their dues, dug in and built a world-class, thriving, muscular new America. They set an example of hard work, discipline, sacrifice, pride of work, discipline, delay of gratification, discipline, commitment to a goal. And did I mention discipline? American exceptionalism did not come by accident.
But the worm turned. Their kids, my drug-taking generation, we "Age of Aquarius" baby boomers, and now our children, followed a very different, self-oriented path. Not all of us, and not all of our kids, but enough did to have had a worrisome cumulative effect. Subtly at first, our forms of entertainment became increasingly less upstanding, and our sports and action heroes began to openly live with an amoral self-indulgence that became less and less shocking. To stand out, to be recognized, our entertainers seeking attention resort to the extreme; and do so in forms of unembarrassed conduct, dress, or undress. And their example filters its way into our thirsty common culture. As our heroes become less and less respectable, we slowly become less and less offendable. Our sponge-like brains soak up whatever surrounds and gradually the extreme quickens less and less unease until what had been the extreme becomes more or less the norm. We adopt a live and let live tolerance, in many ways a good thing, but which can easily lead to an openly lived "anything goes" permissiveness. Our luminaries boast of, joke about, compare notes, and make reality TV programs about casual sexual hookups. They put homemade self-starring pornography on the Internet.
There's a consequence to this. An ethos sets in of self-indulgence and a free-floating standard of "If it feels right, it must be right" and "If they can do it, so can I." Standards of right and wrong give way to menus of excitements, desires, needs and wants. Lives are lived without an ounce of due diligence. A quick review of the current crop of entertainment figures and at two generations of our sports darlings sends clear signals that the things that made for a world-class America are getting, on balance, harder and harder to find.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the anything-goes life is new or has never been lived before. An even cursory read of history offers up lifestyles of the amoral and infamous. We have decisions to make about the kind of future we want for our posterity. Individual decisions aggregate themselves into cultural tectonic shifts. What I am proposing is that the moving plates of acceptable societal norms can't shift back fast enough to some center -- a center that anchors us all to values and lives that are edifying to generations yet to come. History tells us that a society that doesn't look to the nurturing and edifying of its progeny is a society in trouble. Hopefully we're better than that.
Brik McDill, Ph.D., is a senior supervising psychologist at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi.
