One of my close friends just had his son begin the American tradition of playing Little League. His first T-ball game was on a recent Saturday. After the game, we talked about the experience and at one point he expressed frustration at how some of the children on his team didn’t want to follow the rules. We aren’t talking about following the rules of the game….at the ages of 4-6, few of the children know the real baseball rules. That’s the point of T-ball anyway, to help introduce the children to the sport of baseball.
No, we were talking about some children who refused to follow the simple instructions of “stand up.” About 7 years ago, I was also a coach for T-ball with my daughter Brynn who wanted to follow her older sister’s footsteps to playing softball. There isn’t really a program for little girls to play softball before the age of 8, so we played T-ball. It was frustrating for her, and me, for many reasons, but a chief one for me was seeing just how far, and how poorly, the children understood basic authority.
Helping children understand how the world works is a core aspect of parenting. Learning that all of life has authority and at various and sundry points, everyone falls under someone’s authority is critical to a healthy society. Part of what has happened to us as a country is that we have lost this point. After the teens of the rebellious 60s became adults, they transfered their disdain for authority to their kids. Of course this is a generalization, and even today there are great parents who teach their kids to obey and submit to authority, but those paretns are the minority. My firend had the same experience as I did, trying to get a child to act in a specific way (such as standing up), and the child simply refused. Worse, when the parent was consulted, rather than the child responding finally to their own parent, they simply continued to ignore the authority. I can remember looking in teh face of the parent only to see them shrug as if to say “ah kids, what can you do?”
Of course there are many things that you MUST do if you are the parent, but that is perhaps for another post. On this point, though,Mike Metzger has once again nailed it. One of his recent posts lays out the critical need for rules, including those of the “thou shalt not” variety. He writes that one expert, Philip Rieff, states that our society has moved into a new cultural understanding of social order. Rieff writes that in this new understanding, any understanding of a sacred canopy that helps society have order has fully collapsed. Metzger explains “If there is no God, life has no transcendent meaning. With no meaning there’s no morality. Transcendent virtues were replaced by personal “values.””
The damning reality of moving into this setting is that without a firm grasp of rules, of authority and of the “thou shalt nots,” a civic entity can no longer hold to what Hobbes and Locke called the Social Contract. Metzger explains in brutal detail:
[those cultures] still have a few prohibitions, such as paying taxes and obeying traffic signals. But the institutions essential for supporting the American experiment in self-government collapse because no one can utter Thou Shalt Not. The founders considered marriage to be one of those institutions vital for sustaining the experiment. There is no evidence that they considered marriage to be anything other than a permanent, monogamous, heterosexual relationship.
I’m fully aware that in making this judgment, some will say I sound judgmental of others’ values. But there’s a world of difference between judging and being judgmental. To be judgmental is to have an excessively critical point of view. Sound judgments are what football referees do. If a ref judges that a runner did not cross the goal line, he or she prohibits six points from being awarded to the offense. It’d be the death of the game if officials’ judgments were taken as personal values rather than binding prohibitions. The same goes for societies. Prohibitions promote virtues.
Rieff summed up today’s culture as “this idea that men need not submit to any power – higher or lower – other than their own.”4 It’s actually the death of a culture. Lincoln operated in a second, not third, world culture. That’s why his negations stand in stark contrast to what we so often hear today. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln cited several prohibitions, including, “but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” That phrase is an allusion to Matthew 7:1, where Jesus says, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Jesus wasn’t against sound judgments. He was opposed to being judgmental. So was Lincoln. This could be why “Lincoln” appeals to moviegoers on a visceral level. In watching the 16th President refer to the thou-shalt-nots, many viewers are listening to a language that unknowingly stirs longings for a world that’s largely disappeared.