William Bennett and racism and gambling

Poor Bill Bennett. Misunderstood again, especially by all those left-wing liberals who never fought for civil rights the way he did. Misunderstood, just like he was misunderstood in 2003 when he had frittered away millions of dollars (after he thought he had about "broken even") in casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City and people tried to criticize him for his gambling habits. After all, he never abandoned his family. He always provided for them. His penchant for late night/early morning gambling never really hurt anyone. But then, when the torrent of ridicule turned into a tsunami, he admitted that perhaps what he did wasn't setting the best example for people. But, repentance? Admission of a mistake? Confession of a personal weakness? Not at all. Such a confession just wouldn't fit the pugnacious personality who made his way in public life by throwing around his considerable bulk with the aid of the little word "moral" or "virtue" inserted into every third or fourth sentence.

Bill Bennett's latest debacle, where he, very defensibly in his mind, used an example (which he called a ridiculous and morally indefensible one) of aborting every black baby to reduce the crime rate, has brought him back to public attention. He is in the denial stage right now--he claims that what he said, when understood "in context," is not a problem. Indeed, those who criticized him owe him an apology. This is vintage Bill Bennett. People just don't understand. He is a philosopher, who gives counterfactuals and hypotheticals of an extreme nature so that he can just view the problem being considered in its full measure, to coax truth out of it. Socratic Bill. Just trying to teach America to be moral, to think clearly, to pursue the apparently illusory goal of "moral clarity." But the problem is with us. We just don't understand. We weren't on the front lines with him fighting racism in the 1960s. We don't know how pure his heart really is. And, that, frankly, is our problem.

Assessing Bill

When I was doing my doctorate in religious studies about 25 years ago, I always hung around guys (they were mostly guys in those days) who wanted to talk about "moral" issues a lot. One of my professors had even written a controversial book on a "new" Catholic morality. Well, in fact, they didn't want to talk about the moral components of current issues--the burning issues of the day were investing in South Africa or our Central American policy-- but they wanted to talk about "moral responses" or "moral reactions" in general. The higher the level of abstraction, the more they seemed to revel. But they definitely were haunted by the word "moral." It seemed to suggest to them that there was, after all, a right answer to things, even though the problem was not clearly defined nor was the answer very evident.

Sometimes, on occasion, I would run into a philosophical type who wanted to use the language of morality not simply to explore problems on an academic level, but seemingly to beat me over the head with it. That is, the word "moral" seemed to be a term used to claim high ground in a debate, to sort of try to beat someone up, to establish a position of personal superiority that was untouchable and incontrovertible. The word "moral" functioned as a sort of code word trying to tell me that the person using it was really the expert and that I ought to shut up. I never really understood these people, but concluded that some of them were just bullies who now had a different method of trying to bully people--use the world "moral" a lot.

I think that is what Bennett may be doing. He is a product of Catholic secondary schools (where the word "moral" appears even more frequently than in Ivy League doctoral programs) and then got his doctorate in philosophy at UT Austin. His doctoral advisor was one John Silber, the ambitious and imperious Kant-scholar who became, whatever your politics, one of the great chancellors in the history of Boston University. In many ways Bennett is a "junior Silber," though he couldn't pull "Silber" off as well because he lacked the personal discipline (I think he never could manage his weight) and the personal hardship (Silber has a significant disability; Silber grew up in penurious circumstances in the Great Depression in San Antonio) that might have given him a, oops, moral center when the inevitable inconveniences of middle age start to stalk us. In addition, Silber, having been a professor of philosophy for years in which he was immersed in the mind-boggling complexity of 18th-19th century German metaphysics and ethics, at least had to establish a disciplinary focus in his life while Bennett went on to Harvard Law School and then began raising a ruckus almost immediately thereafter. In short, Bennett seemed to want to take on the Silber confrontative style and employ moralistic language without himself having developed habits of virtue (to use an Aristotelian phrase) that might have stood him in good stead for the future.

A Meteoric Career

And then Bennett's star rose meteorically. By 37 he was Chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and he became Secretary of Education before his 42nd birthday. He could swoop in to conferences, give speeches, make big pronouncements and then depart for the next big event. He seemed to give intellectual underpinnings to the Reagan Revolution, and became a stern critic of what was wrong with America as well as a proponent of "moral" things, whatever that might mean. He dropped out of public life in the early 1990s after heading up the Office of Drug Control Policy for the elder Bush's administration. He said at the time that he wanted to spend more time with his sons, a wonderfully moral thing to do. His 1993 blockbuster Book of Virtues burned him into the American psyche as a conservative but eloquent defender of traditional morality. Had he died then [Bill, it is only a hypothetical; please don't get upset], he would have probably gone down as a person whose public life was congruent with his public pronouncements.

Conclusion

But, thanks to modern medicine and longevity tables, most people don't die in their late 40s. The long and difficult years of middle age confront, and they relentlessly follow one after another. And, Bill Bennett hasn't hit late middle age well. Maybe it was because he was sort of a wunderkind and that success at a too-early age tends to make you think that you are immune to the regular processes of life. Witness Michael Jackson. But we aren't. A lot of us do foolish things in middle age, things that just make us feel like the dirt to which we will one day return. Defensiveness is understandable. Indeed, you want to maintain your national "visibility." But sometimes it is good to admit to yourself that you just screwed up, and that you, even if you are very moral, have made a botch of things.

1396