The (Inter)National Book, Or, "We Are Doomed!"

[LeSellers]

Until about 1968, USmerica and the western world (less Japan) had a "National Book". This book was the Bible. Some might add that we also had a "National Dogma" in the Constitution.

What the National Book does is define the culture. Even people who did not believe in the Bible still accepted it as a common, cultural normative text, and could and often did quote from it as though it were, well, the Bible.

Over the past four or five decades, the Bible has lost its "National Book" status, to be replaced with ... what?

Without a National Book, a country is doomed to slip into oblivion—its culture will wane and dwindle into obscurity. In the late XX (1990s) a poll showed that the National "Book" had become "Rock (or Pop) Music". The morals "defined" by rock music were becoming the norm. We became a nation defined (and driven) by "Sex, Drugs, an' Rock'n'Roll".

I used the word "nation" repeatedly in this mini-essay, but, as the title of this topic hints, it's much wider than USmerica—it's been true across much of the English-speaking world, and further to the whole of the West.

Is there hope that my grandchildren (the eldest of whom will have their own families in less than a decade) will raise their families in a wholly irreligious and immoral world? Will my great-grandchildren even have a safe culture in which to grow and accumulate their values and mores?

Will anything (short of The Second Coming of Christ) good and righteous flower and lead man to virtue and morality? Or has the National Book become the Kama Sutra?

Lehi

[thesometimesaint]

A better "Book" would be the US Constitution.

[LeSellers]

A better "Book" would be the US Constitution.

Please don't push this into politics. It' s not about politics, it's about morality and establishing norms.

Lehi

[wenglund]

I hesitate to say this, but I was completely unaware that there was such a thing as a "National Book," let alone what it was.

I wonder whether I am alone in my ignorance of this book, and if not, and if I tend to be the rule rather than the exception, then I am not sure what difference having a "National BooK" makes to our culture one way or the other. To my mind, we tend to be more affected by what we know about rather than what we don't--not that I necessarily disagree with you.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Edited October 6, 2011 by wenglund

[Jesterss]

I hesitate to say this, but I was completely unaware that there was such a thing as a "National Book," let alone what it was.

I wonder whether I am alone in my ignorance of this book, and if not, and if I tend to be the rule rather than the exception, then I am not sure what difference having a "National BooK" makes to our culture one way or the other. To my mind, we tend to be more affected by what we know about rather than what we don't--not that I necessarily disagree with you.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

This was my take as well...

and as much as I believe you wanted this to be about morality and religious norms, I think it ultimately comes down to politics when discussing the future of a nation... Sure, there will be individuals and groups who are motivated by religion, but as we know, there are so many religions that even religion can't agree, so the direction of a nation or country is directly related to the politics and political agendas it seeks...

[KevinG]

Harry Potter Series.

[Senator]

Please don't push this into politics. It' s not about politics, it's about morality and establishing norms.

Lehi

Actually I think SS's responce was legitimate given this thread is destined to end up in a discussion of the separation of chuch and state. ( and who can avoid politics in that arena?) The Bible is only a "National Book" insofar as it is the religious text of the predominate religion in the nation. As (if) that predominance fades the influence of text will as well.

I agree with SS. The Constitution is a better fit for a "National Book"

[LeSellers]

I hesitate to say this, but I was completely unaware that there was such a thing as a "National Book," let alone what it was.

I wonder whether I am alone in my ignorance of this book, and if not, and if I tend to be the rule rather than the exception, then I am not sure what difference having a "National BooK" makes to our culture one way or the other. To my mind, we tend to be more affected by what we know about rather than what we don't--not that I necessarily disagree with you.

The "National Book" is the commonly accepted work (it used to be "text", but can be any art) people refer to (often unconsciously) when they determine what is "right" or "moral".

This lecture/essay explains it: Seven Reasons to Study the classics.

Lehi

Edited October 6, 2011 by LeSellers

[LeSellers]

From Oliver Demille's essay mentioned above.

National Books

Please take out a blank sheet of paper. Now answer each of the following questions:

1. What books are your companions through life?

2. If you were evacuated to another planet and could only take one book, upon which to base the whole teaching of your family and establishing right and wrong for your community, what would it be?

3. What is good? What is evil?

Thank you. I'll refer to these later, so please stop reading and answer these three questions in writing before continuing.

In 1987, the bicentennial of the Constitutional Convention, three very important bestsellers swept America: Robert Bork's The Tempting of America, E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. They presented essentially the same message, about law, society, and education respectively: that we have strayed from our founding-and not in a good direction. In fact, together they are a sort of update to Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Consider Allan Bloom's profound analysis of American education. As I read this modern classic, three major points stood out. First, societies are successful when people choose to be good. If people choose mediocrity, they end up with a mediocre society. If they choose excellence, they build an excellent society; if they choose decadence, society decays. This is not only common sense, it is historically accurate.

Second, people choose to be good when they are taught and believe in good. People's choices are a direct result of their beliefs. And their beliefs are profoundly influenced by what they are taught by parents, friends, teachers, clergy, etc. If they are taught a falsehood or even evil, and if they believe it, they will choose poorly. Teaching influences belief, which guides action.

Third, the thing which determines how well they are taught is their national books. A national book is something that almost everyone in the nation accepts as a central truth. The national book of the Jews is the Torah; Muslims, the Koran; Christians, the Bible; etc. It could be argued that Shakespeare is a national author for England, Goethe and Luther for Germany, Dante and Machiavelli for Italy, Tolstoy in Russia, and so on. Whatever the nation, its national books, the books almost everyone in the nation revere and believe in, will determine the culture. Good national books, like the Bible or Shakespeare's works, will lead to a good nation. Bad national books like The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf will lead to bad nations until they reject such books.

Now, what of a nation with no national book, with no central text which almost everyone agrees upon as the measuring rod of right and wrong? Such a nation is simply without culture, or at best it is in the process of losing it.

America's National Books

This leads to the question, "What is America's national book?" Bloom argues that when he was teaching college at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, he could tell what the national books were by asking students what books formed the core of their lives, the basis of society. The two answers he always got were the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. In the late 1960s this changed: Bloom's students really couldn't answer his question. They stopped referring to the Bible and the Declaration, and they listed . . . nothing. No national books. The Bible and the Declaration remained for the older generations, but the youngsters came up with no core source of absolutes, no central fountain of truth.

In the 1980s it changed again: students began listing various rock n' roll music tapes as the thing they revered and turned to for truth and answers. Practically every college student knew this new fountain of truth, studied it daily and for long hours, and felt passionately about it.

If you doubt it, Bloom suggested, try to tell a group of youth why their music is bad and they will respond with the same energy and even anger as if you had tried to tell a group 100 years ago that the Bible was bad.

This obviously has some very negative ramifications for America's future, but even rock music isn't truly a national book because it is only shared by the younger generations.

In fact, there is no true national book in America today. No national books means no culture; and this is very ominous for the future. Any society which loses its national book declines and collapses in ignorance, dwindles and perishes in unbelief. In Bloom's own words: "The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own . . . .The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated . . . .

"People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.

"The cause of this decay of the family's traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth . . . . In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and . . . provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise-as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine."

Bloom is not only correct about the failure of the American family to fulfill its role as the primary center of education; his analysis of the modern famine of classics as the source of education is equally important: "My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible's commandments, and their explanation in the Bible's stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the seeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material . . . . There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief . . . .

"Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished."

If Bloom is correct, and I think he is, then America cannot remain free, prosperous or moral unless the overall culture adopts a central text of the caliber of the Bible. This is not only profound, but it is actually a marching order for parents and educators. The whole problem is a result of families failing to teach, educate, train and civilize.

...

Your National Book

Now, refer to the answers you wrote at the beginning of the chapter. Look at question number two: "If you were evacuated to another planet and could only take one book, upon which to base the whole teaching of your family and establishing right and wrong for your community, what would it be?"

Your answer is a good indication of what your national book might be.

Look at the other two answers you gave. Are your companion books through life in line with your national book? What about your definitions of good and evil? Look at your life; is it in keeping with your canon?

All of this can be very powerful as you analyze where to take the education of your children, your students, yourself.

Perhaps the most important thing America can do to remain free and prosperous is to clarify a national book and live by it. From the Founding through the end of World War II, the Bible and the Declaration were our national books. Even the great revolutions which occurred after 1945, such as increased freedom for Blacks and Indians, were fueled by those two national books. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches center around them and quote them extensively. America was based on them and became what it did because of them. Take them away, and America will become something very, very different.

The place to start is with yourself: Establish a clear canon, and spend time in it every day. Become an expert on it, ponder it, put your life in line with it. Teach it to your family; then others. If you are a teacher, take it into your classroom. If your faith doesn't include the Bible, use the Declaration or something of equal magnitude. And then broaden your knowledge to the other classics which support that central classic. America is what it is due to its national books, and the choices you make now regarding books will have tremendous impact on what America is twenty and fifty years from now.

Enjoy,

Lehi

[LeSellers]

Harry Potter Series.

I have been tempted to write a book, The Gospel According to Dumbledore. I believe that this is the kind of source young people will resort to when defining their own "canon". There's nothing wrong with Harry and Friends, but they are not Apostles.

Lehi

[LeSellers]

Actually I think SS's responce was legitimate given this thread is destined to end up in a discussion of the separation of chuch and state. ( and who can avoid politics in that arena?)

This is not about church and state. It's about what people have chosen to use as their "canon", that foundational concept of good and evil. Politics is not the issue, nor is religion, per se.

The Bible is only a "National Book" insofar as it is the religious text of the predominate religion in the nation. As (if) that predominance fades the influence of text will as well.

But the Bible need not be the "National Book" for the nation to be a moral people.

This issue is, which book (art) will USmerica and the West choose as the "National Book"?

I agree with SS. The Constitution is a better fit for a "National Book"

For USmericans, perhaps (although I doubt it will be: we've rejected its principles even while honoring it once a year—and on the wrong day even then). But for Brits, or Japanese, or Italians, or Frenchmen it is not and ought not to be.

Lehi

[thesometimesaint]

Lehi:

No politics I promise. Our(within the US) normative social expression should be within the confines of the US Constitution. If it is against the Constitution then just maybe we(Especially given the LDS reverance for the US Constitution) shouldn't do it. Further there is only two of the Ten Commandments that have any validity within the confines of the Laws governing the US.

Edited October 6, 2011 by thesometimesaint

[LeSellers]

No politics I promise. Our(within the US) normative social expression should be within the confines of the US Constitution. If it is against the Constitution then just maybe we(Especially given the LDS reverance for the US Constitution) shouldn't do it. Further there is only two of the Ten Commandments that have any validity within the confines of the Laws governing the US.

Which is all well and good, but the question is not about some vague standard imposed from "on high" (be that Washington City or Denver or Albany), but which book people choose in their own canon on which to base their decisions about "right'n'wrong".

The "book" is a personal choice, but the combined choice then becomes the "National Book".

Is Bloom right? Has the National Book in USmerica (and elsewhere, based on my observations) become Madonna, Britney Spears, and 50cent?

Lehi

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Hey hey hey, let's not diss the Kama Sutra, yo!

[Jesterss]

Which is all well and good, but the question is not about some vague standard imposed from "on high" (be that Washington City or Denver or Albany), but which book people choose in their own canon on which to base their decisions about "right'n'wrong".

The "book" is a personal choice, but the combined choice then becomes the "National Book".

Is Bloom right? Has the National Book in USmerica (and elsewhere, based on my observations) become Madonna, Britney Spears, and 50cent?

Lehi

Generations... all want to be different and known for their own inventions/customs.. As we age morals become more important... And the aged look down upon the younger due to their lack of morals.. continual cycle if you ask me..

[KevinG]

Hey hey hey, let's not diss the Kama Sutra, yo!

I haven't decided on a position regarding the Kama Sutra yet.

[Zakuska]

I haven't decided on a position regarding the Kama Sutra yet.

[volgadon]

The "national book" did actually have a profound influence on the likes of Guthrie, Seeger, and Dylan, which leads me to think that the issue is not so cut-and-dried.

Edited October 6, 2011 by volgadon

[Loran Blood]

The "national book" did actually have a profound influence on the likes of Guthrie, Seeger, and Dylan, which leads me to think that the issue is not so cut-and-dried.

Communists (Seeger and Guthrie)?

[Loran Blood]

Generations... all want to be different and known for their own inventions/customs.. As we age morals become more important... And the aged look down upon the younger due to their lack of morals.. continual cycle if you ask me..

And there's a great deal to be learned from the study of continuing historical cycles.

[Loran Blood]

From Oliver Demille's essay mentioned above.

National Books

Please take out a blank sheet of paper. Now answer each of the following questions:

1. What books are your companions through life?

2. If you were evacuated to another planet and could only take one book, upon which to base the whole teaching of your family and establishing right and wrong for your community, what would it be?

3. What is good? What is evil?

Thank you. I'll refer to these later, so please stop reading and answer these three questions in writing before continuing.

In 1987, the bicentennial of the Constitutional Convention, three very important bestsellers swept America: Robert Bork's The Tempting of America, E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. They presented essentially the same message, about law, society, and education respectively: that we have strayed from our founding-and not in a good direction. In fact, together they are a sort of update to Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Consider Allan Bloom's profound analysis of American education. As I read this modern classic, three major points stood out. First, societies are successful when people choose to be good. If people choose mediocrity, they end up with a mediocre society. If they choose excellence, they build an excellent society; if they choose decadence, society decays. This is not only common sense, it is historically accurate.

Second, people choose to be good when they are taught and believe in good. People's choices are a direct result of their beliefs. And their beliefs are profoundly influenced by what they are taught by parents, friends, teachers, clergy, etc. If they are taught a falsehood or even evil, and if they believe it, they will choose poorly. Teaching influences belief, which guides action.

Third, the thing which determines how well they are taught is their national books. A national book is something that almost everyone in the nation accepts as a central truth. The national book of the Jews is the Torah; Muslims, the Koran; Christians, the Bible; etc. It could be argued that Shakespeare is a national author for England, Goethe and Luther for Germany, Dante and Machiavelli for Italy, Tolstoy in Russia, and so on. Whatever the nation, its national books, the books almost everyone in the nation revere and believe in, will determine the culture. Good national books, like the Bible or Shakespeare's works, will lead to a good nation. Bad national books like The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf will lead to bad nations until they reject such books.

Now, what of a nation with no national book, with no central text which almost everyone agrees upon as the measuring rod of right and wrong? Such a nation is simply without culture, or at best it is in the process of losing it.

America's National Books

This leads to the question, "What is America's national book?" Bloom argues that when he was teaching college at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, he could tell what the national books were by asking students what books formed the core of their lives, the basis of society. The two answers he always got were the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. In the late 1960s this changed: Bloom's students really couldn't answer his question. They stopped referring to the Bible and the Declaration, and they listed . . . nothing. No national books. The Bible and the Declaration remained for the older generations, but the youngsters came up with no core source of absolutes, no central fountain of truth.

In the 1980s it changed again: students began listing various rock n' roll music tapes as the thing they revered and turned to for truth and answers. Practically every college student knew this new fountain of truth, studied it daily and for long hours, and felt passionately about it.

If you doubt it, Bloom suggested, try to tell a group of youth why their music is bad and they will respond with the same energy and even anger as if you had tried to tell a group 100 years ago that the Bible was bad.

This obviously has some very negative ramifications for America's future, but even rock music isn't truly a national book because it is only shared by the younger generations.

In fact, there is no true national book in America today. No national books means no culture; and this is very ominous for the future. Any society which loses its national book declines and collapses in ignorance, dwindles and perishes in unbelief. In Bloom's own words: "The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own . . . .The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated . . . .

"People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.

"The cause of this decay of the family's traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth . . . . In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and . . . provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise-as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine."

Bloom is not only correct about the failure of the American family to fulfill its role as the primary center of education; his analysis of the modern famine of classics as the source of education is equally important: "My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible's commandments, and their explanation in the Bible's stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the seeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material . . . . There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief . . . .

"Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished."

If Bloom is correct, and I think he is, then America cannot remain free, prosperous or moral unless the overall culture adopts a central text of the caliber of the Bible. This is not only profound, but it is actually a marching order for parents and educators. The whole problem is a result of families failing to teach, educate, train and civilize.

...

Your National Book

Now, refer to the answers you wrote at the beginning of the chapter. Look at question number two: "If you were evacuated to another planet and could only take one book, upon which to base the whole teaching of your family and establishing right and wrong for your community, what would it be?"

Your answer is a good indication of what your national book might be.

Look at the other two answers you gave. Are your companion books through life in line with your national book? What about your definitions of good and evil? Look at your life; is it in keeping with your canon?

All of this can be very powerful as you analyze where to take the education of your children, your students, yourself.

Perhaps the most important thing America can do to remain free and prosperous is to clarify a national book and live by it. From the Founding through the end of World War II, the Bible and the Declaration were our national books. Even the great revolutions which occurred after 1945, such as increased freedom for Blacks and Indians, were fueled by those two national books. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches center around them and quote them extensively. America was based on them and became what it did because of them. Take them away, and America will become something very, very different.

The place to start is with yourself: Establish a clear canon, and spend time in it every day. Become an expert on it, ponder it, put your life in line with it. Teach it to your family; then others. If you are a teacher, take it into your classroom. If your faith doesn't include the Bible, use the Declaration or something of equal magnitude. And then broaden your knowledge to the other classics which support that central classic. America is what it is due to its national books, and the choices you make now regarding books will have tremendous impact on what America is twenty and fifty years from now.

Enjoy,

Lehi

Russel Kirk wrote an excellent book called Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution that elucidates rigorously the Christian background, as to ethos and core agreement on what constitutes civil society and how that is best maintained. No, America is not a "Christian nation" in any official sense, but it, and its constitution, are deeply embedded within that cultural patrimony and rise of fall with - or without it (as do all other societies who come to a point at which the voice of the majority come to choose wickedness).

[volgadon]

Communists (Seeger and Guthrie)?

More to the point, all three singer/songwriters were highly influential in shaping the culture and music of the 60s.

[Loran Blood]

In the 1980s it changed again: students began listing various rock n' roll music tapes as the thing they revered and turned to for truth and answers. Practically every college student knew this new fountain of truth, studied it daily and for long hours, and felt passionately about it.

If you doubt it, Bloom suggested, try to tell a group of youth why their music is bad and they will respond with the same energy and even anger as if you had tried to tell a group 100 years ago that the Bible was bad.

Bullseye Lehi, and a well thrown dart at that. Outside of the Book of Mormon and our General Conference addresses, I think it could be argued that the books you've mentioned above (I haven't read Hirsch's book) are required reading for anyone wishing to think and talk seriously regarding out present age and its many discontents. Regarding the phenomena of the replacement of rock music lyrics for serious literature (both non-fiction and fiction) as a means of a taking of cultural bearings, I should mention Diana Wests The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, one of the best books I've read in the last several years, and a lucid account of the now pervasive phenomena of "prolonged adolescence" and what could only be termed the adolescentization of society. This has been a major project of both the public schools and the pop culture (especially Hollywood and the pop music industry) for a very long time.

I would be remiss if I did not also mention Bork's compelling follow-up to The Tempting of America, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, which takes closely argued aim at the same problems and concepts you've brought up here.

Edited October 7, 2011 by Loran Blood

[Loran Blood]

More to the point, all three singer/songwriters were highly influential in shaping the culture and music of the 60s.

Well, yes they did, but you had mentioned them within the context of the "national book," which Lihi had identified as the Bible.

[Loran Blood]

2. If you were evacuated to another planet and could only take one book, upon which to base the whole teaching of your family and establishing right and wrong for your community, what would it be?

Reminds me of the 1960 Version of The Time Machine, where Rod Taylor takes three books with him back into the future to help the newly liberated Eloi found a working civilization. I've never been able to ascertain just what books the screenwriter meant to suggest to the mind with this dialog. Interesting question, however.

For all too many of the present generation, I fear, the answer would be the Kama Sutra, Dude, Where's My Country, and ten years worth of back issues of Cosmopolitan.

Edited October 7, 2011 by Loran Blood