Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
Sacrifice vs. Self-Fulfillment
The crises in nursing and the priesthood are publicly acknowledged. The crisis in the military is not. Yet all of these problems are real, and each has roots in the replacement of a traditional ethic of sacrifice by a post-Sixties ethos of self-fulfillment.
What is the source of the crisis in priestly vocations? Certainly, author Michael Rose (Goodbye, Good Men) is correct to point to the influx into the priesthood of liberal dissidents (many of them gay) as a barrier to recruitment of the orthodox. Yet this dynamic is itself rooted in a more profound set of changes in American society — the erosion of a communal ethic of sacrifice, and the rise in its place of an androgynous individualism.
Time was when you could ask a Catholic where he lived, and be given the name of a parish, not a street. No one chose their parish; they were just born there. People offered substantial portions of their income to their parish church, and working-class Catholics donated hours of personal labor to build its magnificent structures. At some level, people “knew” most of the other families in their parish — even if the numbers ranged into the hundreds, or thousands. Parishioners spent much of Sunday at church (rain, snow, or shine) and in social activities centered around the church. Vast numbers of Catholics went to parochial schools, whose public events were attended by members of the parish, whether they had school-age kids or not. Catholic families were large, and kids learned to share attention, clothes, even Christmas gifts.
Nowadays, parish identification is virtually gone, as Catholics live scattered in city and suburb. In an earlier generation, a family without a car would have walked together to church on Sunday for a day of varied activities. Now suburbanites, who may have just relocated from another city, might travel a good distance by car to their church of choice to squeeze in a late day mass. Their kids (who probably number just two or three) might attend public school.
The old mode was ruled by an ethic of sacrifice, an ethic at the heart of Christianity itself. Parishioners sacrificed for their church, and family members sacrificed for one another. Yet each sacrifice was balanced by the fellowship and standing that it yielded in the larger community. Priests were teachers and community leaders, and Catholic schoolboys looked to the priests as role models. A boy's discovery of a vocation for priesthood was an honor to his entire family — a family large enough to give a son to the Church, yet still produce grandchildren.
Nowadays, the parish has lost its substance as a community, thus draining much of the meaning from the ethic of sacrifice. In a society of individuals, self-fulfillment is the watchword. It's tough to make sacrifices for neighbors you don't worship with (or even know), or to pattern your life on the model of a teacher-priest you've never met. Where is the honor in giving a son to the Church if the families of the parish aren't present to witness, benefit from, or praise the act? And can a parent be pleased knowing that their only son will present them with no grandchildren? (See Alan Ehrenhalt's, The Lost City, for a wonderful account of a traditional Catholic urban parish. For more on the roots of the crisis in the priesthood, see “Vanishing Vocations,” an excellent and illuminating 2000 Harvard Senior Thesis by Carlye Ann Murphy, from which much of the above account is drawn.)
In a world that has largely replaced the ethic of sacrifice with an ethos of self-fulfillment, “gender” is an insult. Restrictions on “lifestyle” because of sex, or sexual orientation, contradict the freedom of choice upon which an ethos of self-fulfillment is based. So the Catholic priesthood opened itself to gay men and, increasingly, to those who dissented from the sacrificially based social and sexual morality of the Church. Yet, since gender and sexual orientation are real and significant social facts (however offensive their very existence as distinctive modes of life may be to the new morality) difficulties ensued.
Feminism Destroys Nursing
The nursing shortage has roots in the very same forces that brought us a shortage of priests (as is made evident by Ronald Dworkin's extraordinary article, “Where Have All the Nurses Gone,” in the Summer 2002 issue of The Public Interest). With hospitals routinely canceling or delaying surgery for want of nurses; an aging population of nurses; and large number of nurses leaving, or contemplating leaving, the profession, the nursing shortage has turned into a full-blown crisis.
Nursing was once built around a spirit of feminine compassion and sacrifice. In the new, feminist world, that is unacceptable. Nursing has therefore attempted to transform itself into an androgynous, knowledge-based career. It hasn't worked. Men are still reluctant to become nurses (even as they enter teaching or become airline “stewards”), and no distinctive body of knowledge on which nurses can base their expertise exists. New women disdain nursing for its retrograde femininity, and women who embrace its caring ethos are burned out by bureaucratic requirements and cost-cutting measures that leave little time for the rewards of compassionate service.
In the days when most women were married and mothers, nursing was thought of as ideal part-time work. There were no pretensions to special scientific expertise, and little danger of burnout. Doctors respected nurses for the personal care that they delivered, understanding how important it was, yet also knowing that they themselves could not provide it.
Nowadays, many nurses are single mothers, forced to work extra shifts just to pull down a decent income, and with little time left for their own children. Underappreciated for the caring skills that they do possess, yet also unable to care adequately for either their own patients or their own children, these women burn out quickly, and discourage others from entering the profession.
In short, the feminist reform of nursing has failed. The attempt to purge the profession of the feminine compassion and sacrifice upon which it has traditionally been based has yielded no satisfactory alternative. And the collapse of the traditional family system (itself deeply related to the rejection of the ethic of sacrifice) has forced nurses into a trap — trying to make economic and emotional ends meet as poorly paid professionals, and as single mothers. The result is the collapse of the vocation at the very moment when a rapidly aging population stands most in need of nursing.
Suspended between Two Cultural Poles
If women once sacrificed careers for the satisfactions of family and community life, men often sacrificed their preferred career for one that would enable them to support their families. But a man's greatest sacrifice was his willingness to put his life on the line to defend his family and his country in war. The post-Sixties culture of self-fulfillment has apparently brought that ethic of sacrifice to an end. (Or has it?)
A large proportion of our manpower needs are presently being filled by reservists who, in many respects, embody the ethos of the “citizen soldier” of old. Many of these reservists are the local police and firemen who, since September 11, we are finally beginning to honor for the everyday heroism they exhibit, and upon which we all depend. Yet having acknowledged the importance of the reservists, it must be said that the “citizen soldier,” is increasingly a thing of the past.
This is Eliot Cohen's argument, in the Summer 2001 issue of Parameters. America's professional soldiers may still technically be “citizens,” says Cohen, yet increasingly, their civilian identities are weak, as is their sense of living among and representing a broad demographic swath of the country. For some, motivation is subtly shifting from a sense of patriotic obligation to career advancement (although many of our best patriots are still soldiers!) More important, although Cohen does not explore it, is the shift in attitudes of those who do not serve in the military, a substantial number of whom would be outraged if asked to do so. Along with the relative collapse of local communities of obligation, our sense of being part of a nation upon which we depend for freedom and survival — and to which we therefore owe our freedom and our lives — has also atrophied.
The ethos of androgyny plays a role here as well. As Stephanie Gutmann showed in, The Kinder, Gentler, Military, standards have been corrupted and morale degraded by “gender norming” in military training. And the pressure for gender norming comes not only from feminist ideologues, but also from the army's need to pull in women to make up for the shortfall of male recruits.
Unlike the crisis in priestly and nursing vocations, the crisis in military vocations is not widely acknowledged. That is partly because the need for military service is periodic, and so a vocational crisis in the military cannot become obvious until a wartime emergency arises. Yet the crisis is also hidden because the subject of a military draft is now taboo — a taboo rooted in the vocational crisis itself. Even before September 11, however, we were having serious recruiting troubles. Digging ourselves out of these difficulties with a slogan like “An Army of One” was a desperate attempt to turn the new ethos of self-fulfillment to a military purpose that, in the event, cannot be accomplished on individualist grounds. And who knows, the new small families, reluctant to sacrifice an only son, may play a part, not only in the problems of the priesthood, but in popular resistance to the draft as well.
Technology has a critical role in all this. In general, technology advances individualism. As Tocqueville pointed out, the gun turned nobleman and commoner into equals, while the printing press spread knowledge to all. In our own day, the automobile broke up the urban enclaves upon which the parish was based, while television and the Internet have replaced Church social clubs and other civic organizations with broader, but thinner, communities. Technology has precipitated medical specialization and slowly sapped the soul out of the doctoring and nursing alike (Consult Ronald Dworkin's numerous articles for the details). Thanks to the miracle of medical technology we live longer — but also in a more delicate state, in which we need scarce nursing all the more. Secretary Rumsfeld appears to believe that the new military technologies will obviate the need for more troops. Whether or not we face an actual crisis in the military vocation may depend upon whether Rumsfeld is right.
The point here is that the full consequences of the Sixties in our lives have yet to be realized or measured. It took three decades for changes in the priesthood to break into a full-blown crisis. The boomers have not yet grown old, and already there is a nursing shortage. They will be living a lot longer than their parents did, yet without the numerous children or stable families to care for them that previous generations took for granted. It is also anything but clear that America can shoulder its new global burden without a substantially larger military. And consider this: Even when the boomers are in their graves, we still won't know what it will have been like to raise a generation from birth under the regime of post-Sixties culture.
I do not believe that it is either possible or desirable to return entirely to the social and moral world of the Fifties. Yet I also believe that the Sixties ethos is incapable, by itself, of providing the model of a livable life. That is why the Sixties adventure, in its pure form, collapsed around 1970. The old communities of sacrifice are gone, but life without something like them is unworkable. For generations, I think, we shall be suspended between these two cultural poles, each with its characteristic dangers and benefits. But the world we are living in is still a new one. We have already capitalized on its promise of individual freedom and fulfillment (and paid a tremendous price in family instability). Yet, with simultaneous vocational crises in three professions that embody and rely upon the traditional ethic of sacrifice, we are still being tested. In a time of aging, amidst the din of war, and in the deepest recesses of our spiritual souls, we have yet to face down the worst that this new moral world can do to us.
