Civil Rights in a Moral Vacuum Thomas Sowell Few things could more poignantly demonstrate the difference between the problems facing the black community today versus the problems of yesterday than the recent attack on Rosa Parks by an intruder in her Detroit home. This heroine and symbol of the civil rights struggle against racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s was just another victim of the brutal criminality plaguing black communities during the 1990s. None of the things that worked during the civil rights struggles of a generation ago is of much use in the battle against today's crime, drugs, and family disintegration. Unfortunately, a whole generation of black leaders has risen to the top solving yesterday's problems with yesterday's methods. These methods don't work, in part because the problems are radically different. But another reason they don't work is because the moral universe of the 1950s and 1960s has been systematically undermined, often by the liberal allies of the civil rights movement. What Martin Luther King understood, and used with great effectiveness, was the fact that blacks and whites alike ultimately shared a common moral universe in this country. However much racism there might be, this moral universe not only limited how far it could go, this common set of moral values even galvanized into action whites who did not necessarily share the goals of the civil rights movement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was no believer in racial integration, but he was also not going to stand idly by while a bunch of redneck hoodlums harassed little black children trying to go to school in Little Rock. When Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus failed to protect them, Eisenhower sent in the National Guard. Similarly, millions of white Americans who may have had no great sympathy with the goals of the civil rights movement during the 1950s were nevertheless morally outraged when they saw police dogs turned loose on peaceful black demonstrators in Alabama. That sense of moral outrage helped propel civil rights legislation through Congress. Today the common moral universe is being undermined in many ways. For the hoodlum who attacked Rosa Parks in her home, there is no such moral universe. Meanwhile, in public schools across the country, children are being taught that there is no such thing as right or wrong. They are learning that lesson all too well. "Situational ethics" and other intellectual fads, together within a cheap glorification of gross violations of social norms, are steadily eroding the moral standards of the society. Moreover, the idea that these moral norms apply ultimately to everyone - regardless of race, sex, or other groupings - is being destroyed by a new surge of tribalism that says it all depends on whose ox is being gored. When someone asked House Speaker Tom Foley if it wasn't wrong to impose taxes retroactively, his reply was that this applied only to the top 2 percent. If the government were to begin passing antisemitic laws, would it be a justification to say that Jews are only 2 percent of the population? Yet that is the "logic" of the class warfare rhetoric of our time. Without a common moral universe, a multiracial and culturally diverse society like the United States can shatter into a thousand fragments. If that happens, everybody loses. Some within the black community automatically spring to the defense of any blacks on trial for crimes against whites. In other words, they deny the common moral universe on which the advancement of blacks has depended so crucially in the past. Moreover, tribalism is a dangerous tactic for any minority in a country where the biggest tribe of all is white. Already there are white hate groups capitalizing on the new tribalism to recruit followers for their own brand of tribalism. A poll not long ago showed, for the first time, that younger whites were less sympathetic toward blacks than older whites. Such is the "success" of efforts to dismantle the moral universe and deny its common application to all. The civil rights movement, including such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, have turned their backs on the common moral universe on which their own past success was founded and instead have gone in for tribalism increasingly. Recently-deposed NAACP executive director Benjamin Chavis epitomized this trend with his efforts to line up with extremists and hoodlums simply because their skin color matched his. Chavis's departure from the NAACP gives that organization another chance to decide whether it wants to stay with tribalism, especially now that they understand how much support this has cost them in the larger society. Even the New York Times recently questioned what role remains for the NAACP in meeting today's problems. "Be wise in time" is the great lesson of history. Unfortunately, history is also a record of how often that maxim has been ignored. [from the Orange County Register, September 12, 1994] Mr. Sowell is a syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.