c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _”Social Promotion”is a tactic urged by the Self-Esteem theorists who have infiltrated American school systems more effectively and to greater harm than communists ever did the country itself.

The essence of the movement is that promoting students’ self-esteem is far more important than teaching them how to read or write. School thus becomes a quasi-therapeutic rather than an educational experience. Advocating manufactured Self-Esteem is the moral equivalent of tearing the goal posts down and claiming victory before the game begins.

In fact, you never have to play the game for which there are no rules anyway. Nobody gets hurt, nobody loses, everybody wins. At term’s end students are granted a”social promotion”to save face _ both theirs and the faculty’s. Finally, in that most fatuous of all our modern pseudo-moral phrases, they may”put it behind them and move on.” Self-Esteem philosophy has drawn us all into the huge”Pretend”game that has oozed out of our schools and into our national moral and political life. The Self-Esteem scam is driving the current pathetic moral conversation about the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

You can hear it in every voice that is raised to say, in effect, let’s not punish the principal for harassing the young girl in his office. Let’s ignore his lying to everybody, including the faculty, the student assembly, the P.T.A., and the school newspaper.

Give us a P for Put it behind Us. And, oh yes, an L for Let’s Move On.

Let’s pretend that no true moral exchange took place, that”nothing”happened between the President and the Intern, that crude sexual gratification is not sex, and that lying under oath is not perjury when it concerns sex. The president, in the flimsiest excuse since”The dog ate my homework,”says sex never occurred anyway. It depends on what you mean by”any way.” This enormous fiction is now being proposed for the same reason that it is throughout our school system. If we never have to judge an action _ because no standards exist by which anything can ever be judged _ we are freed from every and any moral obligation.

Self-Esteem thus becomes the god of all cheap grace. Worshipping Self-Esteem is guilt-free and it means that you never have to say you’re sorry. Everything is fine, everything is the same, have a nice day.

How would you apply Self-Esteem Theory to a man who has disgraced the office that was placed in his trust, has misled the people he is supposed to lead, and gives no sign of ever telling us the truth?

The answer is: Exactly the way the present discussion of the president is being carried out.

The one question, never heard midst the spin din, perhaps never to be placed, also applies to our self-deceiving school systems: What is the right thing to do?

Answering that question in a straightforward way is not difficult. Shattering the moral order is not an indifferent action. No human action ever can be, for our entire moral personality is present in the small and great ways in which we relate to each other.

That space in which we are true or false with each other is, in fact, the locus, and the only locus, of our moral and spiritual lives. It is the sacred space at the center of our existence.

The measure of our unobserved intimate failures is found in the arc of distorted truth we utter afterwards. That’s the curve on which our true moral grade appears.

The moral hesitancy of our political leaders (matched by that of our clergy and other professions supposedly concerned with ethics or morals) has produced a spiritually wan harvest of inquiries, reassurances, or prayers that it, like bad weather, will pass on its own.

Listen to them and weep for their utterance so like the first seeds of an illness whose deadliness will only surface later on.

What shall we do with this fellow posing as a lovable rascal?

Pass him, maybe ask for a note from his wife, or keep him after school for a few days, or point him out at the next assembly and have him take a repentant bow? Can we all then”move on?” Failing to cut through this nonsense makes us and our oh, so silent moral leaders, accessories to the timid absolution of”social promotion”of the president. That will mock truth, justice and ourselves long into the new century.

DEA END KENNEDY