COMMUTER MASSACRE, OUR WARNING

The Long Island Railroad train massacre has temporarily shaken Americans. That it took a shower of bullets in a suburban railway car to outrage us, though, is a measure of our complacency about crime and violence in our society. For too long we have allowed the deeper problems that underlie violence and other social ills to pass without comment.

America is not in danger of becoming a Third World country; we are too rich, too proud and too strong to allow that to happen. Many people live well, decently, even honorably. There are places where virtue is taught and learned. But there is a lot less of this than there ought to be.

Murderers like Colin Ferguson are becoming more common. Earlier this year I released, through the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. It showed that since 1960, there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime. There has also been more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births, a quadrupling in divorces, a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes, more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate, and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of hlgh school students. Today 30 percent of all births and 68 percent of black births are illegitimate.

The U.S. ranks near the top in the industrialized world in its rates of abortion, divorce and unwed births. We lead the industrialized world in murder, rape and violent crime. And in elementary and secondary education, we are at or near the bottom in achievement scores.

Civilization Gone Rotten

But there are other signs of decay, ones that do not so easily lend themselves to quantitative analyses. There is a coarseness, a callousness; a cynicism, a banality and a vulgarity to our time. There are too many signs of a civilization gone rotten. And the worst of it has to do with our children: We live in a culture that at times seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young, to ensuring the loss of their innocence before their time.

A large part of the problem is that such criminals as Colin Ferguson no longer face the sure punishment they once did. Last month a violent criminal was awarded $4.3 million in New York. Why? He had mugged and almost killed a 72-year-old man, then fled the scene. A police officer shot the criminal in the back; the courts deemed that wrong and made the man millions. Public reaction? Virtual silence.

Other court cases have proved similarly disheartening. During last year's Los Angeles riots, Damian Williams and Henry Watson were filmed pulling an innocent man out of a truck, crushing his skull with a brick and doing a victory dance over his fallen body. Their lawyers then built a successful legal defense on the proposition that people cannot be held accountable for getting caught up in mob violence. When the trial was over and these men were found not guilty on most counts, the sound you heard throughout the land was relief. We are "defining deviency down," in Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's phrase. And in the process we are losing a once-reliable sense of civic and moral outrage.

Pop culture plays a role here. Through it we have seen the terrible debasement of music. It is a steep moral slide from Bach, or even Buddy Holly, to Guns n' Roses and 2 Live Crew. This month an indicted murder suspect, Snoop Doggy Dog, saw his rap album, "Doggystyle," debut at number one. On the daytime television talk shows, indecent exposure is celebrated as a virtue. In just the past few weeks, these shows dealt with cross-dressing couples; a three-way love affair; a man whose chief aim in life is to sleep with women and fool them into thinking that he is using a condom during sex; women who can't say no to cheating; prostitutes who love their jobs; a former drug dealer; and an interview with a young girl caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle.

In my view the real crisis of our time is spiritual. Specifically, our problem is what the ancients called acedin, or sloth. Acedia reveals itself as an undue concern for external affairs and worldly things. It is spiritual torpor; an absence of zeal for divine things. And it brings with it, according to the ancients, "a sadness, a sorrow of the world." The old theologians taught that acedia arises from a heart steeped in the worldly and carnal, and from a low esteem of divine things. It eventually leads to a hatred of the good altogether. And with hatred comes more rejection, ill-temper, sadness and sorrow.

When the late novelist Walker Percy was asked what concerned him most about the future of America, he answered: "Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom ... gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement ... but from within from weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed and in the end helplessness before its great problems." Only when we turn our affections and desires toward the right things -- toward enduring, noble, spiritual things -- will things get better.

Material gains will not be enough here. If we achieve full employment and greater economic growth -- if we have cities of gold and alabaster -- but our children have not learned how to walk in goodness, justice and mercy, then the American experiment, no matter how gilded, will have failed.

Even now, there is a sense of this. Amid the current prosperity and security almost 70 percent of the public are saying we are offtrack.

When millions of people stop believing in God, or when their belief is so attenuated as to be belief in name only, enormous public consequences follow. And when this is accompanied by an aversion to spiritual language by the political and intellectual class, the public consequences are even greater. Dostoyevsky reminded us in "Brothers Karamazov" that "if God does not exist, everything is permissible." We are now seeing "everything."

What can be done? First, the short answers: Do not surrender; get mad -- and get in the fight. Now, let me offer a few, somewhat longer, prescriptions.

- Our first task is to recognize that it is foolish, and futile, to rely primarily on politics to solve moral, cultural and spiritual afflictions.

- We must have public policies that again make the connection between our deepest beliefs and our legislative agenda. Do we Americans, for example, believe that man is a spiritual being with a potential for individual nobility and moral responsibility? Or do we believe that his fate is to be a soulless cog in the machine of state?

We say we desire from our childrn more civility and responsibility, but in many of our schools we steadfastly refuse to teach right and wrong. We say we want law and order in the streets, but we allow violent criminals to return to those same streets.

We say we want to stop illegitimacy, but we continue to subsidize the behavior that virtually guarantees high rates of illegitimacy. We say we want to discourage teenage sexual activity, but educators are more eager to dispense condoms than moral guidance. We say we want more families to stay together, but we make divorces easier to obtain.

We say we want to achieve a color-blind society, but we continue to count by race. We say we want to encourage virtue and honor among the young, but it has become a mark of sophistication to shun the language of morality.

- We desperately need to recover a sense of the fundamental purpose of education, which is to provide for the intellectual and moral education of the young. "If you ask what is the good of education," Plato said, "the answer is easy -- that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly." Jefferson believed that education should aim at improving one's "morals" and "faculties." Until a quartercentury or so ago, this consensus was so deep as to go virtually unchallenged. Having departed from this time-honored belief, we are now reaping the whirlwind.

- As individuals and as a society, we need to return religion to its proper place. Religion, after all, provides us with moral bearings.

Hatred of Religion

In America today, the only respectable form of bigotry is bigotry directed against religious people. This antipathy toward religion cannot be explained by the moral failures and financial excesses of a few leaders or charlatans, or by the censoriousness of some of their followers. No, the reason for hatred of religion is because it forces modern man to confront matters he would prefer to ignore.

These are matters we can no longer ignore. It would be impossible for any society to entirely guard against madmen. But the commuter murders and incidents like them touch our core. And it is to our core that we must attend.

Mr. Bennett is a former Secretary of Education and ... , a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is author of "The Book of Virtues" (Simon & Schuster).