Part II: Lessons to Take To Heart

Lesson 1, We’re All In This Together

We live on Vancouver Island, off the southern coast of British Columbia, Canada. Victoria, a beautiful city and the capital of B.C., nestles on the Island’s southern tip. We’re in Nanaimo, about a fourth of the way up on the east coast of the Island (population about 100,000). (See my first post in this series for a map).

Vancouver Island is a big island with cities and towns, highways and byways. It’s not isolated. Airports and ferry terminals provide ready transport onto and off the island. By and large, Vancouver Island is like anywhere else—any other locally-defined area in North America. But not totally, not quite. Islanders feel their relative remoteness, a certain distinctness. We are terrestrial beings surrounded by water on all sides. That makes a difference. 

To the west, it’s a long way to Japan or China, even if there are (or could be, depending on your route) a few other islands dotting the vast Pacific Ocean along the way. Looking east, you can see the towering and usually snow-covered distant peaks of the Canadian mainland across the Salish Sea (previously the Georgia Strait). It takes two hours by ferry to get from here to there—two hours from Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island where we live, to Vancouver city on the mainland.

Vancouver, B.C., with an ethnically-diverse metro-area population of 2,581,000, is a major west-coast urban center on a par with Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.  As in any major city the pace of life is, one might say, “bustling,” in contrast with the slower more relaxed pace on Vancouver Island.  The occasional bumper sticker reminds visitors—and islanders: “Slow down, this ain’t the mainland.” 

Living on an island, you’d think that we might be more ready than those on sprawling and more diverse continental mainlands to take in what is perhaps the #1 big lesson of The Virus—or at least one of the big ones: “We’re All In This Together.” It just naturally feels more true. We “get it.”

But then again, maybe not. After all, that big lesson, “We’re All In This Together” is equally true here, there, everywhere. That’s what this pandemic shows us, isn’t it? The Globe, “our” Earth, is humanity’s “island” in the vast, cold emptiness of space; and we’re all on it together, in it together. 

The Virus vs. Trump

As The Virus was crossing national boundaries and leaping oceans, “speaking” (for those who could hear it) its tragic message of unity, Trump delivered the opposite message. His was a message of division and contention, you against me, us against them. 

“We’re All In This Together”

“We’re all I this together.” How often we hear and see this phrase since Covid-19 struck! There it is everywhere we turn, in social and public media, in government announcements, and in places of business across North America. It’s a timely message; but Trump and his supporters couldn’t hear it, can’t hear it even yet. 

Maybe part of the problem is that even though it is a timely message now, it’s actually one we’ve heard and lived for a long time. Long enough for those who are ideologically predisposed not to hear it to become immune, to close their ears, to refuse the idea, to not hear it no matter what.  Historically, in fact, we have “all been in it together,” literally and immediately, for a long time—long before Covid -19 struck.

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne in 1642.  The truth of that general observation has become less abstract and more immediately real in modern times. We’ve all been in it together ever since the human world became tied together in a globally interrelated economy; ever since global climate change became a concern of scientists and eventually of almost every one; ever since social and public media began to bring bring events on the other side of the globe into our living-rooms; ever since environmental destruction and species extinction on a global scale threatened ecological networks of land and sea that ultimately support us all. And maybe, truly, long before all that, as philosophers and poets like John Donne have always known. 

But those existential threats are still a little distant from our daily lives, a little abstract. They are there, they are real; but they’re not here. They loom ever larger on the horizon; but they’re not here, not yet.

Some of us may feel the hot winds of climate change. We catch the occasional worried voice on the news. We might miss the numbers of birds and amphibians we remember as children—if we’re old enough. Scientists warn about melting ice caps and plastics clogging the oceans.  But for the most part we go about our business anyway. They don’t much affect our daily lives. These issues loom ever larger on the horizon; but they’re not here, not yet.

The Virus, however, is here. It forces us to experience our interconnection with others, our mutuality, in new and shockingly immediate ways. With every breath we take in the company of others, The Virus shoves it in our face, so to speak, that we are all in it together. Truly, “No man is an island.” 

As people we know fall sick or die; as whole sectors of our economic and social life shut down, we see, we feel, that we are all, more than most of us realized, integrally part of each other, of larger wholes, of local, regional, and global social and ecological systems. A tiny particle of rudimentary life emerging in a city in China most Westerners probably had never even heard of spread through human populations around the world in a matter of months with devastating effect.  It gives a whole new slant to the phrase, “It’s a small world”!

Being “in it together” means mutual responsibility. 

All of humanity, all of us together being impacted by the Covid-19 Virus as we have been, invites a keener consciousness of personal and collective responsibility—one that’s more real and less hypothetical or abstract. Infecting each other, we affect each other.  It makes you, me, each and all of us, more immediately responsible for each other whether we like it or not.

Responsibility requires action—both individual and collective action. That’s because the decisions we take individually impact not only our inner circles of friends and loved-ones but also people we’ll never even know.  The decisions we take collectively reverberate throughout society. They condition how many people will get sick and die; how many suffer economic hardship for how long; who will be most affected; and much more. 

We hear it said in different ways. “We’re all in this together.” “We each have to do our part, wear our masks, respect physical distancing guidelines, flatten the curve.” “By standing apart we stand together.”  Mask mandates and closures of restaurants and other social venues, and restrictions on mass gatherings, enact our mutual responsibility for each other as government policy. 

As the virus surges here we watch on the news as it swells and recedes in other parts of the globe. We see bodies lined up, too many to process.  We hear obituaries for those who have died, and the tearful stories of those who have lost loved ones.  As I write this (2021-05-09), India is experiencing a terrible surge of Covid-19 with each day bringing more deaths and infections than the last.  Now, as vaccines are being rolled out unevenly across the planet, public health experts remind us that no one of us is truly safe until we all are. 

What Trump Did

In the face of all that, what did Trump, President of the United States, “Leader of the Free World,” do?  Trump delivered an opposing message—a message of division rather than unity. It’s not humankind as a whole, or even the United States as a national unity, dealing with a common threat. In Trump’s world The Virus is not so much a force of nature, a common threat, as it is a political football. It’s us vs. them all the way. If you define sanity as being connected to reality in a generally human kind of way, then there is a kind of insanity, a lack of groundedness in reality, in such a response. 

It’s us vs. them. The Democrats will take away your freedoms, Trump blared. The immigrants take your jobs and bring crime and disease onto our shores.  If you want to keep your country you’ll have to fight like hell. In a “long history of language that incites and demonizes,” writes Peter Baker in the New York Times (August, 2020), “President Trump has employed provocative and sometimes incendiary words and images to focus attention on demonstrations and away from the human and economic costs of the pandemic.” 

From the beginning Trump made The Virus into a partisan issue.  “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” Trump said on February 28, 2020.  At the same time, he seemed to call Covid-19 itself a Democrat “hoax.” (Some analysts think that Trump’s “it’s a hoax” remark may have referred not to Covid-19 but rather to Democratic criticism of himself.”  Trump’s remarks, often larded with inconsistency and ambiguity, leave a lot of room for interpretation and projection.) 

In any event, blaming the Democrats for making Covid-19 a political issue was pure projection. It was Trump who politicized The Virus.  Trump derided Biden for wearing a mask.  Trump called for “liberating” states where Democratic governors had imposed mask mandates or restricted mass gatherings. In doing so he went against the advice of infectious disease experts and other medical professionals who supported the measures. Wearing masks, imposing reasonable curbs on travel and social gatherings recommended by his own experts, all became Democratic vs. Republican arguments in Trump’s divisive rhetoric.

Even if Trump did not actually mean to call the pandemic itself a hoax, he did repeatedly pooh-pooh its threat, not just at first but throughout the course of the pandemic.  Trump knew all along that Covid-19 was deadly, and would become a major pandemic, as he later admitted in a well-publicized interview with journalist Bob Woodward.  Nevertheless he continually played down the threat, undermined expert warning and advice, and opposed and derided efforts by state and local authorities to impose the only known measures—physical distancing and masks—that could slow or stop the virus’s spread.

Did Trump’s failures of leadership—did his vacillating messages and outright lies, his seeming lack of groundedness in the real world—have real-world consequences that affected real people’s lives? Of course they did.

Consequences

The U.S., of all the countries of the world, has suffered among the most severe impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic. As of May 9, 2021, Worldometers ranks the United States first in absolute numbers of cases—a million more than India which has over a billion more people than the U.S. and is in the midst of a crisis-level surge in Covid-19 cases at this writing. 

As of 10 May 2021, Wikipedia ranks the United States first in numbers of infections and deaths with 32,707,750 confirmed cases, and 18^th in deaths per 100,000.

Similarly, maps of Covid-19 infections on Wikipedia visually show the United States as among the most severely impacted nations by any measure. 

How did the U.S., which prides itself on being among the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations of the world—if not the most advanced—end up in such dire straits? “The United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world…,” writes Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis, but “there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the United States until now: pity.”  How did Americans, of all people, in Davis’s words, find “themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world”?

I won’t lay the blame solely on Trump, whose elevation to the presidency is as much the symptom as it is the source of the problem. But that said, it’s hard to separate cause and effect here. Once he ascended to office, Trump’s words and actions amplified the issues that put him there. When the pandemic struck, Trump’s vacillating messages and outright lies, the disdain for science and expertise that pervaded his administration under his leadership, hindered America’s response. The wavering, waffling, divisive and conflict-ridden reactions of the Trump administration to the onset of the pandemic substantially account for the U.S.’s costly failure to respond to The Virus effectively.

One expert epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins concluded that “people have died” because of the Trump administration’s lack of “consistent messaging on mask-wearing.”  Another modelling study at Columbia University calculated that “at least 36,000 lives” lost to the coronavirus (As of May 21, 2020) could have been saved if the U.S. had implemented social distancing measures sooner.

The consistent messaging and the rapidity of vaccine roll-out under Biden’s leadership stand in sharp contrast to the previous administration’s actions.  Recent data underscore the relative effectiveness of the U.S. response to the pandemic under the new administration. 

Accountability

It matters what leaders do in their roles as leaders. Leaders take on responsibility, and accountability, in ways that don’t apply to people in non-leadership roles.  At the same time leaders need to be somewhat buffered from blame and accountability for actions taken in office in good faith. It’s hard to know where to draw the line. But the “in good faith” part is an important qualifier, even if it is hard to know what might be on a politician’s mind at a particular moment. Leaders act in good faith when they at least try to put the well-being of the nation ahead of narrow partisanship and self-interest.  

On the other side, individuals, of course, are ultimately responsible for their own actions. It’s each person’s own choice to follow and support one leader rather than another.  But all that said, there’s still no way around it: leaders are leaders because they have followers, they have influence; and with influence comes accountability.

Given the above figures and studies, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump, in his role as President of the United States, nominal “leader of the free world,” bears some measure of accountability for tens if not hundreds of thousands of unnecessary infections and deaths of U.S. citizens—just as he also bears accountability for uttering inflammatory statements and tweets that led to the Capital riot on January 6 as Biden’s win was being certified.

Why did Trump chart such a divisive and deadly political course with respect to Covid-19?  Most likely he hoped to score political points against Democrats, keep the economy humming along despite the pandemic, and further rally his “base.” That would be in character.  Not the most admirable or realistic motives, perhaps, but understandable—assuming that is, that he didn’t know the likely consequences.  Trump publicly disdained science and expert advice.  Maybe he really did think that the pandemic would just go away like he said it would do.  If so, you could possibly argue that Trump acted with some measure of good faith even if events proved him wrong. 

But no—Trump did know all along that the pandemic would be bad.  According to his own words Trump knew all along that the pandemic would be worse than he said it would be. That’s a truly damning admission, unmistakable evidence of bad faith.  Trump made political calculations; and based on those calculations he lied to the American people knowing his lies would cost American lives. 

Some Tough Questions

Could the United States have fared better in its response to the pandemic than it in fact did under Trump?  Yes. It didn’t need to be as bad as it was.  We could have done better.

Did Trump utter public statements and pursue policies for his own political ends that he knew would result in more U.S. infections and deaths? Given Trump’s own words regarding his response to the onset of the pandemic, it’s a fair question.  And Trump himself later answered it. Yes, he did know that things were worse than he had said. Therefore they needed a more vigorous response than he pursued. 

 And if Trump in his leadership role as President did knowingly act in ways that resulted in unnecessary infections and deaths, should he be held accountable? And if so, how?  We—all the citizens of the U.S., and of the world—won’t agree on the answers.  But these are tough questions that need to be asked. 

Trump & The Virus, An Island View. 

Part I: “We’re All In It Together

Early Spring, 2021. Like each of the other nearly 7.9 billion humans on Planet Earth, Faye and I have lived through a pandemic year like no other in our lifetimes. In our south-facing third-floor condo in Nanaimo (Population about 100,000), on the east coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, off the northwest coast of North America, we have much to be grateful for. And much to think about. 

Unlike so many others we have lost no loved ones to the Covid-19 virus. Being retired, we have no jobs to be impacted and our lives are only minimally disrupted. We both have pensions, small but adequate so far.

At this point, like much of North America, however, B.C. is experiencing new waves of infections. Why now? Partly it’s just people. We’re tired of restrictions, tired of the winter’s gloom, and now it’s Spring! To hell with it! Early flowers, trees misted with new green. It’s still chilly but even so the very air seems new, softer, welcoming.

[Below: Daffodils in Maffeo-Sutton Park, Nanaimo, British Columbia.  Early April, 2021. Photo by author.]

Released from the grip of cold, dark, damp weather, people are coming out of their hidey-holes, going places, gathering in the welcoming open air and other venues. The B.C. Provincial health authority—who deserve rave kudos for responsible leadership and clear public communications—recently reinstated mask mandates in public places and closed indoor restaurant dining.

At the same time the unimaginable kajillions of living Covid-19 virus particles swarming around the globe are creatively evolving, morphing into new more infectious versions. Even as new variants arise globally and infections surge, a massive and unprecedented combined government/industry effort and recent advances in genetic science rise to the challenge. Mass vaccines against the infection are being rolled out in record time.

Being in the elderly vulnerable population Faye and I received our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on March 18, about three weeks ago now. According to online sources we should be 80% to 85% protected (I’m not quite sure what that means, but it’s 80% reassuring anyway). 

A light flickers dimly at the end of the long tunnel. Even as new and infectious variants spread the end of the pandemic is in sight. Thank God for science! Already it leaves us all with much to think about.

Trump & The Virus. What Can We Learn?

Along with The Virus, we’ve had Trump. The other big stories as 2020 slid by and into the frame of the rear-view mirror revolved around the U.S. election and the political dramas that marked the end of the Trump presidency. The rise of The Virus in the fourth year of Trump’s term looms as an epic historical conjunction—one that seems…. What? Timely? Destined? Fitting somehow? Like it couldn’t have happened any other way? Or maybe that’s simply an illusion of inevitability. Maybe the co-incidence of Trump and The Virus is simply a consequential historical accident? Either way it leaves particularly rich ground to explore.

Here’s a few notable “lessons” to take to heart from this epic conjunction of natural forces and political theatre.

1. We’re all in it together—all 7.9 billion of us humans on our little planet.
2. Truth matters. Because our world is getting so interrelated, we increasingly have to make decisions that affect more of us, and even all of us together and our planet as a whole. To make good decisions at any level we need to know what’s happening.  We need experts and leaders who tell the truth. That leads to the next “lesson.”
3. We need good leaders. In a democracy we the people decide.  That’s the whole idea of democracy.  Therefore, it matters what our leaders, who have more direct access to information, tell us.  It matters not only what our leaders do, but also what they say. To make democracy work we need to select and elect leaders with integrity who will tell us the truth, as much as possible.
4. Integrity matters. Telling the truth is an aspect of integrity. Another important aspect of integrity is not to sacrifice means for ends. That means, for one, obviously, not lying or cheating to get what you want.  And it similarly means not putting up with bad or dishonest leaders because they promise particular policy results.  More broadly, it means acting responsibly with the well-being of others and the larger whole in mind.
5. Finally, democracy is fragile. The very freedoms and openness that make it what it is also open a democracy to abuse and misuse.  That’s why, especially in a democracy, truth matters, integrity matters, and we need good leaders. 

The conjunction of The Virus and the Trump presidency brings these, and doubtless other, core “lessons” up, front and center. Hopefully more of us will take them to heart. I’ll pick them up for a closer look in order, in subsequent posts, beginning next time with “Lesson” One: We’re All In This Together.

What is human nature?

Someone lies or steals because they can; another schemes to get ahead no matter who else gets hurt; a man beats his wife in a fit of possessive jealous rage; a nation goes to war to expand its empire. A common response to such selfish or aggressive activities is something like: Well, what can you expect; it’s just human nature. “Human nature,” it seems, or “basic human nature,” in that view of humankind is what we’re really like underneath the thin veneer of civilization and culture.

The thing is, that view of “human nature”—no matter how engrained it is in our thinking about ourselves, no matter that it underlies much of our economy and political institutions—is flat-out wrong. Where did it come from, then?

(Image by Gerd Altmann.  Downloaded from Pixabay.com 2019-06-05)

That rather jaundiced notion of who and what we most basically are—of what humankind most basically is—is part of our own particular cultural legacy. It was part of the huge cultural shift that occurred about five centuries ago in Europe and North America known as the Enlightenment.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for instance, famously wrote in his book Leviathan that without civilization humans were doomed to a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” life, or even to perish in an unlimited “war of all against all” (Bellum omnium contra omnes). Being also rational and self-interested, however, humans formed governments to protect them from themselves. Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), like Hobbes, imagined a theory of society based on a machine metaphor in which greed explains economic human behavior like gravity explained the movements of the planets.

Other major social, economic, and political philosophers of that era articulated similar dismal views; and politicians along with social and economic entrepreneurs embodied them in the actual institutions, practices, beliefs, and habits of thought that would become modern Western culture. They still live on, as many scholars have observed in our capitalist economy and democratic governments where it’s often assumed that everyone’s out for the bottom line and votes their own narrow interests. It’s easy to find examples that illustrate the ongoing force of such ideas.

When you say out loud that such negative ideas shape modern Western culture, or write it explicitly as I’m doing, there’s going to be pushback. People don’t like to think that they think that way. It’s easier when such notions remain implicit. And, of course, there are many positive ideas about humans that also are part of our cultural legacy. But all that said, it’s easy to find examples that illustrate the ongoing force of those more negative ideas about basic human nature.

As we’ve seen, phrases like, “What can you say, it’s just human nature,” float around in conversations and in peoples’ heads. Our economy operates on the principles that humans are naturally greedy, and that greed is good (or at least inevitable). Words and actions, and even institutions, embody the implicit belief that we have something at the core of our being that makes us be selfish, greedy, conniving creatures.

So it’s hard to deny that such basically cynical beliefs—which, by the way, help hold inequality in place and make the kind of avarice and self-interest behind so many exploitive and environmentally-destructive actions seem normal—are themselves one defining element of North American culture. Not the only one, but a prevalent one nonetheless. Such notions become self-fulfilling when they underpin institutions and habits of thought. Cynicism abounds. The economy looms large in every election. When acted on and institutionalized, such ideas become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Widespread ideas that underlie critical institutions and practices are part of what we now call culture. So to make more sense of our own culturally-engrained notions about human nature—both that 500 years old limited and limiting understanding of human nature that is embodied in present economic and governmental institutions, and the updated more complicated and nuanced understandings of human nature that now prevail in today’s sciences and humanities—requires some understanding of the idea, or I would say the theory, of culture itself. What is culture?

What is culture? That’s a hard one. Whole books have been written to answer that question—and even just to catalogue various answers that have been proposed. For now here’s a relatively simple and traditional approach: Our culture is our way of life, including language, customs, beliefs, habits of thought, mores and values, world view, economy, and so on, that distinguish us from other cultures around the globe.

Today we can offer another quick answer: Culture is our human nature. As human beings we are cultural beings. Culture as just defined—a symbolically ordered, language-based system—distinguishes humans from all other Earthly beings.

We simply know more now than Hobbes and Smith and other cultural forebears of a half a millennium ago knew. Enlightenment philosophers and social thinkers did not have a theory of culture. We do. They reasonably used the reductionistic and mechanistic model of physical science they had at the time to try to understand human behavior. We now have a much expanded science that includes notions of systems and complexity that better represent empirical human life. We know, for instance, that culture, not biological race, shapes our human abilities and actions. In the same way our desires, feelings, and actions are shaped by culture, not by some biologically-based universal human nature.

As understood in today’s sciences and humanities, culture is what makes us human—and thus it defines our human nature. Humans are highly social animals; culture by definition is first and foremost an attribute of human societies. Right there the idea of culture corrects the over-individualistic and reductionistic premises that still define popular notions of human nature and shape much of our public life. (I’ve written more about this gap between what we know and how we live in an earlier post titled “Catching Up To What We Know.”)

Reflexivity. Only humans judge their own looks, behavior, or thoughts. Only humans worry about how others perceive them. Only humans ever could exclaim “I hate myself,” or purposively commit suicide or self-harm. As far as we know, only humans get embarrassed, or become either healthfully or pathologically narcissistic. What is all that about?

It’s about one unique aspect of culture that especially needs mention. With language and culture humans become self-reflexive. That is, we’re able to view ourselves, to know ourselves, even to act on ourselves, from perspectives outside ourselves—as in the above instances. This seems like such a distinctive and important aspect of being human, yet in my experience it isn’t much thought about or talked about.

We’re reflexive in many other ways as well: in science (including anthropology, for instance, and sociology, psychology, and other social sciences), in poetry and novels, in meditation, sometimes in the visual arts, in music, and many others. And even, I would say, in natural sciences like astronomy and biology, that give us knowledge of our place in the broader scheme of things.

While rarely explicitly mentioned, reflexivity in human life is often assumed. An earlier anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, wrote a 1949 introduction to anthropology titled Mirror for Man, indicating that in this discipline we see and study ourselves. Australian anthropologist, V. Gordon Childe, wrote a 1936 book titled Man Makes Himself about the rise of civilization. Putting aside the gendered language of another era, that’s reflexivity.

Reflexivity is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a key aspect of human consciousness, and conscience. It makes us humans responsible for how we think and act in ways that that other species who lack language and culture can’t be. I’ve explored this aspect of being a cultural species a little more in a separate post here.

Like the broader theory of culture of which it is one aspect, reflexivity also counteracts the overly individualistic and mechanistic views of human society still prevalent in popular thought. If we can “see,” think about, and change how we think, what we value, and how we act, then no mechanistic theory of human society based on supposed universal human nature (like greed or self-interest) of individuals, can ever hold water.

That leads me to the next question, the next topic: Why Politics? I’ve written quite a bit about politics here—both from my own frankly partisan (in the sense of taking sides in a political issue) position, and sometimes from more academic perspectives. In the latter context, politics as part of culture ties into this discussion about human nature and reflexivity.

Why politics? How we think about ourselves becomes self-fulfilling prophecy when it’s embedded in our political and economic life. This is yet another dimension of reflexivity. Ideas about human nature couldn’t be more political if they tried.

The basic political and economic institutions of our society remain largely based in particular ideas of human nature that we inherited from our Enlightenment forebears. Given that those ideas have been superseded by the growth of knowledge over the last half-millennium, it’s fair to ask—to explore—what institutions based on more up-to-date culturally-based understandings of human nature might look like. A first step, perhaps, might be to more fully take in the reflexive insight inherent in cultural theory that we ourselves make the institutions that make us. We’re the responsible party here—not some fictive universal human nature, not fate, not destiny, not some pre-ordained path.

These observations themselves are political. In that light, let me tentatively put forward an observation, maybe more a hypothesis, something to think about. It is that economic and social conservatives by and large still subscribe to the individualistic and even mechanistic views of a fixed human nature we’ve inherited from the social philosophers of the Enlightenment. That’s why they’re so often anti-science, and anti-regulation, preferring to rely on the mechanisms of the market to deliver economically and on authoritarian rule to keep the peace, rather than on the designs and values of experts or politicians. Progressives, contrast, are more willing to see our human nature as more malleable, more shaped by culture and intention.

And finally, a closing question….

How do we cultural beings fit in the bigger scheme of things in which we emerged? What’s our rightful place in the cosmos, and in the rich, complex, and delicately balanced webs of life on Earth? Are we Lords of Creation, or vulnerable and ephemeral specks of conscious life on a remote planet in an inconceivably vast universe? Or are we something different—maybe both less and more? Are we, through music, art, language, science, struggling toward becoming those beings through which the universe knows itself. What is our Human Nature in Nature?

* * * *

Part I: America’s Negative Cultural Drift  

Historically Americans think of themselves as strong, optimistic, resilient people, and America as a positive, “can-do” nation. But we no longer live in such hopeful times.  America seems caught in a negative cultural drift.  What happened to hope and optimism?

The sad answer is that we ourselves made the conditions in which they no longer flourish. It didn’t just happen. We make the culture that makes us. We did it to ourselves—with a little nudge here, a shove there, from those among us who most profit from sowing fear and division.

That’s the quick question, and the quick answer. Making more sense of it all, even briefly and in summary form, however, needs some context and discussion. Doing that will make this a little longer than most of my blog posts and will continue in the subsequent four posts in this series.  

Here’s the first part of the story. It’s not such a complicated story to tell, at least in its main outline—it’s just that there are, as it were, a lot of moving parts.

Our Cultural Drift Southward

An Earlier American Era of Optimism and Hope

By M. Maggs, Canada. Downloaded from Pixabay 2018-11-11

The America I grew up in—mid-20th century America—by and large was a hopeful age.  Oh, it had its faults, its inherited failings, its irrational pursuits: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, McCarthyism, segregation. The United States pursued often cruel foreign and economic policies that imposed brutal dictatorships on other countries, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, “to fight Communism”—and just incidentally protect the profits of American corporations. Highways and sprawl ate the hearts out of local communities. One could go on at length.

But for all that, the mid-1900s remained a time of “can-do” and optimism. That optimism helped fuel the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the environmental movement. Its currents ran through and helped energize the “counter-cultural” uprising that characterized the 1960s and early ‘70’s. It found a voice in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; and a quieter, less revolutionary voice in publicly funded education systems that invested social and economic resources in the nation’s youth.

Not everyone likes those particular events and movements, of course. They were too much for many people. But whatever else you can say about them, they were alive with hope and possibility. And there were many other quieter, less turbulent, aspects of daily life that we’ve lost that expressed that same spirit in less tumultuous ways. I’ll mention some more of those in a moment.

But first, a brief word on the cultural shift or drift that we’re experiencing.  Right or Left, Up or Down, almost everyone feels that America is Not going in a good direction.  Even some of the more upbeat assessments of our situation rely on the hope, summarized in the title of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s popular book, The Upside of Down (2006)— that decline and disintegration might clear the way for something better.  That kind of hope is not the same thing as an optimistic outlook on our future.     

Cultural Drift

If most people think that America is not moving in a good direction now, what exactly does that mean?  Well, you could point to a lot of things: school shootings, increasing inequality and a dwindling and insecure middle class, the country’s deepening and polarizing political divide, ever more rancorous campaigns, drug overdoses…. But for me these things and more can be summed up as cultural drift—meaning cultural change that seems to be heading in a particular direction, apparently without guidance. (We’ll get to that “without guidance” part later, and especially in the final post in this series.)

As an anthropologist, I don’t use the term“culture” lightly.  Without delving too deeply into definitions or analyses of this complex term, I will say that we are, in our most basic natures, cultural beings. That’s what makes us distinctively human; and there is no part or aspect of being human, even our physical selves, that is not affected by, involved in, or in some way expressive of our cultures.

Also, however, it is critical to realize that as conscious beings we can, and do, shape or change the culture that shapes us.  This is a relatively new, often overlooked, yet immensely consequential insight.  It follows from recognizing ourselves as cultural beings—an idea or theory that became widely accepted only in the late twentieth century.

Knowledge is power. It also is responsibility.  Knowing ourselves as cultural beings is so consequential because it means that large—and in many ways the most important—parts of who and what we are lie in the realms of culture which is infinitely variable and substantially within our powers to shape.  And, for some among us, to manipulate.  That is, as cultural beings, we are not primarily determined by some fixed human nature, by instinct, by racial inheritance or other genetic features, by geography, or even by history.  Those things may set limits, but they are broad limits within which we have options.

That insight raises the question about guidance, and responsibility—about who or what sets the course we’re on: Are we, or is someone, directing the negative drift of American culture?  And if so, how truly conscious of what they’re doing are they?

A culture is deeper and more enduring than most of us realize. But a culture also may undergo shifts or rapid transformations that take even most of its own members by surprise or unawares.  The rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s is a textbook instance.  After emerging from it, even those who lived through the Nazi era could hardly believe what had happened to them. Wrapped up in daily life and routines, somehow we don’t remember how things were. We cede our power, and seem to remain effectively blind to changes taking place under our feet and all around us.

The Direction of American Cultural Drift Today

Over the last generation or so, American culture experienced a significant shift that reminds many people of the slow rise, over more than a decade, of Nazism in Germany—so far not to the extreme we saw in Germany, of course, but troubling nonetheless.  It shows up for us now in part as an erosion of that positive “can-do” spirit—a weakening of the general sense of optimism or possibility that I mentioned above. Optimism and hope give way to heightened levels of fear, helplessness, and anger throughout the culture.  Why, asks Madeleine Albright in her new book Fascism,  A Warning,“are we once again talking about fascism?”

As conscious beings we can shape or change the culture that shapes us. That raises the question: Are we, or is someone, directing the current drift of 21st century American culture?

Growing polarization, callousness toward the plights of those who are different, a shocking rise of scapegoating and divisiveness in our public life, all attest to the cultural shift we’re experiencing.  Our American President openly demonizes Latino immigrants and others to the cheers of angry crowds.

And finally, a surprising growing tolerance for blatant lying, deceit, corruption, and authoritarianism on the part of our leaders—especially among those who recently proclaimed themselves “the moral majority”—strikes me as an especially symptomatic and worrying sign of the negative cultural drift we’re caught in.

A healthy society needs to be anchored in truth. The seemingly purposive creation of a new “post-truth” era paves the way for all kinds of mischief.

Many of us who lived through it will be able to relate to this negative cultural drift we’re in on the feeling level. If you grew up after the shift it represents was well under way—let’s say from roughly the last quarter of the twentieth century on—however, and have experienced only the tamped-down more sullen and fearful post-shift America, the reality of the change as an event may seem more abstract.

Even so, it’s amazing how quickly people forget what they have lost.  That’s one of the reasons why events like the rise of Nazi Germany are even possible. Let’s hope we’ll be more conscious this time around.

In our case, if we look, there are plenty of tangible indicators of the direction we’re going, that anyone can relate to.  Here’s a few such indicators from my own life; you can probably think of others from your experience. Such change makes the negative cultural drift we’re caught up in real.

When I was young in the late 1940s and early ‘50s in Denver, Colorado, USA, we used to go out and play pretty much any time, any where.  I and my sisters, all under 10 years old, wandered freely through nearby parks and neighbourhoods.  We went to friends’ houses on our own and found vacant lots to play in.  We walked to school by ourselves or with classmates, often for many blocks.

Back then, all this was taken for granted. Now parents are fearful to let their children out of their sight, and drive them everywhere.  Back then, the idea that someone would go into a school and start shooting children was unthinkable. Now it happens with some regularity.

The threat of abject poverty and homelessness was more remote—it was there, but much less prevalent, and certainly much less visible. We didn’t regularly meet homeless people sleeping on sidewalks or camping in wooded fringe areas or along railroad tracks. Over-dosing and teen suicide were not widespread public health problems. These things would have seemed appalling rather than normal.

Back then in-state tuition for colleges and universities, believe it or not, was almost free. Student debt was largely optional. I was able to finish college with only a little help from my parents, and my post-graduate studies with no outside help and no debt. In part public investment in education responded to the Cold War; but it also expressed American idealism and the idea of American progress—that our children would know more, be able to do more, have better lives than their parents.

The idea that Americans would pay more for prisons than for higher education for their children would have seemed bizarre. (It still does, if you think about it). But now it’s the American reality, has been for some time; and student debt soars.

There were huge problems; but the very acts of seeing, writing about, and even demonstrating against them that characterized that mid-century era expressed the belief that we can fix them.  An overall sense of “We can make things better!” prevailed. That spirit has not totally winked out in the American psyche; but it has become dimmer, patchier, flickering, more uncertain, while the problems we face loom larger.

Too Damn Much Democracy

That mid-twentieth-century hopeful flame of positive can-do energy, burning brighter and more surely than it does now, helped energize an-all-too-brief outbreak of democracy.  Most young people didn’t graduate from college with crippling debt.  Peoples’ concerns about the environment, about the Vietnam war, about the lives of working people, mattered and shaped policy.  The issues got debated in the streets, in the courts, in the halls of Congress.  Legislation and court decisions addressed the public’s concerns—some of them—in ways that affected what happened in our communities, our environments, our jobs, our lives.  It was all too much for the oligarchs of corporate America.

Although it was before my time—and well before the era I’m writing about here, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the many amendments and court challenges that followed laid some of the foundation for the more hopeful, more humane America of the mid-twentieth-century.  Historian Ronald Wright in his A Short History of Progress (pp. 126-127) writes about a “consensus” that emerged after the Second World War “to deal with the roots of violence by creating international institutions and democratically managed forms of capitalism based on Keynesian economics and America’s New Deal.” Although far from perfect, Wright continues, it had some success. “(Remember when we spoke not of a “war on terror” but of a “war on want”?).  Too much success—too damn much democracy—it seems, for some.

Look what that success made possible. It wasn’t all demonstrations, rock-and-roll, and pot.  To name a few: The civil rights movement (1954-1968) finally gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed by other important acts that targeted discrimination in voting, housing, and education.  Mounting public pressure ended the seemingly endless and destructive Vietnam war. Advances in social and environmental sciences contributed to public awareness of growing environmental problems, and led to the passage of a raft of important environmental legislation spearheaded by the Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, enacted during Republican Richard Nixon’s first term.

For a while, in short, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, Congress passed ground-breaking laws that responded to broad-based public concerns.  Then Congress didn’t answer only or primarily to highly paid lobbyists representing the narrow interests of the very wealthy and the corporations they own (the most powerful of which are transnational and have allegiance only to their own bottom line and not to the well-being of any local community or nation, including the United States). This takes us to the really important question: What Happened?  What happened to push us over the edge of the anti-democratic, socially destructive and dangerous slippery slope we’re now on?

What Happened?

That’s a question we have to grapple with if we want to make a course correction—if we want dial things back and slow or halt the damage, and right what’s been going wrong.  We don’t have to look far for the answer.  In a word, neoliberalism happened.  I’ve written about that in recent posts here,  here,  and here, which include links to other more in-depth writings on the topic.  

The next four instalments of the “America’s Decline” series—will pick it up from here.  They focus on what happened—or more accurately, what was done—to direct us onto the dangerous course we’ve been following.

That means shining the light again on neoliberalism, adding to the earlier posts on that topic.  This time we’ll look more closely at its negative and destructive effects, and at how powerful interests got organized and “engineered” the neoliberal turn.  We’ll see how they poured financial and other resources into legislative lobbying efforts, think-tanks, public media campaigns.  In particular, they targeted educational institutions of higher learning.  It was a deliberate, conscious effort to turn the United States, and other nations as well, in the direction they wanted; and it has been frighteningly and dangerously effective.

Along the way I’ll critique the very common notion that we’re just in a swing of the pendulum, or at a low point in the normal cycle of society’s ups-and-downs. Such ideas make it seem like no one is really responsible for our current ills, and that things will get better on their own.  No, not so. There has been conscious human purpose (however self-serving and uninformed) driving us into the situation we’re in; and it will take conscious purpose-driven action to remedy it.  In the case of mechanisms like pendulums, there is no moral accountability.  In the case of human purpose-driven, socially-engineered change, there is moral accountability.