Darwin’s theory of evolution clinched it: We humans evolved just like and along with ants and ant-eaters, butterflies and bison, and all other Earthly living beings. What, then, sets us apart? Some might say it’s that we’re intelligent; maybe others would point to tool-use and technology; many still say it’s that we have a soul.

Without precluding other answers, I would sum it up this way: What sets us humans apart is that we think. We are highly social beings who think. With thought comes choice; and with choice comes morality and ethics. All that makes us more than the sum of our physical selves which may be, at least in part, what we mean by soul. Thinking also makes it possible to review the past, plan the future, and design tools and ways of life. So, symbolic thought, language, in the context of our being highly social beings, are part of or behind all other possible answers to what sets humans apart from all other Earthly life.

This very thing that makes us distinctively human, and the most successful species on the planet, is also our greatest challenge. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Our human lives are based in thought which is both rooted in and shapes our cultures. The ideas by which we live fundamentally shape the lives we live, and often the lives of other beings we ourselves need to survive.

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We and we alone on the Planet design (whether we know it or not) how we live based on what and how we think. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it, “thinking is a social act, and one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, in the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts.”

Geertz goes on in this article with a sensitive and insightful account of anthropological fieldwork in what he calls “the new states,” and others call “the third world”; but I’m going to stay with his identification of thought as a social and moral act.

Different peoples in different cultures learn to think in different ways about themselves and their world. Not that all these thoughts are conscious, or recognized as such. There’s a lot of custom, and habit involved in the very different ways of thinking, feeling, believing, acting, and ingrained practices in the mix in every culture. But one way one way or another it all boils down to thought.

Further, that great diversity of cultures around the globe illustrates what I said above: that how we humans think—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us—shapes how we live. This, I think, is what Geertz is talking about.

But why is this self-reflective realization “chilling”? Well, as Geertz suggests it makes us personally responsible at deeper levels than perhaps we had realized for the ideas and beliefs we hold and their real-world consequences. As the truth of it sinks in, it takes such comforting notions as a distant God, or fate, or destiny, or some supposedly natural economic system, or a presumedly fixed human nature, out of our moral equation. Now we can’t pass off responsibility to such distant beings or abstract forces. We ourselves are responsible for ourselves in the here and now. Woah!

It’s up to us. If God created us with minds and souls, he/she gave us some core principles to live by in the example and words of Jesus and other great teachers and now leaves it to us to use them and challenges us to get it right. She/he doesn’t step in like an over-protective parent to fix what we break. If we ourselves simply evolved into mind and spirit—if mind and spirit and moral compass evolved into the universe with us—then with that also comes the responsibility to figure it out, and live with the intelligence and moral compass that is our evolutionary birthright. Either way it’s up to us. For all practical purposes, it seems, we’re alone with ourselves at the cutting edge of intelligent and moral life in our small corner of a big universe.

Taking responsibility—that’s what grown-ups do. So this realization that we and we alone are responsible for how we think and its real-world consequences—if we really understand it and take it in—that would mark a milestone in humans becoming responsible grown-ups in the universe and on the Planet we share and are part of along with its other living beings. But it’s complicated, no question.

Human Life is Complicated

Like other living beings on our Planet we humans act within webs of possibilities and constraints. What makes us different, special, is our ability to think about what we do—to make self-reflective conscious decisions based on what we know (or think we know); and, crucially, the values we have. This is what makes us responsible in the sense just discussed. And on top of that we can change what we know and what we value with new knowledge and greater insight.

Think about it! Take your dog, for instance—that (thinking) is what he doesn’t do. At least not in the sense we’re talking about here. When you put down her bowl of kibbles she doesn’t sit on her butt and scratch her ear and think about it. He doesn’t worry that they might make him gain weight, or that other dogs out in the world are starving, or that there might be a cockroach hiding in there. She doesn’t double-check their best-before date, read the ingredients label, think about their cost, or wonder about the environmental impacts involved in their manufacture. She eats them. Life is simple. He’s the very personification of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” When he’s finished gulping them down he wags his tail and takes a nap on the couch or asks to be let out in the yard to play, or whatever. It’s a lot, lot more complicated for us.

I’ve come to these reflections in round-about ways after reading a couple of chapters beginning with Chapter 13, “Democracy Versus the Market,” in a book that’s languished on my shelf for I don’t know how long. The book is The Future of Capitalism by the late MIT economist, Lester Thurow. I started reading with Chapter 13 because its title caught my attention when I took the book down and idly thumbed its Table of Contents before consigning it to the box for the Rotary book sale; but now after I finish I’ll go back and read the rest of the book from the beginning before it goes into the box (if it does).

How Can We Get Society Right If We Get Human Nature Wrong?

Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s clear that for an economist Thurow thinks widely and deeply about our society as a whole. It’s an old book now, published in 1998; but much of it couldn’t be more relevant—which is kind of scary in itself. Almost all the trend lines have only gotten worse faster. Anyway, what Thurow says about our present circumstances got me thinking again about human nature—and about what we as a modern Western society think about human nature. That’s what I want to share now.

I’ve been interested for a long time in how humans shape our societies and economies around core beliefs about human nature and its place in the wider natural order of things. In that light, some of Thurow’s observations about mistaken thoughts at the foundation of the capitalist economic system stand out. Since the economic system we’ve put in place dominates—by way of expanding commodification and privatization—ever more aspects of our lives, this is an important issue.

A misguided view of human nature, Thurow says, animates capitalism. This error actually contributes to capitalism’s success so far including some of the values we cherish, like individualism, being “productive,” and personal initiative; but it also contributes to today’s unprecedented economic and social turmoil and the very real hazards of climate change and other environmental problems.

But maybe we don’t have to give up on capitalism entirely. Perhaps those positive values of capitalism could be grounded in truer and more positive understandings of our human nature.

What does Thurow mean by saying that capitalism gets human nature wrong? He puts this quite clearly:

“The conservative (capitalist) view of government,” Thurow writes, “sees men in a violent state of nature submitting to central authority in exchange for security and stability. Chaos, the lack of private property rights, essentially leads to the need for government. But historically it wasn’t so. Capitalism’s conception of government is precisely backward. Groups came long before individuals. Social support and social pressure is what makes humans human”

Thurow, L. C. 1996 The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World. New York: William Morrow and Co., p. 275

As an anthropologist I have to say that we’ve known this for a very long time now. It’s nice to see others apply this knowledge in their areas of expertise. Thurow, the economist, focusses on economic dynamics and related economic and social problems; but I think he’d agree that this error, this distorted and dismal view of human nature he’s describing, is the key driver of those dynamics. Thurow elaborates further:

“No significant group of human beings has ever lived in an individualistic state of nature. No set of individual savages ever got together to decide to form a government in their own self-interest. Government or social organization has existed as long as humankind has existed. Instead of existing first and being subordinated to obtain social order, [p. 276] individuality is a direct product of [our] social order. Over time individuals have gradually gained rights vis-à-vis the community rather than giving up some of their individual rights in order to gain the benefits of community. Social values informed individual values and not the reverse. Individuality is a product of community rather than something that must be sacrificed to community” (Thurow 1998: 275-276).

Well said! Others in different fields and from different perspectives identify the same error underlying capitalism, as I mentioned in an earlier post on obsolete “Zombie Ideas.” To illustrate his point Thurow points to the Dark Ages.

“In the Dark Ages the public was squeezed out by the private. … In our societies just as in the Dark Ages, the private is gradually squeezing out the public. … Almost by definition feudalism is public power in private hands. … In the Dark Ages as now, there was no vision of how one made a better life. … Today there is a similar lack of vision. Something is going wrong, but no one knows how to fix it” (p.164-167).

But maybe we do know how to fix it. Thurow doesn’t say in so many words that the mistaken view of human nature as naturally violent, self-interested, greedy, and chaotic that he catalogues is an—maybe the major—underlying cause behind the dysfunction we see in our Western democratic capitalist countries. But based on what he does write it’s certainly fair to ask whether, finally, this error has caught up with us? A case could be made. It is, after all, a fundamental error of thought and judgment—a wrong, limited, and we can now say ignorant view of what we humans are and can be. Problems could show up in various ways in any economy or society built up around such an error. Thurow himself documents such many problems throughout his book, and at least suggests this mistaken idea of human nature as a root cause:

“What is the story that capitalism tells to the community to hold the community together when capitalism explicitly denies the need for community? Capitalism postulates only one goal—an individual interest in maximizing personal consumption. But individual greed simply isn’t a goal that can hold any society together in the long run” (p. 257).

Greed & Fear

A key part of capitalism’s mistaken view of human nature is the notion that blind greed not only defines the natural human condition but ultimately is a good. Everyone striving and competing for themselves drives Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, and, so the theory goes, in the end benefits everyone. (Everyone, that is, except the marginalized, drug-addicted, and homeless who seem to become more numerous on our streets every day, and those in the underdeveloped corners of the world economy. Capitalist ideology not only justifies extreme inequality on the one hand, and the ever more visible homeless on the streets of the world’s richest countries on the other; the visible homeless also serve a purpose. They introduce another fear factor, another motivator for other citizens to work hard and conform. Who wants to live, and die, like that?)

Based on its theory of human nature, capitalism runs on greed and fear. Like other socioeconomic systems it creates self-fulfilling prophecies whereby its members, at least in much of their public and work lives, respond to those ideas and the actions they motivate that define it as a system. We humans, swimming in our seas of ideas and knowings and beliefs, make the culture that makes us. We need a better story to tell ourselves about who we are.

A Better Story

Fundamentally, then, wrong thoughts based on inadequate knowledge add up to misunderstandings of human nature that result in problematic and even dangerous outcomes. We need a different, more accurate, and better story to tell ourselves about ourselves, about who we are. Fortunately, we already have that better story—one that’s empirically-based, authoritative and complete. It comes from anthropology, history, biology, systems theory, and other up-to-date sciences that correct the mistaken view of human nature that capitalism is based on.

So, according to modern science what is that better story? That question takes us back to the beginning of this essay. What really ultimately makes us human? We can now be sure that capitalism has it wrong. It isn’t our drive to accumulate or win or dominate—you find those drives way down on the evolutionary scale. What makes us human is our ability to think and learn and feel and value, to strive to be better, to care for others. To paraphrase Thurow, our human nature isn’t bestial, it’s cultural.

There are consequences to designing our way of life on that foundation of wrong ideas that underlie the capitalist system. That’s a harsh reality, but it is our reality. No invisible hand, no mechanistic economic or political system, no distant God, no pre-ordained destiny, will save us from ourselves. We have to design our own cultural and social and economic systems that make us who we are; and if they are to reverse the dangerous social, economic, and environmental trends we see today, they will have to be based not on false ideas of human nature motivated by greed and self-interest, but rather on what most makes us human: our intelligence and moral sensibilities.

The post Thoughts on Reading Lester Thurow’s The Future of Capitalism(1998) appeared first on JamesPBoggs.

Anthropology is the only science whose subject matter encompasses humankind as a whole. This holistic approach has distinct advantages, but also brings unique challenges. 

It has to hang somewhere on the tree of knowledge, so people typically classify anthropology as one of the social sciences. But it’s too holistic to fit neatly anywhere in our standard classification of disciplines. This strange study straddles the sciences and the humanities (As the science of humankind, how could it not?); while as science it encompasses both the biological and the social/cultural dimensions of our human being. 

But anthropology’s holistic approach is more than a curriculum designer’s nightmare. As it became a genuinely theoretical science in the mid-twentieth-century (I’ll talk more about that later), anthropology (especially cultural anthropology) did so by participating in the major paradigm shift that was and still is sweeping all the sciences into a new configuration, a new dimension of knowledge, a new world-view of humankind in nature.

The hallmark of this new view is the shift from reductionism to holism—or at least the acceptance of holism as also valid and necessary—across all the sciences, and in much philosophy of science as well.

I don’t mean to say that everyone is on board here. Some people just like the established, “hard science,” linear logic of the reductionist program that Galileo and Descartes laid out about five centuries ago. This has been so even in anthropology, where the very nature of the discipline would seem to favour holistic perspectives. In many ways the respect people give traditional science is warranted. After all, the “hard science” programme has served us well in many respects.

But there’s another, almost instinctive, source of resistance to moving into more holistic forms of knowledge, too. This shift toward focussing on interconnection and whole system dynamics disquiets our cultural life. So much of how we live today still rests on earlier more simplistic ideas of the natural world and human society and relationships between them. Introducing notions of whole system dynamics, emergence, complexity and chaos into our existing cultural universe can be dizzying, turning things inside out and upside down, revealing gaps between what we now know and how we live that cause tensions and instability in politics, business, and many other aspects of life.

But science often does that. Always has. Today’s science demands that we face up to wholeness and interconnection just as the consequences of not doing so are becoming increasingly obvious and dire. And just as in times past people slowly and with much social turmoil came to terms with heliocentrism and evolution, so today we are slowly coming to terms with our inescapable embeddedness as but one element in a dynamic, complex web of living and non-living systems. More and more workers in various fields accept this shift in perspective, further it, and apply it in diverse venues. 

The rise of systems theory as a formal discipline in the mid-twentieth-century perhaps most directly signals this shift of viewpoint. I’ll look further at this below. Meanwhile, anthropology’s original traditional focus on humankind in all its dimensions, all its levels of being—even despite resistance in some quarters of the discipline itself—gave it a unique place in the rise of systems theoretical understandings. Let’s begin there, with a quick review of anthropology’s four main sub-fields.

ANTHROPOLOGY’S FOUR FIELDS

Traditionally American anthropology has four main subfields: cultural anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. These subfields all come together in anthropology’s holistic approach. Graduate students take required courses in all the subfields, and specialize in one—at least that was the program when I was going to graduate school at the University of Oregon in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  As knowledge and specialties have expanded, it’s been a challenge to keep anthropology’s integrated four-field approach alive. 

Cultural Anthropology is the study of different cultures around the world. It includes both ethnography (when the anthropologist goes and lives in a different culture and writes about what she or he observes), and ethnology (when anthropologists study ethnographies and make generalizations or theories about different cultures). Ethnology shades off into theoretical cultural anthropology, which involves thinking and writing about anthropological theory as such; and that in turn shades into what I call philosophical anthropology. This latter interest includes, on the one hand, what basically is philosophy of science with a focus on anthropology as science; and on the other it explores what the findings and theories of anthropology mean for the humanities and for human life on Earth generally. 

Archeology is the study of past human societies and cultures by means of excavating their remains. Tools, dwellings, settlements, buildings, trash heaps, and so on, buried deep in the past, and often deep in the earth or under more recent settlements, are all grist for the archeologist’s mill. Archeologist also have been known to look at our own modern dumpsites for insights or perspectives on contemporary Western culture. 

Archeology’s main immediate focus is material culture (in contrast to non-material culture—beliefs, rituals, organizations, and so on); and accordingly it has its own set of specialized tools and concepts. But in the end it aims to reconstruct past human cultures as wholes. It looks at past human cultures, just as the ethnographer or ethnologist looks at different contemporary cultures and cultural differences around the globe. It also looks at the broad sweep of human cultural development in different regions, and compares regions. In the end, archeology views its subject matter from the perspective of cultural theory just as cultural anthropology does. 

Physical Anthropology focuses on the human animal as a physical being. It includes human anatomy, embryology, and genetics, as well as human evolution reconstructed through rare fossil remnants. 

You can see how from a holistic or systems perspective it all begins to tie together. How does humankind’s physical evolution relate to our cultural evolution, and to the evolution of language? What was the role of our distinctive upright posture? How does the advent of culture relate to human population genetics? How did obvious racial differences arise, and how does what they are from strictly biological perspectives differ from or relate to the cultural meanings different groups assign to them? What can bone and teeth fragments from the earliest cities tell us about effects of the cultural transition to city life on human health?

Linguistics. The study of language and languages. Language is a very complex human phenomenon with varied aspects. Its study therefore also, itself, gives rise to a number of subfields. On the other hand, it also is a core part of what it means to be human, so linguistics as a field of study overlaps or is part of other disciplines. You might find courses in linguistics not just in anthropology departments, but elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities. Some aspects of linguistics also relate to the natural sciences, and to new fields such as cybernetics. But for all that, linguistics remains a core piece of the anthropology curriculum, and I think it’s fair to say that most linguistics is done and taught in anthropology departments. 

Those are the main sub-fields; but then there are sub-sub-fields: political anthropology, social anthropology, economic anthropology, ecological anthropology, human evolution…. All these different sub-fields, and even particular foci within sub-fields, exert tremendous centrifugal force on anthropology; but anthropology’s particular genius as a discipline is to constantly exert centripetal counter-forces to pull them all back together.

This genius of anthropology as a holistic discipline resides in our ultimate focus not on abstractions, but rather on humankind as a real entity (or as comprised of real, whole entities), in relation to other real entities in our real natural world. This means something rather specific, which is what we’ll look at next. 

GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY & ANTHROPOLOGY

Before the mid-twentieth century the social sciences, including in large measure anthropology, still held up Newtonian physics as the ideal science—indeed, as the very definition of science—and tried to model their own understandings of human social life in terms of its linear, reductive approach. I mentioned that earlier; but there’s more. Indeed, our whole modern culture rests on that same intellectual foundation. It’s not surprising that even today the reductive approach still has many prominent adherents in the sciences; nor that challenges to it spill over into conflict in the streets over environmental and economic policy, and much else. 

“Physics is still the paragon of science, the basis of our idea of society and our image of man,” wrote Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the preeminent early systems theorists, in 1968 (p. 187).  Today Bertalanffy’s observation is widely accepted, and that insight itself, about the grip the “hard science” ideal still has on our minds and way of life, could only come with the shift to the new and alternate vision of reality that general system theory was even then building. But that’s another story for another time.

Systems theory has many practical implications. If you google it you’ll get a lot of references to “management science,” cybernetic control systems, and the like. But its real contribution in my view was and is to reframe how we think—how we think not just about this organization or that process, but about reality, about our own place in the big scheme of things.

Basically, systems theory signals a gestalt-shift in science from primarily thinking reductionistically to thinking holistically. Physical laws still hold, of course, for things like falling bodies, planetary orbits, the forces that hold atoms and molecules together, and so on. The difference is that now not everything is thought ultimately to be reducible to those laws.

Rather, reality is structured hierarchically, with phenomena at higher organizational levels governed by irreducible (i.e., emergent) laws and dynamics at that level. Thus, life, mind, emotion, art, culture, depend on physical and chemical phenomena, to be sure, but, in principle and in reality, can’t be fully explained by or reduced to physical laws. 

That advance in understanding has huge implications which still are too little appreciated; and that failure, or lag, of imagination in turn has much to do with the gap between what we know and how we live. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Real vs. Abstract Systems

For now I’ll just mention one insight from systems theory—specifically, from sociologist Marion J. Levy’s 1952 book, The Structure of Society—that helps clarify anthropology’s unique place among the sciences.  It also makes for clearer thinking in general.  Levy distinguishes between analytic (I prefer the term abstract) systems, and concrete or real systems (pp 88-100)—a distinction that many policy-makers and scientists still too often ignore, but which can head off all kinds of muddled thinking. 

An abstract system is one that could not, in principle, exist by itself. For example, take “the economy.” We talk about “the economy” as if it were a real thing in its own right (“the economy is in a downturn;” “what people really care about is the economy,”); but just try to imagine “the economy” as a real separable thing tangibly out there in the world in the same sense that you or I or a building or a family unit or a nation are real

“Economic behavior”—that is, behavior motivated primarily by economic calculation—sure. A set of social and legal rules that govern exchange, many of which are codified and written down? Absolutely. A currency that circulates according to the economic rules of the society? Yes. We abstract those behaviors, rules, and associated objects like money, and call it “the economy,” or “the economic system.” But all of that really only exists within a whole human society that also “has a political system,” a “social structure,” “a set of guiding cultural norms and beliefs,” and so on. 

In fact and in principle you can’t have an economy, an “economic system,” all by itself. “An economy” (however much economic rules and dynamics influence other aspects of life) can in principle only be one aspect or dimension of life in a concrete human society that also has a political aspect, a social dimension, cultural norms and beliefs, and so on. 

Now, contrast that with the social group, or corporation, or nation that has an economy, a politics, a social order, a culture. That organized definable group, however open its boundaries, is a concrete system.  A real or concrete system is one that in principle might exist by itself. A whole society (with all its economics, politics, and so on), a family, even a network of telephone poles and wires, are concrete systems is this sense.  Even a business firm as a concrete unit concerned largely with economic activity will still have a social structure, a political system, customs and values that might be abstracted as its “culture,” and so on. Such membership systems aren’t abstracted patterns of behavior.  They have tangible, material reality as interactive systems in the real world.

A brief physical analogy might be helpful here. Physical objects with attributes are easier to visualize than human societies. Take a red rubber ball, for instance.  The ball exists as a distinct thing in its own right—a “concrete” thing in Levy’s sense. You can hold it in your hand.  You can throw it or kick it.  You can see it rolling there on the ground or floating in the water.  It also has various attributes: it is round, solid, of a certain consistency, mass, weight, and so on.  In contrast to the ball itself, these attributes of the ball are not similarly things in their own right.  They are “abstract”properties of the real ball.  You can think “round” as an abstract idea; but you can’t have “round” by itself as a real, concrete, tangible object—it always is a characteristic or property of some thing (a ball, a ring, the Earth) that is real, and that also has other abstract properties, like a ball does. 

That distinction between abstract systems that cannot even conceivably exist as separate entities in the real world, and the concrete systems of which they are aspects, from which they are conceptually abstracted—that important distinction helps define anthropology’s unique place among the social sciences. Among all the sciences, only anthropology focuses on humankind as a whole, and takes a uniquely holistic approach in studying particular human societies or groups. This is a challenging endeavor, not least because human societies are open systems with often ill-defined and in varying degree permeable boundaries. But even with that, anthropology’s holistic perspective coupled with systems theoretical concepts provides an indispensable platform to better understanding of ourselves and our place in the Earth’s natural systems, and in the cosmos.

Appendix: More About Systems Theory: 

If you want to know more about systems theory and its broader implications for anthropology, I would begin with anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind  and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity 

For more general introductions there are physicist Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point, and The Hidden Connections,  and Ervin Laszlo’s The Systems View of Life (1996).  (Capra also has other books, too that are worth browsing). And of course there’s Wikipedia for a brief overview and links to more contemporary works. 

Two early important systems theorists are economists. Kenneth Boulding published “General Systems Theory, The Skeleton of Science,” in 1956 (you can find a good overview here.  Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978, contributed to various fields including general sys tem theory, most notably to my mind with his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial.

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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. 

The post <strong>Our Pandemic Year: Trump & The Virus II, An Island View. </strong> appeared first on JamesPBoggs.

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.

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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?

* * * *

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Stupid, crazy, or in denial: Whatever you want to call it, we have come to the point where continuing to do the same thing just doesn’t make sense. The troubles we’re getting into are getting out of hand—whether it’s global problems like climate change and rising economic inequality; or ecological problems like species extinction and growing dead zones in the oceans; or social problems like rising anger, divisiveness, and susceptibility to demagogues who promise to reclaim lost greatness. We can’t keep on keeping on, and expect things to get better. 

Yet that is precisely what is happening. It’s time to ask why?We know better; and there are good ideas and programs for doing better. But it’s not happening. There’s something or someone in the way of the changes we need to make. Something’s keeping us from being smarter, from charting a more enlightened course or responding to widely-known problems. Some force or cultural impediment weighs us down. Some people are putting the brakes on needed change. 

Actually, it’s not just one thing; human social reality is complex, shaped on different levels by different actions: long-range historical forces, environment, individual activities, and so on. But one shaping force in American society presently is pretty straightforward, obvious, visible in the daily news, and directly linked to identifiable persons and institutions. Here’s where the issue of accountability takes a new turn.

We don’t act sooner, as a society, in response to growing public problems because powerful private interests, often those causing the problems, profit from what they’re doing and don’t want to quit. They tend to believe that humans are naturally self-interested—that everyone is or should be like them, always acting in competition with others to benefit themselves. They spin complex economic theories and often high-sounding ideological rationales to bolster these views. They turn their eyes away from mountains of anthropological and biological evidence to the contrary, and remain seemingly blind to countless everyday acts of kindness, cooperation, and generosity.

Our problem, as well as our richest gift, is that which makes us human. Humans, uniquely, are cultural animals: We make the culture that makes us. People who act and relate to others as if we all were self-interested “economic man,” become that kind of being. If we shape our culture around such beliefs, they become self-fulfilling. (See the earlier post on “self-fulfilling prophecies” and their limits). 

In some ways it’s that simple; and almost everyone knows it on some level. Those who would reconstruct our whole culture on the model of self-interested “economic man” often live their own lives as such. They don’t seem to care about the rest of us, about the planet, about future generations. Their eyes remain fixed on their own bottom lines (something almost too appropriate about that metaphor!). Pursuing their narrow interests, these sometimes brilliant (in some ways), immensely wealthy leaders and those who serve them with carefully framed and crafted arguments, behave like stupid, short-sighted, immoral criminally sociopathic bullies. 

“Just as the property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive health care assistance or antismoking counsel from government, so they would rather invite global ecological and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty.”

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, p. 216 (2017, Duke University Press).

We don’t have to go far for timely examples.  For now, here’s just two: Particular persons—and the corporations they own and run—profit hugely from cigarettes and oil sales; and they spent, and spend, tons of money to sow confusion and doubt about the harms they cause. They invest fortunes to undermine and discredit good science.  Beyond succumbing to stupid ideas fueled by greed themselves, they work overtime to infect the nation as a whole with the same disease. 

They knowingly sow public discord and distrust of public institutions tasked with looking out for the public welfare. They intentionally nourish large-scale public denial of issues of which they themselves are aware. They willfully, undertake actions that result in ongoing loss of life and property—actions that cost the public billions of dollars, even as they themselves know the consequences of their actions. 

They do these things, laughing stupidly all the way to the bank.  And finally, with their gains they fund the think tanks, professors, and programs that help sell large sectors of the public on ideas like neoliberalism—which undeniably generates inequality (see the earlier post) and further drains the world’s wealth into their own pockets.  They seem to benefit, but in the end such actions make the world worse for everyone, themselves included. That’s stupid.

Here I want to pick up this problem of the purposeful production of doubt and controversy that I also touched on in an earlier post. Politics, I wrote, is naturally conflictual. That can be healthy. And our economic system, too, is all about winning.  But any game needs rules and a sense of shared play, of fair play. Outright lies and cynically creating conflict to exploit it, or doubt when there should be none, overreach the rules (more or less implicit, but critically important) of a healthy democracy.

Yet key players in American political and economic life now openly resort to those unprincipled, unbridled, cynical, and stupefying strategies of lying and sowing discord. Such strategies have become business-as-usual, especially for large segments of the political right and corporate interests that Trump currently represents. Such open disrespect for truth and for the well-being of the nation as a whole on the parts of political and business leaders, any less the current President himself, is both a major cause of, and yet another sign of, American decline under the recent reign of what historian Nancy MacLean calls “The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” (I’ll come back to her important book in a moment). 

The Conspiracy of Confusion: Manufacturing Doubt, Creating Controversy 

Not all of the confusion and doubt in today’s public life in the United States arises innocently simply from different points of view. There are forces out there who have learned how to capitalize on conflict, who nurture untruth, who thrive in disruption, who happily pick up the pieces and re-order them in their own interest—as Naomi Klein astutely documented in her important book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

George Packer, in The Atlantic, attributes the problem specifically to the kind of corrupting ideological fanaticism that has taken over the Republican Party. But it also has roots in more calculated corporate practice—as we’ll see further below. With particular reference to the extinction crisis, blogger and commentator Ken Orphan eloquently writes: “The magicians and merchants of corporate consumerism have fostered [our] pernicious disconnection from the natural world and have created a labyrinth of distractions and doubts that numb the senses to our own looming demise.”  

Political discourse in the U.S. has been made a disaster area.  Let me just briefly remind you of a couple or three more widely-known examples of special interests who find profit in division, doubt, confusion, and tragedy for the rest of us, and are all too happy to stir the pot.  

1. Trump’s Lies.

Political discourse in the U.S. didn’t just fall into the morass of divisive partisanship, “post-truth” arrogance, “fake news” and “alternative facts.” It was pushed. 

Trump fits the current sorry state of U.S. politics and political discourse to a “T.” He plays the role of bad boy—lying, cheating, groping, tweeting so openly that people have trouble taking him seriously. Yet oddly that same bad-boy image appeals to many of his one time “Moral Majority” supporters. Carlos Lozada, in the Washington Post, writes “There is a pattern and logic behind the dishonesty of Trump and his surrogates.”

When I first saw The Washington Post “Fact Checker” on Trump’s lies on Aug. 1, 2018, the Fact Checker team had found that “President Trump has made 4,229 false or misleading claims in 558 days.”  Looking again at the most recent (February 3, 2019) update, the President has now logged an astonishing 8,459 false or misleading claims in his 745 days in office.  By now it must be closing in on 10,000.

That’s lying on a monumental scale.  Susan B. Glasser concludes in the New Yorker Magazine (Aug. 3, 2018), that “The [Trump] White House assault on the truth is not an accident—it is intentional.”  

Lying’s not nice.  It’s not Christian.  It’s not smart. Why doesn’t someone—Congress, maybe—at least slap his wrist?  

But could Trump really be lying intentionally, deliberately, so openly, so much?  No business man, no President for gosh sakes, would really act that way, would they?  He’s the schoolyard bully who gets away with it, blaming the other guy, hiding behind the mayhem he creates.  Is it political tactics, a negotiating ploy, or is it really just who he is?  Maybe all the above?  Who knows?  Does he even know when he’s lying, or does he just not care so long as it works for him?  Who knows!  But what better way to sow doubt in public institutions (a long-term goal of the radical right), than to have a U.S. President, leader of the free world, who consistently and openly lies to the world.

While appearing as something of a bad clown, Trump’s rhetoric, and his actual policies, have more sinister overtones.  Here Bonhoeffer’s stupid and evil come together.  Carlos Lozada, in the Washington Post article mentioned above, recognizes that the degradation of truth “predates current management,” and cites other authors who explore “the death of truth” (to quote the title of one of the books) more deeply.  He himself points to the interweave of stupidity and selfishness that reaches the level of malice, attributing the storm of lies that blankets our political landscape to “the simple subordination of reality to political and personal ambition.” 

But the problem also has deeper and more troubling historical roots and social significance.  The Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, is often misquoted as saying, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The idea actually probably comes from Hitler: If you tell a great lie, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, people will believe it because they believe in truth and can’t imagine “that anyone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” 

Even beyond the lying, Trump’s words and policies scarily echo those of Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, says Bill Moyers, who adds his own observations to those of economist Robert Reich. While Trump’s “National Capitalism” differs in some ways from Hitler’s “National Socialism,” says economist Ken Peres, it parallels it in many others.  You can easily find other observers on line who draw similar conclusions.  That sober, perceptive commentators openly draw such comparisons—even given that some are on the other side of the fence politically from Trump—should concern us all.

2. The Tobacco Industry

I did mention this earlier, but it’s worth another word or two.  A 1969 tobacco industry document famously stated, “Our product is doubt… Doubt is our product [because] it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’… and establishing controversy.”  Never mind that many thousands of people died painful, unnecessary deaths while the industry and its lobbyists manufactured doubt about the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoke.  Other industries have since followed the tobacco industry’s playbook, as documented in the 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, among others.

Manufactured conflict and confusion, doubt and disorder, certainly do not serve the public interest at large.  But then, maybe that’s precisely the idea—for those who don’t believe in public goods; who put their own private commercial interest and will to power above the public interest; who want to spread cynicism and doubt about, and diminish, the public sector; and who want to privatize everything—“every conceivable public service, from sanitation to toll roads,” from schools to parks, says historian Nancy MacLean (2017, p. 145). We’ll look further at her recent important book below).

3. The Powell Memorandum

Finally, one relatively early, most telling and sweeping illustrations of the purpose-driven assault on truth can be found in a relatively obscure memorandum written by Lewis Powell, a prominent lawyer. Powell penned this memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971. President Nixon later appointed Powell along with Antonin Scalia to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The Powell Memorandum, as it became known, views corporations and the laissez-faire economy as identical with America. Again, we confront the simplistic, even stupid, idea that all of American society and culture is or should be simply an extension of the capitalist economy. But now there is a new or expanded element—to the extent that American society isn’t wholly consumed within the economy, Powell expresses the driving intent to remake it so that it is. 

That, of course is an extremely simplistic and reductionistic viewpoint: American society is much richer and more diverse than that. Nevertheless, from that position Powell takes a strongly polarized, victimized stance, painting the American “government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system” as being under “frontal assault” by those who want to destroy them. 

Powell calls for corporations and their wealthy owners to mobilize their resources to wield political power, and to develop strategies to roll back public-interest legislation that, as Powell sees it, hamstrings business and threatens the “free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.” The time for “appeasement” is past, Powell writes (p. 6). “the time has come…indeed it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.” Bill Moyers calls the Powell Memorandum “a call to arms for corporations.”

Here we see a persistent theme: Among the most powerful and privileged segments of American society, a radical movement that paints its leaders and participants as victims to justify what is in effect an outright attack by them on American institutions, American culture, and American democracy.

Powell identifies colleges and universities as “the single most dynamic source” of “the assault on the enterprise system.” Powell might have wondered why criticism of the “enterprise system” he defends was coming from the institutions in our society that perhaps most foster learning, freedom of inquiry and speech, creative thinking, and expansive perspectives; but apparently he didn’t. Instead, he develops a blueprint for narrowing all of those by extending business control over education (pp. 7-12). Powell’s agenda includes financial support for business-friendly scholars, and the creation of a staff of such scholars to review “social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology” (p. 9). 

Universities, of course, don’t just “assault the enterprise system.” They also provide the environment in which the growth of knowledge, deeper insights, broader visions, and critical thought best flourish. Gus Bugakis has written a cogent short essay that looks at the Powell Memorandum as a foundation stone in “Neoliberalism’s Decades-Long Attack of Public Universities.” Powell, a prominent attorney, also not surprisingly urged the mobilization of corporate political power he advocated to focus on the courts, which he called perhaps “the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” 

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In short, Powell’s memorandum and the whole radical right-wing movement it represents culminating in the Trump presidency, is at its base a program for protecting the property rights of the wealthy few against the broader interests of an informed and democratic public. It is a curriculum for corporate control of America.  One of its major taproots nourished by fear and bigotry, goes directly to the slave-based economy and culture of the South and its reaction against federal mandates for emancipation and integration. 

The ideas and emotions nurtured there in a defeated South set “individual liberty” or “economic freedom” (for privileged propertied Whites) against democratic ideals and broader public goods. Those ideas also well fit the purposes of powerful corporations and some super-wealthy billionaires who control them, and their political allies, who later picked up and energetically followed them in their fights against taxation and regulation in the public interest. 

The original Powell Memorandum in pdf format can be downloaded here. Bill Moyers has an easily accessible on-line review of the Powell Memorandum. It’s an excerpt from Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (2011).  Greenpeace also has done an analysis of Powell’s “corporate blueprint to dominate democracy,” that also includes further links to other sources. 

The Root of the Matter: Who’s Responsible? 

Powell and his memorandum are but one instance in a much larger, longer, and more comprehensive, well-thought-out campaign to permanently alter, incrementally undo even, American democracy. Where did his ideas come from to begin with?

Troubling Questions.

As an anthropologist, I wonder about the interplays between human nature and human history. Like many others, I’m curious about what dynamic persistently results in the decline and fall of civilizations—in the cycles of expansion and growth of hierarchy and inequality followed by collapse (see earlier posts in this blog, like here, and here, and here). But that’s the big picture. What about the little pictures in the big picture? What about the specifics that impinge on our short human lives now, at this moment?

Having grown up in the 1950s, and participated in the’60s, I have long wondered what and who so successfully dampened the spirit of American democracy from the later 1970s and 1980s on. What dimmed our nation’s spirit of hope and optimism. What sent the flame of America’s deeply held (however imperfectly realized) democratic ideals to guttering and flickering so perilously as they are now? What happened? Who’s responsible?

Such questions gradually have gone from general to more specific. What are the roots of the deep distrust and dislike of democracy so evident in the growing radical-right influence in American society and politics? Who concluded that democracy is the enemy of capitalism—that the free society is inherently hostile to the free market? Who masterminded policies and laws to debilitate or destroy unions? What or who perversely sows cynicism about democratic government and its core institutions and programs as a political tactic? Who promulgates doubt and denial regarding science, and works to force universities to function and think like private corporations? Who pushes the notion that only the private sector is the domain of freedom (without specifying freedom for whom)?

Who, in particular, developed stealth political agendas now in play that are consciously designed to make the free market capitalist economy rather than humane democratic ideals the core governing principle for every nook and corner of American society and culture? Who hatched, built on, and developed plans to subvert the popular will toward these aims? Who had the deep pockets and ideological commitment to make it happen?

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Fortunately, there has been some good work recently on these questions. One of the best and most comprehensive I’ve seen so far is by the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, Nancy MacLean.

MacLean’s  Democracy in Chains (2017) shows how private corporate interests in the 1960s and 1970s, resisting government regulation and taxation for public goods, began to pick up radical-right ideas nursed in the South’s slave economy and culture, and further developed as the South fought against desegregation. These profoundly anti-democratic ideas rooted in Southern slavery proved useful to later radical right-wing corporate billionaires in their fight against redistributive taxation and government regulation of their enterprises.

In particular, MacLean tells the story of a long-term collaboration between a radical right-wing southern economist, James McGill Buchanan, and the billionaires who through funds they established and private donations poured hundred of millions of dollars into forming and supporting right-wing university institutes, activist individuals, and think-tanks.

Charles Koch alone funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to Buchanan’s cause. As MacLean explains, Koch’s aim in funding Buchanan and a long list of other radical right-wing scholars and think-tanks was “to save capitalism from democracy—permanently.”

The movement that evolved with massive financial support from such funders was decades in the making. In it Buchanan’s ideas, both strategic and substantive, played a foundational role. Knowing all along that their agenda could never win majority support, its key figures, Buchanan prominently among them, developed their plans behind the scenes. They built their stealth program for shackling democracy to protect extreme private wealth from public interest regulation and taxation along the lines of a “secretive, infiltrative fifth column.”

This concept seems, MacLean says, “the best one available for capturing what is distinctive in a few key dimensions about this quest to ensure the supremacy of capital.” It finally became crystal clear to Buchanan that economic freedom for the wealthy required the permanent suppression of popular democracy: “There was no sense glossing over it anymore,” writes MacLean, summarizing Buchanan’s thinking (p. 152): “democracy was inimical to economic liberty.”  At least for men like Koch.

One of the scariest chapters of MacLean’s book for me is Chapter 10, “A Constitution With Locks and Keys.” It tells how James Buchanan worked closely with Pinochet after his 1973 coup in Chile to set up a constitution “to forever insulate the interests of the propertied class they represented from the reach of a classic democratic majority” (p. 155). The Pinochet regime also followed Buchanan’s ideas by privatizing universities, health care, and other services.

In the view of Buchanan’s friends in the Mont Pelerin society and like-minded colleagues, “Chile [under Pinochet] was a beacon,” in that it “removed major social questions…from democratic influence” (p. 162). That’s the agenda these same people have and are actively pursuing for the United States.

And, says MacLean, they already have built a huge coordinated, massively funded network of key players in government, industry, and academia to advance their cause.  The conscious, purpose-driven, large-scale coordinated nature of this effort has been a key missing piece in own understanding—and probably that of many others as well—of why and how the takedown of key institutions and ideals of American democracy has gained so much ground in recent decades. 

Following the whole history of the collaboration between Buchanan and other thinkers on the radical right and corporate billionaires, from its roots in the South’s reactive outrage at desegregation, MacLean (2017: xv) characterizes it as “the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”

Exhaustively documented with published and primary sources, yet easy reading, this is an especially important book for anyone who wants to better understand how the United States has become so divided and unequal—how it finds itself floundering on the brink oligarchy, and even raising fears of fascism. (See also here and here.)

* * * *

Through MacLean’s work and that of others, some of whom I’ve referenced above, it’s possible to see precisely who’s responsible; to trace their intellectual and ideological roots; look objectively at their stated goals and aims for the United States; and review almost step-by-step how they have pursued their agenda over the last half-century or so. And looking around where their policies have been implemented—such as Chile under Pinochet, and America’s own ever more divisive politics, unequal society, and our nation’s falling standing in the world—we can assess their results. As the old adage says, “the proof’s in the pudding.”

I don’t believe that the neoliberal program to turn America into such a one-dimensional capitalist oligarchy will be successful in the end; but it has made more headway to date than I would have thought possible, and has done great damage already, in the process. It’s important to understand how that was done.  The stakes in resisting this campaign are large, and are real. 

We make the culture that makes us. What’s at stake is the kind of world we’ll have, the kind of people we will be. 

Will we become the mean-spirited, hyper-hierarchical self-serving “economic man” of the neoliberal vision embodied in Koch’s and Buchanan’s programme, or will we respect and nurture everyone’s human potential? Will we restrict real opportunity only to the “haves,” or will we instead get back on track to build a culture with institutions that bring out the best and most humane in everyone? 

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The post American Decline, Part V: Who’s Responsible? appeared first on JamesPBoggs.

In this well-known acid-tongued quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that stupidity can be more dangerous than malice or evil. But scanning back over previous posts in this series, you might see that very smart people sometimes act in just the ways Bonhoeffer describes stupid. They close their minds; “reasons fall on deaf ears”; when challenged they get mean and attack; they engage in outright denial of known facts; they care more about winning than about the truth; and some evidently (in some respects) smart people lie shamelessly and obviously. 

The last three posts in this series on America’s Decline reviewed some of the problems that we have brought on ourselves—problems of growing inequality, worsening social and political division, and looming ecological crises.  They also emphasize that those problems don’t just happen; they are consequences of policy decisions and of the ideas underlying those decisions. Therefore, people who develop those bad ideas, who buy into them, and who act on or tolerate them—and that’s all of us in one way or another, some more and some less—are responsible for the damage done. It’s time to stop making excuses or blaming something or someone else. There is direct moral accountability involved here. 

This post will continue exploring these themes as lead-up to the final post, which looks more specifically at some individuals and institutions who most directly set us on the course leading to extreme inequality and the threat of ecological collapse. We want to see what ideas guided and motivated them. And in the end we want to know just who formulated these bad ideas, spread them, and sold us on them, and why.

Thinking is a Moral Act. 

But, you might ask, What does it matter? They’re only ideas. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has one answer, summed up in the essay “Thinking as a Moral Act” (Chapter 2, reprinted in his book Available Light). “Thought is conduct,” Geertz says, “and is to be morally judged as such.” 

“Thinking is a social act, and one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts.”

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz

How could this possibly not be so, especially for ideas that are developed as the basis for policy decisionmaking that affects people’s lives? 

Bonhoeffer counterpoises stupidity and malice. But Geertz’s observation suggests their convergence. It’s easy to get lost in all the complications, and of course we want to be fair and charitable. There is, however, also a time and place for calling a spade a spade. 

Einstein supposedly said that “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity.” But maybe it’s worse than crazy. Continuing to act on the basis of ideas that are widely known to be wrong and that produce bad results—especially when the underlying motive for doing so is greedy self-interest—is in our present circumstance both stupid and immoral. 

Different Kinds of Stupid. 

It isn’t nice to call people stupid or crazy—we all learned that on the grade-school playground, or should have done. Nor is it generally helpful to beat ourselves up by turning such disparaging terms on ourselves. But let’s put nice aside just this once, and look at ourselves in Bonhoeffer’s terms in which “stupid” is a more grown-up, complicated concept. 

If people with high IQs still act and think in ways Bonhoeffer labels “stupid,” there must be different kinds of stupidity just as there are different kinds of intelligence. Nominally smart people may give in to denial or delusion—I’d like to think not as often those with less smarts, but I’m not sure that’s the case.  We can all recall brilliant thinkers who have spent their lives defending ideas that they’ve become fixated on, refusing to see their limits or to be open to counter-arguments. What Bonhoeffer says about stupidity being dangerous perhaps especially applies when smart people are being stupid—when they make their own blinders and put them on themselves.

Such problems, as Geertz’s observations suggest, and as the rise of German Nazism illustrates, can affect not just individuals but a whole community, or even a nation.  When people are stressed, economically insecure, frightened, they are apt to act with less intelligence or care. 

Highly developed and advanced societies can act stupidly if they refuse to let go of inherited mistakes; or if they fall or are pushed under the spell of narrow thinking, ideological obsession, mistaken dogmatisms, or policy prescriptions rooted in fear, greed or prejudice with the one reinforcing the others. What might begin as honest mistakes become moral failures and a kind of stupidity when people continue to push them or cling to them after their errors are known and their harmful consequences have become obvious. 

Let’s Take the United States, For Example.

National character, just like the character of individuals, has many sides. Like any country, the United States has its failings, its ups-and-downs. Now we’ve hit a particularly rough patch in the road. It’s a good time for self-reflection, and maybe for taking on a little more humility. 

In that spirit, I’m being pretty critical in this series of posts because we’re facing hard realities that need a hard look. The shifting cross-currents of the tumultuous global economy, and the fallout from domestic economic policies that create gross inequality and squeeze the middle classes, make many people insecure; and insecurity readily turns to anger. Fear and anger become fertile ground for demagogues to exploit. They also dampen creativity, openness, and the willingness to think outside the box—all qualities we especially need now. 

Knowledge can be a potent antidote to fear and anger. Knowledge is empowering. This much should be obvious: The better people understand the combination of circumstances, consequences, historical currents, understandable errors, and bad ideas that put us on the path we’re on, the better able they are to chart more intelligent course corrections.

Then there is the question of values. In the end, people make decisions and act on the basis of the ideas and ideologies they hold, and the values they care about. Most people are basically good, and want to be good. Being aware of the moral dimensions of policy ideas and actions can only help people choose ideas and policies with better outcomes. 

And while taking hard look at the issues, it’s important to remember also that America has much to be proud of. Among other things, Americans can be extraordinarily generous, positive, and innovative. The United States, my native land, has its softer, gentler, compassionate and more sensitive sides. With a little care and tending, they will flower and prevail over the rapidly-sprouting weeds of conflict and division. 

Ideas and Politics. 

I mentioned above that countries can make mistakes, be led astray, just like individuals. Sometimes their best ideas become their worst errors when they get misused or mis-applied, or out-live their time. Let’s look a little more closely at some of the foundational ideas of U.S. politics, and where they come from. 

The United States is arguably the world’s most advanced scientific nation—or at least remains high on the growing list. A long time ago our nation’s founders inherited some mistaken ideas—the best ideas at the time, perhaps, but mistakes nonetheless, as later scientific advances and social consequences revealed. 

Most nations evolve into being. The United States was different. It was born in revolution and more or less consciously designed as a constitutional democracy. That’s a bit of a simplification, I know; but it remains true that a lot of conscious thought went into the United States Constitution and institutions of government.  What ideas did the authors of U.S. civil, political, and economic life have to draw on? Well, for one, at that time Newtonian physics had much prestige as the cutting edge of science. 

Our nation’s forefathers borrowed ideas from Newtonian physics—even more, they worked within the world-view it embodied—as they set up the mechanics of government and economy for the new Union they conceived. They strove for a balance of powers in government, and for an economy that would work as an autonomous system.  They also drew on vastly simplified notions of evolution driven by a crude “survival-of-the-fittest” model. The (limited) scientific understandings of their day became woven into the fabric of the everyday life of the new democracy. 

In many ways it worked well. In others, not so much. Subsequent science has greatly complicated or even outright refuted some the premises the Framers worked with.  New more sophisticated understandings of complex systems and how they work is now available. In light of those advances, we can see where some of the mistakes lie, and how they’re causing trouble today. The chickens are coming home to roost. 

What mistaken ideas? Well, l et’s look a couple. For one, take a look at the one-time supposedly scientific, crudely Darwinian notion that other (that is, non-White) races are biologically inferior. It’s mostly forgotten now, but a lot of effort went into trying to prove that theory; and, we aren’t entirely over it yet. 

For another, consider human nature as defined in today’s still-dominant mainstream economic theory. This theory portrays human beings in all our complexity as the vastly simplified Economic Man. We have made significant progress on redressing some of the harms of the first; virtually none at all on the second. Let’s take a closer look at these two bad ideas. 

Two Bad Ideas

Scientific Racism. When American ideals of freedom and equality conflicted with the economic benefits of slavery, “the answer was simple,” observes one historian: define those with dark skin as inferior, limiting the definitions of “the people” and “all men” to refer only to Whites.  In this way the Framers contrived a constitution that “guaranteed white men the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution while preserving a thriving economy based on racial oppression.” Many disagreed with this solution on moral grounds, of course; but without a definitive counter-argument it was still possible to justify a slave-based economy with theories of race-based biological inferiority.

Later scientific advances—in particular, the discovery of culture bolstered by parallel progress in genetics and archaeology—provide an alternative explanation for human differences. Thus science moves on, shunting scientific racism into the historical dustbin of failed theories. Progress, to be sure; but the job isn’t done. 

When such ideas become entrenched, as racism did in the institution of slavery, they are devilishly hard to root out. People’s livelihoods, way of life, and even cultural identity can be at stake. In that case, it took a bloody civil war. But war never really settles issues of ideas and ideology. Neither does science, for that matter. At least not right away, and for some never. Some people will always believe what they want to believe, science be damned. 

Despite the Civil War and later scientific advances, people still fight today over those conflicting ideas and principles from our early national history revolving around race. On a drive through portions of the rural South a few years ago, we saw Confederate flags proudly flying on high flagpoles people had put up in their yards. These families are still fighting the Civil War. The fights over race in the U.S. today are vicious still, but largely more covert. Coded messages rather than bullets and bayonets serve as weapons; and the fights, thankfully, now range over the battlegrounds of politics and culture rather than bloodied fields—as I’ll discuss further in a moment. 

Economic Man. Another severely mistaken scientific idea from the same era, and first cousin to scientific racism, is the notion that all people are individuals first and foremost, governed when all’s said and done by the same basic human nature. 

Like racism, this idea of humankind as made up of individuals driven by universal innate traits reductively ties human behaviour directly to a biologically-defined nature. “At the heart of twentieth-century economics.” writes economist Kate Raworth (p. 27), “stands the portrait of rational economic man: he has told us that we are self-interested, isolated, calculating, fixed in taste and dominant over nature—and his portrait has shaped who we have become” 

Unlike racism, this notion lumps everyone together instead of dividing them into unequal categories. Based on analogies inspired by the universal laws of early physics, it became the model for today’s mainstream economic theory. As Raworth puts it, with a touch of humour (p. 111), Newton’s physics revolutionized science, and its prestige later “gave rise to “physics envy, misplaced metaphors, and painfully narrow thinking in economics.” This mistaken way of thinking about human nature and the economy became, and remains, even more entrenched at even deeper levels of our culture than racism. 

Economics defined in those terms—that economic outlook—shaped the emerging weave of our cultural lives. Over time it came to dominate almost every sphere from the family to education to health care, and more. Again unlike racism, it doesn’t have a widely-known name or label. Many scholars call it “classical liberalism,” but that’s confusing to the rest of us on a number of counts. It has been revived as “neoliberalism.” That term also is not widely understood—as I discussed in an earlier post. Let’s just follow Raworth for now, and call it the belief in economic man.

But science is progressive. That’s its nature. Science moves on, even as these early mistaken ideas become entrenched in the fabric of Western culture and economy. Later science definitively refutes the Myth of Economic Man that still lies at the foundation of economic theory. It belongs with racism in the trashcan of socially pernicious failed theories. Here I’ll quote Raworth again:

“Human nature,” she writes (pp. 22-23), “is far richer than this, as early sketches of our new self-portrait reveal: we are social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world. What’s more, it is indeed possible to nurture human nature in ways that give us a far greater chance of…” living rich, full, sustainable lives. 

Kate Raworth (2017, p.27)

Given the ongoing influence of economic man in our lives and institutions, it’s important to realize just how solidly science has knocked him out of the ring. But he keeps sneaking back in anyway—a zombie idea, a vampire of the mind. 

That’s a puzzle in itself. Why? Why won’t these negative ideas of human nature as naturally individualistic, greedy, calculating, and competitive just die the final death they deserve? 

Self-Fulfilling Ideas: Mythology Becomes Reality

The answer, like so much else in human life, is complicated. The gist of it is thatideas,when people believethem and act on the basis of these beliefs, can become self-fulfilling. We literally turn ourselves into the beings we believe that we are—whether or not these ideas are right to begin with or not. 

If we structure our lives and institutions around an economy based on the principles embodied in the figure of economic man, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves forced by those institutions to live according to the dictates of that image—that economy. We become economic man: individualistic, competitive, accumulative, self-interested and largely indifferent to others’ suffering caused by the gross inequities that our economy inevitably produces. The stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live. 

But, you might ask, if that is so, then how can we say that the theory is wrong? Didn’t I just say that we become what the theory says we are? It’s a bit of a paradox, a tautology—but that’s the nature of culture. If we believe it and act on it, the theory makes itself right to some degree. Well, you might persist: How then canit be wrong? 

The answer is that it’s wrong because economic man is not who we really are, and squeezing ourselves into that image harms and limits us. The theory posits that economic man is who we naturally are. There is no point, then, in trying to change, because it’s just human nature.  It is a whole other ball game if who we are is not defined by a fixed human nature, but rather by cultures that we ourselves create. This new understanding makes us responsible for who we are in ways that older theories of a given, fixed human nature do not. The advance of knowledge brings moral accountability more front-and-center. 

That’s the first part of the story. The second part is that once the system built around economic man is in place, those who benefit from it are those who most completely buy into its premises and live it. They become deeply invested in it. They wantto preserve it as it is—not just to protect their outsized wealth and incomes, but also their very selves. 

This is a more complicated picture that I’m painting here. But we are complicated beings; and with recent advances in social and cultural theory we now have more complicated understandings of who and what we are. 

Who are we, really, then? The very taproot of our human nature is sociability. Sociability rather than self-interested individualism isn’t just an outcome of civilization having tamed our original brute nature, as some people might still assume. As anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari explains in his bestselling book Sapiens (2016), ever since our earliest ancestors diverged from the Great Apes, walked upright, and developed larger brains, human biology and evolution “favoured those [early humans] capable of forming strong social ties” (p. 10). Sociability not only defines us as genus Homo, but also our genius.  We are the most social of animals. (Sociability, in fact, was integral to the very earliest evolution of life—but that’s another story for a different time.)

“Sorry, beg your pardon,” says Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago, and another one of my favorite anthropologists, “Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.” “Perverse and mistaken” are the operative words here. 

The problem isn’t just that Economic Man is a myth. Myth is the foundation for human society. “Any large-scale human cooperation,” Harari goes on to say (p.27), “whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.” The real problem with Economic Manis that he’s a dangerous myth, a painfully limiting myth.

Before moving on, I want to say a further word regarding Harari’s observation that human culture and society are rooted in myth. I find that characterization both right and wrong, both illuminating and misleading. It is true that human society is built on stories—that the stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live. But some stories are true, or at least more true than others. Calling allstories “myths” fails to make this distinction; it implies they all are equally ungrounded in reality. 

Let’s go back to Economic Man—who clearly is an entirely mythical being. Until, that is, he becomes incarnated in a society built on the notions he represents. But as far as representing basic human nature is concerned, Economic Man, as we saw above, is an entirely fictional character. 

One historian calls ideas like liberal individualism or Economic Man, “technical fables.” Another anthropologist refers to this idea as “a kind of normative charter” for liberal political, social, and economic life.  These are different ways of saying that we shouldn’t take those representations of human nature literally any more. We once believed them to be literally true; now we know better.  But at the same time, they continue to shore up our way of life. 

So, think about what these and many other social scientists and philosophers are saying: We know that such notions are false, they say; but we hang on to them anyway because they give order to our lives. That might make sense if we didn’t know any better—and, if the order they provide is working for us, is the best we can do. .

But what does recognizing the mythical basis of such ideas mean for us? Do we really want how we live to be propped up by zombie ideas when better fully alive ideas are available? More and more people are asking that very question in one way or another. For an excellent, clearly laid out overview of better ideas and how to act on them, see Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, that I mentioned above. 

So, Just Who Is Responsible

It’s not easy to change. That’s true for individuals; and its doubly or triply true for a powerful and in many ways successful nation like the United States. On the other hand, however, the need for some basic changes in how we live and govern ourselves is evident; and more and more people see this, feel it, and desperately or angrily want positive change—for some, any change, it seems. What’s in our way, then? Who is responsible? 

In a way, of course, we’re all responsible. But that isn’t much of an answer. It’s true—almost by definition. Also, if everyone is responsible, then no one is. We need to get more specific. 

The final post in this series tackles that question more directly, asking who, in particular, is in our way. Who most actively and effectively works agains the kinds of changes we so critically need to make?

The post America’s Decline, Part IV: Ideas & Politics appeared first on JamesPBoggs.

The last couple of posts looked at some indicators and aspects of Americans’ crumbling quality of life. But it’s one thing to see a problem, and another to do something about it. No one wants to point fingers; but the reality is that social conditions don’t just happen, they’re made. Especially in the modern world. They follow from policy decisions. Someone makes those decisions and promotes the ideas they’re based on.

This brief series on “America’s Decline” continues with with some further reflections on the predicaments we’re putting ourselves in; and how knowing more about these predicaments makes us responsible to act (this post, Part III, Blame Responsibility, & Cognitive Dissonance). It’s followed by Part IV: Ideas & Politics, which takes up the questions of bad ideas that have been guiding U.S. policy-making and the moral accountability associated with them.  Finally, the series concludes with Part V, Who’s Responsible?

“Knowledge is Power?”: Knowledge & Responsibility.  

Let’s start with some general reflections about knowledge and responsibility. Saying that someone is responsible for a problem can sound an awful lot like blaming that someone for the problem. Sometimes that’s even appropriate. But blame (rightly) carries heavy negative connotations; the idea of responsibility is more nuanced and complicated, and goes well beyond that of blame. Let’s first briefly consider the connection between knowledge and responsibility.  Succeeding posts go further into these questions. 

The more we know and understand about ourselves and our world, the more conscious control we have. Gaining control of things, after all, is one of the main reasons to attain knowledge and understanding. And it follows that the more control we have over something, the more responsible we are for it. But in the real complex world it’s not always so simple.

We are on the cusp of new possibilities, and new responsibilities.

Sometimes it seems that the more we know about and control things, the less control we actually have over our own lives. Advances in technology make more things possible; but they also make everyday life, and society itself, more complicated. The more ably we control nature, the more complicated and out-of-control things get at the social level.  That may seem counter-intuitive; but if you look at it, that’s been the real story of humankind at least since the invention of agriculture and the beginnings of civilization.  As some things get better, others get worse. That “X” formed by those opposing trend-lines is The Human Equation Now.

But we’re on the cusp of a new dynamic in that regard. As people become more knowledgeable and self-reflective about themselves and their place in the larger schemes of nature, they’re more able to bring even such culture/nature interactions more under conscious consideration and control.  We become, in principle, less subject to blind historical forces, and better able to control—to be more responsible for—our own cultural lives.  Approaching this level of understanding, control, and responsibility is a very recent development in human history. 

But, you might ask, isn’t such control really just an illusion? We still can’t control so many forces of nature. And, try as we might, we can’t control what other people—or sometimes even ourselves—do, any less what states and nations do. And didn’t I myself just now say that the more we control nature, the less we seem to be able to control ourselves controlling nature?

That’s all true.  We’ll never control everything, and humility is in order here; but it’s silly to think that the spheres of human control over nature and ourselves have not grown. The whole idea of democracy itself, for example, is to give the people themselves greater control over their own lives. And, as a whole we have been and are becoming ever more knowledgeable and conscious about our situation. That’s what I mean: there’s a lot we didn’t know during the time that we’ve been so carelessly changing the ecology and climate of our living planet Earth. But we’ve been learning a lot, too. We’re on the cusp, just possibly, of having the ability to become truly responsible citizens of planet Earth.

Sure, no matter what, even an “advanced society” such as our own has to deal with outside forces: natural disasters, plagues, war, the vicissitudes of its history. That’s precisely the point: It deals with them. Policy decisions shape and condition how it does so—whether resources are distributed equitably, the quality of its justice, whether every citizen has access to the basic necessities needed for a full and productive life, whether it uses its natural environment wisely with the common good and future generations in mind. All such matters follow from decisions that people make. (Indeed, policy decisions affect even the likelihood and social impacts of wars, depressions, and natural disasters.) 

A modern, powerful, wealthy nation like the United States has the cumulative knowledge of ages along with recent scientific insights available to almost every citizen with the touch of a finger or the click of a mouse. Such a nation, especially, surely in many ways holds its destiny in its own hands.

There is no question that with all that we know now, we do in fact control our environment, and our lives, far more consciously and extensively than, say, our hunter-gatherer or even Neolithic ancestors did. Perhaps it’s time to own up to the responsibility and accountability that should go with such power.

So, back to our original question: When things go haywire, who’s responsible? We all are—but in different ways and degrees. We’ll need to break that down. Some of us are a lot more responsible—perhaps by acting irresponsibly—than others for what’s going wrong. 

But first, what’s to worry about? Are things really going haywire? Are things really so bad? Aren’t things better than ever for more and more of us? Lots of smart people think so, and they’re not wrong. Yet others find plenty to worry about. All that’s the “X”, the Human Equation Now that I mentioned above and in the earlier post.

Without denying the many ways that things are improving, it would be irresponsible to ignore the very real and growing problems we face. That’s the surest road to giving them the edge in defining our future. One group of steeply down-trending problems that has risen up to become a dominant feature of today’s America relates to general quality of life. 

Declining American Quality of Life

Americans are not so happy now as they were a few generations back. Wide swaths of American citizens are beyond uncomfortable—they’re angry, struggling, and don’t know why. Hope, optimism, confidence and a general sense of well-being are all on the skids. The troubles show up in part in the divisiveness and anger that characterize American politics today, as epitomized in the Trump administration. 

Runaway inequality and the consequent decline of the middle class stands out as both a symptom and cause of America’s collective distress. 

Other indicators also reflect America’s inequitable distribution of the good things of life. In a U.S. News and World Report quality of life survey (accessed 2019-01-05) the United States ranks 17^th, behind Austria, Luxembourg, Japan, Ireland, and France. The usual suspects, Canada and the Nordic countries were first. In a 2000 World Health Organization (WHO) ranking of health care systems, the U.S. came in at number one for health care expenditures, but ranked only 37^th for “overall health system performance,” behind Chile, Morocco (29), Saudi Arabia (26), Malta (5) Costa Rica (36), to name few.  Another report concludes that “Based on a broad range of indicators, the U.S. health system is an outlier, spending far more but falling short of the performance achieved by other high-income countries.” 

I could go on citing statistics galore, but the point is clear: America’s overall wealth does not translate into health—and it does not mean corresponding well-being or quality of life for the majority of its citizens. The question is: Why this failure? 

The consequences are quite real in human terms, even lethal, as we saw last time. They include families falling into “the tailspin of debt, overwork, underemployment, and precarious financial states,” as well as climbing death rates for middle-class men, while death rates continue falling in other advanced countries. 

The last post also zeroed in on neoliberalism as the social and economic doctrine behind the policies that tip us into spiralling inequality. But how did we end up with this foolish and untimely doctrine with all of its seriously negative consequences?  It couldn’t have come out of nowhere. Who came up with the ideas that define it? Most importantly, who sold them to us? And why did so many otherwise smart people—politicians, economists, citizens at large—buy into it?  Who’s Responsible?  Who’s to blame? The answer is knowable, and we’ll get there. Bear with me. 

Taking Responsibility or Making Excuses

“It wasn’t my fault. She made me mad. She made me hit her.” When our children pull out that old “blame someone else for my actions or feelings” game, we tell them: “Grow up! Take responsibility. Own up to what you just did. You’re responsible for what you do, and for its consequences. You didn’t have to hit her. If you hurt your friend’s feelings, tell her you’re sorry.” You’re accountable: You spilled the milk, so quit blubbering and wipe it up! 

It’s a great lesson to learn. Maybe the single most crippling idea human beings ever invented is some variation on the theme of “He, she, or it, made me do it.” In most families even five-year-olds don’t get away with it. When otherwise sane adults blame what they do on circumstances—mean parents, deprived childhood, poverty—we still hold them accountable for their actions. 

Yet every time we teach or preach that lesson, we put ourselves in the way of that awkward hypocrisy that’s as old as the blame game itself: “Do as I say and not as I do.” We want our children to be responsible; but collectively we (sane grownups, we’d like to think) continue to blame someone or something else for what we do—for the kinds of people we are, for the lives we live, the immoral economic systems we make and subject ourselves and others to, the inequitable social orders we tolerate, the dysfunctional cultures we create. It’s fate, human nature, or history. What can you do? 

Excuses aside, who is responsible?  Ultimately, all of us. But there are those among us who are more responsible, more accountable for leading us down this garden path. That said, however,we’re a democracy, after all; we’reallsupposed to be responsible for—or have some say in—who leads us, aren’t we? 

Let’s return for a moment to the questions of blame and accountability. What’s the difference between blaming someone and holding them accountable? It can be a fine line but I would put it this way. Blame is basically narcissistic. It’s an ego defence. It’s all about my misfortune, and it shifts the responsibility, the blame, to someone else. 

In contrast, when you hold someone or yourself accountable, the focus isn’t on me and my misfortune; it is rather about broader and even universal moral principles. It points to a moral lapse, or perhaps a misjudgment that results in harm. We don’t hold someone accountable to exonerate ourselves, but rather to uphold the truth or to serve justice. That’s the difference.

“We can’t help it,” we tell ourselves. We blame something or someone else. Human Nature made me (us) do it. Or, Destiny, Fate, The Economy (viewed as something like a force of nature), Evolution, God, The Devil, Lazy People, Society, Bad People, History. We blame others for our bad treatment of them. Rather than hold ourselves accountable, we spin endless excuses for creating and tolerating human misery, for mistreating and driving to extinction our fellow living beings, for plundering the planet and robbing future generations—our own children and grandchildren—of what should be their birthright. 

We start making excuses as children, and instead of outgrowing the habit we ignore our parents’ words and follow their examples. We just get better and more sophisticated at making up excuses for the ever more complex and consequential problems that we,supposedly adults, make for ourselves. 

That’s the first problem: We keep on blaming and making excuses for our own or others’ bad behavior or stupid decisions. 

Cognitive Dissonance & the Art of Ignorance

If making excuses is only the first problem, then there must be others. “Cognitive dissonance” is one. It’s a psychological term referring to the uncomfortable state of holding beliefs that contradict each other, or encountering new facts that contradict established beliefs. Americans more and more experience cognitive dissonance in practically every area of life. That’s the second problem.  Ignorance is a third problem, and they’re all interrelated. 

The “theory” (if you want to call it that) of cognitive dissonance says that when people confront “facts that contradict personal beliefs, ideals, and values, [they] will find a way to resolve the contradiction in order to reduce their discomfort.” Making excuses remains a primary and time-honoured way of making (the symptoms of) cognitive dissonance go away. People also often use or even cultivate ignorance (aka “denial” when it’s ignorance on purpose) to fend off or “cure” cognitive dissonance. This whole tangled knot of excuse-making, ignorance, and denial as a bandaid for cognitive dissonance is unhealthy—pathological even, when it dominates public policy-making. 

Of course, ignorance can be real, too. Often, we don’t know that we’re ignorant until we learn what we didn’t know. For instance, way back in the day most Americans really didn’t know that cigarettes cause cancer—which not only brought suffering and often death to the victims, and grief to their loved ones, but also higher taxes and insurance costs for everyone. We genuinely lacked the knowledge and foresight to anticipate how taking over habitats, gobbling up resources, and carelessly polluting sensitive ecosystems might precipitate mass extinctions. In 20/20 hindsight maybe we should have known, but we didn’t. 

We didn’t see, to start with, that our extravagant use of fossil fuels changes the Earth’s climate in adverse ways, resulting in great loss of life, property and public expense. We couldn’t have predicted (Well, maybe we could have, but we didn’t) that allowing ourselves the convenience of throw-away plastics would eventually clog the oceans—and (plastic being rather indigestible) the guts of sea birds and animals, causing illness and countless painful deaths. 

We didn’t know those and many other uncomfortable things; but now we do know them. And in many cases we’ve known them for a long time. Science alerted us to the threat of global climate change decades before it began to be felt or individuals and governments responded—and even now our response is pathetically inadequate to the problem. Environmentalism runs deep in American history; and scientifically informed environmental concerns go back at least to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Science revealed—and tobacco companies knew—the deadly consequences of cigarettes decades before governments took action and suffering plaintiffs sued big tobacco. 

As I said at the beginning, the more we know about and understand ourselves and our world, the more we hold our destiny in our own hands—the more effectively we can act in our own interest.  Andthe more responsible we become for failure to do so. 

Cognitive Dissonance in What We Know & How We Live

Take species extinction as one other example. Back in 1996, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin published a book on human-caused mass extinction of species, based on already-existing knowledge.  Newspapers report it.  Bloggers eloquently write about it.  Recently Elizabeth Kolbert published another acclaimed book on the ongoing disaster. We’ve known for a long time that species are dying off at an unprecedented rate and that we’re causing it. But I can’t think of one major policy initiative to address the problem—or even to acknowledge it.

Such discrepancies between what we know and how we live are painful. Cognitive dissonanceclogs the American soul. 

We instill the values of truth, honesty, and responsibility in our children. Yet we currently tolerate the most blatantly self-serving dishonesty, lying, and irresponsible actions in our public life. Our current supreme leader, the President of the United States, is an almost daily embarrassment on these counts. This is yet another ringing (or is it cringing?) example of the cognitive dissonance that infects modern American culture. 

But the cognitive dissonance I’m pointing to, in today’s circumstance, is more than psychologically uncomfortable; its deadly. Paralysis in the face of looming catastrophe, making excuses, denial, hiding our heads in the sand rather than responding with creative and effective action, show an underdeveloped morality, a pathological collective neurosis, in modern Western capitalist culture. 

The Advance of Knowledge Generates [Creative] Cognitive Dissonance 

Cognitive dissonance can be creative, too. It spurs scientists to figure things out. When their empirical findings don’t mesh with established theory,scientists’ minds open to creating new paradigms, to seeing things from entirely new perspectives. 

Our own science has taught us that we evolved within and remain one with the rest of creation. Learning that lesson has been a hugely important achievement—especially for a culture that for thousands of years believed it had a divine mandate to rule over the Earth, the sky, the seas: 

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

Indeed, one could say we have fulfilled that mandate with a vengeance—perhaps even a little too enthusiastically. With climate change, over-population, the threats of ecological collapse and other looming problems, we may already have exceeded the limits of human dominion over the Earth. 

On the positive side—in part through the resources that the exploitive drives nurtured in Western capitalist culture have given us—we’re beginning to understand those absolute limits that we can’t stumble across without dire consequences. Humankind has well outgrown the simple-minded hubris that let us imagine that we’re outside and above the rest of Creation.  Youdoubtless have heard about the Zen monk who went up to the hot dog vendor on Cony Island, and ordered, “Make me one with everything?” Modern science confirms ancient spiritual insight: We know, now, that we are one with everything, inextricably part of the web of life that we are exploiting. 

This is such an important step in our growing up as a conscious, sentient species. We have learned everything we really need to know to begin living with understanding, humility and respect within the complex ecosystems within which we ourselves arose and inescapably remain.

Oh, we do still have a ways to go on the practical sides of getting from here to there; but we’re nothing if not an ingenious species, and we have the basic knowledge we need to make that journey. This conscious learning that we’ve achieved takes us full-circle, back to what many hunter-gatherers knew more implicitly through everyday, integral experience.  The difference is that they lived it; they had to; they had no choice.  We do have the choice; we have the power and the knowledge to choose. And therein lies our responsibly. 

So, what is it in a nutshell, exactly, that we know? We know that humans evolved with and still are inescapably part of the ecologies we’re destroying. We can’t plead ignorance; yet we haven’t so far stopped or hardly even checked our mindless depredation and exploitation of the grounds of our own existence. Earlier failed civilizations might not have known better. We do. How’s that for irresponsible? How’s that for cognitive dissonance?

What really gets in the way of our living more fully up to our potential? Why don’t we, as a society, as a culture, better implement what we’re learning, what we already know? What, or who, is in the way of our creating a better, more sustainable, more equitable society and culture based on what we now know?  The final two posts explore these questions further, and get more specific about who’s responsible—who must be held accountable. 

* * * * *

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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.

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