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! 

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

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

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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