It’s both satisfying and terrifying to finish a book. It’s
satisfying because it’s a little like finally getting a Haystacks Calhoun clone
to remove himself from your prone chest cavity. It’s terrifying not so much
because of what others may think of it—though that’s not an entirely negligible
concern—but because of the fear that the book might have been lots better if
you’d worked harder or had more time.
Sometimes the best sentences finally form and key data points only
become available after you’ve closed up shop, and that fear tends to be sharper
the more expansive and open-ended the book’s topic.
That’s certainly how I feel about my new ebook, Broken:
American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It. I’m gratified that at least some people have
already expressed appreciation for what I try to do in that book—and that
includes Thomas Friedman’s generous call-out in this past Sunday’s New
York Times, under the somewhat improbable
title “Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win.” But I’m finding it hard to let go of
the subject despite having let go of the subject (if you know what I mean),
because everywhere I look, it seems, I see more grist for my recently shuttered
mill.
Thank heaven, therefore, for this blog—where I have the
opportunity to supplement Broken on an ad
hoc basis on those occasions when I can’t
bear not to, and I can do it here without leaking footnotes all over the place.
That’s exactly what I’m about to do now, but in all
fairness, especially to readers who have helped me with this project along the
way as it rolled out in pieces here starting last year, take a warning: Below
you will encounter a long, somewhat esoteric discussion in political
theory/sociology that only eventually reaches a conclusion you might (or might
not) care about. That conclusion takes as its prooftext, so to speak, the new
Sprint advertising campaign that most of you resident in the USA will have
noticed by now: “Be Truly Unlimited.”
My argument is that “Be Truly Unlimited” is not just an ad
campaign, although it obviously is that, too. Sprint is trying to sell
unlimited minutes for some carefully calculated market price, and the deal
appeal resides largely in its simplicity: No more counting minutes or wondering
about budget thresholds breeched, no more fuss with rollovers and so on. (I’m
not in a position to comment on the commercial proposition, since I’ve never
owned or paid for my own cell phone.) But I think the marketing team is aiming
to leverage a strengthening American meme the larger consequences of which are
somewhere between capacious and portentous, depending on one’s point of view.
To see that, however, you must be able to decode the glitz and glitter of our
crowded semiotic environment to find the core attitudes and assumptions, some
we’re self-aware of and some we’re not, beneath. So if you’re ready, warnings
be damned, let’s turn over some symbolic rocks and get started.
* * *
It in the introduction to Broken: American Political
Dysfunction and What To Do About It, I take
some pains to explain why I choose a middling level of analysis, a Goldilocks
level that’s neither too superficial nor too deep. I offer a teaser pointed
toward deeper explanatory templates for our current difficulties, but soon
leave off from them. The reason, as I explain in the book, is that deeper
cultural explanations, however interesting and even true they may be, have
close to zero chance to gain policy traction. They don’t speak wonk.
That said, there are a few verities about political life
that simply cannot be ignored despite their falling outside the ambit of
practical policy analysis. The first and most important of these is that most
societies, most of the time, tend to govern themselves to one extent or another
without much help from formal political structures. The glue, metaphorically
speaking, that enables societies to do this is referred to as social trust, or
sometimes as social capital.
All this really means—and in the book I refer to this key
concept on several occasions—is that people in their communities establish over
time certain reciprocal standards and expectations of conduct. These standards
and expectations may be the result of a religious culture whose institutions
tutor young people during their socialization to conform to behavior that is understood
to be commanded from outside the human world. In such cases, moral behavior is
ratified by the theotropic inclinations of human nature, in other words, by the
sacred. Presumably, other forms of social authority, fully intrinsic to the
community, can accomplish the same ends. Sometimes, usually in fact, both occur
simultaneously, bringing about a merger encouraged by the fact that as people
mature they learn to appreciate the virtues of civility, integrity, honesty,
politeness and other social-guidance systems through which people reassure one
another that we are allies-in-common by virtue of sharing a basic interest in
the safety, security, prosperity and beauty of our surroundings. Government can
encourage and structure the formation of such benign attitudes, but it usually
cannot create them de novo.
The point here is that healthy societies create networks of
expectations that work thanks to the magic of reciprocity, not because agents
of a state constantly enforce them. Reciprocity amounts to sets of implicitly
matched or parallel promises of future behavior, and it is the cumulative
consequence of making and keeping such promises that is the font of any moral
order. (This is something Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt well understood, but that
most modern moral philosophers have managed somehow to miss, possibly because
the insight has been tarnished in
their eyes by association with Abrahamic theologies.) I don’t steal your
backpack and you don’t steal my wallet not just or mainly because of a worry about
the police catching us in or after the act, but because we know it’s wrong, and
we know at one level or another that if everyone did wrong we’d all be in a
total mess, police or no.
Generally speaking, the better a society can maintain social
order on its own dime, the less government, and the less coercion, is required
to keep civic life clear of Hobbesean nastiness, brutishness and brevity. This
observation is the source of anarchism as a political philosophy, just in case
anyone is interested. At its essence, the idea is that if people can refine
their behaviors sufficiently through some form or other of enlightenment, then,
very much pace Hobbes, the need for
government can be dispensed with altogether. I confess to a youthful
infatuation with anarchism. Some decades ago I read and sometimes thrilled to
Bakunin, Krapotkin, Emma Goldmann, and, closer to our own time, the
irrepressible Murray Bookchin (1921-2006).
Anarchism is based on a very optimistic view of human
nature, or rather of human social nature, which is why it tends to appeal to
youth. It was Don Marquis who had his cockroach hero Archie say, to Mehitabel
the Cat I think it was, that “an optimist is a guy without much experience.”
There is nevertheless a case for such a view beyond youth, and a recent case
well made is that of James C. Scott (Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton University Press, 2012)—recommended for
young and old alike.
That said, I do not know of any large-scale human
civilization that has not needed at least some government to establish the
basic parameters for justice and economic activity, as well as for collective
defense—the first and historically the most compelling and popular reason for
government. But clearly, some societies are much better at creating their own
internal stabilities than others. Some societies need and want less government
than others. To generalize boldly (and perhaps foolishly), high-trust societies
needing less government tend to be more homogeneous with respect to language,
ethnicity, work profile and religious culture. In theory anyway, these are
enabling but not necessarily limiting factors. Low-trust societies needing more
government tend to be more diverse, more urban, more functionally specialized
and complex—in a word, more modern.
In a sense, this general observation parallels that of
Edmund Burke when he observed that the less discipline a person exerts on
himself from within, the more discipline will need be imposed from without.
What is true of individuals may also be true of entire societies. It may well
be, too, as John Adams said: “Our
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other.” Translation from 18th
century to 21st century vernaculars: A limited government devoted to
liberty can only work if society’s own high-functioning moral order allows it
to work by keeping expressions of liberty within certain bounds. Or put in more common if analytically vaguer language, self-government requires civic virtue.
If that is so, it follows that even a complex and
specialized modern society—if it cherishes liberty—should strive for maximum
feasible anarchism, even if that ends up being far short of the utopian outcome
anarchist theorists have sought. It should strive to be as much of a self-regulating
social system as possible, the basis of which is, in my view, the Jeffersonian
principle of subsidiarity (to which I also make reference in the book). The
best way to reduce the demand for both government and coercion is to layer
government, building in as best we can protective buffers between them—just as
the natural world builds buffers into interdependency to reduce the dangers of
systemic contamination and collapse. The fastest, most economical and most
sustainable ways to solve most problems are to solve them as close to their
points of origin as possible. What neighbors can handle neighbors should
handle. What local communities can
handle local communities should handle. What smaller jurisdictions can handle,
smaller jurisdictions should handle, and so on. That is how a federal system
should work. Any so-called federal system that congenitally drives decisions up
and toward the center is a federal system that is malfunctioning, just as any
non-governmental organizational form that gratuitously overloads leadership is
a form that is inefficient by definition.
Obviously, some standards do cry out for a
one-size-fits-all, nationalized (so to speak) solution. In the book I specify a
few even as I debunk presumptions to others. There are also cases where
centralized economies of scale work well in organizational life, and they may
be important ones. As many as there once were of such cases, they are becoming
scarcer at a time when distributed systems are the bellwethers of efficiency. All the more reason not to clutter the
channels with marginal issues better handled at lower levels of governmental or
social responsibility.
But again, all this depends on people being able to learn
and apply standards to conduct over a wide range of interactive domains, from
business to sexual proprieties to recreation to rules of the automotive road.
To do that, people have always gleaned the harvest of face-to-face interactions
by reading not just words but expressions and body language. The moral ballast
of any society starts at the capillary level, when any two people interact. At
the other end of the spectrum, therefore, as we consider a nation as a whole,
we can say that no society can be more refined than the mean of individuals and
families that compose it.
* * *
What also follows from this is a second verity of political
life, namely that the political institutions of any society emerge from that
society far more than the other way around. The United States is a democracy
because its founding society was egalitarian-minded, not the other way around.
All of the American Founders and all of their tutors, from Locke to Montesquieu
to even the great bad-boy of the time, Rousseau, understood this. The idea that
a governmental form could remold or create a society after its desired image
earned the derisive label “talismanic” at the hands of William Taylor
Coleridge. Yes, sometimes the bully pulpit can make a difference, as the mid-20th
century American experience with desegregation shows; but even here, I think, a
changing society for the most part led the government, not the other way
around.
Social authoritarianism, which exists in both soft and hard,
leftist and rightist versions, denies this, or at the least wants to overturn
it through the force of a supposed vanguard will. Social authoritarians believe
that the state can and should shape society. They want to raise our
consciousness. They want to make us unselfish, or pious, or prim, or whatever
the virtue d’jour happens to be. They want to squeeze our egos until they bleed
compliance. Above all, they want us to conform to explicit standards regardless
of any expectation of natural reciprocity. Moral obligations in this kind of
command-morality world resemble Kantian categorical imperatives. Whether they
want us to worship Karl Marx or the god of John Calvin makes little difference
in this respect. Whether they want us to abjure private property or stigmatize
tobacco smoking makes little difference, too. They want to create community,
whatever its standards may be, by fiat.
Anarchism and statism are thus opposites, even though both
have made and may yet again make use of similar radical methods. Anarchists
want the least amount of government and the least amount of politics, while
statist authoritarians want the most government and the most politics (as long
as they control its vicissitudes). The utopianism of anarchism depends on human
nature overcoming the distortions and barriers and bad faith accumulated in a
history once described by Hegel as “a butcher’s block.” The utopianism of
socialist statism depends on changing human nature from a “fallen” state to a
pure one. Anarchists see true toleration, as against mere forbearance, as
natural; statists do not. If you like the extension of a polarity from Western
religion, anarchism is a Hebraic extremism, statism a Pauline one.
All the same, both have in common the idea that for human
beings to live fulfilled lives, they must do so together, in communities. The
difference between them is this: For anarchists, social trust develops
naturally and organically as long as artificial hierarchies can be prevented
from perverting and diminishing it; for socialists, social trust has to be
imposed from the top down along explicitly devised lines. Both fear too much
individualism untethered to the social commons. Both see hubris as the sin that
turns the wondrous gift of individual human creativity into that which
boomerangs to harm the community that ultimately nurtures us all.
* * *
So now, finally, let’s talk about contemporary America, and
about Sprint’s new advertising campaign.
Let me continue by quoting a bit from Broken—from the aforementioned tease.
Recent widespread commercial
applications of information technology extend broader trends toward the individuation
of American society. The gossamer stuff from which the American dream has been
spun is all about maximizing individual freedom, and about giving substance to
that freedom by maximizing individual efficacy. We have willed our
individualist myth into reality, for, as an old professor of mine, Erving
Goffman, once put it, “Social life takes up and freezes into itself the
conceptions we have of it.” Individuals in cybernetically advanced America
today are autonomously powerful as never before, with worlds of information,
education, training, products, social exchange and means of expression at their
fingertips. But they are also apparently lonelier, less happy and more anxious
as the interpersonal glue that ratifies our corner of humanity as a social
species dissolves. . . . I suspect a Goethe moment at hand: We have got what we
wished for as a youthful civilization, but now that we are older we are not
sure what to do with a society made up of Protean individuals, or even why we
wanted it in the first place.
Some few of us, anyway, are unsure. Most Americans, and most
young Americans in particular, are downright enthusiastic about the
I-am-an-island power they have at their disposal these days. They
overwhelmingly see the upsides of the new technology insofar as education is
concerned, for example, and are mostly oblivious to the tradeoffs.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they have made a conscious
choice to care less about community, or friends, or about the natural pleasures
of face-to-face relations. (Thank God for sex, or the prospect of it anyway.)
We are so early in this new era of mass cybernetic connectivity that no one
knows how social-trust friendly or social-trust unfriendly the gadgets will
ultimately turn out to be. Look
hard enough and you can see signs pointing both ways. But the fact that Sprint
has chosen to mount the individuating, Protean meme and ride it all the way to
the bank suggests that a tendency, at least, may already be discernable.
Why should we be concerned about this? Because if the
individuating tendencies inherent in the technology are not offset by creative
balances that can restock social trust, or social capital, in America, it means
that we will drift ever further from an organic social equilibrium to a kind of
order that needs ever more government to make it work. We will have to face
what David Brooks has called “brutality cascades”, a kind of positional arms
race to the bottom that ensues when it becomes difficult to impossible for
standards of behavior to form out of interpersonal relationships.
Similarly and closely related, it also may mean that the
social authority signals that flow from a naturally evolved social equilibrium
will weaken, flattening a bit (or more than a bit) too much the bell curve of
moral conformity. If that happens it will erode the constraints against extreme
views and behaviors that are in every society the guardrails of civilization
itself. One at least has to wonder whether that flattening hasn’t already
contributed something to episodes like Buskerud, Norway, Aurora, Colorado and
even Newtown, Connecticut.
Don’t misunderstand, please: I love liberty as much as the
next American, and perhaps more than most. I am well aware that the concept of
individualism that infuses the American ethos is the essence of Enlightenment
modernity, and that it explains why both Hobbes and Locke, whatever their
differences, were similarly the avatars of modern political life. I can find in
my heart little enthusiasm for earlier ages suffused by superstition,
smothering conformity, racist and misogynist hierarchies, stultifying fatalism
and more besides. But a refined social
order is nevertheless the indispensable base for individual fulfillment and dignity, no less than an infant’s
willingness to roam and explore is a function of propinquity to parental
security.
As Edmund Burke understood so well, tradition is not the
mere accretion of habit; it is the wisdom of the ages hard accumulated, often a
wisdom difficult to articulate but no less essential to basic civil order for
so being. The yawning extent and accelerating trajectory of our individuation,
I fear, threatens that order, threatens the natural moral balances in American
society and, in their absence, lures many of us, at least, into seeking governmental
solutions for everything that may displease us. (Yes, you guessed it: I suspect
that American society, as more a creedal or covenantal nationalism than the
bloodline forms of European nationalisms, is particularly vulnerable to the
depredations of excessive individuation.) Our obsession with
self-gratification, self-expression, self-fulfillment—in short with the “imperial
me”—and the concomitant rejection of the old virtues (patience, humility,
thrift, inter-generational responsibility) as quaint enough for museums but not
much good for anything else, has made our country increasingly in need of
government and at the same time increasingly ungovernable (other reasons for
the latter are explored in the book).
So here I go beyond the book: Yes, globalization and
automation have upset some very effective and fairly longstanding arrangements
and elements of our political institutional dysfunction have made it much
harder to adjust. Corruption is running rampant in a third historical wave of
plutocratic assault, and it mixes in myriad ways with the dislocations of our
political economy and the frailties of our political culture, making everything
worse.
Above all, perhaps, never have plutocrats had it so easy,
since countervailing collective action has become more difficult in an age of
individuation. Where are the 21st century populists or progressives?
Where is the outrage? Do we see so little extra-parliamentary activity because
things are simply not so bad (yet)? Or is it rather that the natural social
platforms that serve as the basis for such political mobilization have been
eviscerated by our headlong individuation? Sure, Facebook and Instant Messaging
can facilitate 20-something bar-mobbing, and Twitter can help crowds gather in
Midan al-Tahrir, but today’s American social environment arguably offers up to
small groups of the specially interested a door flung more widely open than
ever when it comes to looting the treasury of the public weal. The logic of
collective action has never been less limited.
What I am suggesting is that our crisis of governance, which
is reflected but only partly expressed by the mess our political class has made
in Washington, is ultimately anchored in a cultural shift that is both a source
for and a consequence of revolutionary technological change. Increasing numbers
of young and well-educated Americans love the gadgets that help isolate them
from one another because they do not wish to be obligated by civilities, do not
wish to be constrained by responsibilities to others, do not wish to be limited
in any way. We are witnessing the
eternal temptation to self-indulgence raised to both principle and art.
The marketeers at Sprint are clever folks; five will get you
ten that they know all this. If we want to be radically free, autonomously
powerful, they are eager to pose as our helpers. If we want to escape social
gravity, to propel ourselves into orbit around our own egos, we can sign that
cell phone contract. And, ironically enough, in all this we are encouraged
because everyone else seems to be doing the same thing. This is
pseudo-individualism, narcissistic faux non-conformity in a crowd.
Where will this lead, if it keeps up? Well, there’s a very
old story, let me suggest, that succinctly speaks to this. It is about a
certain tower in a place called Babel. Are you confused?
All I can say is that I liked Sprint’s older,
Beatles-inflected advertising slogan better: “All. Together. Now.”
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