“There was nothing…not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”1
I. Introduction
Types of Augury
As an American citizen, I find it hard to avoid the impression that I am witness to a dying nation. Pretty much everything about public life seems worse than it once was, and I’m not alone in thinking so. Fewer people than at any point in the last 30 years believe our young people will have a better life than their parents. The majority of us think the future will be worse than the past. In short, decline is on the tip of people’s tongues; the faint stench of decay is in the air.
But is this anything to get up in arms about? Humans are about as eager to predict the future as they are bad at it. A more reserved individual might argue that natural oscillation occurs in any society. Sure, America could be on a downswing, but that does not preclude brighter days ahead. For example, a Harris presidency.
To those serious about the truth, then, the first point of skepticism toward the belief that “the world is going to hell in a handbasket” is that it’s about as common in aging people as a slower metabolism and earlier bedtime. People who want their premonitions taken seriously must therefore search for some “hard” metrics to prove their point—and lo and behold, they usually find them.
For example, in the span of a week on the Honestly podcast, two different guests laid out their arguments for why the current moment is so fraught. In Are We In A Pre-War Era?, Walter Russell Mead talks about how AI and the “third major technological revolution” make us “more vulnerable than ever” to human-caused catastrophes. “Apocalypse used to be a religious, even a mythological concept. But in our time, it is becoming a political possibility,” he writes in the essay the show is based upon. In Are We Living Through ‘End Times’? Peter Turchin argues, on the basis of literally millions of data points, that the United States has peaked—and is now on the downswing in the typical life-cycle of societies.
There is no shortage of augury, then—not now, and probably not ever in the history of human society.
But the original practice of augury, a method dating back to Roman times of predicting the future from the flight of birds, shows us that some soothsaying is better than others. Of all the causes for concern, then, here are the ones I personally find most troubling:
low levels of public trust in government and other institutions
increase of depression and suicide among teenagers
climate change (do you really need me to cite this?)
increase of human-controlled destructive power (bombs, AI, etc)
As a “hairless ape with two dozen tricks,”3 however, my impression of America as a sinking ship did not originate in these facts. I wasn’t walking around, absent an impression, until I stumbled upon a robust dataset of America’s civic health. No, these are simply the hard metrics I’m using to confirm an impression built upon my daily experience.4
The suspicion that my country sucks is based more specifically on my life in Philadelphia. It is there that I encounter, for example, more homelessness than I ever remember before. In the early morning, on my way to work, it is not uncommon for me to see people splayed out in all sorts of positions on the street. (Just the other week, someone sleeping in a waist-high planter stirred as I passed—and nearly scared me to death.) I have also noticed an uptick in crime: there were more murders in Philadelphia in 2021 than in any other year on record, and 2022 wasn’t much better. Trash is ubiquitous; quiet is scarce. People seem angry and hopeless at the same time. These are the kinds of things that make a person search for hard metrics, so as to confirm what their senses are reporting.
There is no shortage of anecdotal material outside Philadelphia, either. As much as I try to insulate myself from the news, I still hear about mass shootings. I still become worried near election time at the fervor our country whips itself into. I still kind of scratch my head at the depthless stupidity of the far right and left. But I try not to take these things into as much account, because the truth is that they are passing through a medium—conveniently called The Media—which perhaps I cannot entirely trust.5 I can trust my own experience much more. And that experience suggests that something is amiss.
Indulging the Stomach
Even if my experience, and some of the data I use to confirm it, are true in the main, it is also true that things could change. Humans could fix climate change or learn to live with it. Trust in government, political polarization, and suicide rates among teenagers could regress to the mean. Crime and homelessness could subside.6 There’s nothing per se that says these things have to continue getting worse.
On the other hand, I don’t see something like wealth disparity getting better without major disruption. I don’t see humanity ever losing destructive power, unless we go through another Dark Age (potentially as a result of using some of that destructive power). So maybe we could say that some trends are likely to continue—and are therefore concerning—while others are likely to fluctuate—and therefore aren’t that concerning.
Maybe, in fact, instead of raising the alarm, we ought to simply put our heads down and get back to work. There are warning signs, yes, but there are always warning signs. Doomsdayers simply cherry-pick the negatives as part of their trade, neglecting the positives because they don’t sell. But that doesn’t mean the negatives will persist, or that positives can’t be found. I mean, what about expanding lifespans, rising material affluence, ease of information access? Meanwhile, one only has to look a few decades into the past to see the absurdity of prior panics. Russia never dropped the nuke. Y2K was a bust. We still have plenty of clean fresh water (right?). Even covid has become—finally—much like the flu.
To figure out what’s really going on, then, the temperate and sober thinker must enter the convoluted world of equations. What are the probabilities that a catastrophic event will occur? How do we convert the positives and negatives into the same units of measurement, so we can see which sum is higher? At this point, we are outside the realm of what most humans can grasp, whether intuitively or with advanced algorithms— meaning any work on the subject is, ultimately, subjective. I can imagine digging into the fine details of Peter Turchin’s model and sort of shrugging my shoulders at the end. Could be, is all I’d be able to say. As a species, we may be slowly getting our fingers around the neck of the future, but as of yet, we cannot affect its breathing.
So, I find myself in a very human place to be. On the one hand I have a strong, daily impression that the society around me is unraveling—and I have some facts to back it up—and on the other, I know there are many reasons to doubt it. It is, ultimately, a battle between the stomach and the head; and since there is no way to compare apples and oranges, and yet a paper to write, let’s indulge the stomach.
Cause of Causes
Let’s assume for the moment that America is on the decline. What I am most interested in next, as someone who was educated to ask “why?” until blue in the face, is the cause of the causes. What undergirds all these disturbing trends?
At base, I believe that America is missing the forest for the trees. That is how I would describe what is ultimately driving the proximate trends of homelessness, crime, wealth disparity, political polarization, declining mental health, and so on—all those things which, taken together, suggest that America is hollow at its core.
“Missing the forest for the trees” is a colloquialism for focusing attention at the wrong level of analysis. Here’s an example:
Daughter: “Dad, I’m really struggling. I care about less things than I ever have.”
Dad: “Fewer.”
The dad, in focusing on the correct grammar of his daughter’s statement, misses the far more important point that his daughter is struggling.
Humans of all shapes, sizes, and time periods are susceptible to this kind of thinking. In Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how it led to the demise of Easter Island. In their constant effort to outdo each other with moai statues, the clans of Easter Island eventually cut down the last tree sometime between 1200 and 1600, and all but ensured their collective destruction.7 With the trees gone, the Eastern Islanders could no longer make fire or build boats for fishing and exploration. The roots of the trees could also no longer held soil in place, so there was a great deal of erosion. The rest is history.
Without a doubt, the Eastern Islanders take the cake for being the most prototypical example of missing the forest for the trees, given that they literally cut down a forest for its trees, but they are far from the only ones to commit this kind of error.
So here is my thesis. In America, at the current time, our particular version of missing the forest for the trees is that we are focused on the individual at the expense of the group. This is the simplest and broadest explanation I can think of for what has gone wrong. In the rest of this essay, I’ll attempt to show how poisonous and far-ranging our emphasis on the trees, and neglect of the forest, has become.8
II. Personal Identity and Identity Politics
“As long as a minority acts to increase its share within a growth-oriented society, the final result will be a keener sense of inferiority for most of its members.”9
The most obvious example of how individualism is poisoning our country is the way we prioritize and conceptualize the individuals within it. Not only do we think of individuals as standalone and paramount, we have become adept at creating groups (White, Trans, Boomer) at the expense of the Group (Americans). This latter is called identity politics and can be found seeping into all corners of public life.
Individuals within Groups
Human nature is the product of both selfish and cooperative pressures. On the one hand we are clearly a social species, and on the other, we know that the process of natural selection can only have operated on the selfish gene. This apparent tension has caused many people to mull questions of altruism and group selection, but these debates can sometimes muddy the simple fact that humans throughout history have belonged to groups and in large measure defined themselves by their roles within them. In fact, some scholars have suggested that individuality itself evolved for the purpose of becoming irreplaceable to others, so that in the event of misfortune, there would be a palpable reason to help us.10
A powerful first step in understanding an individual, then, is to ask to which groups they belong—and how.
Personally, even as someone who enjoys solitude more than society, I find it hard to describe myself without invoking groups, whether of writers, therapists, oldest siblings, Philadelphians, introverts, my friends and family, or Thoreau-lovers. Yet, generally speaking, we are quite strange in America. We are WEIRD, par excellence. The individual is the end-all, be-all in our country. “I” is king. Our legacy of rugged individualism and self-reliance have wormed their way throughout the years into knee-jerk cultural mutterings and assumptions, the stuff you see on posters or printed on handbags. “Don’t worry about what others think of you.” “Learn to love yourself.” “Just be you.”11
Somehow, we Americans assume that personality operates in a social vacuum, as if I can say whether I am funny, shy, squirrely, prone to indignation, or likely to stay in on a Friday night without reference to the social context and how I fit within it. But the reality is that funny is something I am in many, but not all, groups. When someone else happens to be funnier than me, I find another role. I take another route to the cheese. But our culture doesn’t like that. It prefers heroes who proceed unchanging, unphased, from situation to situation—a bit like Don Quixote, only not a fool. This stiff-backed stance has its roots in our very beginning. After all, weren’t the earliest Americans those who didn’t play well with others in the Old World? Many of the earliest settlers were likewise too stubborn, proud, or stupid to adjust to the New.
It’s not only our cultural narratives and folk heroes. Even our economic structure promotes the individual. We are proud, for the most part, to be a capitalist society with stark winners and losers. We believe that fierce competition amongst individuals is best for the country as a whole. We idolize people who are loud, brash, and defiant toward authority. Who command attention, never mind how. Even when it comes to taxation and social programs, we leave individuals to fend for themselves far more than in Europe.12 We assume that people know how to spend their “hard-earned” money best, and we protect our citizens’ ability to make choices as part of their civil liberties, regardless of whether those choices are destructive to the chooser, destructive to society, or made under some kind of insanity.
Of course, I am not the only one to recognize tradeoffs to our individualistic approach. In Beware Psychotherapy That Works, Steve Salerno asks: “It is possible for a nation of 330 million fully optimized Is to also function as a fully optimized We?” In Generations, Jean Twenge argues that technologies such as smartphones and social media have led to increasing amounts of individualism, which she sees as a major driver of generational differences. Jon Haidt has argued that these technologies are responsible for the teen mental health crisis, especially prevalent among girls in the West.
Indeed, the West is unique in emphasizing the individual not only in comparison to other countries today, but especially in comparison to most societies of the past. As Katiyar et al. highlight in a table depicting the differences between foraging societies and WEIRD ones, foragers were “very rarely alone,” usually slept and lived in close contact with others, and had “low prevalence of external representations of the self and others (e.g. absence of mirrors, billboard models etc).”13 Suffice it to say, the situation has changed drastically since then. As a society of lone wolves, America might end up teaching humans of the future a valuable lesson.
In brief, the messaging all across our country is I, I, I—and I, for one, am tired of it.
groups within Groups
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”14
In addition belonging to groups, humans have always belonged to groups within groups. We are, in fact, accustomed to nested groups: a married couple within an extended family; a family within a tribe; a couple of buddies within a class. All of these are navigable relationships and have obvious parallels to American life with its unprecedented diversity.
As Burke’s quote illustrates, nested groups could constitute a rung on the ladder to a larger sense of collectivity, but we’re not doing that in America. Instead of scaling up to a shared sense of American identity, our groups are undermining it: groups are being created at the expense of the Group.
Yes, I’m talking about identity politics and the clustering of individual and group identity around things like gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity,15 generation, political orientation, and so on. By focusing on this small set of identifiers, we not only short-change personal identity, but we prevent a shared American identity, too.
Why do identifiers such as race, gender, and sexuality short-change what it means to be a person? Because they end up drawing a tighter circle around individuality than exists in reality.
All of us is extremely complex in ways that science hasn’t even begun to grasp. Yet, the underlying message of identity politics is that we’ve pretty much isolated the components that best represent the pit and pith of who a person is. Our sensitivity in these matters ends up doing the opposite of what we want it to—it caps our empathy both for ourselves and each other. And it makes a lot of people mad in the process.
The poison of identity politics—that each of us is a sum of the descriptors-du-jour—has spread to all corners of our society. You can find it on dating apps and therapist directories. On Netflix, movies are categorized in ways like “Strong female lead in foreign film,” as if any of those qualities contribute to what makes a movie good or worth seeing. Many of those who voted for Hilary wanted to see “the first female president” in the same way that many who voted for Obama wanted to see “the first African-American president”—as if either of these qualities has anything to do with running a country well.
The ideology of identity politics has, for the most part, infiltrated how even smart and considerate people think. A friend recently told me a story about how one of her friends sat her down at the height of Black Lives Matter and asked whether she was an “ally” of the movement—if not, their relationship had met its end. Never mind that the two of them had been friends for years and had gone through some terrible and wonderful times together. Likewise, I asked a colleague of mine the other day if she had room for a referral, but she wanted to know if the client was LGBTQ+. “I don’t know,” I said, wondering how this was relevant. My colleague seemed disappointed. “I’m really trying to work with people in that community.”
You’re missing the forest for the trees! I wanted to scream.
“The value of a man is not in his skin,” Thoreau writes in Walden, “that we should touch him.” Nor is it in her pronouns. Yet to be an American means occasionally listening to someone stumble through a story just to get the right pronouns for someone who isn’t even there. Do I care if someone wants to be called by certain pronouns? Absolutely not! What I mind is the assumption that I should bend over backwards to get it right, and the supreme indignance that would follow if I happened to get it wrong.
The logic of identity politics reaches its final, absurd conclusion in the following tweet:
In what world does the underlying idea here—that all straight male therapists are the same, or at least share enough condemnable qualities to be roundly dismissed from something like providing therapy to women—make sense? Only in an insane one, I’d argue.
In the end, the notion that such descriptors say something deep, true, and final about a person is something that the future will rightly judge us for…but not until long after we have finished judging each other.
Now, someone could argue that many of the identity-politics labels are important to people and do form the core of their identity. I agree that someone’s ethnicity or sexuality, for example, might run to the very core of who they are and how they define themselves. But it also might not matter at all. In deciding a priori that it does, we exclude everything else that might be relevant, for which we have much less political enthusiasm or patience. Rather than gender, a person might feel defined more by their sense of humor, how romantic they are, how well they listen, their level of devotion to family, their friendships, their work ethic or lack thereof, what they think happens after death, the town in which they grew up, the events which have happened in their life, where they like to travel, what they like to read, their culinary tastes, their sleeping habits, the grace they display in movement...
I could go on forever. That’s the point.
So, even when we do individualism, we do it wrong. But it doesn’t stop there. Identity politics don’t inform personal identity only; it is the basis for group identity, too. This is what I mean about creating groups at the expense of the Group. We’re a nation of small interest groups that, instead of summing up to a larger conception of Americans, is increasingly preoccupied with in-fighting. Blacks are pitted against Whites; men against women; men and women against trans; straight against LGBTQIAXYZ; Boomers against Millennials; Republicans against Democrats; and the rich against the rest of us.16
The tragic thing about our commitment to all these different ways of dicing people up is that it’s presumably done in service of bringing everyone together—of “celebrating” this country’s great diversity. The more of aware of and sensitive to the differences between people, the idea goes, the easier it will be for us to all get along. But this just isn’t true. It turns out that if you want people to get along, you would be much better off emphasizing what they have in common—not what sets them apart. Because when we focus on what sets us apart, we become antagonistic rather than cooperative. We become a nation more divided by what brings some portion of us together than united by a larger message.
America needs a Group appeal more than any other country in the world because we have more diversity to unite. Yet we have done so little of this kind of messaging—and seem to have so little zeal or talent for it anymore—that in my circles, patriotism has become something of a faux pas. Embarrassing to admit. Meanwhile, the Republican party has taken over the American flag as one of their symbols. How the fuck did that happen?
What we need is a consistent, persuasive story about what it means to be an American.
What should it be? I don’t know. But just imagine if the answer were as automatic to us as the promotion of individuality. Then we’d be cooking with gas.
Summary
A group relies on the individuals within it, whether a single person or subgroup, to not be exclusively individual. Members of a group must capitulate in some ways if the group is to survive. Are we providing examples of this? Avenues for it? Are we encouraging it? Are sacrifice, commitment, or deference anywhere part of our heroism? Maybe on the right, where they wave the flag, support the military, and defend the honor of our country tooth and nail. But on the left, it is mostly a parade of individual triumphs, without any valid appeal to commonality beyond the subgroup level.
Perhaps the best way to drive home my main argument in this section is to ask you, reader, why you love those you do—your romantic partners, friends, teachers, coworkers, favorite artists, and so on. Why were you drawn to them? Was it on account of identity-politics descriptors, or something else? Again, I do not deny that those descriptors can matter, but what I push against is that they consist of the core of a person by default. That they typically form the most meaningfully lump of a person’s—or even a group’s—magnetism. And if you agree with me, that it was something else that drew you to these people, can you say what, specifically? My guess is that in some instances you can, and in others you can’t.
Take the therapist I have been seeing for the past three years. She’s religious (I am not) and practices a technique that I disagree with. Yet I continue to see her because, in being a kind and non-threatening person, she helps me open up. In not being impressive, she helps me admit my weaknesses. Where’s the box for that? Indeed, I can’t think of any friendship, mentorship, or romantic relationship that I have ever had, that drew its strength from what we are increasingly coming to consider as the building blocks of individual and group identity.
III. Rights over Responsibility
Every year, a friend and I go on a fishing trip, always to the same place. We stumbled on the place during covid, a simple log cabin in private community where the fishing is better than we could have ever expected. But as the has world emerged from lockdown, we’ve discovered that the community is stereotypically—almost to the point of being a joke—a portrait of rural America. At the entrance, my friend and I encounter about 15 signs that say something like “Private,” “No Trespassing,” “Get Out,” “Strictly Enforced.” Beyond that is a bumpy dirt road, lined on one side by simple properties amidst the beautiful scenery of trees and the lake, almost all of them dotted with the ugly orange of “No Trespassing” and many with the ominous “Beware of Dog.”
Eventually, toward the end of the road, we reach our destination. The lake shining through a sparse collection of trees lets us know that we have indeed left the city. The neighbor’s yard dotted with heavy construction machinery (sitting there for years now) lets us know that we’re still in America.
We fish for about two-thirds of our waking hours. We get lost in it, we really do, and for many hours don’t speak a word. The far side of the lake is state land, meaning no houses, meaning naturally picturesque. The woods stretch flat and far, reaching something of a small ridge about a mile distant. In early April, we can see which trees have begun their transformation, which have never changed, and which are still asleep. Sometimes, our silence is met by nature’s silence, which is rarely completely silent; and other times, although very few people are at the lake that early in the year, it is met by the barking of dogs or the firing of guns.
My friend and I have come up with a phrase for such moments, one we can communicate now by briefly raising our eyebrows: “I have every right.” This is the indignant response we’ve imagined from these neighbors should we ever appeal to one of them for silence. Not that we ever would, of course, partial to living as we are.
But the bottom line is that we are so obsessed with rights in America that we rarely mention the logical counterbalance of responsibility. This prioritization of individual rights over group responsibility is another subset of the broader cancer of missing the forest for the trees. “I have every right to leave my dog outside and let it bark all afternoon.” “I have every right to fire thousands of rounds into a tree on my land.” “I have every right to blast music in my backyard, never mind that it carries over the water.”
“Of course you do,” my friend replies whenever I mime one of these stereotyped Americans. “We’re not trying to take your rights away. We’re just asking you to think of others.”
A good chunk of our society can be seen from this perspective. The spectrum ranges from the sheer delight of exercising one’s rights to the sheer terror of—and apoplexy toward—having an ounce of them taken away.
Our public discourse is so often the faux-intellectual debate of which right is mightiest. There is little talk of responsibility in the sense of stewardship, respect for the commons, deference toward others,17 or anything like that. The only responsibility we care about is liability, i.e., determining who is responsible for taking our rights away, and what they will do to make us whole again.
Framing the conversation in terms of which right is mightiest precludes us from reasonable compromises which are sometimes found in other countries. For example, in Paris, they have “noise radars” designed to ticket overly loud vehicles. Here, we would see that as a violation of the individual’s right to blast ear-shattering music. Granted, an argument about rights could theoretically arrive at a better compromise between individual and society by considering, in this instance, the public’s right to a tolerable amount of noise—but how wonderful would it be to live in a culture in which responsibility to the group was almost a knee-jerk reaction? As in, of course the driver has a responsibility to his fellow citizens.18
Remember Japanese fans cleaning up after themselves at the World Cup? Is there any reason we couldn’t have a little more of that attitude here?
Much of American life comes into focus once a person understands the emphasis we place on individual rights. This emphasis prevents much that could be beautiful, robust, and shared. Personally, I find it most devastating with land. I sometimes want to choke up at the difference between Finland, with it “Everyman’s Rights,” and America, where whoever made the “No Trespassing” sign is a multi-billionaire. Hell, the U.S. elected a president on the idea of “no trespassing.” This attitude of sitting behind high walls, though, ferociously protecting what is ours and neglecting everything else, extends far beyond just land.
The Tragedy of “Tragedy of the Commons”
For my money, the excessively strict rules of most parks are a laughable and pathetic reflection of what we have done to public spaces in this country. Partly as a result of how we have treated such places, it is assumed in America that public ventures will be subject to the “tragedy of the commons.” In other words, unless we aggressively constrain behavior, people will naturally ruin whatever is shared. Thus we end up prohibiting the very things people most want to do in parks, rendering it virtually useless:
No alcohol.
No glass.
No trespassing after park hours.
Please keep all dogs on a leash.
Children MUST be supervised.
At that point, why the hell would I ever go?
We think of the tragedy of the commons as a law of human behavior, and there is ample opportunity for confirmation bias to cement it as such. Every day on my walk to work, for example, I am reminded of why Philadelphia cannot have nice things. Everything public is broken. The city’s streets should enter a national competition for average pothole depth. Subways are urinals; commuter rails are late; buses sometimes just never show up (and even disappear from the app that tracks them). Down by where I live, people use the public roller-skating rink—a rare gem as far as public offerings are concerned—as a toilet for their dogs. (I asked a friend of mine once why he lets his dog pee there. “I wouldn’t do it if everyone else didn’t already do it,” he said. “But since they do, there’s no point.”) Libraries are places where people go to plan murders or watch porn. The list goes on.
Philadelphia cannot have nice things, but plenty of Philadelphians can. Amidst the squalor of what is shared, stands the grandeur of what is privately owned. Philly has some of the best restaurants in the country, which my wife and I step over the homeless to patron. Swanky roof-decks are popping up around the city, giving those who can afford them more opportunity to look down on others. Just before covid, Comcast erected one of the most magnificent buildings on the East Coast. This appalling difference between public and private isn’t restricted to Philadelphia, though, nor is it recent. It’s America through and through. Here’s what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society, published in 1958:
[American citizens] pass on into a countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters, we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?19
Incongruent with the American experience as it may be, the truth about the tragedy of the commons is that it’s more of a social norm than law of human behavior. Again, it helps to have traveled abroad. In Finland, for example—the Nordic countries are everyone’s favorite counter-factual—my wife and I were shocked to discover that the government not only builds huts along hiking trails in their national forests, but that they also stock them with cooking equipment, a shed full of firewood, and an axe for cutting more. In America, that axe would be stolen within 24 hours, and we’d be lucky if it didn’t end up in someone’s skull. Fortunately, the liability would all be worked out beforehand, which increasingly means there’s no axe to begin with.
Litigation and its Costs
That brings us back to responsibility in the main way we Americans understand it. We don’t recognize much of a responsibility to our country or each other, but we do insist that someone be liable for an increasingly large number of happenings. Litigation is the mechanism by which we assign this blame—the main way we punish people for infringing on our rights—and therefore it should come as no surprise that America is the most litigious country in the world.
I mean, is it just me, or can we not do anything anymore without signing our lives away first? The meta of this paperwork is to establish who is at fault—who is responsible for what—should something go wrong.
That’s another thing you don’t see in other places. A friend of mine recently went on a rafting trip in Slovenia, and, like any good American, braced himself for the paperwork beforehand. But he was mistaken. The paperwork turned out to be a single page, and what’s more, it stipulated that in the event of a catastrophe, the company would share responsibility with him.
What an incredibly reasonable position! Of course the company should share it. Aren’t they a joint partner in the mission’s success and safety? And isn’t this the kind of arrangement that any two ten-year-olds would agree to, at least a priori?
By relying on litigation to settle our disputes, we betray that we have no higher—or even alternate—authority that could weigh in. We cannot appeal to patriotism, familiarity, religion, tradition, common decency, or culture. The fact that we can’t get on the same page in terms of basic reality—as evidenced by the number of people who believed in stuff like Pizzagate, Stop the Steal, or QAnon20—shows that we can barely appeal to common sense. No, only the law can tell us what is right, because Americans have nothing else in common except their love of freedom—or, put another way, disdain of communalism.
Outsourcing conflict resolution to the law has the effect of intensifying and entrenching individualism and selfishness. As the purview of Law grows, the muscle of determining what is right, not only for ourselves but in dialogue with other people, atrophies. What is the point of having opinions on the matter outside of what is proscribed and enforced? The more of public life that is covered by the law (and its cronies, like insurance companies), the less incentive and experience people have working things out amongst themselves. Any good therapist will recognize this as a classic case of triangulation.
In this Land of Lawyers, then, thousands of small gestures every day, which otherwise would strengthen the social fabric and promote a social norm, are never undertaken due to the fear of being sued; while thousands of small gestures which weaken the social fabric are. Not only the aura of litigation, but each individual lawsuit, takes a bite of someone’s charity, their neighborly spirit. I’ll restrain myself to just a few examples:
About a decade ago, I was living next to a farm which had several ponds on it. Being an avid ice-skater, I asked my neighbor one winter day if I could skate on one of them. He hesitated for a moment and bit his lip. “As long as you promise not to sue me if you fall in.”
A few years ago, my hairdresser was sued, along with her landlord, because someone fell on the sidewalk in front of her shop at 11pm, during a snowstorm. My hairdresser wasn’t there, of course, but she was sued nevertheless. She won, and came out of the exchange down thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees, and with a seething attitude toward her fellow citizen.
A few weeks ago, a friend was riding Amtrak and left her laptop on the train. Fortunately, Amtrak located the laptop in Harrisburg. My friend was delighted and asked if her computer could be put on a train the next day bound for 30th St. Station, where she’d pick it up. I’m sure you know the answer. While the operator would love to help her, his hands were tied. If somehow Amtrak lost the laptop, they would then be responsible for it, and my friend could sue them to high heaven. So she used PTO for the six-hour round-trip the next day.
These stark examples are the same in underlying principle as more mundane ones, such as coffee shops insisting on giving you a fresh cup so you won’t get sick and sue them, never mind the litter it creates. Or public parks not allowing people to pack a bottle of wine on their picnic, for fear of someone later cutting their foot. I’m not saying that laws, law enforcement, insurance, and so on aren’t necessary. Obviously, they are. But there is a role for social and cultural norms, too, especially at the everyday level that comprises most people’s lives. There is a role for putting responsibility on people themselves—no one else—to be good group members and work things out amongst themselves. The disappearance of these muscles is the (often hidden, rarely discussed) cost of so much litigation.
Summary
Hopefully I have been able to show how the theme of rights over responsibility manifests across American life. The park prohibits glassware because in the past, some typical American who wasn’t taught an ethic of responsibility for public spaces, broke a bottle there and never cleaned it up. Then someone cut their foot and assumed every right to sue the city. The city responded by posting an ominous sign that basically says: “You can’t do anything here.” Everyone moves on with their day as if nothing happened. Bit by bit, though, this stuff accumulates. It accumulates in people’s attitudes toward each other and in their beliefs about how the world works—for example, it suggests or reinforces the tragedy of the commons. It also accumulates in how people spend their time and money. Who needs a park when you can build a roof-deck instead? Soon, a beautiful roof-deck overlooks something that can barely be called a park. Citizens make a mental note: public bad, private good.
In the end, we can’t have anything nice in America because we aren’t taught to care about anything other than ourselves. We are allergic to the idea of sacrificing an ounce of our rights for each other, the land, or other inhabitants of the earth, including future humans. Instead, we compulsively guard our own keep, using the arms of the law to slap anyone’s hand that comes near it, even if that hand is meant to shake ours and make a connection. We routinely, automatically, and nearly unconsciously repair to the teacher whenever some slight has befallen us on the playground, like the children that we are, instead of being adults and trying to work things out ourselves. Because on what basis would we even do so? We have no shared religion, culture, tradition, or even reality. The result is that everything public is gutted, further reinforcing the view that it’s inevitable.
This past year’s fishing trip, during the afternoon of the second day, my friend and I were coming up empty. It didn’t seem that our luck would change, so I told him that there was another pond we could walk to, about half a mile through the woods. A stream connecting the two could guide us. He was up for it, so we made the trek. But we made it carefully. The signage was obscene and foreboding. We quickly became silent, and winced at the cracking of every twig. At one point, when we had to cross a clearing, we ran fast and low, like soldiers in war. When we reached the other pond, I was almost glad my first cast struck a root. I cut my line and was done. I wanted to go back, to be safe within the space I had specifically paid for; the area I was contracted to be in by the legal agreement I had made with AirBnb, which of course I didn’t read because it was a thousand pages long.
On the way back through the clearing, with my head so low that my knees were almost hitting my chin, I thought of what a Finn would say of my situation. No doubt they would be confused, and standing tall through the clearing would ask: “But doesn’t everyone have a right?”
IV. Privatization
So far, we’ve discussed two instances of America missing the forest for the trees. First, America focuses on individuals and groups at the expense of the Group. Our country cares about individual trees, or certain types of trees (e.g., beech), more than the forest to which they belong. Second, our obsession with individual rights over group responsibility predictably weakens the social fabric, and creates a self-reinforcing cycle in which we need more proscribed authority—in the form of laws, litigation, insurance, and so on—to deal with one another. A third and final way our country misses the forest for the trees is via privatization. This theme surfaced a bit in the section above, but I’d like to tackle it more formally here.
To my mind, America’s most indefensible position is the allowance of private schools; I really cannot overstate how much this shocks and disappoints me. As far as I was taught in my public school in Connecticut, America was supposed to be the “land of opportunity.” In other words, the radica idea for which millions upon millions washed upon our shores was specifically that with a little luck, a little skill, and a lot of hard work, a person could improve themselves and the future of their family. Meritocracy over aristocracy. Opportunity over social predestination. It wasn’t always perfect, but I thought it was by these North Stars that our country charted its progress over the centuries.
What does it say, then, that at the very beginning of a person’s life in this country, they can be made into a second-class citizen with respect to their education, which is quite possibly the most important factor in their future success? I mean, isn’t education the one thing we would want to provide as equally as possible if our goal was to give everyone the same chance?
I am not calling for equal outcomes. Those who do so miss the point just as much as those who support private schools on the basis of freedom. America is about providing the same beginning, not the same ending. At least I was under the impression that, to whatever extent America has ever had a coherent culture, it was centered around an appreciation for what people did between their birth and death. That was where their freedom lay. It was the Old World that was in the business of arranging endings—not us. Our ancestors wanted to get the hell away from that. They sought the latitude to make their own luck. If we don’t agree on this anymore—and I cannot see how we can, as long as we allow private school to exist—then perhaps our country’s problems run deeper than I thought. It sometimes makes me wonder if America is held together by anything firm, real, or concrete at all, or is rather like a mirage in the desert.
Appreciating the Counter-Argument
If the entire idea of America is to be a place where people have, as best as we can make it, equal opportunities, then how can we look ourselves in the mirror when the very first step on the most common path to advancement is divided between the haves and the have-nots? Allowing private school to exist is the end of that promise—at the very beginning of the journey. That said, let me do the argument for private schools some justice, and explain why I disagree with it point-by-point.
People defending private schools tend to point out, first and foremost, that local taxes are still paid, and that is true; public schools undoubtedly benefit from this money. But that does not nearly capture the full extent of a family’s value. Let’s take parents first. Sure, they chaperon school dances, share their input on school board decisions, and so on, but their value is much higher than that. Not to be dramatic, but parents become the “overstory” of a community. Some of the most influential people in my life have been my friends’ parents, but of course I didn’t know them as that: I knew them as teachers, coaches, and mentors. (Hell, my friend Marissa’s dad got me my first job.)
For whatever reason, we have a habit of neglecting this kind of value in the private school conversation, even though in other settings we will freely admit: “It’s not what you know, but who.”
Second, what about the contribution of kids to the classroom and school community? Surely the children of parents wealthy enough to afford private school are likely to be a net-benefit to a public school. But more to the point, friendship is the stuff of growing up, and more likely to happen with those nearby. What a shame that Suzy doesn’t know her neighbors because she gets shuttled out of the community every morning…!
Personally, I can’t even conceptualize myself without my childhood friends, who not only made me into the person I am today, but who continue to help me now. For example, my wife and I were recently struggling to buy a house due to, you know, one of the worst housing markets ever, but we eventually purchased a fixer-upper because one of my high-school friends (whose dad was the lacrosse coach) is an architect and gave us a deal. Between my friends and their families, I’ve come by pretty much every good thing in my life.
A family’s decision not to invest in the local school is a negative externality on everyone in the community, who otherwise would have benefitted in various ways. This is a cost that, in my opinion, is not nearly covered by the tax dollars left behind. I’d also argue that a “sense of community,” if you’ll allow such a thing, disintegrates when not everyone is going to the same school. At least in my neighborhood growing up, the private- or home-schooled houses were dead zones—places we avoided. I sometimes felt bad when I saw the private-school kids playing by themselves…but I never said anything to them.
Private-school supporters have the understandable goal of providing their children with the best education available. It’s simply not in a parent’s nature to pass up this opportunity. That’s why I really think we’d all be much better off if the option were taken away. The semi-wealthy parents wouldn’t have to endure financial stress of keeping up with the Joneses’. (Trying to decide between giving your child a better education or remaining debt-free is a form of torture.21) The rest, for whom private school was never an option, would stop feeling ashamed by their inability to give their children the best. Meanwhile, the quality of public education would improve dramatically, if for no other reason that it’d be the only game in town. Put another way, everyone except the very rich would win if private schools were abolished, and the rich should have no problem giving their kids a different leg up. It’s not like we’re banning private tutors or summers in Paris.
By the way, this general argument can be applied to any competition between public and private options. People tend to discount nonfinancial forms of participation in public ventures, as well as the extent to which withdrawal from the public option initiates a cycle in which the public option becomes increasingly worse compared to the private.
The Reinforcing Cycle of Private Advantage
So, why don’t we abolish private schools? Part of the answer is at the core of this essay: our obsession with individualism. I have every right to spend my hard-earned money exactly how I want. Yes, we get it. But I think the issue runs deeper in at least two ways. First, public and private enterprises are subject to different investment mechanics, which makes comparing the two unfair. Second, once public works reach a threshold of dysfunction, the reasonable response is to prefer private alternatives. In other words, a public school can become so bad that I have no option but to pay for private school, even if I can’t really afford it.
A central theme in The Affluent Society is that private projects have many advantages over public ones. Consider the example of a city that wants to build a sports arena. The first hurdle is that not everyone in the city wants one. So, fights and delays ensue. If the project gets approved, then no matter how popular it was, there will be a salty contingent afterwards. This contingent will go around grumbling about how the government spent their hard-earned tax dollars on a frivolous expense.
By contrast, if a private company wants to build an arena, only those who want the arena will pay for it. They won’t pay for it upfront, of course. The private company will raise money on the promise of interest, and if all goes according to plan, will pay their lenders back with money from only those city-dwellers who want to become customers. The private route thus eliminates both the fighting beforehand and the grumbling afterwards. The entire process is just much simpler and more flexible. Everything happens behind the scenes, without the public’s knowledge or participation, until one day another business exists for their potential patronage.
Consider another example of a housing development project that hits an early snafu. Let’s say a toxic substance is found underground and requires additional testing before work can proceed. In a private operation, the money is supplied immediately, and the work soon continues. In a public operation, the project is now over budget, and it will take some time before additional money can be secured. While this happens, workers sit on their hands and machinery collects dust on the lot, wasting even more time and money. Everyone observes this and most come away with the correct observation—that public works are inherently more cumbersome—but not the correct conclusion, in my opinion—that they are nevertheless worth it.
The common perception that public projects are less efficient and more wasteful, indicated by phrases such as “good enough for government work,” is mostly true. It’s the inevitable result of private investment’s built-in advantages. This perception synchronizes well with an American attitude already suspicious of anything common, group-based, or shared. When this leads to significant underinvestment in public expenditure, a further problem is created, namely that the private option becomes the only sane one. At certain levels of dysfunction—and I am tempted to throw Philadelphia’s public transportation under the bus, no pun intended—it’s not worth having a public option at all. Then and only then does it become a waste. Likewise, as much as someone like me might want to send my kids to the public school, it might be so bad that I just can’t.
The peril of this escalating trend—favoring private options over public ones until private becomes the only rational choice—is that a society dominated by private options would be a dystopia. This stems from the perennial issue of capitalism: it is efficient within its own scope but fails to see the broader context. Capitalism would never provide, on its own, many things that we presumably still want. Beautiful parks is one. Where’s the money in that? Public safety is another. Sure I’ll protect you—for a price. No, I think most of us want a somewhat visible hand when it comes to stuff like education, health, infrastructure, safety, clean air, and so on.
So what do we do? you might ask. Subject ourselves to the inefficient process of public enterprise once in a while? Yes! As Galbraith says, “Complaint about waste and inefficiency in performing these [public] services, which is endemic in our political comment and often with some foundation, should not be allowed to confuse the issue. Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are. And waste can rarely be eliminated by reducing expenditure.”22
Certainly in isolation, waste is a bad thing. (I’m with you there.) But if we zoom out and recognize waste and inefficiency as the price we have to pay for something that otherwise wouldn’t be provided—like a public transportation system—then perhaps it’s not so hard to swallow.
We need public investment, goodwill, and faith to inject our public offerings with some life. On the other hand, we need our public offerings to be good enough that we want to continue to improve them. The exact opposite cycle has been happening for some time, much to everyone’s detriment and despair.
Summary
Allow me to end this tirade against privatization with an anecdote. A few years ago, some friends and I were hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. One friend and I, who had gone to public school together, were talking about how private schools provide a better education. Another friend friend was vehemently disagreeing. For a while, I couldn’t understand his anger…and then it clicked:
“Kyle,” I said. “You know Mike and I went to public school, too?”
“Oh,” he replied, and then laughed a bit. “Yeah you’re right, private school is much better.”
Offering private options in lieu of, or in addition to, public options undercuts the investment people would otherwise make in public options. We would make much better the one thing we had if there were no option to abandon it. But private school is not the only example of something that, in having both a private and public option, pits unequal offerings against one another. Many things that were once in the hands of the community, and thus part of the general experience, are coming under a private umbrella, leaving their public counterparts to wither on the vine.23 This gives people in our society yet another way to feel unequal to and ultimately different from each other. As if we needed more.
V. Here at the end of all things
“Our narratives are also no longer shared at the societal level.”24
There’s a reason people in America so often talk about building community: it’s not already there. We have missed the forest of community in America for the trees of individuals, and unless something changes soon, I worry we are committed to decline.
Where we need to go is clear. Though, I suppose, how to get there is anything but. The basic question is the same one Salerno asks in his essay about what happens when therapy goes well: “Is it possible for a nation of 330 million fully optimized Is to also function as a fully optimized We?” If the answer is No, which I think it is, then how do we become We again?
The answer might be: we don’t. Indeed, the public enterprise called America might be in the same sorry state as Philadelphia’s parks and public transportation. The patience of the people might be spent, and at a certain point, I sympathize with the conclusion that all a person can do is raise the drawbridge and protect their own keep.
But if it isn’t too late, then the guiding principle for change should be this: build and center as much as possible around everyone being in the same boat. Do not emphasize what makes us different and stop encouraging people to “go their own way.” Instead, emphasize what we have in common, and give people every chance to contribute to the wellness of their communities.25 There is no set of laws, no system of incentives in a society, that can ever approximate the power of people caring about one another and their community.
I’ve offered plenty of quotidian examples in this essay, but let me end with perhaps the most banal of all—albeit the one that prompted this essay.
I was at my wife’s office one morning, getting some coffee at a bakery on the ground floor. We had just walked from a different part of the city where we had watched a teenager leave his dog’s poop on the sidewalk and continue on as if nothing had happened. At the bakery, I was still disappointed with myself that I hadn’t said anything. My wife asked if I would have said something if the event had occurred here, in front of her office, in a much nicer and well-kept part of town. I said yes—certainly. But why?
I think that in the nice part of town, I would have been emboldened specifically by the impression that the people around me would’ve agreed. “There’s a clear norm here,” I said to my wife, “which not only makes it less likely that someone would leave poop, but also more likely that if I said something, people would back me up.”
My wife then asked me if I’d be just as willing to say something if the teenager was black.
“No, probably not,” I admitted.
“Why?”
“The optics, of course.”
“Even though it’s the same act?”
“Even still.”
“I guess that’s what’s wrong with this country,” she agreed. “We’re missing the forest for the trees.”
My Antonia, p. 7.
see also political polarization in the american public, polarization in today’s congress, and Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized
Just another casually brilliant line from the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I’m not one of these whackos that thinks the media is part of a larger conspiracy. I merely acknowledge that their incentives are misaligned with mine. I want the unvarnished truth; they want my eyeballs.
And indeed have…only 410 murders in Philadelphia in 2023!
The trees were used to roll the statues to their final location. I should note that there is some debate about whether this was the only or major cause of Easter Island’s deforestation, or whether deforestation is what led to the Eastern Islanders’ demise. But it’s a great example, so we’ll let it stand.
By the way, I am not the only one beating this drum, nor is it a recent thesis. For example, MacDonald and Leary wrote in 2005: “Those of us living in individualistic societies are inundated with messages trumpeting autonomy and individuality. Yet, a picture is emerging that people are so vitally important to each other that social needs are ingrained in our very biology.” (218)
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, p. 71-72.
Funny, because in America the expression of individual personality is often seen to be in defiance of the oppressive group, not as an appeal to them.
In the waiting room of a hospital the other day, I was a captive to a TV screen flashing physical and mental health advice. “Today I will,” one particular quote said, “be my authentic self.” Barf!
Yes, I actually read this. No, I would not recommend it.
p. 8.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 47.
What’s the difference between these again?
Truth be told, I’m upper middle class, but you already knew that.
including animals or future generations
Yes, it’s almost always his.
p. 188
whose tagline, hilariously enough, was “research it”
“I can’t even send my kids to the school down the street without second-guessing it because now we have the options of homeschooling and charter schools.” - https://thelifeinstitute.net/blog/2013/why-im-going-to-keep-letting-santa-and-the-tooth-fairy-ruin-my-life
p. 178
This is the main argument of Ivan Illich’s work, that we deaden some capacity within individuals and communities when we institutionalize it. For example, formal education deadens the curiosity in children and weakens the community’s ability to nurture it. Institutionalized medicine incentivizes people to ignore their own health and siphons power from community healers and healing practices.
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, p. 189.
I say all this, by the way, as a dedicated introvert; as someone who prefers spending his time writing essays like this than chit-chatting with people on the street or going to a show. Hopefully, that will only bolster my argument in your eyes because I am quite clearly not advocating for the world to become something that is better for me.