Understanding history and current affairs is a signal-to-noise problem. There are always fundamental shifts taking place in the culture
that will shape the future, but they are usually largely masked by a great deal
of day-to-day noise, ephemeral fads, political battles, hyped news, and the
like. I spend a great deal of time trying my best to discern the fundamental
shifts through the fog of the daily noise of life. And by the way, this whole election and its
aftermath - important and emotional as it seems to many people right now – is
really just noise in the long term, as were similar upsets, now largely
forgotten, when Reagan was elected, when Roosevelt was elected, etc, etc.
The fundamental shifts that seem to me to be important for
the future direction of American culture include the encroachment of automation
and the resulting changes in the labor market, the effects of worldwide
interconnectedness (the internet, cell phones, etc), the demographic changes
producing an older population, and the rise of China as an economic powerhouse,
just as examples.
Of all of these, there are two movements in American culture
which I think are pernicious and a threat in the long run to national survival:
The first is the emergence of a victim-centered culture, or as
one writer named it, the grievance culture. The essence of this culture is the
assumption that whatever is wrong with one’s life is someone else’s fault, and
that they therefore owe recompense for it. We see it everywhere. Lawyers put up
billboards advertising their services for litigation to those involved in auto
accidents (in my youth such lawyers were called “ambulance chasers”, and it was
a derogatory term). African-American leaders demand payment to themselves for
indignities visited upon slave ancestors many generations back. Doctors go out
of business because their liability insurance rates are unsupportable –
patients sue them because medical procedures, always chancy by their very
nature, didn’t turn out the way they expected.
Certainly there are real grievances in the world. Prejudice
based on gender, on race, on sexual preference, on religion, on politics, etc
is alive and well. Corporations and bureaucracies on occasion do terrible
injustices. There are careless and incompetent doctors in the world. All of
these are valid reasons to try to change the culture. But they are not valid
reasons to assume that any misfortune in life is someone else’s fault. Life is uncertain, unfair, and probabilistic
in nature. We all – even the wealthy of us – are born with disadvantages. We
all – even the privileged among us – have bad things happen to us. The measure of our character is how well we
handle the misadventures of life – how much responsibility we take for our own
condition. Women do rise to be CEOs of
major corporations, despite the glass ceiling. Blacks do rise to be president,
despite the prejudice. Poor people do rise to become wealthy, despite the
economic disadvantage.
The essence of American culture through most of our nation’s
history has been the Horatio Alger story – poor boy works hard and
succeeds. The essence of American
culture though most of our history has been embodied in the hearty settler
family, fending for themselves in a wilderness, facing off hostile Indians,
uncertain weather, and wild bears. Yes, these were in many ways myths, but they
expressed the expectations of the culture – that people were responsible for
their own condition. We are losing that,
to be replaced with the expectation of a sort of childlike dependence on
others, on the system, on government, to make up for whatever ills happen to
befall us in life. That attitude will, I think, seriously harm our culture and
our nation in the long run
The second pernicious cultural movement is the rise of
identity politics, of attempts, for political advantage, to divide Americans
into distinct “tribes” – women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc., and set them
against each other in zero-sum political games. America is a nation of
immigrants, and the great success of America has been to accept a wide variety
of peoples from around the world and
weld them within a generation or two into a common culture and a common nation
– something Europeans have not done so well and far East nations haven’t even
tried yet. As Theodor Roosevelt said in a speech 1915:
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans.
Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans,
Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all …
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing
all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it
to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of
German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans,
Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate
nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality,
than with the other citizens of the American Republic … There is no such thing
as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good
American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
More recently, Whoopi Goldberg expressed the same sentiment
last year in an interview:
I can’t keep up with it. I went from being colored to
being a negro to being black to African-American. I figured I would land on
American……You know what uh-uh! This is my country. My mother, my grandmother,
my great-grand folks, we busted ass to be here. I’m an American. I’m not an
African-American. I’m not a chick-American. I’m an American!...... Any time you
hyphenate American, any time you put something in front of it, it’s like you’re
not a real American. Well, I’m a whole lot of all-American. This is my country
and I’m an American.
The attempt to divide people with identity politics – a
staple for example of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign – is an
existential threat to the nation. One only has to look at European countries
that have within them ghettos of disaffected immigrants who don’t feel part of
the nation they live in to see the problems it causes.
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