George F. Will has an interesting thesis: Our politics are toxic because we live in an age of plenty. I'm not sure I buy it. But I place it before you:
In 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression and of a decade that would end with the beginning of the worst of wars, a great economist wrote an essay (“Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”) of ambivalent cheerfulness. John Maynard Keynes said the economic problem, “the struggle for subsistence,” was approaching solution. Another century of growth — by around now — would mean that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares … to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
So, material plenty deprives humanity of what had been its unavoidable preoccupation. This would be a problem, Keynes wrote, that could plunge society into something akin to a “nervous breakdown.” Brink Lindsey says that Americans who think Keynes was mistaken should look around.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, indulging in progressive utopianism, insisted that “necessitous men are not free.” If so, freedom is the absence of necessity. But living beyond necessities is not enticing: Surmounting necessities is a source of life’s meaning and satisfaction.
Will speculates that, with so many Americans living above the poverty line, America is experiencing a nervous breakdown. He cites Lindsey:
“Reported unhappiness is on the rise, and mental health problems are surging. Morbid obesity is becoming normal … IQ scores have begun falling. Marriage and childbearing and personal friendships and community involvement are all becoming less common … We now have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but the social authority of that knowledge has fallen into embattled retreat while conspiracy theories and mass delusions fill the vacuum … Where once workplace solidarity and tight-knit social relationships were compensations for lower economic standing, now the new class divide leaves those outside the elite increasingly atomized and adrift … In the industrial era, workers had it much tougher physically, but the status of the working class in social estimation was incomparably higher than today.”
Lindsey’s list of social ills does not include the one that is the most debilitating because it impedes addressing the others: the poisonous politics of rivalrous grievances. A politics of distributional conflict — who gets what from whom — is banal, but it is better than today’s politics of cultural contempt and score-settling: who gets even with whom. Today’s political conversation is dominated by tone-setting minority factions who would be improved by banality.
The politics of grasping is unlovely, but not as ugly as politics treated as a mode of cultural bullying and disparagement. As memories of subsistence struggles recede, people who are no longer necessitous are indeed free — free to use politics for unpleasant self-expression. Their default mentality is anger, which reminds them that they are alive.
“The effect of liberty to individuals,” said Edmund Burke, “is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.” The fundamental economic problem of attaining subsistence having been banished by plenty, many hyper-politicized Americans have filled the void in their lives with the grim fun of venting their animosities. This would not have surprised Peter De Vries, the wittiest American writer since Mark Twain: “Human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”
As I see it, the way the plenty is distributed has a lot to do with the anger. But I admit that there's more to it than that.
Image: Roll Call
16 comments:
Freedom without responsibilities sends us aimlessly to the future.
TB
Precisely, TB.
Saying...."I want my freedom to choose whether I am vaccinated against covid or not", is a prime example of not living wisely, agreeably or well or, taking other peoples health into consideration or, any other issue that may occur regarding the collective. Anyong
It's a sign of self-absorption, Anyong.
I was moved by a TikTok clip of an older American black fellow. He related a conversation with his own father who told him that his grandfather walked 10 miles to work. His father walked 5 miles to work. The narrator, the son, drove a Cadillac. The man's grandson rode a Mercedes. The great grandson might drive a Ferrari. But the great, great grandson, he'd be walking.
The man asked his father how that could be? He replied that tough times create hard men. Hard men create easy times. Easy times create weak men. Weak men create tough times.
He said, many will not understand, but you have to raise warriors.
I watched this just after I had read a couple of papers about strong societies and weak societies and how each will fare under the pressures and disruption of climate breakdown. Strong societies are not necessarily those wealthiest or most powerful or otherwise advantaged. In fact those societies may be the weakest, most vulnerable to these impacts because they have weak people incapable of preserving their bounty. Weak people who are unable to sacrifice even for their own good.
The Depression and WWII created tough men. Even the most devastated countries such as bombed out Germany or Japan recovered, bounced back. Weak men could never have done that. North America emerged with tough men and they built the most broad-based and powerful middle class known to history. They delivered easy times and those "the world is your oyster" times created weak men, people who are today dragging us back into tough times.
My dad raised warriors, one RCN, the other RCAF. It wasn't a matter of coercion but example. That's out of vogue. The Canadian forces, miniscule as they are today, cannot meet even modest recruiting targets.
We're weak, Owen, and we're headed for tough times. Our prime minister can glibly toss away $24 billion on a pipeline but take pride in scrounging up a paltry 10-year, 1.6 billion fund for climate adaptation.
Canada, despite our many advantages, is a country of weak men led by weak men.
- MoS
Tolstoy was right, Mound. Character is destiny. Our collective character suggests that we face a dark destiny.
"country of weak men led by weak men."
Thanks MoS ... So glad we no longer have the 'weaker sex' amongst us.
It's difficult to find profiles in courage these days, PoV.
The strong men of the generation that grew up in the 1930s and fought through WW2 displayed what I took to be adult behaviour when I grew up in the 1950s. I don't see much of that behaviour now. They were my dad's buddies from the union and the VSL. One thing they couldn't tolerate was the sycophant. Those weakest of men were sorted out. Nowadays they're everywhere. They're running the place. I've wondered whether there might have been a causal relationship between tough military service and the success of collectivism that led to the prosperity of the working class in the post war period.
While I don't fully agree with Mound's thesis, he does bring up an interesting question. If the Americans were to invade Canada what would Canadians do? Would Canadians defend as they did in the War of 1812? Would they stand to oppose a foreign invader as the Ukranians are presently doing? Would those wearing red MAGA hats defend Canada? Would those Alberta separatists? How about our corporate sector with all their financial ties to Wall Street? Or would we just roll over?
That generation faced poverty, violence, and a threat to their survival, John. We too face a threat to our survival. But so many of us just don't care.
Good questions, Toby -- existential questions.
I quick couple of googles at my figures suggests that "only" ~11% of the US population is living below the poverty line. Not exactly what John Maynard Keynes envisaged.
Personally I think Wills thesis is wildly simplistic but may have a bit of validity. The USA is a snake pit of competing and hating groups and has been for most of its existence. Politics do not get much worse than a civil war. Then, there were shooting battles between mine owners and union-organizing miners in the late 1800's and 1920's, McCarthyism in the 1950's, lynchings as a political art of suppression.
Marine Major General Smedley Butler reports in his memoirs, being solicited by a groud of US Oligarchs to organize a coup d'état in the 1930's.
We may just have had a relative period of calm in the USA from the end of WWII until roughly the turn of the century due to the fact that for much of that time the US had generally rising levels of prosperity. Now this rising prosperity has hit a stone wall. All the good-paying blue collar jobs have been outsourced, a mass of the people are facing increasing financial insecurity---30 year olds still living in their parents' basement?
What we probably are seeing is the usual rise of extremism/populism that these sort of things as we saw in Germany in the 1920s--30s or in Argentina in roughly the same time period which let to the rise of Juan Perón.
It's not exactly the '30's, jrk. But as Twain wrote, history may not repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
"country of weak men led by weak men."
Had a farming friend used to say
"From shirt sleeves to shirtsleeves is 3 generations"
had another friend who would exclaim
"I'm surrounded and hounded by slack jawed idiots and imbeciles"
then wryly smile
"present company excepted ...of course."
@Toby
I often asked that in conversation the reply being "Why invade what you already own?"
Might be odd considering both militaries have equal status in each others country as of about 2010.
While it may be true that great minds think alike, lungta, it's also true that fools never differ.
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