Rethinking "Community"

I was both shocked and dismayed last Thursday morning over coffee to read a letter to the editor of our local paper that began, “In the event that Barack Hussein Obama is re-elected to the presidency of the United States of America, all members of the military, all members of all the police services, and members of emergency services providers, will have to evaluate and decide if they are going to obey the dictates of the president and his cadre of ‘czars,’ or they will honor the Constitution of the United States.”

            The shock was that someone would go so far as to urge members of our military to consider what is, at the bottom line, something that looks very much like treason—that U.S. soldiers should disobey their commander in chief—and, even more, that a newspaper would publish it.   Free speech is the price of democracy, and in this case I felt some “sticker shock.”

            More deeply felt, though was dismay over what the letter suggests about the loss of community in the U.S.   We’ve seen this in so many ways over the past few years, but this letter illustrates just how profoundly separated from the mainstream some of our citizens feel. 

            It is easy to chalk some of this up to racism.  Clearly, there is a segment of the U.S. population who cannot identify with an African-American being President and who, as a result, see themselves as no longer needing to be loyal to a government led by a President who is not “us.”  This is downplayed in the media, but it is obvious when you listen to what people say.   There is also an element of xenophobia—fear of the stranger—at work.  For the past decade, many in the U.S. have marginalized all Moslems for what some Moslems did on 9/11/01.  Note that the letter emphasized President Obama’s middle name, which is also the name of the dictator that we deposed in our misguided war against Iraq.  The ongoing nonsense about the President’s birth certificate is an example of how this has been used to create suspicion that he is not one of “us,” but instead an exotic “other.”  The right wing in our country has used this as a tool to further radicalize those who already felt disenfranchised by the economy, loss of social standing as workers, etc.

            But I believe that these two factors are symptoms of a broader and, ultimately, more widespread concern.   William Irwin Thompson wrote about the idea that, as society expands, so does our cultural identity.  Early cultures celebrated the clan or tribe as the point of identity.  As farming took root and towns developed, the family identity became “private,” and citizenship in a town became the “public identity.”  Eventually, one’s identity with one’s hometown became private as nationality became the public identity.  We see this in the evolution of how immigrant families identify themselves over the first few generations.  The first generation brings to their new home the language and customs of the old country.  The second generation begins to make much of that private, as they take on the identity of the new country in which they were born.  By the third generation, the old culture is a heritage celebrated at family events and holidays.

            Today, we are at a point where our public identities are being challenged by globalization.  Traditional definitions of communities as groups of mutually dependent people in a defined geographic area are fading.  The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, even the ephemera of our lives—our toys, our greeting cards, etc.—are not made locally by our neighbors.  Instead, they are produced all over the world by people most of us never see and to whom most of us have no sense of social obligation.   But, we have not yet begun to see ourselves as “citizens of the world” or members of a “global community.”  As a result, many of us—having been raised to expect to be part of a traditional community that takes pride in the “Made in the USA” label—feel vaguely disenfranchised.  Being an American seems not to mean what it used to mean, but we don’t know what else to be.

            Then along come the politicians and the robber barons who finance them, who sense they can gain an advantage by playing off the unease that people are feeling.  The result can be seen in headlines throughout the political season as politicians pander to the unease, turning fear into anger and, they hope, action that will benefit their political or corporate interests.  In this environment, we cease to be a community at a much deeper level.

            I have been reading Citizen, Louise Knight’s biography of Jane Addams, the great social reformer of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.   Looking back on the Pullman strike of the 1890s, she noted that one’s ethics are contextual and that, when major changes happen in society, a new ethic may arise.   In the context of the Industrial Revolution—and the massive immigration and urbanization that accompanied it—that meant moving beyond the old class-based ethic of philanthropy as looking down on others to a new ethic of mutual engagement among social equals.   

            Today, the Information Revolution is causing a disruption that is similar equal in scope, if not greater, to the Industrial Revolution.  Instead of immigration and urbanization, this new revolution is causing globalization and, as Fareed Zakaria noted in his book, The Post-American World, not the decline of America, but the “rise of the rest.”   We can no longer see the rest of the world as strangers:  we are too interdependent on numerous fronts.

            What we need to do, in order to mend our increasingly shattered sense of community, is to embrace what is best about our culture and celebrate it and, at the same time, get to know our neighbors.  The long-term solution lies in our educational system.  When I was in high school in the 1960s, seniors took a course called “Problems of Democracy.”  It was designed to help us understand the complexities of the American vision in practice before we went out and joined the adult world.  We need a fresh take on that to prepare people to live as citizens and be productive workers in our new, global community. 

            Meanwhile, I hope that, by the end of this political season, we will be able to find ways to mend relationships and find common purpose as members of a shared community.  That, it seems to me, is the job of our elected representatives—and those who want to be elected—and our media, which has been awfully silent on the issues that underpin the headlines these days.

Responding to Extremists

This report--which details the growth in "militias" and other anti-government groups, should be seen as a warning sign to every reasonable American and a signal to politicians to stop pandering to people on the fringes and start working together to build a new, strong middle ground in American politics.  

Report: Number of U.S. anti-government groups rises for third year - Local News - Monterey, CA - msnbc.com

Merck to pay $950 million to settle U.S. Vioxx charge - Health - msnbc.com

Merck to pay $950 million to settle U.S. Vioxx charge - Health - msnbc.com

This article reinforces the idea that we have returned to the Robber Baron era. For corporations like Merck, breaking the law is simply a cost of doing business. They lack any sense of civic responsibility. The only way to reverse this is to hold the people who run these companies legally responsible and give them jail time for the criminal acts that their companies commit under their leadership. Ultimately, perhaps the solution is to hold their stockholders responsible for financing criminal activity. That would be one small step toward public accountability.

Net Generation as the "Occupant" Generation

 In 2005, Diana Oblinger and James Oblinger first defined what they call the “Net Generation”—a generation born in or after 1982 who have lived their entire lives in the era of the Internet.  If Baby Boomers were defined by television and Generation X by video gaming, the Net Generation is defined by the Web and online communities. 

They are, in effect, the emerging American society.

This month, as the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon morphed from a localized protest in New York to a global movement, it became clear that the Net Generation is also the “Occupant” Generation.   They were born at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution and have lived all their lives in an era where one’s identity in the broader society as “citizen” has been replaced by “consumer.”  They are the increasingly disenfranchised victims of a corporate plutocracy that has reamed out the core of our culture and, one might expect, left little for this generation to strive for—except for righting the wrongs that have been done to their society. 

And, perhaps, creating a very different society in the vacuum that the financial 1 percenters have left in the wake of their greed.

In Educating the Net Generation (EDUCAUSE 2005, available at www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/ ) the Oblingers reported several unifying characteristics that Howe and Strauss described of this generation, which has also been called the Millennial Generation:

·      They tend to gravitate toward group activity.

·      They believe that “it’s cool to be smart” and focus on academic performance.

·      They get involved in extracurricular activities.

·      They are close to their parents and identify with their parents’ values.

·      They tend to respect social conventions and institutions.

·      They are fascinated by new technologies.

·      They are racially and ethnically diverse.

They also noted that, while this generation is very mobile, it is also always connected and most are experiential learners—they prefer learning by doing, an exploratory style that, note the Oblingers, “enables them to better retain information and use it in creative, meaningful ways.”  Some other preferences:

·      They prefer to work in teams.

·      They prefer structure to ambiguity.

·      They are oriented toward inductive discovery or observation, formulating hypotheses, and figuring out rules.

·      They crave interactivity.

·      They eagerly participate in community activity.

·      They believe they can make a difference.

The same characteristics that made this a unique generation of learners may also serve to help them confront imbalance between the people, through our government, and increasingly international corporate forces.  The challenge is to create a new balance in society between corporations and our government.  In many ways the task before them is much more difficult than what the Baby Boomers faced in the 1960s.  Then, we still lived in a mixed economy in which there was agreement that government should respond to society’s needs and protect people from the excesses of the private economy.  Today, the government, while still a potential ally, is weakened by a generation of deregulation.  The Net Generation, with its willingness to engage as a community—to be more than consumers—can overcome the current ambiguity about the role of government and create a society that will truly make a difference.

The Occupy movement is an important step toward that goal. 

Sachs' "Mixed Economy"--A Middle Path

I am continuing to read Jeffrey Sachs’ The Price of Civilization.  It is like taking a crash course in modern economics.  Sachs’ discussion of the current political and cultural context of economics makes me think that the struggle is not between two opposing views of how to manage government within the context of our constitutional democracy.  Instead, I am beginning to think that the struggle is between democracy itself and a plutocracy in which a tiny minority of super-rich elites rule on the backs of an increasingly poor working class, buffered by a small professional class. 

           

To find a counterpart, I suspect we need to look back not to the Roaring Twenties or the Gilded Age of the Industrial period, but further to the landed aristocracy of the agrarian Middle Ages.  While that aristocracy was based on land—the proper form of wealth in an agrarian era—today’s aristocracy is based on market wealth, a wealth that manipulates markets rather than produce goods that improve the lives of people.   Just as the landed barons controlled the government of the Middle Ages, the corporate/finance barons are attempting to control democratic government today, rending it in the words of one presidential candidate, “inconsequential” and opening the door to direct corporate control.

Ultimately, I suspect, this is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are really rallying against.  And, I further suspect, it is what concerned the Tea Party before they were taken over by the plutocrats.   At its most absolute, the fight, is not just to determine which political party will control government.  The fight is for idea of democracy itself.  

That said, it is absolutely essential that people not drift to extremes.  Neither a corporate plutocracy, in which government is inconsequential, nor a socialist government, in which the market is controlled centrally, are likely to produce long-term health for society.  What has proven to be successful—and which made the United States the most successful country in the world for most of the 20^th century—according to Sachs is a mixed economy, in which corporations are generally free to produce goods and service and the government serves to do those things that are necessary for a happy life but that do not produce profit:  build roads and train systems, create levees and dams to control rivers and avoid floods, fund basic research that often has no immediate profit value.  And, I would add, regulate the activities of corporations only so that they do not work against the best interests of the population as a whole.

Ultimately, we need to focus not on the extremes, but on the balance—the mix, if you will—between these two aspects of a healthy democratic society.  Government and business are the Yin and Yang of a successful economy.  Together—as we found in the half-century between the Great Depression and the Reagan Revolution—they can create a wonderful society.  As we have seen elsewhere in the world, without that balance one gets failure at either extreme, whether it be the socialism of the USSR or the plutocratic oil dictatorships of the Middle East that are now being dismantled by the Arab Spring. 

Moderation, rather than extreme idealogy, is the key.  We need to reward politicians who have a long view and who are able to see the value of a diverse American “us.”

Civic Virtue

Jeffrey Sachs begins his new book The Price of Civilization with this statement:

At the root of America’s economic crisis lies a moral crisis:  the decline of civic virtue among America’s political and economic elite.  A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world.  America has developed the world’s most competitive market society but has squandered it civic virtue along the way.  Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.

It is a statement that sheds light on the ongoing debate about Social Security. 

            Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”—a fraud by which the government cheats taxpayers—“investors” in Perry’s analogy—by not returning full value on their investment but instead using it to pay out funds to others.   Perry’s accusation is a good example of the civic blindness that has infected conservative thinking in the U.S. 

            Social Security is not the equivalent of an individual retirement account.  Instead, it is a kind of publicly funded insurance policy.  Behind it is a key assumption:  that those of us who have been able to make a good living will ensure that our neighbors who have not done as well will still be able to retire with a modicum of dignity.  The “return on investment” of Society Security is not what the well-off take out of it, but that our elderly neighbors in need don’t go hungry.

            In the early run-up to the 2012 presidential primaries, we have heard candidates for the highest office in the land suggest that those who cannot afford health care should simply die and that those who don’t have jobs should simply go out and get one.  The lack of compassion among these people—and, by extension, in the general population that keeps these folks thinking they have a chance at being our President—is appalling.  Moreover, as Sachs suggests, it bodes ill for our country’s long-term health.

            Sachs’ book suggests that civic virtue and prosperity go hand in hand.  I would love to hear a debate among the candidates about how they define these terms.  What constitutes “civic virtue” for a Presidential candidate who advocates a government that is inconsequential?   Is a society in which one percent of the population control 20 percent of the wealth a “prosperous society?”  Or is it a poor society with a handful of very rich plutocrats?

            I hope that we can get to a debate about these issues in the months ahead.

NYT: Forests dying off as world's climate warms - Technology & science - The New York Times - msnbc.com

Here is a detailed report on how global warming is resulting in a not-so-gradual killing off of forests around the world, as insects that used to be controlled by cold weather are living to become invasive.

The article notes that richer nations will need to fund the work that is needed to stop this trend. Given today's political climate, it is hard to imagine that we can come together as a community to fight global warming at this level. It is sad to think what we stand to lose because of wrong-headed politics and radical ideologies.

We can make progress--and save countless lives--only by working together. It is time for a little humility in our politics.


NYT: Forests dying off as world's climate warms - Technology & science - The New York Times - msnbc.com