I ended Quietly
Doing One's Duty by wondering whether
the ethic implied in its title might have become anachronistic—whether
individual devotion to the collective good is passé. In more and more arenas, we have adopted a market-oriented
approach to communal objectives, asserting that they are best gained from the
random interactions of myriad individuals, all selfishly seeking their own
goals. This is Malthusianism and
social Darwinism redux, holding that the survival of the fittest in human
affairs is an inviolable natural law leading to the benefit of society as a
whole.
Perhaps
no societal question is more fraught than the relationship between the
collective and the individual. The
pendulum of thought and power constantly swings between the two. Daniel
T. Rodgers, professor of history at Princeton, argues in his 2012 book The
Age of Fracture that the last part of
the 20th century involved such a swing, a massive one from the
collective to the individual.
While I found the book at times tedious and rambling, I think its
underlying thesis is correct, and therefore felt it was worth reading. Consider just the following issues,
some of which are thoroughly discussed in the book:
• The "Greatest Generation" celebrated by Tom Brokaw, which
ennobled self-sacrifice for the good of all, morphed into Tom
Wolfe's "Me Generation": the baby boomers who despoiled the
commons for their own advantage.
In the process, John Kennedy's famous 1961 Inaugural plea, "Ask
what you can do for your country," segued into Ivan Boesky's infamous 1986
dictum, "Greed is healthy," shamefully enunciated at a UC Berkeley
business-school commencement,
• The top-down Keynesian macroeconomics that advocates economic
regulation for the good of the commonwealth—a view widely held in the wake of
the Great Depression—was displaced by a bottom-up microeconomics interested
only in countless individuals and firms responding to price signals in
satisfaction of their own wants.
We have put Adam Smith's invisible hand of the marketplace on
steroids, although he was concerned with a measured trade in goods, not fevered
gambling on derivative financial instruments. Any measure of control of the economy is widely scorned by
those who wield the greatest power in it, those who glorify Schumpeter's ideal
of "creative destruction" in unrestrained capitalism (as long,
perhaps, as it is not their own domains being destroyed).
• The conviction that government is an active partner providing goods
and services that the market cannot provide easily or at all—safety nets,
infrastructure, education, defense, environmental protection—has come into
disrepute by much more than a fringe.
Many consider government as an outright enemy, at best a hindrance,
which gets in the way of an efficient marketplace and sops up resources better
left in the hands of individuals.
The safety nets of Social Security and Medicare? Switch them over to competition in the
private sector. Medical care for
all? Let the devil (or the
emergency room) take the hindmost.
Welfare? Consign it to
private charity.
Infrastructure? Let it
crumble until a catastrophe dictates repair, or sell it off to private
enterprise. Education? Issue vouchers for it that can be used
at private schools, which will vie for them, or outsource it to competing
charter schools. Defense? No citizen's army is needed; let its
burden be assumed by the least advantaged, and outsource as much as possible to
the efficiencies of mercenary market participants. Environmental protection? Let it function most cost-effectively in a marketplace where
licenses to pollute are traded.
• The ideal of E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One—with all of the One
subscribing to a core ethos, has dissolved into a plethora of contentious,
often-hostile special-interest groups, each congealed into a power bloc. The pendulum has swung from the
stultifying conformity of the mid-20th century to a veneration of
unconstrained individualism.
Hyphenated Americans fixate more on the adjective that modifies the word
"American" than on "American." It is the market again at work, this time in the political
arena, where blocs striving against one another are thought to yield a greater
common good than blocs cooperating or subsuming their own agendas to a common
national purpose.
This is the Age of Fracture about which
Rodgers writes. There seems to be no sphere in which the market's invisible
hand is not seen as a solution. Of
course, not all obeisance to the marketplace is bad per se; but the constant hosannas to its god-like powers
are. As Rodgers puts it,
"The nation disaggregated into a constellation of private
acts"—those acts to be mediated for the benefit of the nation by the magic
of the market.
In the
face of such fissuring, is it any wonder that our ability to govern ourselves
has plummeted? Legislators,
selfishly concentrating on their re-electability, dare not depart from the
schismatic blocs to which they are beholden, dare not give priority to the
commonweal. Compromise is
anathema. Lobbyists, who seem to
be more numerous than legislators, re-enforce loyalty to blocs with massive
amounts of money. The Supreme
Court has ruled that money—any amount of it—is a vicar for free speech in the
marketplace of ideas. The result
is a system of governance stalemated among immovable cabals.
To return to the question with which I opened: Is individual
devotion to the collective good passé?
Perhaps temporarily, but not in the long run. The pendulum will inevitably swing back as the damages
caused by extreme individualism become more apparent to all. The real question is, can the
pendulum's oscillations be dampened so that commitment to the community and to
the individual can coexist in a balanced equilibrium?