Adam's Ideas

Parades and Infrastructure

Donald Trump wants to hold a big military parade. It makes sense. The military is the most trusted institution in the US, according to polls over many years. So a controversial President might want to identify himself with the military.  He has already larded up his administration with generals.  Certainly there is little payoff in identifying with the government, or Congress, or most other US institutions that have nosedived in popular opinion. The Donald, like a lot of other Americans, looks at our government and dislikes most of it.

Maybe one reason the military stands out is that we no longer try to use government for much else.  It used to be that government led the way on big things that made Americans proud. The Panama Canal. TVA. The interstate highway system. The space program. Social Security, the GI Bill, the Great Society. We don’t do that kind of stuff any more. We have a huge military that bounces around the world–without a whole lot of success, one is forced to add—but is popular partly because there isn’t much else we do as a country.

In Canada and the UK and the Nordic states and a lot of other developed countries, their national healthcare system is tremendously popular—probably the most beloved national institution. It symbolizes something that they do together to share the wealth generated by a successful post-industrial economy.  So do other social programs that offer unemployment benefits and free higher education and family leave. One can argue about the pluses and minuses of each of these programs. But taken together they create a sense of community and shared purpose about what matters for a thriving society.

How do Americans rate our healthcare system? Not so good. It remains astronomically expensive, with mediocre performance that still leaves out a lot of Americans. Obamacare improved it, but it certainly didn’t unite the country behind a shared sense of commitment. Social Security and Medicare are popular, but the rest of our extremely complex and fragmented welfare and safety net programs are often disliked and resented.  The recipients are nickeled and dimed and scapegoated to feel small, while the donors convince themselves they are suckers.  Education costs keep rising and are outside the reach of more and more Americans.  We spend oceans of money on healthcare, education, and welfare, as much or more than the social democracies we like to scorn, but get much less, not just less actual assistance to people in need, but less trust, less sense of common purpose, less of the intangible glue that makes isolated individuals into citizens.

The Donald just floated a plan for an infrastructure program that illustrates his view of government. The idea is to throw out some small sums, a few billion a year, and have them catalyze lots of investment by states and private companies. There is no signature project and even if the idea works (and most think it won’t do much) it will result in projects that are profitable for private investors, meaning it will address only a fraction of the real needs the country faces for fixing the infrastructure we already have. As for building something new and better—high-speed rail like China, or a renewable energy system, or ways to deal with rising sea levels along the Atlantic Coast—that’s not going to happen. Having just triumphantly passed a tax bill that shifts money sharply from government to big companies, there are no resources left.

Think small and short-term and steer benefits to the investor class. Let billionaires and their fancy new foundations handle anything big.  Abroad, advertise our narrow self-interest and leave managing global institutions to China.  That’s the underlying vision.

Without vision the people perish. If the only thing we can agree on is that we love our military and want it to grow and grow and entertain us with parades, we are in serious trouble. Is there nothing else we can muster the will to do collectively to make our country a better place?

A cartoonish version of meritocracy is popular with many conservatives. Newt Gingrich, for instance, during the recent controversy over black athletes kneeling for the national anthem, castigated them on Fox and Friends because they justified it by appealing to the importance of equality and diversity: “All this left wing rhetoric, but the fact is what has made America extraordinary is that we reward winners.” Gingrich argued that rich black athletes are ‘winners’ and invited them to embrace his Darwinian version of America.

The Gingrich view is in fact the opposite of what really makes America extraordinary. “Rewarding winners” is a good definition of the way most of the world has always worked: some set of tough/smart/lucky men win a no-holds-barred, violent, struggle for mastery. They fend off rivals and upstarts. They institutionalize their victory with an army and laws and legitimizing rituals and voila, we have a ruling oligarchy, dressed up as Kings and Queens and courtly aristocrats.  In this society, where the losers are castigated as natural inferiors, a lesser order of human beings, the   Winners rule indefinitely–until taken down by a new set of tougher/smarter/luckier men.

America was meant to be a standing affront to this world. It was meant to be the first society where you didn’t need to be a “winner” to have dignity, to possess rights, to make a decent living, to have a voice in public decisions.  You might gain great wealth and high office, but that wouldn’t mean you were better than other citizens, and it didn’t give you any entrenched privileges or let you pass your status on to your sons and heirs.  You didn’t take power by killing your rivals and their families, and you didn’t keep it by using your immense wealth and power to keep your boot on the neck of every possible challenger.

Our love of the rugged individual is perhaps the American version of original sin. Nurtured by centuries of frontier society, a Protestant emphasis on a one to one relation with God, and the priority placed on individual rights at our founding, it is easily fanned into flame by special interests seeking to hide their pursuit of privileges under the cloak of meritocracy.  Affirmative action is the most common but not the only target. Consider for instance how corporate campaigns against unions play up supposed infringements on individual rights if workers are ‘forced’ to support unions in a closed shop, or how attacks on the Affordable Care Act often start with how the individual mandate violates fundamental freedoms.

In all these cases we are being asked to sacrifice some of our autonomy to achieve a collective good. Americans may claim to ask “What Would Jesus Do,” but often what they really want to know is “What Would John Wayne Do.” Scratch the average American male and you discover that they imagine themselves alone in the saddle, fighting off Injuns and horse-thieves with their trusty Winchester. When this manifests itself as self-reliance, it can be a source of strength and confidence; but it can easily slide into a self-destructive shame at accepting help or acknowledging weakness. When it manifests as winner-take-all selfishness, it corrodes bonds of community and country. The unrestrained love of “winners” leads to the despicable picture of candidate Trump daring to criticize John McCain because he was a ‘loser’ who allowed himself to be captured and made a prisoner of war.

The better image of America is not John Wayne riding off alone into the sunset, but the wagon train:  a community of regular folks working together, sharing, moving forward but leaving no one behind. It is the Statue of Liberty inviting to our shores the tired and poor. It is every Frank Capra movie.  It is rich successful people kneeling to draw attention to those left out of the American story.  There is no room in it for Newt Gingrich.

Dismiss the Past, Dismiss the Future

At church today the sermon was about how we link to the past, in particular our own ancestors. Our minister was eloquent in describing how she reconnected with the story of her grandmother. But we Americans are not especially ancestor-oriented, to put it mildly. Our history and our self-understanding tell us that we are new, that we are not constrained by the past, by what our great-grandparents did. We don’t care if they were poor nobodies. We don’t venerate the ancestral village. We make no offerings to the ancestral gods. Any reasonably self-aware American who spends time abroad—in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, almost anywhere else—quickly realizes that for most peoples, the past, in the form of family and culture, is powerful and alive in a way that it just isn’t for most Americans.

This can be a real source of strength. We absorb immigrants and newcomers readily; we re-invent ourselves and start anew; we are not imprisoned by old customs and fears and prejudices.

But there are some huge dangers as well. A people that doesn’t care to be molded by the past may end up ignorant of it, and molded without knowing. Today’s debates about race, for instance, suffer from a terrible ignorance and selective forgetting. “Why dredge all that stuff up?” is a common complaint, at least from those who would be made uncomfortable by remembering.

To care about your ancestors and the story of your family, your community, your country, is to make them no longer past but part of the present. It is to see yourself as part of something greater than the individual you, something that shaped you and that you have a responsibility to pass on. If this sense of connection is weak, it’s easy to believe that everything you are is your own doing. And it is hard to sustain a sense of responsibility for the people who will come after you.

A prickly individualism that denies the shaping power of outside forces easily denies the duty to give back. Debates today about taxes and public spending often pit those who see all such demands as suspect, as taking from successful people to give to the less deserving, against those who stress that no one is successful alone and we all depend on public institutions that work for the common good. When President Obama said “if you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” his point was not to denigrate individual effort but to remind entrepreneurs that they are embedded in a country and society that helped them succeed.

Maybe more importantly, this mindset makes it hard to feel responsible for the future. We pay lip service to thinking about our children and grandchildren. But public policy to meet longterm challenges, like climate change and failing infrastructure and marginalized minorities, suffers when we are not habituated to think of ourselves as part of this greater multi-generational enterprise. Our decisions have consequences beyond the next election cycle, the next up and down of the markets. The rational-choice framework that undergirds our individualism has a hard time offering good reasons why we should care about generations yet to come.

Tocqueville ends Democracy in America by telling us “I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes; as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man now wanders in obscurity.”  This is exhilarating but also frightening.  Two hundred years later, it is essential for us to connect more naturally and normally to the past.

Caring too much about the past can be dysfunctional. But an appropriate and measured regard for our past may be the only way that we humans can connect ourselves to the future. And that is not dysfunctional, it is vital and necessary.

Why I Miss Communism: The Great Leveler, Inequality, and The Need for Passionate Egalitarians

It seems clear that in discussing economic inequality, what needs explaining is not today’s high and rising levels of inequality, but the opposite: how could we ever expect to see a lengthy period of economic compression. Thomas Piketty is convincing when he argues that the mid-20th century’s 70 or so years of economic leveling, from roughly the end of World War I until the late 1970s, was due primarily to the effects of two unprecedented global wars that destroyed enormous amounts of accumulated wealth and made it politically acceptable to tax the rich. The lengthy period of peace that the major powers have enjoyed since World War II is re-creating the historical norm of large economic disparities.

If you want to get a sense of what any argument in favor of greater equality is up against, I recommend Walter Scheidel’s new book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality. Scheidel is a classical historian who specializes in Ancient Rome and Mediterranean civilizations. The Great Leveler, however, roams across history and the globe to give us a gloomy picture: since the invention of agriculture, in most civilizations a small predatory elite captured society’s wealth, and the vast majority were poor, often living close to the theoretical limits of biological survival. You can look at ancient Egypt, Rome and Sumer; China and Japan; medieval Europe and ancien regime France; Aztecs and Incas, and their Spanish conquerors; the American South and the Russian north. The picture is the same: “early societies tended to be about as unequal as they could possibly be.”

It hardly needs to be said that this economic inequality corresponds to, is in fact the same thing as, similar disparities in power. A tiny set of rulers and supportive elites (priests, merchants) monopolizes the state and the instruments of coercion, using them as the means to seize and keep wealth.

Can this ever change? Yes, according to Scheidel, but only as the result of enormous violence. Mass-mobilization warfare, civilizational collapse, plague, Leninist revolutions—all these can and do produce greater equality. But all manner of change and violence short of these Four Horsemen doesn’t succeed. Economic crises, with the partial exception of the Great Depression, do not reduce inequality—witness the failure of the recent Great Recession to reverse the rise of inequality in the US. And the effects are not lasting. Patterns of inequality reassert themselves.

But, you may say, that was then. In the modern world we have altered this heartless dynamic. Democracy has undermined the political monopoly of the few. Capitalism and technology have created economic abundance and growth, doing away with the zero-sum static agricultural economies of the past. In today’s developed societies we have some very rich people, yes, and some very poor people, but most live somewhere in the middle, nowhere near bare subsistence. Across the globe these forces are raising hundreds of millions in China and India out of abject poverty. Marx predicted that capitalism would replicate old patterns and impoverish the working class, but he was wrong.

Scheidel begs to differ. First, the expansion of the franchise for many democracies is closely tied to the needs of mass-mobilization war. States who needed to enlist all their citizens in war had to give them greater say in choosing their leaders. Second, studies do not show any clear relationship, positive or negative, between greater democracy and inequality. Inequality in many European countries dropped during and after WWI as governments raised taxes on the rich and coped with the disruptions of the war—so the real cause was arguably war and mass mobilization, not democracy per se.

As for economic development, inequality does not seem to be systematically related to rising levels of development: “Conventional measures of nominal inequality do not offer much support to the notion that at certain stages of development, economic advances predict an attenuation of inequality.” Scheidel largely dismisses the arguments of Simon Kuznets, who theorized that developing economies would initially become more unequal, but inequality would decline as the economy matured. Today, countries with very different levels of development all “cluster in an income Gini range of about 0.35 to 0.45.”

All this doesn’t mean, of course, that the standard of living of most people living in developed economies is not dramatically better than before. But the size of the gap between haves and have-lesses has not really changed. What has happened is that limits on the “extraction rate,” which for pre-modern societies averaged 77%, have risen because the extractors can gain by allowing most people to raise their incomes, become consumers, and help generate much greater overall productivity and wealth. The extraction rate for the United States today is around 40%, half of what it was as recently as the 1860s.

But democracy and a high level of development are no guarantee against exploitation. For the past 40 years, a small set of wealthy and super-wealthy individuals in the United States—and to a lesser extent in other developed countries–have captured almost all of the gains in productivity. Their wealth has skyrocketed, while the incomes of much of the middle class and working class have stagnated.

Still, if modern economic development has moved most people away from falling off the cliff of starvation and abject poverty, and given them a decent standard of living and some security against shocks and downturns, what difference does it make what the level of inequality is? Why does it matter if a few people are extremely rich, as long as their being rich no longer requires that I be extremely poor?

Scheidel doesn’t address this—his book is a straight history. But the history suggests part of an answer.

In the long and depressing story of economic exploitation, according to Scheidel, one case stands out as an exception: Ancient Greece, and especially Athens. Beginning with major political reforms in 600 BC that included some cancellation of debts, Athens began to expand the franchise while building up a naval power that depended on popular support and participation (the navy depended on mobilizing thousands of unskilled oarsmen, unlike the army, which relied on wealthier knights who could afford weapons, armor, and horses).

• In the wars with Persia in 480 and 490 BC, Athens mobilized most of its adult population; after victory, Athens used its new power to establish an empire that eventually included most of the Aegean.
• In the 5th century democratic governance expanded to the courts and Assembly. To make it feasible for citizens to take part in public affairs, Athens used its imperial wealth to introduce state pay for jury duty and carried out massive public works projects to provide employment.
• Later, when the Empire was gone, Athens heavily taxed the rich to maintain its navy.

As Scheidel summarizes, “The convergence of military mass mobilization, democracy, progressive taxation, a sizeable state share in GDP, substantial civilian spending, and limited inequality lends fourth-century BCE Athens, in particular, a curiously and precociously ‘modern’ appearance.” What was true of Athens was true, to a lesser degree, of other Greek cities during the same period.

There is no need to belabor the unparalleled achievements of ancient Athens and Greece. It is impossible not to suspect that Athenian equality—political, social, and economic, all intertwined—was inseparable from this burst of creativity.

Limiting the extractive pressure of the rich and powerful and allowing large numbers of people to live at multiples of subsistence has proven to be a tremendous source of energy, innovation, and freedom. It is critical among other things for enabling genuine political engagement that goes beyond a tiny elite. Scheidel and other scholars see an average income around five times subsistence as a critical point—a level achieved in Ancient Athens, in 16th century Holland, in England around 1700, in the US around 1830—and in China in 1985. It is one of the defining characteristics of what we think of as ‘modernity.’

I am not inclined to be as fatalistic as Scheidel. But what I take from his history is that keeping inequality within limits and making space for the many to participate in public life is not easy. It is swimming upstream. It requires very serious, very tough measures, not nibbling around the edges. Not a Leninist revolution, which in any case turned into another version of oligarchy, but a dedicated, powerful political and intellectual movement.

This movement does not exist today, although capitalists are chronically worried that the masses will turn on them and confiscate their wealth. Liberal Silicon Valley moguls and paleo-conservative Texas oil billionaires alike are buying up condos in abandoned missile silos designed to let them ride out the coming uprising.* Part of me hopes their fears are well-founded. Peasants with pitchforks have stormed castles in the past. But today’s resistance has grown feeble. Even in the wake of the Great Recession, we have not seen effective mass demands for real action to break up big banks and monopolies, or reduce corporate pay, or do something about rising income inequality.

The difference now may be the absence of the communist threat. In the 19th century, capitalist ideology quickly generated a potent counter-ideology that mobilized workers and scared capitalists. Eventually it captured state power in Russia and sent capitalists and landowners to the firing squad. To avoid this fate, ruling elites in Europe and the US accepted reforms—the right to form unions, anti-trust laws, income taxes, social safety nets—that would otherwise have been scoffed at.

There is nothing comparable now. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Here in the US, market fundamentalists continue to scare us by loudly shouting that any restrictions on capitalism are the first step to a Marxist dystopia. These arguments have been effective. While workers a hundred years ago went on bitter strikes and risked their lives in violent confrontations with owners, many workers today have succumbed to the belief that the only way to create jobs is to give corporations tax breaks and lighten regulations. In America we have come to accept the right of wealthy individuals and corporations to use their money without limit to determine who gets elected and what laws they pass—in many cases laws designed to let the rich get richer and pass it on to their heirs. A new version of oligarchy has taken shape before our eyes.

Scheidel’s work is another shot in the intellectual war over the distinctiveness of modernity. How different really is the world today? A host of thinkers have argued that the combination of science, economic growth, technology, and liberal democracy represent an arrow of progress that separates today’s world from the past. At the dawn of the post-communist age, the estimable Frank Fukuyama crystallized this thinking in The End of History. But Fukuyama was not Panglossian about the implications. He worried that in this world without fundamental conflicts we would become complacent, morally and spiritually numb: Nietzsche’s Last Men. I think a lack of spirit, of intense concern for freedom and equality, is part of our problem.

Scheidel warns us that swirling around our historically recent and fragile Modern World are very deep currents, rooted in human biology and millennia of culture, that do not comport well with democracy and equality. There will be no democracy without democrats. It will not maintain itself because History makes it so.

No one wants to recreate communism. But we will get nowhere in fighting the growth of entrenched wealth and incipient oligarchy without a sharply defined alternative and people who are committed to it. As Scheidel so clearly tells us, a predatory ruling elite is the historic norm.

 

*”Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

 

 

 

In Defense of Thucydides

Poor Thucydides! He is being dragged onto the public stage once again, with White House acolytes vying in the press to prove their devotion. Steve Bannon is a fan, but military intellectuals such as National Security Adviser McMaster and Secretary of Defense Mattis take a back seat to no one in their esteem for the Greek historian. The NSC’s dimwitted spokesman, Michael Anton, loves Thucydides too; especially, he has been careful to tell us, in the translation by Thomas Hobbes. Recently the most insider of all insiders, Graham Allison, has written a short book, Destined for War: Can American and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, all about how Thucydides should be our guide for dealing with China, that is apparently getting a close read from the Administration.

I am far from being an expert on Thucydides. My Greek, even at its best, was never up to translating Thucydides’ notoriously difficult prose. I have not scratched the surface of the commentaries and analyses done by generations of scholars. Of Donald Kagan’s magisterial four volumes on the Peloponnesian Wars, I have read only his one-volume summary.

On the other hand, I have enough acquaintance, and enough respect, that I feel a certain proprietary zeal. I read and discussed Thucydides at my alma mater, St. John’s College, and again in graduate school at the University of Chicago. Thucydides surfaced regularly when I studied International Relations at the Fletcher School, and over many years as a military and political analyst. When I taught recently at the Air War College, I held a seminar on Western political thought that started with reading generous excerpts from the Peloponnesian Wars.

All of which is to say that I feel qualified enough to express deep unease with the current Thucydides enthusiasm. Thucydides is especially invoked to support no-nonsense realism and tough-mindedness. Let’s cut to the chase, is the message, and agree that relations between states are only about power. A few choice quotes about how the real reason for the Peloponnesian War was Sparta’s fear of the rising power of Athens, and a brief reference to the Melian Dialogue to demonstrate that the right stance for Great Powers is amoral self-interest, and we have established our credentials as Serious Thinkers. This appears to more or less exhaust Thucydides’ usefulness for most of the current denizens of the White House.

Plenty of commentators have skewered the astonishingly narrow nationalism of Bannon, the self-destructive America firstism of McMaster and Cohn, and Michael Anton’s Straussian pretentiousness. Are there different lessons to learn from Thucydides, lessons that can both help us today and salvage Thucydides’ reputation? Several come to mind.

First, Thucydides is a subtle observer of democracies in their more populist form, a problem about which we could all use some insight. Democracy in Athens was largely unmediated by the various institutions and restrictions that hard-won experience has taught us are needed to keep democratic systems from going off the rails, things like constitutions and representative assemblies and a free press and a robust civil society. Athens and other Greek democracies are prey to sudden changes of mood often instigated by blunt-sounding demagogues like Cleon, or spoiled celebrities like Alcibiades. This is an important lesson at a time when these mediating institutions are under attack here at home by a President and assorted henchmen who see them as unwanted checks on their power.

Thucydides admires democratic Athens when it is largely run by its “First Citizen,” Pericles, who can channel the advantages of democracy—the incredible energy, the public-spiritedness, the diversity, the inventiveness—in a productive direction. Pericles, unlike those who come after, is able according to Thucydides to “lead them instead of being led by them.” Pericles is not a populist who gains support by flattery and spectacle. He has a long career of service and sacrifice that enables him to persuade his fellow citizens to do difficult things.

Without Pericles, who dies of the plague in the war’s third year, Athens is unsure of its strategy and veers between over and under-confidence. The disastrous Sicilian War begins with the cocky promises of Alcibiades that victory will be swift, and ends with the dithering Nicias who allows himself to be paralyzed by bad omens. Alcibiades is guilty of whipping up the people into a war-frenzy, but he is a brilliant general who is nevertheless removed from command by those same people for the apparent crime of impiety and more generally for being an unabashed democracy-scorning elitist. His successor, Nicias, is well-liked and appropriately cautious—but having opposed war, he is a bad choice to lead the army.

This love-hate relation between the people and its democratic leaders has not gone away in our time. Like Athenians, Americans are habitually suspicious of their politicians, convinced that everyone who goes to Washington becomes corrupt and easily persuaded that some new ‘outsider’ will drain the swamp. Small violations of norms quickly balloon into career-wrecking scandals. Policy that rests on the findings of experts or professionals is suspect, and many reject all claims of knowledge or objectivity, if they are invoked in opposition to some popular sentiment.

Thucydides is no less insightful about the problems of oligarchy. Sparta has its own problems with authority and strategy. The Spartan equivalent of Pericles at the start of the war is Archidamus, an experienced king described by Thucydides as having a reputation for wisdom and moderation. When Sparta is deliberating whether to end the treaty and go to war with Athens, Archidamus counsels caution and outlines a multi-year strategy: find more allies who can remedy Sparta’s deficiencies in naval power and money, build up domestic strength, and shift the odds in Sparta’s favor so Athens will back down. He cloaks his advice in traditional Spartan virtues, such as the conservative maxim “never underestimate the enemy.” But Archidamus, despite being a king, cannot carry the day with his countrymen; he has less real authority than his democratic counterpart. Other Spartan leaders urge immediate action—in violation of Spartan norms and the treaty with Athens requiring arbitration—to defend Spartan honor. They carry the day. In Sparta power that is personalized and unmoored from legal and traditional bounds veers towards rashness.  We see this danger growing today in Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia.

The “Athens first” realpolitik that imbues the city is revealed by Thucydides to be destructive of Athenian interests, and an easy-to-don cloak for ambitious demagogues. Unnamed Athenian representatives in Sparta tell Athens’ enemies at the start of the conflict that Athens is only obeying “the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.” Athens’ mistake, according to these Athenians, has mainly been to treat its subjects too much like equals, which causes resentment when the underlying inequality comes to the fore. Justice doesn’t enter into it, since justice only matters between equals. The Athenians warn the Spartans with language that, with slight alteration, could be talking points for the US to use in a private meeting in Beijing: “If you were to succeed in overthrowing us and in taking our place, you would speedily lose the popularity with which fear of us has invested you, if your policy now were to be at all like the sample you gave during the brief period of your command against the Mede.  Not only is your life at home regulated by rules and institutions incompatible with those of others, but your citizens abroad act neither on these rules nor on those which are recognized by the rest of Hellas.”

As the war goes on, Athens doubles down on this mindset. At Melos, mid-way in the conflict, the Melians try to persuade the Athenians that a policy of naked self-interest is counterproductive because it will alienate potential allies. Who will trust you? Who will emulate you? In modern terms, they argue that Athens is undermining its ‘soft power’ and this will, in the long-run, do more damage than anything Athens stands to gain by crushing Melos. The Athenians are unmoved and destroy Melos utterly. But as the war continues and Athens’ demands grow, its subjects resist more, relationships that had a veneer of equality become more nakedly about power, and Athen’s resources are strained by the need to fight the Spartans while keeping forces at the ready to subdue unruly partners.

It is Pericles who admits candidly that the empire was acquired unjustly, but it is now too dangerous to let it go. To do so would ruin Athens and reduce it to slavery. Whether American pre-eminence today is entirely just can be debated–just as the Athenians defend their rule by pointing out their role in defeating the Persians in the last Great War, and organizing smaller states to hold the line for decades against the Empire, so we believe others owe us for winning World War II and the Cold War. Like Athenians we complain that allies don’t share all the burdens nor appreciate our leadership. But the advantages far outweigh the costs, and to push away loyal allies because of our resentment would be fatal, both to us and our allies.

Even worse is to start fighting with former friends. The Peloponnesian War resembles less a war between modern nation-states, and more a civil war between distinct but similar cities who speak the same language and share the same culture and religion. Civil war, as Thucydides tells us, is the worst type of war. At the end Greece is devastated, and it is the Persians who are the real winners, having stoked the conflict and become the patrons of the Spartan victors. American leaders who bash our historic democratic friends and heap praise on dictators are inviting new civil wars.

Pericles’ broader advice to Athens is what should resonate today: the real danger comes from within. Even in dark times, after a devastating plague and repeated Spartan incursions, Pericles rallies the people by reminding them of the city’s underlying strengths and longterm prospects for victory. Athens has wealth, naval power, and depths of ingenuity and energy—fueled by its openness to immigrants and the outside world–that its opponents cannot match. If it stays united and mindful of its strengths, it will win. Unlike less talented successors he does not set faction against faction; he does not paint a picture of gloom and carnage to set himself up as the city’s savior; and he warns against foolish expeditions against secondary enemies that will squander resources and give openings to genuine threats. (America’s endless obsession with terrorism is the contemporary case in point, and the Iraq War our Sicilian Expedition). The people are ambivalent; they fine Pericles, but then re-elect him as their general.

A powerful asymmetry is evident in the Greek civil war: there is a strong oligarchical faction in Athens (which surfaces especially towards the end, when Athens is on the ropes) but no real democratic faction in Sparta. Sparta and Persia can appeal to Athenian elites behind the backs of the people. Throughout the Peloponnesian war, cities are torn apart by contending oligarchical and democratic factions. Until recently most observers would have judged that there is a strong potential democratic faction in China, and no corresponding oligarchical/authoritarian faction in the US. This may no longer be true. Elements of the American right have become enamored of strong leaders overseas, especially Putin. Steve Bannon admires Sparta, not Athens. Sparta after all was the winner, which for some is apparently all that counts.

Of course, a lot depends on what is meant by ‘winning.’ Comparing Athens and Sparta at the start of his story, Thucydides offers a prescient and melancholy observation. If centuries from now someone looked for the remains of the two cities to understand their greatness, they would inevitably judge the power of Athens to be greater than it was, and Sparta’s less. Future archeologists would find impressive ruins at Athens—great temples, statues, public buildings—while at Sparta there would be next to nothing. Thucydides doesn’t mention them, but the picture would be similar if you looked at science, poetry, drama, history; all raised to new heights in Athens, and never encouraged in Sparta.

Thucydides may be taking a swipe at Athenian pride—real power comes from steady discipline, not outward show. But maybe not. I expect Thucydides knows that if either Sparta or Athens are remembered in the future, it will be because of his book and the work of others like him. The heroes of Troy are known because Homer wrote about them, not because they were the most worthy of remembrance, and Thucydides is very clear that he sees his history as supplanting Homer. The democracy-fueled arts of Athens will in the end decide who and what gains the eternal fame that the Greeks desire. Sparta wins this battle, but Athens wins the war.

How should we understand the argument at the heart of the “Thucydides Trap”analogy that Allison and others want to apply to today’s China-US rivalry? The underlying question is whether Thucydides presents his particular story as one of inevitability—rising powers always end up fighting with established ones—or contingency—on this occasion and these circumstances, the actors chose war, but might not have. Are there points where we see decisions that made war more or less likely? Or where conflict, once started, could have been ended or damped down? Why were those particular decisions made or not made, and by whom? For Thucydides to spend time compiling his detailed and meticulous account would make no sense if human actions were entirely determined by impersonal forces or structural conditions or internal drives. The rising power of Athens and its effect on Sparta is a necessary but not sufficient condition for war—war would not occur without it, but is not fated.

Allison’s judgment rests on his Thucydides Project, which has examined sixteen historic cases and tries to draw meaningful patterns. This political science approach is not Thucydides. Still, the broad picture that Allison draws is, I think, consistent with Thucydides: the rising vs. established power dynamic often leads to war, but not always. War can be averted; if it breaks out, it can be limited

After the fact, all actions tend to look determined. I think the point of Thucydides’ famous speeches, the arguments that his principal actors make to persuade other leaders and citizens what course to take, is to shake this fiction of determinacy. He shows convincingly that before major decisions there are frequently moments of deliberation where people argue for and against different paths. The reader is thrown in the midst of the debate, and is often perplexed—each argument has its merits, each has its risks. Listening is hard. Choosing is hard.

Thucydides shows these debates occurring all over Greece; not only in democracies like Athens, where we would expect them, but in Sparta and other oligarchies. This may tell us something about the common character of the Greeks—would there be similar speeches in Persia? Under an absolute emperor or Great King? Spartan decisionmaking is still a deliberative process with a variety of voices. We know that one of the common weaknesses of dictators is that they don’t allow debate and don’t receive alternative views. States with personalized autocrats are the most unpredictable, dangerous, and impulsive. Today Russia and North Korea are more dangerous than China, which has habits of collective leadership; if these erode under Xi, China will be harder to deal with.

Genuine debate is one of the great strengths of democracy, but it can be stifled there too. Leaders who value loyalty over honesty, see opposing views as lies or disinformation, and mistake a single election for an absolute mandate, throw away what makes democracy work.

I think reducing Thucydides to short maxims misses and distorts his purpose. It is by reading and living with his book that he seeks to affect the reader. In this he is similar to his fellow Athenians Socrates and Plato, Aeschylus and Sophocles. None are reducible to bullet takeaways; all try to carry the attentive reader or listener into the midst of thinking, judging, choosing. Like Thucydides they are frequently critical of democracy and its impulsiveness, shallowness, and poor judgment. But without democracy they would not exist. I like to think Thucydides would respect our modern modifications, many of them invented by close readers who learned about democracy’s strengths and weaknesses from the Peloponnesian Wars. And he would warn us—do not take your position of strength for granted. Debate. Listen. Listen again. Choose carefully.

 

 

Meritocratic vs. Egalitarian Visions of Freedom

There are two competing visions about the value of freedom and what the life of a free human being should be like.  I think understanding what these are, who holds them, and why, is the key to understanding our political divide.

In one vision, which we can call ‘meritocracy,’ the real value of freedom is that it allows the excellent and exceptional few to thrive. When these individuals can exercise their talents to the fullest they will make scientific breakthroughs, invent new products, build great companies, make marvelous movies. The rest of us will benefit as we make use of their inventions, get jobs in their enterprises, enjoy the fruits of their creativity and hard work—as their efforts trickle down.

In this vision, the greatest sin is getting in the way of the talented few. We need to have systems of education and training that identify these people, let them emerge, and then channel them into the best experiences, schools, and opportunities to thrive. We want secondary schools with strong programs for gifted students, lots of testing and competition, and high standards. We want elite colleges and universities that look closely at test results and other achievements and pick the cream of the crop. We want a free enterprise system that lets people take risks and win big or lose big without too much interference from high taxes or regulation or other constraints.

Many meritocrats call for public policy to focus on a level playing field. Exceptional talent can come from anywhere, not just from particular races or classes or genders. The best results for society as a whole will come from making sure everyone gets a fair chance to compete. But it’s critical that in doing this, standards aren’t lowered, and affirmative action and political correctness don’t undermine the basics of merit-based advancement. Because the underlying human reality is that we are not equal, certainly not in the characteristics that count for real achievement. Don’t coddle people; let them compete ferociously and see who wins. There is a ‘natural aristocracy’ of the smartest, toughest, hardest-working, most ambitious.

If your heart melted at 18 when you read Atlas Shrugged, you were responding to this vision. Of course, it is a given that when you were melting, you were identifying yourself with the elect few. You weren’t thinking that maybe you were one of the poor shmoes who didn’t have what it takes to rise to the top.

But if you did, you might have a different view of what freedom is about.

In this alternative, freedom is good not primarily as the way to let a few people do exceptional things, but as the condition that allows ordinary people to live decent lives, without being abused by the aristocrats—whether natural or artificial. Let’s call these freedom-lovers ‘egalitarians.’

Egalitarians are wary of meritocratic arguments because it is very difficult to keep a ‘natural aristocracy’ from morphing into an old-fashioned oligarchy of birth and inherited advantage. People who get rich and powerful try hard to stay that way and pass their privileges on to their children. They don’t want a level playing field anymore; if their kids are born on 3rd base, they want them to advance from there, not return to the batter’s box. It is human nature to convince yourself that your money and status come from your individual excellence, not any advantages of birth and fortune. Hence the embarrassing contortions from the Mitt Romneys and Donald Trumps to try and persuade us that they earned their way to the top.

Like oligarchs throughout history, oligarchs in our democracy have found ways to protect and perpetuate their position. Much of this is done by using wealth and access to elected officials to gain privileges in the tax code and elsewhere. Many self-defined meritocrats, such as today’s libertarian titans of Silicon Valley and the Texas oil fields, have little use for democracy, which they see as a threat to their freedom. Hence their advocacy for ways to limit popular power by allowing unrestricted flows of money into politics, limiting voting rights for the poor, and supporting media and messaging designed to confuse the public and discredit democratic institutions. Preferring weak and easily manipulated government, they are happy when people don’t trust elected officials and think politics is corrupt or rigged. (Here their interests overlap in dangerous ways with those of Putin and other enemies of the United States.)

Egalitarians on the other hand tend to favor strong and effective government as the only way to counter the oligarchs. They want rules and laws that constrain the power of the rich, and programs that help everyone make it to the middle class and stay there. Tax policy should be steeply progressive and designed to break up inherited fortunes. Politicians need to be insulated from the temptations of deep-pocketed lobbyists and rich contributors.

Clearly these competing visions are both present in today’s America, and often in the same person. Who doesn’t believe in the American Dream of rising by individual effort and talent? Many Americans, including many of the poor and disadvantaged, admire the country’s flamboyant billionaires and hope devoutly that one of them will set up a distribution warehouse in their neighborhood. But who doesn’t also believe that somebody needs to keep a watch on Wall Street and make sure we all have a decent education and—increasingly—decent health care? Many Americans are scared of rising inequality and the gap between a few insanely rich and powerful individuals and the decaying middle class.

Navigating this divide is not new—it has been at the heart of the American experiment from the beginning. Here’s what Madison has to tell us in the famous 10th Federalist as part of his argument for how the new Constitution will reduce the effects of ‘faction’:

• The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. [emphasis mine] From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

Here Madison is acknowledging the meritocratic contention, that people are different with regard to their different capacity to succeed and become rich (“acquire property”). And government’s responsibility, in fact its greatest responsibility, is to allow these faculties to realize themselves. Human progress depends on individual initiative.

But if we accept this, it will lead to a division of society into those who have property—the successful winners of the merit-based competition—and those without. Freedom does not produce an egalitarian utopia.

• But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Inequality is the inevitable result of freedom, and with inequality comes factions and clashes of interest. Democratic government has the great task of ‘regulating’ these interests. It must act for egalitarian interests by mediating between the haves and have-nots to prevent the permanent victory of one class over another. It must stand for the common good and not be captured by one faction.

However, while Madison admirably and succinctly describes the challenge, it is hard to agree that Federalist 10 gives an adequate solution. Madison is focused on the dangers of a ‘majority faction’, meaning a majority that has an interest that is not consistent with the common good. For this the extent and diversity of the country are a check. But the danger of oligarchy or rule by those “with property” is a threat posed by a minority. Madison says unconvincingly that the majoritarian principle prevents this; a minority faction will simply be voted down. Rich and powerful minorities, however, have many ways of influencing elected officials—and electorates– that outweigh the ballot box. Outright bribing and vote-buying are only the most egregious methods. Today campaign contributions, lobbying, and media manipulation are preferred and effective tools.

In 1789 the size of the United States was a real obstacle to forming a cohesive minority faction with national clout, but advances in communications and transportation changed the situation a long time ago and continue apace. Oligarchical interests find it easy to coordinate national-level campaigns, and their smaller size and focus gives them an advantage compared to the mass mobilization needed by egalitarians. Dedicated libertarian meritocrats like the Koch Brothers and the Mercer family have outsized influence on our politics because they and a coalition of like-minded oligarchs have worked over many years to shape the rules of the game to maximize the impact of wealth, block transparency, and weaken the power of egalitarian institutions like labor unions.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Tipping Point, has a podcast (“My Little Hundred Million,” part of his Revisionist History series) where he contrasts how wealthy philanthropists donate to higher education. Some have used money to expand opportunities for poor students, like Hank Rowan who gave $100 million to start an engineering school at Glassboro State College in New Jersey. Rowan, however, is the exception. More common are people like hedge fund manager John Paulson, who gave $400 million to Harvard. Why these huge donations to schools that already have massive endowments and few needs? In effect, they are giving money to perpetuate oligarchy. (All of this at taxpayer expense, since these acts of charity are tax-deductible).

Gladwell says the Paulsons are playing basketball, a game that depends on one or two top stars. The Rowans are playing soccer, which depends on having a lot of good players. Basketball is a strong-link game, soccer is weak link.

The strong-linkers, the meritocrats, think the best use of resources is to make the top even higher. Give more to the Ivy League. Reduce taxes on corporations and the rich. Define money as a type of speech to make it easier for wealth to influence the political system.  (And to be fair, today’s meritocrats are not found only on the right or in the billionaire-class.  The top 20% who fight to get in the right neighborhoods with the right schools that get you in the right colleges have also bought into the meritocratic narrative).

Most American meritocrats believe in democracy but favor limits on popular sovereignty.  And among growing pockets, democracy is not so secretly disdained in favor of ‘strong leaders’ like Putin or top-down systems like China. China understands itself increasingly as the world’s real meritocracy, drawing on its tradition of hierarchy and exam-based leadership.*

The weak-linkers, the egalitarians, want to broaden the base. Make college education affordable for everyone. Tax the rich more to pay for this and other uplift programs. Limit private spending on political campaigns. Most American egalitarians believe in a market system but want stronger government action to help people succeed in a modern economy, and to constrain what they see as the dangerous power of modern oligarchs. Many look to wealthy social democracies in Europe as offering better models for the United States.

This is not the only fault-line in America, but it is one of the deepest. Two sides, both dedicated to freedom but understanding it in different ways. Neither one is unambiguously right, but ask yourself: are we threatened more today by too much egalitarianism, or too much oligarchy? Look at the trends in economic inequality. Look at the political strength of wealthy special interests. Look at the arguments for unregulated free markets that were behind the financial crisis. Look at who we elected president.

The marchers we just watched in Charlottesville should be anathema to both sides and to any side that espouses freedom. But they emerge from the extreme fringes of the meritocratic vision.  They feel themselves to be the rightful winners in a racial competition who are not getting their due. They want to re-establish a hierarchy they think is ordained by nature and God, and validated by struggle and violence.  They hate a government that they think is assaulting their racial and cultural hegemony with “affirmative action” and “political correctness.” It is vital to stand up to them and to their many intellectual and moral cousins who want us to think that the only meaning of “freedom” is freedom from government. Government that is genuinely of, by and for the people remains the only means of preventing today’s meritocrats from having their way with our country.

*For an explanation and defense of China’s self-understanding, see The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, by Daniel Bell.

 

Making Baseball Great Again

Last night, a Friday, my wife Gale and I went to a Washington Nationals game against the Cincinnati Reds. We are big Nats fans, we have season tickets, and we go to 12-15 games a year. We were enthused because the Nats are in first place and have a very strong team (OK, other than the league’s worst bullpen). Weekday games involve fighting awful traffic and parking a mile from the stadium to avoid $20 parking fees, but we’re used to that.  The threatening rain held off and the evening turned out to be balmy and dry.

It was a pretty good game. The Nats went behind early when Strasburg gave up 4 runs in the first, but the Nats sluggers kept pecking away with solo home runs. They tied the game, the bullpen came through and kept the Reds in check, and they went into extra innings tied 5-5. Then in the 10th, Bryce Harper hit a dramatic walk-off single to score Trea Turner from 3rd and win the game. Huge excitement, Harper being chased around the field and drenched in ice water, fans high-fiving their neighbors.

Only we missed it. We left for home at the end of the 9th, at that point 3.5 hours after the scheduled 7:05 start time. We were tired, we had no idea how much longer the game would go, and above all we were worn out with modern baseball’s excruciating approach to pitching. Specifically, the constant use of relief pitchers. In this 10 inning contest, the Reds used 8 pitchers, the Nationals 5—13 pitchers in all. The real sin here falls on the Reds, who made 4 of those changes in the middle of innings, stopping the momentum of the game and forcing everyone to endure minute after minute of players and coaches huddling around the pitcher, the new pitcher jogging in from the outfield, and then throwing 8 warmup pitches, since for some reason the extensive warmup in the bullpen is assumed to evaporate in the time it takes to get to the mound.

Everyone knows the use of relievers has been on the rise for decades. In 1980 teams used an average of 1.5 relievers a game; today that number has doubled, to almost 3 per game. The number of innings thrown by relievers has only risen a bit, from 2.5 to about 3. More relievers throwing about the same number of innings=more pitching changes.

In addition to making games longer, reliever mania has changed the game in other ways, mostly for the worse. Super relief specialists who throw 100 mph or have one unhittable pitch help keep down hitting and scoring, preventing the time-honored and natural offensive damage that deserves to be inflicted on tiring starters. Super-relievers strive for strikouts, which take longer and mean fewer balls are put in play, making the game less interesting. Pitchers who throw less can be pushed to throw harder and harder, meaning they are more likely to get hurt. This is happening at younger and younger ages.

Enough. Baseball keeps grappling with ways to speed the game up, and Commissioner Manfred is on the warpath to reduce the time between pitches, keep batters from calling time, and lower the number of mound visits. He succeeded this year in—finally—letting teams issue intentional walks without actually throwing four balls. Thank you. But it’s not working; the average game time is still going up. A much more aggressive approach is needed. Here is my solution.

1. No pitching changes will be allowed other than at the beginning of an inning or half-inning, with the following exceptions.
a. Each team is allowed one (1) within-inning pitching change every 9 innings. This allows a team an additional change for extra-inning games.
b. After using their one allowed within-inning pitching change, any additional changes can only be made because of injury. Therefore, any pitcher relieved under these circumstances will automatically be placed on the 15-day disabled list, effective immediately upon removal from the game.

I think this rule change would sharply reduce the number of within-inning pitching changes, and the number of changes overall. The game will speed up, offense will improve, and we can all stay for those great extra-inning comebacks. Let the hate mail begin.

 

I came across this paragraph the other day while reading Susan Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason. Jacoby, almost 10 years ago, was trying to understand why Americans seemed to be losing their respect for facts and reason.

“I read The Agony and the Ecstasy when I was fifteen and was so fascinated by Stone’s descriptions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Michelangelo’s sculptures that I sought out reproductions in an art book in a library for the first time. That kind of connection between popular middlebrow culture and high culture is so obvious that it is almost impossible to understand why the idea of a reader’s actually learning something important from such works was dismissed so contemptuously by highbrow critics of the thirties, forties, and fifties. How did Virginia Woolf think a girl in museumless Okemos, Michigan, was supposed to acquire an inkling of what great sculpture might look like? I could not, after all, take the Tube to the British Museum to see the frieze that Lord Elgin swiped from the Parthenon.”

Her description made me smile, because I too read The Agony and the Ecstasy when I was growing up, and it had much the same effect. I was even younger, just 10, and our family was planning to move to Italy for a year. We were immersing ourselves in all things Italian and I stumbled on Irving Stone’s novel, a fat, dense piece of history crammed with information that Stone got from years of research, which he supplemented by working in a marble quarry, to get the details just right. I certainly didn’t understand half of what I read but what definitely came through was respect, awe and admiration for Michelangelo and the tremendous work he put into his art. Great art and artists were worthy of our adoration. As a 10 year old I couldn’t fully respond to most of Michelangelo’s works, but knowing his story made his art familiar and beloved. As we traveled around Italy I would always be excited to see his work, because of the book, which I must have read three or four times.

I’m pretty sure The Agony and the Ecstasy is not a great book—I haven’t re-read it, and don’t intend to; I prefer to see it through my 10-year old eyes. But Jacoby’s insight is on target, I think. It’s a good example of the kind of mid-20th century, middlebrow cultural product that was seen as appropriate for educated people, not only good but Good for You. It upheld the right values and was backed by impeccable research. Jacoby is irritated that real artists and high-brow intellectuals, like Virginia Woolf, held it up to ridicule. They wanted to pull up the drawbridge against the invasion of the masses; but in America, the masses for most of the 20th century wanted to scale the castle walls, and Irving Stone and his like were the ladders they used.

For many decades, Jacoby argues, upwardly-aspiring Americans took for granted that becoming middle class meant valuing the ‘higher things,’ not just classical music and Italian art and Russian novels, but the latest historical discoveries and scientific achievements. A whole industry grew up to help American strivers: the Book of the Month club, the Britannica Great Books, thick tomes like H.G. Wells’ History of the World and Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, lecture series, and magazines like Life that mixed pictorials about European artists and accounts of new scientific wonders with stories about fashion and Hollywood.

I grew up in this era, and feel the loss in part because my beloved undergraduate college, St. John’s, was a product of the period which has improbably survived more or less intact into our present, very different, times.  The St. John’s College Great Books, seminar-based program was designed—is designed—to make the highest, most elite parts of Western culture available to all. Its founders were convinced that anyone who wanted to could, if they put in the effort, read and understand and benefit from the very best products of civilization. Their idea of how democracy should work was not to dumb down, not to deny the existence of a hierarchy of arts and sciences, but to de-mystify it and open up access to all.

St. John’s got started in the late 1930s, and by the time it found its footing in the 50s, it didn’t stand out as something so strange. Pretty much every college had some kind of introductory sequence to introduce young Americans to the high points of (mostly Western) civilization. St. John’s just took the idea farther.

This whole edifice and the assumptions behind it have largely disappeared. Nothing has really replaced it, and so it is not clear anymore what it means, culturally, to be lower or middle or upper class. Everyone is free to assemble their own pastiche of influences, mixing together all manner of pop culture, classics, and material from around the world. Most intellectuals no longer accept that there is any valid distinction between high and low, better and worse. There is no reason to expect that any college graduate now will have read or come into contact with any of the once-iconic ‘great’ authors or artists, or, unless they are STEM majors, with any scientific discipline.

There were certainly drawbacks to the old standards, which could be impossibly stuffy and rigid, but having no standards at all is not necessarily an improvement. Jacoby underscores how this has contributed to the denial of scientific expertise and willingness to accept lies and falsehoods that seems to characterize large chunks  of contemporary American society:

“The old middlebrow outlines, by contrast, were unabashed in their proselytizing for the scientific and the rational; while Wells did not tell people they had to abandon religion in order to accept evolution, he did tell them that they had to abandon the idea that the Bible was a factual historical record. Because middlebrow culture placed a high value on scientific discoveries and progress, its degeneration has played an important role in the melding of anti-intellectualism with the fundamentalist war on science during the past three decades.”

Vacuums are abhorred. The loss of confidence in a secular High Culture has made it hard to push back against fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, and junk science.

Mixing It Up: A New Progressive Political Strategy

This essay is an attempt to outline a domestic political strategy for progressives that focuses on ways to bridge our class, racial, and political divides.  It is built on the conviction that this cannot happen with more arguing, more posturing, or more manipulation by special interests.  It specifies policy choices that can bring Americans together, not metaphorically but in real life: integrated neighborhoods and schools, national service, unbiased news. It isn’t neutral between liberals and conservatives, it is resolutely liberal, but it does try to frame our choices in ways that can appeal to both sides.

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, which has become the go-to book for people trying to figure out why so many poor white Americans voted for Trump. Vance tells us how millions of Appalachians migrated out of the hills to find work and brought with them a culture of dysfunction—hair-trigger, chip-on-the-shoulder tempers; distrust of authority; wary of schools and learning; insanely loyal to family but violent and neglectful towards actual wives, husbands, and children. These tendencies were kept in check in the good times, but have eaten away at entire communities as jobs and opportunity evaporated. Today these communities are rife with opioids, alcoholism, suicide, and despair. Trump’s promise to bring back jobs, his belligerence, his scorn for the hated elites, has proven irresistible.

Vance is a thoughtful guy—I heard him recently in a discussion with Ezra Klein from Vox, and he integrates his personal history with a good knowledge of research on many of the issues—but he has a generally conservative takeaway that I think is off-base in one critical respect. He thinks because the problems are cultural that they can’t be solved by public policy. His hillbillies have a ‘learned helplessness’ that he believes is made worse by government policies that often reward people for failing. Bad policies are a serious problem, but Vance makes a mistake that is unfortunately common across the political spectrum in thinking that cultural change can only come from ‘within.’ Yes, cultures—values, identities, norms—do need to change, and not just for Vance’s ‘hillbillies.’ But culture is not something independent of policies and institutions; they are interwoven. And while cultural change has to take place in the head and the heart, the levers to induce it are often external.

The core experience that Vance relates is revealing. The Appalachian mindset cuts its members off from the outside world. Vance describes all the times he suffered from not knowing how the world worked—not just specific skills like how to apply for college or what to wear to a job interview, but deeper intangibles such as how a ‘normal’ family interacts, or how to respond to perceived insults without rage and violence, or how to resist the cycle of impulse buying, debt, and poverty. These ways of behaving were simply outside his experience. Anyone who has tried to unravel the knot of race and class in America has seen the same chaotic family dynamics, the same isolation from the broader world, in our inner cities.

Vance didn’t escape by some miraculous spiritual change. He did it with the help of two big public institutions: the US Marines, and Ohio State University. They were not the whole story—love and guidance from his grandparents were crucial–but they were necessary. Through them he came to understand the outside world and eventually navigate his way to a Yale law degree.

OK, so what is the lesson here? What do we do? Thoughtful people on both left and right properly lament the loss of community and shared identity in today’s America–and beyond, as anyone with even a casual acquaintance with European politics can attest. This problem has contemporary causes but deeper roots: Tocqueville worried two centuries ago about the atomization of modern man in an era of democracy and equality. Middletown in the 1920s and Robert Putnam 20 years ago in “Bowling Alone” lamented that radio, automobiles, and television were increasing social isolation and withdrawal into private life, trends now accelerated by the internet and social media.

What I propose is that we look hard at how this loss of civic community is endangering our democracy, and do something about it. This is what I see: communities of decline in both white and black America; rising economic inequality where a minority wins and the majority loses, spurring a furious winner-take-all mentality to seize the shrinking opportunities still available; political polarization that is furthered by gerrymandering and laws proclaiming ‘money is speech.’ We are segregating ourselves geographically by income, race, religion and politics. Not surprisingly, those who have the least actual contact with immigrants, minorities, or poor white ‘deplorables’ are those who fear them the most.

I think this can be tackled by public policy mixed with purposeful individual action. A ‘bring us together’ strategy that is about really bringing us together, not in some gauzy metaphorical way but real, no-kidding living with and dealing with other Americans across lines of race and class—that’s a way forward I think people can get behind. Americans know something is wrong but don’t know what to do about it. We need to mix it up. Here’s how.

Living together. Vance himself sees clearly that mixing is the key to progress: “As Brian Campbell, another Middletown teacher, told me, ‘When you have a large base of Section 8 [Federal housing vouchers] parents and kids supported by fewer middle-class taxpayers, it’s an upside-down triangle. There’re fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can’t lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.’ On the other hand, he said, ‘put the lower-income kids with those who have a different lifestyle model, and the lower-income kids start to rise up.’” [my emphasis]

Having said this, Vance turns it into another reason to bash the government: “Yet when Middletown recently tried to limit the number of Section 8 vouchers offered within certain neighborhoods, the federal government balked. Better, I suppose, to keep those kids cut off from the middle class.” This is unfortunate. The answer is, fix the policy so Middletown can do some valuable social engineering. Nobody will mix together if the market is left to its own devices. Do the hard work of convincing cities and counties to put low-income housing in wealthier neighborhoods. Fix restrictive zoning laws. Mobilize the private sector, which in many high-rent areas is unable to attract and keep workers because they can’t afford to live nearby. Use the clout the Federal government has with Section 8 and other housing programs to the same end.

Learning Together I. Housing is closely linked to education. Here too the answer is mixing together, integration. Research consistently shows that integrated schools are the single best way to raise the performance of the poor and minorities. Schools where kids from wealthier, more stable families help socialize their peers in the skills and attitudes needed for success—while learning their own invaluable lessons in empathy and diversity—are the best device we know for positive generational change.

When I lived in Montgomery, Alabama many black residents of a certain age told me similar stories of their own history. They had been lucky enough to go to the public schools when they were integrated (under court order) in the 1970s and 1980s. They had benefited from the better teachers, facilities, and learning environment. They had made white friends, many of whom they still had, giving them ongoing social connections in the business and political world of Montgomery. But most of them were saddened by what had happened since. In the 1990s support for integration ebbed as white politicians used racial and economic fear to undermine support. Court mandates expired. White families moved out of the city or sent their kids to private schools. Today’s black children go to largely all-black schools. Schools with too many students from high-poverty neighborhoods rarely succeed. The older generation of black Montgomerians shakes its head at the contrast between their school years and those of their children and grandchildren: no contact with white society, failing schools, violence and gangs, disrespect for authority.

In much of America we are going in the wrong direction. According to an analysis by ProPublica “In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended intensely segregated schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools.”

Strong, integrated public schools that mix kids together as they grow up: easy to say, hard to do. Well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning parents and politicians have fought tooth and nail to keep poor people and black people out of their neighborhoods and schools. When unable to block programs, they have moved into new suburbs and sent their kids to private academies. Many politicians and activists have given up, and politicians continue to exploit the concerns of middle-class parents worried that their kids will fall behind in the ever-tightening race to get into the right high school, the right summer program, the right internship, the right college. But success here is foundational if we want to pull future generations out of poverty. Our country is failing millions and millions of its citizens.

This is not a pipe-dream. The Washington Post had an article recently about a decades long school desegregation program in Louisville, Kentucky that has been supported by community leaders in the face of fierce criticism. The Republican legislature is now trying to force Louisville to end the program. This is exactly backwards. We need more Louisvilles and more leadership from within our cities and counties to integrate schools and housing.

We also need to be honest about our language. “Privatizing” is often a code word for segregating. Privatized schools and “school choice” are ways for parents to evade integration and send their kids to schools with their own kind. We need to call out these programs which make it easier to unmix society. The remedy is to ensure that our public schools, all of them, are places where parents will not be afraid to send their kids because they are afraid they will fall off the education conveyor belt that leads to a good college and upward mobility. It cannot be acceptable anywhere in our country for schools to lack top-quality resources and teachers.

Learning Together II. If we aren’t mixing it up enough in elementary and secondary schools, we are doing no better when it comes to higher education. This is especially true for our elite schools, the most competitive, the ones where admission is an automatic ticket to success. At many of them strides have been made to include minorities, and there are lots of foreign students, but there isn’t enough real diversity of thought. The disturbing signs of this are seen in attacks on people who don’t hew to ‘acceptable’ standards, like the assaults—verbal and physical–recently on Charles Murray at Middleton College. Smart but often coddled 18 year olds show up on campus and are bathed in a sea of hypersensitivity and faux-outrage that would take a very mature and tough personality to resist. A vicious circle has been created in many departments where teachers and students with non-conforming (not just conservative or traditionalist, but moderate and liberal), views are not welcome and so stay away.

In response we’ve seen the creation of religious and self-consciously ‘conservative’ colleges, like Hillsdale College in Michigan. And there has been an explosion of foundations, thinktanks, and special on-campus institutes funded by the Koch Brothers and other rich conservatives hoping to inject their favorite ideas into the academic bloodstream. But these are cures worse than the disease, replicating the close-mindedness of ultra-liberal schools but with a conspiratorial focus on grooming activists to fight the culture wars. They serve to draw battle lines, not reach across them.

I have looked extensively at articles and essays by Trump-leaning intellectuals, and I can state categorically that nothing aggravates them and unites them with conservatives across lines of class and region and background like hatred of campus-based “political correctness.”  It symbolizes the out of touch, coastal elites. It is toxic because it is seen as not just disagreement with, but contempt for, a set of beliefs and values and behaviors. It is an assault on identity and meaning.

To be fair, many of these attacks are overblown, done for political effect, and based on a few anecdotes, not reality. A free, self-governing academic institution will, in my view, always incline towards pluralism, tolerance, and open-ended debate; in short, it will be liberal. Americans need to be confronted with hard truths about race, class, gender and other blind spots. But when Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld tell us they don’t like to do campus shows anymore because students can’t take a joke, something is wrong.

One battleground is college costs and accessibility. Conservatives are seeking to wring liberalism out of higher education by making once-affordable public colleges more and more expensive, hoping that high costs and daunting student loans will push students away from the humanities and social sciences and into less ‘ideological’ and more lucrative STEM majors. This would be a tragedy for our country: bad for the economy, which thrives not on narrow skills but on innovation and new ideas that bridge disciplines; and bad for democratic citizenship, which needs the perspective of the liberal arts. (A recent example of a state that steered its best and brightest into science and engineering and away from history, literature, and social science: the Soviet Union. That went well.)

Instead, it would be better to democratize higher education by making college more affordable, ensuring that the student body is more broadly representative across all the different parts of the university. Make sure the kids from Middletown and Detroit can go to a good college and, once there, can major in anthropology or English if that’s what they want.

(Mixing would be more likely if employers and society as a whole would stop fetishizing degrees from certain schools. There is plenty of evidence that successful graduates from State U’s are just as talented and hardworking as those from Harvard and Stanford. The top schools are sorting mechanisms that pull in lots of high-achievers who are looking for the imprimatur and network advantages of an elite degree. As long as that is true the wealthy and well-connected will continue to use all their tools to get their kids the inside track, elbowing aside those who get in the way and staying away from ‘lesser’ schools. Maybe putting some judges on the Supreme Court who didn’t go to Yale or Harvard would be a start.)

Serving Together. We don’t ask much of Americans these days. And we don’t do much to offset the increasing tendency of Americans to segregate themselves by income, by race, by religion, by political orientation. We used to have an institution, the draft, that did this for three decades, from 1940-1970. It threw together kids from all parts of the country, all classes, all races (after 1948). The poor, isolated ones from small towns and Appalachia and inner-city ghettoes got a crash course in the wider world. The wealthier and better-schooled got an equally valuable lesson in the narrowness of their comfortable lives, that wisdom and moral fiber are no monopoly of the well-off.

Vietnam ended support for the draft. One reason is that it stopped being a genuine equalizer. The rich and well-connected got exemptions and went to college, while the poor went to the rice paddies. Any mandatory service program that doesn’t apply to everyone is a nonstarter.

Our professional military is more capable than ever, but without the draft it is dangerously distant from the country it serves. In an age with little need for massed infantry, the draft may not be a military necessity. But some way to give our young people the experience of working together for the common good is, I believe, a moral and political necessity. The military can be one option, but not the only one, for a program of required service. And when supporters argue for it, they shouldn’t shy away from its purpose—not to save money, or give young people job skills, but to help create the kind of American citizens we need.

There is a tremendous appetite, in my view, for a national call to service. The privileged young understand that they have unearned advantages and need to get in touch with the ‘real world.’ In Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins tells us that many people born rich are eager to connect with those who have less. The less privileged for their part badly need the skills, the networking, the exposure to the outside world.

Martin O’Malley (remember him?) had a strong national service program in his campaign platform. He called for increasing AmeriCorps, starting multiple new federal service programs, integrating service programs into college curricula, and giving service graduates help with education and future employment. Not a bad plan, thought it’s not clear if a voluntary program is enough or if these programs will pull in poorer, less-educated volunteers. Service Year Alliance is a network that hopes to shift the culture to make a voluntary service year an expected part of life. Sebastian Junger in his recent book Tribe describes eloquently how Americans suffer from not feeling they matter, not feeling they belong to something bigger than themselves. He wants a big national service program. I’m with him.

Getting Informed Together. Just as “choice” in education ends up segregating kids by race and class, so expanded choice in how we get news and media is segregating us into narrow, like-minded circles. It is making us less informed and more vulnerable to being misled and manipulated.

For government to try and clean up ‘fake news’ or limit what Americans can search or say is very dicey. There is no appetite for a Ministry of Information. But there are things we can do.

Teaching us how to navigate our information environment needs to be a priority for our schools, in every subject, every class. It has never been more important to learn the fundamentals of the scientific method, how to marshal facts, scrutinize evidence, make a logical argument, write a coherent paragraph, and factcheck what you see and hear. We need to teach our children a history that tells hard truths and gives them a realistic foundation for confidence and pride in their country. We cannot scrub our information environment clean of germs and viruses–we need to inoculate ourselves, and we need to recognize that this is a heroic task for our educators, and give them the tools and recognition to do the job. They are on the front lines in a war that we must win. Let’s consider a ‘public education’ campaign akin to a public health campaign, with an Information General for the US with a fancy uniform and a platform to spread the gospel.

The information middlemen who are making money off our tweets and clicks also have to take responsibility, and fear damage in some way if they don’t. The incentives need to shift from delivering the biggest payoff to whatever meme or rumor or outrageous fabrication gets the most eyeballs. The culprit behind much of the distortion we see is advertising; if news providers depend on advertising, their first loyalty is not to accuracy or objectivity but to making users keep clicking. If they can achieve this with finger-pointing and partisan attacks and scary conspiracy theories, well then, welcome to Breitbart and Russian internet trolls.

Social media and search sites have competing incentives; they want traffic and users, but they don’t want their brand to become debased to the point that people get turned off. They’re taking hesitant steps to stop the worst offenders. Advertisers will keep ads off sites if they think customers will be offended. So let’s be offended. This requires naming and shaming, threats to boycott products and companies, and a well-funded movement to monitor advertising across lots of blogs and websites. The Facebooks, Twitters and Googles should be held to account by users who threaten to move to more responsible platforms if they don’t take meaningful action.

Walter Isaacson has a wise suggestion in a recent Atlantic article “How to Fix the Internet”:  rework the internet to remove the anonymity that lets hackers, basement-dwelling trolls and Russian interlopers have their way with today’s open system.  Anonymity lets a thousand flowers bloom, but today too many of them have turned into weeds.  As Isaacson says, “In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The internet has proven him correct.”  We should not resign ourselves to seeing our communication system become a weapon aimed at democracy and at truth itself.

The advertising model needs to be rethought.  Isaacson recommends a new Internet protocol should include a built-in funding mechanism to let content providers get royalties from search engines whenever their material is used.  Funding platforms and content providers with user subscriptions or donations (like Wikipedia) might be a way to reduce the incentive to grab viewers with extreme content.

Voting Together. Gerrymandering is often described as “elected officials picking their voters,” rather than voters picking their officials. It works by carefully drawing district lines to create safe majorities for one party or another. Because the general elections are not competitive, the real competition occurs in the primary for the dominant party, which tends to focus on the most extreme and ideological voters, because that’s who comes out for primaries. In short, gerrymandering unmixes voters and makes politics more extreme. It makes it less necessary to craft a broad coalition to get elected. The theory of democracy embedded in the Constitution is that in a large, diverse country politicians will move to the center to grab the mythical “median voter,” requiring compromise and moderation. That’s not what we’re seeing today.

The negative effects of gerrymandering are magnified when it’s easy for special interests to fund elections and primaries. Thanks to Citizens United and earlier, related Supreme Court decisions, there are few restrictions today on how much private citizens, corporations, and PACs can give. Influencing a congressional or state primary where decisions are often made by a few hundred voters is a lot easier than influencing hundreds of thousands in a general election. And the best way to do this is to promote more extreme views to mobilize activists and raise money.

These are problems for which there are good policy fixes. Since the Constitution puts the power to define districts with the states, voters at the state level can support laws taking the power to set district lines out of the hands of legislatures and into a non-partisan commission. This has already been done in California, Colorado, Ohio, and other states. Undoing Citizen’s United and the doctrine that money is speech and corporations are people is harder, because it will take either a constitutional amendment or a shift in the balance on the Supreme Court. But multiple groups are building momentum for change, drawing on widespread dissatisfaction with the Court’s rulings.

Americans are self-congratulatorily exceptional in many ways, and one of them is our extreme conservatism when it comes to changing our political and electoral systems. The vast majority of Americans have no idea that in most of the world it is normal to elect more than one representative from a district, for legislatures to have multiple parties, for elections to result not in gridlock but in prime ministers and parliamentary majorities that can actually enact new policies; in short, for a kind of political diversity that is beyond our experience. The supposed laboratory of the states is a great wasteland of sameness when it comes to real alternatives. Many reforms could be tried at the state and local level if leaders are pressured by activists who want to mix us up by giving more voice to third parties, or funding campaigns with lots of small donations instead of a few big spenders.

Administering Together. Periodically reformers propose that one part or other of the Federal bureaucracy be moved out of Washington to the hinterlands. That time has come. Not only does modern communication make it feasible, but Washington is drowning in too many cars, too many high-priced condos, and too many well-to-do, well-educated, well-meaning bureaucrats and the pricy lobbyists and lawyers that follow them around. Move Housing and Urban Development to Detroit, Agriculture to Omaha, Interior to Albuquerque, Energy to Oklahoma City, Transportation to Philadelphia, Education to Birmingham. The rest of the country will benefit from an infusion of jobs and restaurants. More importantly, there will be less inclination for Americans to think of the government as some set of aliens dropped inside the Beltway by flying saucers, and less inclination for bureaucrats to forget where they came from.

Conclusion. This is not an exhaustive list, just some of the ways we can choose to mix or unmix America. It’s an argument to shift perspective that is politically neutral: that we are better off the more we live together, learn together, fight together, serve together, inform together, vote together, govern together. We have, both wittingly and unwittingly, often chosen to separate ourselves. This is a hard trend to buck because the good things we think we want, more money and freedom and choice, are exactly what let us buffer ourselves from fellow citizens who are different or make us uncomfortable.

The fear that our country is breaking apart is not a liberal or a conservative fear. I heard it in the Occupy movement and the ensuing national conversation about rising income inequality and the threat of a new oligarchy. I hear it in the anger of Trump supporters with identity politics, which they see as privileging sub-national or supra-national values at the expense of anything distinctively American.

Obviously most of what this essay proposes is out of step with the direction of the Trump Administration. But if the analysis here is right, Trump’s policies will make our divisions worse and many Americans will want even more desperately a way forward that brings us together. Liberals need to be ready with answers.

A terrible weakness of contemporary liberal politics, in my opinion, is that it comes across as all taking and no giving, all rights and no obligations. It is a list of things we want government to do for us. When liberals complain that “they” are voting against their self-interest, that’s what they mean: not voting for the clear benefits they’ll get from Washington. But nobody likes to be told that all they care about is their narrow self-interest. People often vote for reasons of identity and values and whether politicians seem to ‘get’ who they are. We need a liberal politics that asks Americans to sacrifice something for the sake of a shared national goal, something beyond requiring the rich to pay higher taxes.

If our American identity is to have real meaning it can’t be only a chest-thumping assertion of our rights, or a commitment to allowing everyone the maximum of individual choice and market access. Nor should it be a mystical Bannonesque communion of blood wrapped in a narrow Anglo-European culture. A democratic society cannot be held together by electrons; we are not going to post and tweet our way to a shared life. Democracy is about people knowing and trusting one another. It needs to be created and sustained every day in the way we Americans choose to live—together, or separately. Living together will require some risks and some sacrifices. Let’s be brave, and choose a life that brings us face to face with our fellow citizens.

Theory of Excess: The Rise of Addictive Behaviors

Some time ago I absorbed certain ideas from evolutionary biology and psychology into my mental framework, and now they are almost second nature. It is what keeps me anchored in the conviction that there are some fixed aspects to human nature and we are not free-floating bundles of random impulses. I recognize that some people have an aversion to evolutionary hypotheses, which are usually educated guesses and can be used to shore up rigid views of human behavior. I see them as interesting ‘just-so’ stories, not hard and fast truths, but this essay is probably not for you.

Carrying these concepts around and mulling them over and testing them against what I see has led me to what I call a ‘theory of excess’ that I think explains much of contemporary human behavior. The gist of it is that our modern mastery of nature, the combination of science and technology with industrial capitalism, allows us to satisfy all manner of natural, evolutionary-determined drives and desires, far beyond what was possible in pre-modern times. What pre-modern societies could grant only to a few, or none, is now available to most of us. This is readily acknowledged for some basic needs like food and drink, where our hard-wired affinity for sweets, fats, and salt—all things that were rare and difficult to find for our forebears—is now easily and cheaply satisfied, leading to an explosion of obesity and diseases like diabetes. But the same is equally true for many social, emotional, and psychological needs ranging from music to gossip to sports.

This has many consequences, some of them already abundantly evident, some that are still playing themselves out. We are seeing the development of addictions or addictive-like behaviors associated with a wide variety of human drives.  My list includes Alcohol and Drugs, Sex, Music, Gossip and News, Stories, Humor, Shopping, Sports, Games, and Gambling.  If you read this I hope you will suggest more.

ALCOHOL and DRUGS. All types of wine, beer, and liquor can now be gotten cheaply and in abundance. Of course alcohol has been known and abused for millennia, but before the 1700s it was largely in the form of weak beers and wine. Making straight alcohol was expensive and time-consuming and largely done at home in small batches. Read accounts of the havoc wreaked in England in the 1700s by cheap gin—they are similar to modern descriptions of crack cocaine and meth: mothers abandoning their babies, fathers selling their daughters, to get another drink. Add rum from the Indies and suddenly inexpensive spirits make alcoholism a widespread illness of the poor. Since then the variety and quantity of alcohol has grown by leaps and bounds; it has become very cheap, with predictable negative consequences, made worse of course by driving.

What is true for alcohol is multiplied by the mass production of all manner of other drugs. Again, drugs of all types—stimulants, hallucinogens, depressants—were known to many pre-modern peoples and used for spiritual, medical and recreational purposes; but they were usually rare and expensive. Today entrepreneurs are busy making old drugs cheaper, and devising ever new and more addictive drugs, employing every type of modern agricultural and industrial practice. As with alcohol, attempts to stop this through law enforcement have been ineffective and had the unintended consequence of fostering powerful criminal organizations, funding terrorists, destabilizing much of Central America, ruining the lives of countless people engaged in victimless drug use, exploding our domestic prison population, and enabling corrupt dictators from Africa to Southeast Asia.

SEX. Pornography is a $100 billion global industry that the Internet has made cheaply available to almost everyone. For sale material has become more and more extreme as entrepreneurs try to compete with enthusiastic amateurs. Online matchmaking services help people find marriage partners as well as one-night hookups. Viagra is a household word. Sex tours ferry wealthy men to Thailand, Brazil and other destinations. “Sex addiction” is now a recognized psychological disorder requiring professional intervention.

Food, alcohol, drugs, sex—these are obvious physical drives exploited by modern industry. But many other fixations of modern life share the addictive characteristics that tell us they are manifestations of powerful drives.

MUSIC. There is no consensus on why, from an evolutionary perspective, music exerts such universal power and attraction. Theories include music’s role in creating social bonds, or as an emotional release, or, as Darwin surmised, in impressing potential mates.  Whatever the reason, today technology and cheap communications make it possible for much of the world’s population to listen to any type of music they want, as much as they want. And listen we do.

It is startling to think that only a little over a hundred years ago, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself or go where someone was performing live. Today young people in particular latch onto music as an identity marker for themselves, their group, their generation; often they seem unable to function without constant musical access (not like the good old days when we had to feed our musical obsession by putting needles on delicate rotating discs:). Listening to music now often blends seamlessly into watching music, sharing music, talking about music, in short, being constantly absorbed with music. Like drugs, music exerts a direct appeal to the brain, bypassing our cortex, stimulating and satisfying our emotions. And like drugs, today’s capitalist driven technology makes constantly available something that used to be rare.

If music is only a harmless epiphenomenon, or the sublime and uplifting gateway to the soul (as posited by 19th century romantics), then there is nothing to worry about. But both are off the mark. Plato warned us that music is powerful for good and bad and a society that simply throws up its hands and encourages music of every kind, in any amount, can expect trouble. There is a powerful scene in the movie version of “Cabaret” where we hear a sweet German song and then watch as the camera slowly tracks from the glowing face of the singer to his brown Nazi Youth uniform.

It’s not clear what this does to us, but to me there are some disturbing aspects. Kept from music, constant listeners become disturbed and go through a kind of withdrawal. More and more musical availability can lead to a spiral where listeners need more intense and more exotic forms to repeat a musical ‘high.’ Appreciation for more complex music becomes drowned out by the need to move on to the next song, the next artist, the next playlist. Adored and emulated far beyond their worth, musicians become highly questionable role models.

GOSSIP and “NEWS”. Another characteristic of modern society is the preoccupation with high-level gossip, intently following the lives of the famous: famous politicians, athletes, movie stars, pop stars, and of course people famous for being famous. We inundate ourselves with this sort of information, I think because it links with a strong underlying evolutionary trait for all social animals, the need to pay attention to status and especially to the intentions of higher status members of the group. Knowing what those above you in the pecking order want, what they intend to do, anticipating their needs, emulating them, circumventing them—these were critical survival skills for our ancestors, and of course still are. Commoners have always been well-advised to pay attention to what their lords and kings are up to.

One of the most critical types of information about social superiors has to do with their mates, children, and relations, since power and resources often flow in kinship channels. I think this is why we see an obsessive interest in every rumor about the marriages, divorces, dalliances, affairs, courtships, pregnancies, breakups and so on of the celebrity class. These cravings are fed by a robust industry of gossipmongers, using all the tools of modern media and communications, from late-night television and its endless celebrity guest lists to magazines at the grocery checkout counter.

Further, there are many gossip creators who thrive on inventing and distorting rumors in order to attract more eyeballs and make money—or become famous themselves–from this human need. Of course this is harmless up to a point, but for many I think easy access to this information has turned into a craving, especially for people who are more sensitive to social hierarchy or more nervous about the risks of not being on top of the latest news. And for many this inborn need to focus on—and often to emulate—social superiors leads to an unhealthy preoccupation with unworthy and destructive models.

Information about violent threats would have been another critical category for our ancestors, hence the “if it bleeds it leads” approach taken by many news purveyors. News sources who are criticized for putting out an endless series of stories about car crashes, gang murders, and terrorist plots always say “that’s what the public wants!,” and of course they are right. We find it hard to stay away from stories that feature violence and warnings about violent threats. The steady diet of this information distorts our perception of the world and makes it hard to distinguish between the most sensational and graphic threats, such as terrorist shooting sprees, and more common or more serious—but less vivid–threats like climate change or the rising consumption of opioids.

Political gossip is an important and growing sub-category of news. In the US we have seen a steep growth in radio, TV, and online sources specializing in 24/7 political coverage and commentary, much of it highly partisan and argumentative: as a great Washington Post Magazine cover recently proclaimed, “We Have Reached Peak Punditry.” Why do many people find it compelling to listen to pundits argue and predict (“lightning round, you have 10 seconds!”) about current politics, even when they have no special knowledge and their track records are abysmal? I think it’s because political gossip combines multiple human drives: the ‘need to know’ of gossip generally, the love of competition characteristic of sports and games (see below), and the fascination with threats. The business model of much political gossipmongering and talk radio is to fuel anxiety by publicizing and exaggerating dangers. We are stimulated to keep paying attention to find out more (“don’t turn that dial”!).

STORIES. This is a category I am ambivalent about including, because I don’t want it to be true, but I think it is. We love stories and no human culture is without an extensive repertoire of tales, myths, histories, and people who specialize in making and telling them. Can it be overdone? I fear it can, and is. We have a huge storytelling industry that started with printing and literacy and has exploded with the arrival of radio and film and television and the internet.. Every time I turn on Netflix I see a dozen new series in every genre: dramas, comedies, fantasies, thrillers and new genres trying to combine elements of each. Some storytelling experts look for the blockbuster, the story that appeals to everyone, but today storytellers also seek the niche audience, the special demographic.

I think the reasons we like stories are complicated, and so are the effects of too much storytelling. Stories inform us about other people and other ways of life beyond our immediate grasp, and so challenge our parochialism and loneliness; they distill lessons about human action and how to be in the world; they bind us together by providing the common points of reference for our particular people, our community, and sometimes for humanity as a whole; they provide us the raw material for our own judgments and save us from having to learn everything through direct experience. And of course they amuse and distract us from the pain and boredom of everyday life.

All of these vital purposes can be distorted by the storytelling avalanche of our times. For instance, what stories anymore can bind us together when we are all reading and listening to and watching different stories? Every now and then a Harry Potter comes along and makes us all part of one big story-absorbing community, but those events are rarer and rarer.

Stories are about specific people and specific actions in a specific place and time (though we all recognize that some types of myths or tales are meant to go beyond the individual). The specificity and individuality are key to the story’s attraction, its power to engage the emotions and imagination, and to stick in memory. When we seek more general accounts we have left storytelling and moved into the world of history, philosophy, science. Drawing accurate and meaningful generalizations from the mix of our own experience and the stories we are told is hard, and human beings have always been prone to let the specifics of a good story or anecdote take precedence over abstractions. I’m not sure, but I wonder if the huge sea of stories that everyone now swims in is responsible for the surprising attraction of irrational explanations and the ease with which many people today dismiss scientific and expert judgments.

The dominance in the global marketplace of American stories, pumped out by our prolific and expert entertainment industry, has its own dangers. Our particular American take on life—our individualism, consumerism, love of violence, sexual informality, and so on—has often become the standard for other societies, or caused an intense backlash against America.

HUMOR. The other day I saw a reference to the “comedy industry.” What a strange formulation—humor as a commodity that gets designed, built, marketed, and sold like cars or anti-perspirant. But it seems to be successful; anyway, there is certainly a lot of comedy around these days, in movies, on TV, U-Tube, and of course in all the manifestations of ‘stand-up.’ Comics now seem to migrate seamlessly into other arenas, like news (The Daily Show) and every nook and cranny of television.

What exactly is the demand that the comedy industry is seeking to meet? Humor is present in every part of every society and seems vital to living together. Humor in many of its forms—satire, irony, black humor, dirty jokes—brings to the surface fears and anxieties that we have a hard time addressing head-on. Think of how “All in the Family” let Americans talk together about racism. Other variants give us perspective on our own problems, puncture pretensions, and I think make us feel more like members of the big and hopelessly dysfunctional human family. Humor is the great leveler. And humor is at bottom hopeful: comedies end in weddings, tragedies in funerals.

Too much of at least some kinds of comedy, however, is worrisome. I like Colbert and John Oliver, but their sarcastic take on politics, repeated night after night to an audience that probably gets no other take on public life, is corrosive and contributes to a growing distrust of every type of authority that is undermining democracy. The Comedy Central view of the world discourages engagement and reinforces a sense of unearned superiority.  Internet trolls–mostly young men living in their parent’s basements–who spread ridiculous pro-Trump lies in the recent campaign defended themselves by saying it was all for laughs.

Competing comics trying to find their niche in the industry move quickly to more extreme, more vulgar, more shocking material. Sex is funny, but it’s also tender, and mysterious, and needs privacy.  If everything is funny, nothing is.  Appreciating humor requires that some things not be funny, that some things not be overlaid with irony.

SHOPPING. I saw an ad the other day at the gas pump while I was filling up my car (another zone of privacy invaded by Madison Avenue) that featured a young woman extolling the gas company credit card for allowing her to pursue “my favorite hobby: shopping!” What on earth does that mean? How can shopping be a ‘hobby’? But it seems obvious that many of us get a lot of enjoyment from shopping, above and beyond the value of anything that is actually purchased. Comparing prices, going to stores, tracking sales, clipping coupons, bargaining with sellers, selling stuff ourselves on E-Bay and Craigslist—clearly the activity of buying and selling is compelling to many people. As Adam Smith said, there is a natural inclination to ‘truck, barter and exchange,’ and with more disposable income and more to choose from than ever, we are trucking at an amazing clip.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has gone to the mall, or wandered around Amazon, just because I was bored. Shopping for many these days is a ‘default’ activity, what you do when you don’t have anything else to do. At the far end of this spectrum are chronic ‘shopaholics’ and hoarders who can’t stop themselves from accumulating things far beyond any identifiable need. You can glimpse in this an ancestral drive under conditions of scarcity to get as many valuable things as possible to store up for the hard times to come.

Over-shopping is a major cause of debt and bankruptcy. It clogs our closets and basements and landfills with stuff we don’t need. We pay professional organizers to come into our homes and convince us to let go. But these efforts are dwarfed by the forces encouraging more shopping, not only the need of a million sellers to create new desires, but the conviction of economists and politicians that more consumer spending is needed to create jobs and growth.

SPORTS. All over the world we can’t seem to get enough spectator sports. Sporting events get top ratings on TV and radio, attract huge and loyal audiences on social media, are dissected and obsessed over around the clock by a phalanx of commentators and analysts. Why do we like to see people competing, individually and in teams? One reason is the chance to identify unreservedly with our tribe and our tribe’s representative—the Boston Red Sox, we can say, representing the collective identity of New England. Since sports are self-contained and (usually) have no off-the-field meaning, we can fully back them without the guilt or trade-offs involved in backing a political party, or my country versus others. It recreates the fundamental us vs. them of tribal life.

In the ancestral environment we were highly alarmed and frightened by real threats (from wild beasts, other tribes, natural dangers like storms and floods and famines and wildfires) on a regular basis, probably every day. We courted danger by hunting and gathering, and by raiding our neighbors. We developed complex physiological and psychological reactions: we had to decide when to remain calm, and when to run like hell; and we had to learn from these intense experiences and pass this knowledge on to our kin.

To capture game and conquer enemies we had to work together in small groups and came to value the intense social bonds associated with the hunt and the raid. So in a perverse way we have been designed to enjoy these situations of danger and stress and competition, maybe even seek them out. Further, because being successful in these high stress situations was essential for survival, those who excelled were celebrated and granted authority and status.

Human play teaches these same basic skills. As children we fight and compete and create groups to see who is faster, tougher, smarter, more skilled physically and socially. Through play we develop our personalities, find our comrades, identify our rivals and our enemies.

Watching competitive sports triggers fear and anxiety as we identify with the competitors, share their fear of losing and the shock of expected and unexpected threats, with many of the same attractions outlined above for horror movies and political debates. And through this we bond with the athletes and with fellow fans. The deep drives that this taps into can be seen in the behavior of soccer hooligans and other organized fan bases. A book that opened my eyes is Among the Thugs, about British soccer fans, where the author immerses himself in a culture of drinking and violence and describes the intense pleasure—which he explicitly compares to taking drugs–of allowing himself to disappear into the postgame mob.

GAMES. More people are playing sports as well as watching them, but today far more people satisfy themselves with video games. A new multi-billion industry has arisen to fill the gap between being a full participant and being a spectator. Using all the tools that technology and clever marketers can muster, games appeal to multiple audiences but especially young men. Many spend a large part of their life immersed in games, and the dangers of excess are now emerging—poor socialization, low impulse control, decreased sensitivity to violence, loss of interest in other activities, a need for more and more intense experiences. Video game addiction is being explored by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in the official list of psychiatric disorders.

GAMBLING. Video games appear to share some of the features of gambling, another activity widely practiced in most known human societies that has been greatly expanded by modern capitalism and technology. Huge enterprises and entire cities have been constructed to attract gamblers; slot machines and lotteries have been honed using sophisticated psychological research to maximize their addictive properties. Online systems allow people to gamble anywhere, anytime. Gambling, which some evolutionary theorists think draws on an innate attraction human beings have to situations where outcomes are closely balanced (because in an inherently unpredictable world we might not keep trying unless we ‘enjoyed’ a certain amount of risk) appears to produce the same dopamine-induced high as many drugs. Problem gambling is now classified as an addiction in the most recent DSM (5) of the American Psychiatric Association.

CONCLUSION. All of the underlying drives and desires described here have a positive, in some cases absolutely necessary, part in human life when pursued in moderation or at the right time for the right reasons. Making it easier and cheaper to satisfy them is what modernity is all about, and of course we can point to the many ways life has been improved over the past several hundred years. But a world in which millions and millions of the smartest people are spending all their time finding ways to feed your desires and make money off them has some clear downsides. This may be especially true now that (in the developed world at least) most straightforward needs have been addressed and much of this ingenuity is directed to stoking more problematic drives.

I am not thinking only of the clear dangers of over-consumption like climate change and resource depletion. We are at greater and greater risk of being manipulated in our most common and everyday decisions, as clever sellers study human behavior like hawks, seeking the slightest competitive advantage. More and more of our interactions are mediated by online systems that are trying to sell us things or set us up for advertisers, where the name of the game is to amass as much data as possible on each consumer and then deploy it to keep us shopping, gambling, gaming, and gossiping. The other day I heard a Freakonomics podcast describing the incredible effort that Facebook and Google put into keeping us on their sites for just an extra 10 minutes—thousands of hours of work by the smartest tech geniuses in the world, all aimed at seducing you and me. Not only does this seem like a sad waste of talent, it is dangerous for human privacy and autonomy. Their work feeds into the algorithms that determine what each user sees on-screen, so that we think we are getting an objective view of the news or our friend’s interests, but instead what we see is subtly manipulated to put us in the mood to buy.

Capitalists are not the only players. Politicians and political parties are doing the same thing, using the same research and the same core human drives to sell candidates. Modern campaigns assemble huge databases—often borrowed from market research–to reach each individual voter and figure out exactly what issues and interests will get him or her behind their candidate. Governments are not far behind. China is creating a “social credit” system to rate its subjects, using a “vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distills it into a single number ranking each citizen,” according to the BBC.

I think that our frequent sense of disorientation, of inauthenticity, is closely tied to these trends.  The things we want, the music we hum, the people we admire, the jokes we tell, the politics we obsess over–we sense that these are not really ours, that they have been foisted on us.  The drives and desires that used to serve us well are no longer trustworthy.

A bumper sticker I saw recently says “Do not believe everything you think,” which is excellent advice. We could add to it, “Do not desire everything you want.”