Signs of Failure

Two phenomena of this 21st century American moment stand out as exemplary of what our valueless values have wrought. I consider them the natural effusion of materialistically centered culture aided by the expediency and opportunism that reside so comfortably in that material domain and that help it along. Its implicit theme, the doctrine for which it lives, might be phrased as “More is…uh, More and More is Good,” where the idea of social benefit—the Goods of community—has lost credibility, where “More for…?” has no answer except $$. Some have denoted ubiquitous advertising as “capitalist realism,” counterpart to “socialist realism,” the former acting as propaganda for the American way of life, a way whose beating heart is economic growth, while the latter corrupted Soviet art, culture, and politics during its unhappy tenure propagandizing a Communist way of life.

The two phenomena that I refer to are the American response to climate change and the prevalence of truthlessness in public discourse. The first raises a question about motivation and the possibility, functionally, of an unconscious suicidal impulse—societal self-destruction as a likely result of choices made for other reasons but which implicitly carry forward a suicidal impetus. The second points to the truth of Mishra’s conjecture about American nihilism in the essay I cited above. The two are twinned forces as the denial of climate reality requires comfort with lies, and lies enable progress toward the probability of civilizational suicide (when they aren’t doing their duty deceiving for other purposes). Tobacco smokers with lung cancer are typically more honest with themselves about their condition and its causation than Americans are about climate change, but on the road to catastrophic illness smokers too could pretend when they wanted to. (Not to inject partisanship, but truth requires that we notice the great majority of climate change deniers are Republican, and that this party, in obeisance to its current President, has also embraced truthlessness.)

The evidence confirming anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming and widely available. There’s no need to repeat it. A majority of Americans now claim to believe in the science. Yet the Republican Party, which controls the federal government and the majority of state governments, officially continues to deny the reality, their President calls it a “hoax,” and they raised no objections to his withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord that intended to bring world-wide cooperation to solving the problem. From this I surmise that those who believe do not believe strongly and/or do not appreciate its seriousness. They could also feel helpless or hopeless since there is good evidence from political science that special interest concerns always take precedence over those of citizens on any issue in which the special interests are seriously invested, democratic substance having gone off in the same direction as truthfulness. Although many states and cities along with foundations and environmental organizations see the facts and are acting on them as they are able, the reality for the country is that no unified effort that matches the scale of the problem exists, no national solidarity for confronting the deniers’ lies and distortions and demanding action to protect precious Earth.

Naomi Klein begins her book on climate change, This Changes Everything, with a citation from a 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science report that will help make the point I am after here.

Most projections of climate change presume that future changes—greenhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and effects such as sea level rise—will happen incrementally. A given amount of emission will lead to a given amount of temperature increase that will lead to a given amount of smooth incremental sea level rise. However, the geological record for the climate reflects instances where a relatively small change in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole. In other words, pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes that have massively disruptive and large-scale impacts. At that point, even if we do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, potentially unstoppable processes are set in motion.

The short version of that goes this way: either slowly over a century or two or swiftly within the present century serious disruptions may occur, some of which put civilization at risk and others—unpredictable, catastrophic—theoretically could make human life itself problematic. This is what I had in mind when I suggested the possibility of civilizational suicide. Russian roulette with a weapon that has an unknown number of chambers containing an unknown number of bullets but whose trigger we haplessly pull repeatedly every day that we cling to denial. (Note: As one committed to an ecocentric value system as well as to an animal rights philosophy, I do not consider the loss of natural beauty or integrity and the accelerating loss of species diversity any less important than the prospect of lost civilization; in fact, they are more important and worthy of concern for being innocent and foundational to human existence, which has as a whole ungratefully passed over their gifts to eudemonia, spirit, and meaning, each right there for the taking by those with sufficient care and receptivity, perhaps most palpably in the natural world.)

It sounds almost preposterous to suggest that a society, a nation, especially one as rich and powerful as the U.S., could be suicidal. If the assertion has validity I assume it is an unconscious drift, more of the “oh, whatever” variety (immortalized in teen-speak and meaning “who cares?”, “leave me alone, I’m occupied with other things,” “fate will decide”) than deliberate. Like a speeding drunk, society would assume safe-landing while knowingly risking the opposite. It would have to have grown flaccid in its strivings toward meaning and happiness, perhaps even forgotten how to address the questions striving would raise, accepted substitutes, distracted itself, lost confidence that it could identify and achieve the good or make changes that would entail, slumped into busy ennui and helplessness. Dramatic, life-threatening climate change would feel too complicated to fathom, too obscure and far away, too contrary to present experience and recent history, and so too easy to avoid contemplation of its scientifically assured impacts. Speaking as a former psychotherapist, if a patient presented with this symptom picture, which looks a lot like depression, I would surmise at least tacit acceptance of self-destruction and would worry. Doesn’t the continued existence of nuclear weapons, the lack of effort to abolish them, and the present commitment to spend a trillion dollars plus over the next thirty years “modernizing” them manifest the same dynamic? One way or the other, the patient will almost surely die.

It has to be said that citizens tend to be a complacent lot concerning issues of this nature and will generally follow where they are led when the direction is familiar and reassuring, as it is with the everyday reality to which they have accustomed themselves. When leaders, even those who enjoy as little respect as do most of our traditional authorities, speak in conflicting voices people will gravitate toward the place of familiarity and comfort, which in the present instance is toward business more or less as usual, even though when asked they report belief that dangerous things may be afoot. Astonishingly, we still hear prominent voices assert that even if ameliorative adjustments should be made they cannot be allowed to jeopardize economic growth. I think again of that lung cancer patient dragging his oxygen bottle around wheezing and hawking blood. Economism, self-centeredness, greed…commodity fetish, ideological hatred of government, fragmentation away from community solidarity: denial is over-determined and among the afflicted more powerfully driven than the reality principle.

Which naturally raises the puzzlement of truthlessness and its growing popularity as a way of moral and cognitive life, a way to deny reality and avoid self-reflection and hard choice. There is evidence that a national propensity toward self-deception and flights of fancy (paranoid, religious, racial, etc.) has been endemic from the beginning. Even so, the ethical collapse inherent in such propensity seems to me its most alarming aspect. Aristotle considered intellectual and ethical excellence the keys to good lives, lives well imbued with eudemonic character. Truthlessness fails at both forms of excellence. This seems so obvious that elaboration may be superfluous. Intellectual integrity relies on a love of truth and willingness to follow its trail, regardless the thickets it goes through, as well as self-awareness of internal thickets blocking objectivity. And ethics relies on love of moral goods and consistent effort to act on their behalf. Truthlessness says that neither of these considerations is compelling and both are disposable when competing interests intervene. Interests in facile psychic comfort, in believing without thinking, in conformity with authority or identity group, in anything other than responsibility. This is a scandalous form of thought and behavior and carries within more than sufficient psychological antibodies to ward off recognition by its carriers so it’s hard to imagine a remedy.

This is the 4th part of an 8 part essay.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Happiness and Economism

Let’s be more specific about the sources of our unhappiness. Since I identify the American economic obsession as the central (but not sole) factor leading to societal unhappiness and pathology, I begin with it. I will make it clear that I accept the large truth contained in James Baldwin’s assertion that Americans are “afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.” (Cited in Pankaj Mishra, “America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism,” NY Times, April 28, 2017.)

In the U.S., national wealth, GDP, is supposed to foster and confirm national success and happiness. If we could weigh the words, balderdash and all, that pour oleaginously from the mouths of this country’s political and economic ruling class the scale would lean heavily in the direction of economic growth—measuring it (the Consumer Confidence Index may be the most revealing of all measures, lacking as it does an equally availed counterpart for national happiness or well-being [a Citizen Happiness Index] and suggesting itself as the key measure) and then obsessing, lamenting or rejoicing about it; and monomaniacally promoting it—tweaking variables, adding stimulants, aiming ever larger. The “American Dream” has always been a material dream with foundational principles such as freedom and opportunity existing chiefly to serve it. But principles are only words and here they refer to instrumental values; the crux is measurable prosperity. Richer than ever in toto, we should be happier than ever. The Happiness Report, however, lifts the mask and reveals reality underneath, as does the list of symptoms enumerated above. The time has come to awaken from the Dream.

Part of the problem is surely the oft noted extreme (and increasing) inequality of economic distribution. The Walton Family, for example, (six people with the ingenuity and initiative to have become heirs of the Walmart founder) owns as much wealth as the bottom 42% of American families and the ratio worsens every year. The three richest Americans (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos) have as much wealth as the bottom 160 million Americans, which is half the nation’s total population. Wealth generates wealth while labor barely makes a living. The wealthy, such as Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election, and acolytes such as Congressman Paul Ryan at every opportunity, assert that the difference between wealth and poverty is simply ambition and effort, but that’s an obvious lie as the data and merely being awake and aware make clear. It also depends on a simplistic notion of free will, a will that exists only in the realm of ruling class rationalization. The person running a race with weights locked to his ankles may move in the same direction as those without weights but mysteriously can rarely maintain the pace necessary to win, or often even finish. The Dream propagated turns out delusory and the losers in this race are intended to feel responsible for their fate in lieu of holding the system and its upholders accountable for their share of responsibility.

Gross economic inequality is arbitrary, pernicious, and immoral and so long as the Dream message remains exclusively economic it conceals additional delusion—that materialism can ever compose a good life in the Aristotelian sense of envisioning and pursuing truegoods. Its innate eudemonic emptiness reveals itself in communities, forests, mountaintops, and oceans, air, water, and landscapes… each of these and more exploited and sacrificed for profit. And modern profit-takers increasingly secede from common responsibilities for the common good, such as paying their fair share of taxes. This would be bad enough if we contained it within our national boundaries, but of course we don’t. We are missionaries for the gospel of turning all resources everywhere into profit, the definition of resource being anything that can be turned into a profit and definitely not including traditions, practices, mores, and relationships that may define who certain human groupings are but which are expendable when they interfere with resource exploitation. And I propose that the export of this dogma globally, by all the means that we have chosen, has not only further debased the currency of American values but contributed to hostility, some of whose expressions are terrorist attacks against Western targets. Consider the path from the first war in Iraq in 1991 to the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. ten years later to the second Iraq war beginning in 2003 and still not concluded; add to it that American war-making is capacious enough to have included a variety of other Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African countries over the past sixteen years. Millions of casualties, tens of millions of refugees: the mad pursuit of power projection and commercial ambition forced upon people who have other aspirations. Unhappiness engendering unhappiness.

The mirage of materialist fulfillment takes many forms. If the urge toward material improvements were conceived as a project of social fulfillment, an endeavor aimed at the good of all, it would incorporate generosity, kindness, proportion, and mutual support rather than merely individualist advancement and so have a very different ethical compass and occupy a smaller space within world views that would aim to include other human needs and values. The individualism that roots and flourishes in the garden of community solidarity is clearly something different from the individualism that conceals self-centeredness. National solidarity seems a lost possibility today, appearing only when we begin a new war (and soon wearing thin as reality sets in) and after disasters such as hurricanes. The bonds of community are not only instrumentally valuable as communities go about their business but those who experience these bonds know their innate satisfactions and that they offer meaning not often found as they serve larger ends than themselves. Which of course explains why so many veterans consider their wartime experiences, violent and tragic though they were, the high point of their lives.

Economism, the commodity fetish, distorts and diminishes the human and natural environments that it has come to dominate like a loose cannon on a foundering ship. To make matters worse it has managed to convince some that it is intrinsic to the preservation of freedom, that action to protect valued places and relationships from unbridled economic exploitation, to protect ethical values themselves, imposes grievous risks of sliding into tyranny. Neoliberals, libertarians, and their right-wing fellow travelers along the highway-to-nowhere have propounded this doctrine, which to some eyes looks self-defeating since big unfettered business has been as oppressive in its own way as tyrannical governments, minus only boots on throats except when necessary in certain deep jungles where mineral wealth is discovered but whose indigenes resent intrusion and disruption of their lives and home. The freedom of some to chase wealth carries with it the lost freedom of others to live happier lives than what work, debt, and consumerism allow.

Individualism without direction, community, and larger purpose…economic enterprise without soul and the innate commitments of ethically ensouled humans…freedom without responsibility…what are they for?

This is part 3 of an 8 part series
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Happiness & Plutocracy

I used for dramatic example the modernized expression of terrorism, a method which itself is nothing new, because, despite being a relatively minor national security problem even when ugly and tragic, it preoccupies people and has been latched onto by what passes for our national leadership for reasons that obviously have nothing to do with its degree of danger. And more to the point, it surely arises as a cri de coeur by people who suffer more even than Americans from the hollowness and oppressiveness of the gospel of capitalism (and Euro-American colonialism and imperialism past and present) with its ripples and off-shoots and side-effects—opiate of the people that is losing its anodyne effectiveness and creating violent antibodies. Furthermore, like so many symptoms of the modern malaise, it has received too little in-depth analysis among either the political class or the public.

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network report mentioned above is an annual publication called most recently the World Happiness Report 2017. Speaking of the U.S. it notes that the problem of diminishing happiness is a “…multi-faceted social crisis—rising inequality, corruption, isolation, and distrust…” The “…US showed less social support, less sense of personal freedom, lower donations [signs of generosity], and more perceived corruption of government and business…America’s crisis is, in short, a social crisis, not an economic crisis.” This is so even though “The predominant political discourse in the United States is aimed at raising economic growth…and the happiness that is supposed to accompany it. But the data show conclusively that this is the wrong approach.”

This analysis seems indubitable. One way to illustrate the power of the economic narrative that dominates our thinking, and especially our thinking about national leadership, is this: Humans come in a wide variety of types, styles, and levels of ability and intelligence. Every human endeavor is inspired by the best people who engage in it—there are excellent artists, physicians, craftspeople, teachers, accountants, psychologists, lawyers, scholars, authors…and there are those who excel and/or are lucky at amassing money, some of which is expended to arrange for the tilting of the American system in such a way that even more of it slides their way and stays there once slid. They dominate not just the economic system but the political as well and societally are treated as if their form of excellence is superior to that of those who excel in other areas, which is part of the reason they dominate politically and why they are permitted to possess such prodigiously excessive quantities of society’s wealth. There is nothing to be said in favor of this treatment and much against, but it persists, since the coin of the American realm is money, not excellence or integrity or public spiritedness. The average net worth of a Congressperson is over one million dollars. The net worth of Donald Trump’s original cabinet is said to exceed that of approximately one third of the American population combined, about 100 million people. That wealth does not translate as wisdom, virtue, or effectiveness in doing the work of governing on behalf of all the people is another indubitability. We do not expect philosopher kings at the helm but surely there are many people with less money and more practical, public-spirited intelligence than the pretenders we have.

Societies’ dominance by plutocracies is one half of a two-part rhythm that apparently goes back as far as when humans settled into communities where agriculture provided sufficient surplus for hierarchy and oligarchic dominance to arise. This was 8-10,000 years ago. The rhythm has gone back and forth between degrees of oligarchy/plutocracy and proto democracy. Today’s version in the U.S. displays the forms of democracy huddled tenuously within implicit rule by the few. There’s nothing new or unusual about this. What strikes me as curious is the power of circularly rationalized dominance (i.e., they are rich because they are superior, the evidence for which is their wealth) by moneyed interests within what claims to be an exceptional democracy. As mentioned, excellence comes in many forms and there’s no reason to believe that those good at making money are innately superior in any of the skills of governance to those with excellence in other realms. In fact, since money-making is usually an ego-centered pursuit, we might assume that its practitioners are less well-suited for governance, if what we seek are people with deep concern for the common welfare.

Dominance by economic interests, concerns, and activities along with assumptions and consequences that follow in their wake seem to me the major part of explaining missing meaning, missing happiness, and missing solidarity among American people today, which combine with intense bigotry, violence, disrespect for life, and delusion that go back to the nation’s founding to foment our unfortunate condition. And through our actions on the world stage, the misfortunes of many others. Without a remarkable capacity for self-deception, we couldn’t be who we are.

This is Part 2 of an 8 part series.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Introduction: Happiness and Economics

If Aristotle was right that the good for humans—our best kind of life—consists in the pursuit and realization of happiness (a virtuous, a flourishing life), we are left to determine what that means. Each person somehow arrives at their version of an answer and lives it day-by-day, but if the living falls away from a first commitment to happiness and, equally important, to the discernment of what best composes happiness for him or her, then to that extent their life has failed. To forget why you live or to misperceive the reason and meaning that your life could have are what make failure.

Since we live as individuals within societies it seems that this fundamental dimension of living good human lives should be central here as well, that societies would ask what they should aim for and how they could facilitate, individually and collectively, their members’ realization of happiness just as individuals would ask this of themselves. (In the broadest sense, isn’t this what a “society,” an assemblage of people with shared interests and commitments, exists to serve?) But within the U.S., at least, the farther out we go from me to we, the greater the silence about happiness, and even at “me” it is scarcely addressed with conscious and critical intention. It isn’t just that the question is not enunciated but, overwhelmingly, its answer is assumed without question. Economic factors, predominantly economic growth and personal prosperity are treated prima facie as the obvious answer, nothing more to say, no justification needed even though the claim flies without wings, kept aloft purely on faith and hot air. As a recent report from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network puts it, “…income per person [in the U.S.] has increased roughly three times since 1960, but measured happiness has not risen. The situation has gotten worse in recent years: per capita GDP is still rising, but happiness is now actually falling.” (Interestingly, between 1990 and 2015 China had the same experience: rising income, falling happiness.) The Report continues: “The USA is a story of reduced happiness. In 2007 the USA ranked 3rd among the OECD countries; in 2016 it came 19th [out of 34]. The reasons are declining social supports and increased corruption…”

No one can believe any longer that objective reason is the prime mover of human judgment but even so…: Decade after decade chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of economic increase and to what end? Was Aristotle wrong? Is national wealth more important than individual and societal happiness? Should we live for the economy instead, despite America’s plummeting ranking on the happiness scale?

The disconnect is puzzling and raises an even larger set of questions. Has the present world, which America presumes to lead, made itself or most parts of it into societies unsuited for good human lives? Unsuited in that they do not promote and to some extent actually subvert the discovery and living of such lives. Are we not only slowly and mortally disrupting natural Earth processes through climate change, and risking precipitous destruction through continued reliance on nuclear weapons in military planning, but are we simultaneously crushing human meaning and the human spirit that it nurtures through commercial practices and materialist values that are anathema to the Aristotelian insight, which was in fact correct?

I will assume, based on the figures cited earlier along with everyday observation and experience, that American society today is not a propitious place for the pursuit of happiness by the great majority of citizens. Unceasing war, militarism, and annual expenditures in the $1 trillion range for so-called national security operations; a dysfunctional political system that is polarized and polarizing as well as ineffective at promoting or even envisioning the common good; economic inequality that grossly surpasses rational justification or defense; whistling past the climate change graveyard; levels of gun ownership, imprisonment, drug usage, and neighborly violence that exceed those of any other country; precedence of corporate goals over all others; a populace the majority of whom will believe anything, including obvious lies and flimflammery, that suits its fears or fancy; bigotry in all its forms; etc. A long list of symptoms and it could be longer if made exhaustive. If our society were a person, it would be rushed into ICU.

“Why do they hate us?”, asked many after 9/11. Could it be that the U.S. drive to spread its self-centered (hyper-individualistic, socially fragmented) and commodity-centered values over all Earth, to set the rules for others on how to arrange their societies, and our readiness to impose our will and our values with force have something to do with it? I think so, but terrorism only represents an external response to Americanism; sometimes we turn on ourselves as at Oklahoma City in 1995. I am concerned here with attending to the signs of lost happiness within the U.S. and to its co-optive and distorted pursuits, despite its promise as an unalienable right in our Declaration of Independence. What are its sources? What’s missing and what’s been put in its place? Is our trajectory irremediably downward toward lower and lower levels of happiness combined with higher and higher levels of symptomatic responses?

As a footnote, I offer two speculations about capitalist dominated economic and political systems: first, without significant regulatory restraints capitalism will seriously damage society and the natural world, for it contains no internal ethical checks and attitudinally it prioritizes unlimited expansion over other values; and second, whenever it is solely engaged in bottom-line thinking, which seems its normal cognitive mode, capitalism will trend toward lowest common denominator conditions as long as they serve profitability. So worker security and satisfaction are no more than old fashioned luxuries and therefore dispensable, and obligations toward the community in which a corporation makes its products will not exceed platitudes, for communities are both dispensable and fungible. The obeisance which so many offer capitalistic economy can only be based on its economic dynamism, its capacity for generating more-and- more, while the costs and casualties of more-and-more are society’s and Nature’s price to pay. They have no place on a balance sheet or P & L.

This is the first part of an 8 part essay.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash