In September of 2010, Forbes Magazine announced that the collective net worth of the nation's wealthiest four hundred persons had risen $290 billion above the previous year to $1.37 trillion. This staggering concentration of wealth is greater than the total wealth held by the bottom 50% of all U.S. households. Despite this ever-widening economic inequality between the haves and the have-nots, the GOP was able to impose an austerity budget upon the United States. Equally perplexing, these austerity measures were endorsed by President Obama and the Congress, notwithstanding the almost universal agreement among economists that government austerity measures during a time of economic travail, such as the present, will only prolong a recession and exacerbate the plight of the unemployed, the underemployed and middle class employees who have seen their wages stagnate or erode. How has this happened?
As early as the 1820s, the French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, detected a potentially disquieting link between the pervasive individualism which infused the new American democracy, which Tocqueville celebrated, and the large number of voluntary associations which he discovered Americans so willingly participated in. This collectively-shared adherence to individualism "disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to look after itself." Tocqueville further warned that "Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life...Selfishness is a vice as old as the world..individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ration as the equality of condition."
Almost two centuries later, citizens of the United States experience extraordinary stress and uncertainty. As this culture has made the painful transitions during the past two hundred and thirty-five years from agrarian to industrial and now to post-industrial, and from rural to urban to suburban and exurban, many current observers have detected increasing evidence of social disintegration, violence, fragmentation and loneliness. Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam has observed that ordinary Americans shared a sense of civic malaise at the end of the twentieth century. The empirical evidence, as shown by the quantitative data, is quite startling. "Fully 77 percent said the nation was worse off because of 'less involvement in community activities.' In 1992, three quarters of the U.S. workforce said that 'the breakdown of community and selfishness were 'serious or extremely serious' problems in America."
At a very personal level, years before the financial meltdown of 2008, there was compelling information which showed that trepidation and uncertainty increased as economic inequality and despair rose dramatically. Yale University Political Scientist Jacob Hacker has documented, among many other unsettling indicators, that personal bankruptcy filings by Americans increased from fewer than 290,000 to more than 2 million between 1980 and 2005; since the 1970s the number of mortgage foreclosures increased fivefold; and that one in three children and non-elderly adults--some 80 million citizens in the United States--were without health insurance during the years 2002-2003. Other commentators have emphasized that the increasing complexity and social isolation of American contemporary life have created a dystopia of choice which became pronounced during the last half of the twentieth century. As Philip Salter noted in his book, The Pursuit of Loneliness: "Americans are forced into making more 'choices' per day, with 'fewer givens, more ambiguous criteria, less environmental stability, and less social structural support than any people in history."
Two articles published in the New York Times on the same day last year - March 1, 2010 - illustrate the often extreme forms of anti-social individualism which American culture now tolerates. The first article described a German family who were granted asylum by a U.S. immigration judge both after they were denied permission to home school their children by the German government and after an appeal of that denial had been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights. The family, devout Christians whose asylum application was sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Fund, complained about the unruly behavior of many German students and claimed to be troubled that many of the stories contained in the German Kinderschule Readers portrayed devils, witches and disobedient children as heroes.
The second article reported that a 71-year-old retired property manager in Virginia, Dale Welch, walked into a Starbucks with a handgun strapped to his waist and ordered a banana Frappuccino with a cinnamon bun. Said Mr. Welch, "I don't know of anybody who would provide me with defense other than myself, so I routinely as a way of life carry a weapon--and that extends to my coffee shops."
The late Christopher Lasch lamented that the etiology of these social pathologies is to be found in the American ethos which he described as a "culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, [and] the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic pre-occupation with the self."
The idea of social justice requires an understanding and a commitment to meet our common needs and aspirations as citizens. Social justice can never be achieved on the backs of the most vulnerable. The French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, reminds us that, "the primary duty of the modern state is the enforcement of social justice." But in a society in which the first person pronoun "I" continues to control the political discourse, the pursuant of social justice will remain an hollow platitude as will our ability to collectively reason our way out of the current economic and social malaise.
As early as the 1820s, the French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, detected a potentially disquieting link between the pervasive individualism which infused the new American democracy, which Tocqueville celebrated, and the large number of voluntary associations which he discovered Americans so willingly participated in. This collectively-shared adherence to individualism "disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to look after itself." Tocqueville further warned that "Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life...Selfishness is a vice as old as the world..individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ration as the equality of condition."
Almost two centuries later, citizens of the United States experience extraordinary stress and uncertainty. As this culture has made the painful transitions during the past two hundred and thirty-five years from agrarian to industrial and now to post-industrial, and from rural to urban to suburban and exurban, many current observers have detected increasing evidence of social disintegration, violence, fragmentation and loneliness. Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam has observed that ordinary Americans shared a sense of civic malaise at the end of the twentieth century. The empirical evidence, as shown by the quantitative data, is quite startling. "Fully 77 percent said the nation was worse off because of 'less involvement in community activities.' In 1992, three quarters of the U.S. workforce said that 'the breakdown of community and selfishness were 'serious or extremely serious' problems in America."
At a very personal level, years before the financial meltdown of 2008, there was compelling information which showed that trepidation and uncertainty increased as economic inequality and despair rose dramatically. Yale University Political Scientist Jacob Hacker has documented, among many other unsettling indicators, that personal bankruptcy filings by Americans increased from fewer than 290,000 to more than 2 million between 1980 and 2005; since the 1970s the number of mortgage foreclosures increased fivefold; and that one in three children and non-elderly adults--some 80 million citizens in the United States--were without health insurance during the years 2002-2003. Other commentators have emphasized that the increasing complexity and social isolation of American contemporary life have created a dystopia of choice which became pronounced during the last half of the twentieth century. As Philip Salter noted in his book, The Pursuit of Loneliness: "Americans are forced into making more 'choices' per day, with 'fewer givens, more ambiguous criteria, less environmental stability, and less social structural support than any people in history."
Two articles published in the New York Times on the same day last year - March 1, 2010 - illustrate the often extreme forms of anti-social individualism which American culture now tolerates. The first article described a German family who were granted asylum by a U.S. immigration judge both after they were denied permission to home school their children by the German government and after an appeal of that denial had been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights. The family, devout Christians whose asylum application was sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Fund, complained about the unruly behavior of many German students and claimed to be troubled that many of the stories contained in the German Kinderschule Readers portrayed devils, witches and disobedient children as heroes.
The second article reported that a 71-year-old retired property manager in Virginia, Dale Welch, walked into a Starbucks with a handgun strapped to his waist and ordered a banana Frappuccino with a cinnamon bun. Said Mr. Welch, "I don't know of anybody who would provide me with defense other than myself, so I routinely as a way of life carry a weapon--and that extends to my coffee shops."
The late Christopher Lasch lamented that the etiology of these social pathologies is to be found in the American ethos which he described as a "culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, [and] the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic pre-occupation with the self."
The idea of social justice requires an understanding and a commitment to meet our common needs and aspirations as citizens. Social justice can never be achieved on the backs of the most vulnerable. The French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, reminds us that, "the primary duty of the modern state is the enforcement of social justice." But in a society in which the first person pronoun "I" continues to control the political discourse, the pursuant of social justice will remain an hollow platitude as will our ability to collectively reason our way out of the current economic and social malaise.
"I don't know of anybody who would provide me with defense other than myself, so I routinely as a way of life carry a weapon--and that extends to my coffee shops."
I'm not sure how this is a sign of cultural implosion. Courts have ruled that the police have no obligation to protect an individual, i.e. you can't successfully sue your local PD for not preventing a violent crime.
This is nothing new, either. Lawful concealed carry has been the law of the land for the past 25 years, coinciding with a remarkable decrease in most violent crime rates.
It's harsh to say Mr. Welch is the manifestation of narcissistic selfishness, and it's plain wrong to say he's a soldier in a war of all against all. From what I've read, he's a peaceful, physically vulnerable old man taking responsibility for his personal safety. He's not threat to anyone except his potential muggers.