Here is Robert F. Kennedy, speaking in 1968 and observing, essentially, that our ideas about success, as a people and as a nation, are completely disconnected from reality:
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product—if we judge the United States of America by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Unfortunately, aside from the dollar amount in the second sentence, which now can be revised upward significantly, his observations remain true. Meanwhile, caught in the grip of a terrible economic crisis, we are still latched to dangerous ideas like the “problem” of “consumer spending” being too “low.” And even though Allstate pretends that people are “back to basics” (and one commentator cynically observed, “Home and auto insurance, apparently, are among the basics”), I have not heard anyone seriously suggest that we want to stay with those basics for long.
While I am not an economist and have only a smattering of knowledge about economics, I suspect more strongly every day that the main reason we are in this “economic crisis” is because we have staked our sense of well-being on things like “consumer spending” and “gross national product.” Making, selling, and buying more stuff—any stuff will do. Have an idea for a “product”? Any product will do. Just make a lot of them, or sell a lot of them, and turn a hefty profit: you are now “successful”! Have no skills but need a job? Learn “sales,” which is the profession of selling stuff—any stuff will do—to people who probably don’t need it (or why would anybody pay you to convince them otherwise?). There’s nothing remotely thoughtful, healthy, or sustainable in that approach, but that’s what we Amurricans have been all about for a long time.
Is there a better way? Surely. But I am not confident that we, as individuals, as communities, or as a national or global society, have the discipline to free ourselves from what will only continue to be the long cycle of “boom and bust” that has characterized U.S. history right from the start. Some people like to tout “Western civilization”—with the United States at the apex of that development, of course—as not just a unique phenomenon in world history (it is), but as the best phenomenon in world history (it may be). I question their judgment, not just in the Churchillian worst-except-for-all-the-others way, but in the implicit twin conclusions either that we Westerners or Americans can do no wrong, or that non-Westerners or non-Americans can never do better. The first of that pair is the weaker, obviously erroneous, and would probably be a straw man if pursued. The second is more insidious because it may seem, especially to some “conservative” minds, more rational, perhaps more supportable, but really it’s just another way of expressing the first.
Sophisticated partisans of the Western-is-Inherently-Better view are careful never to state those conclusions outright, however, but leave them to implication. Here’s one I saw in the newspaper recently, dripping with sarcasm:
Here [in a discussion of Islam in history] we see the omnipotent influence of Obama’s multicultural creed: Western civilization is unexceptional in comparison with other cultures, and history must be the story of an ecumenical, global shared brotherhood.
The obvious message behind the eye-rolling is that Western civilization is exceptional in comparison with other cultures and that history is not the story of an “ecumenical, global shared brotherhood,” but the story of a superior, paternal West and its children around the globe.
But we have ourselves turned inside out. We measure our lives and our accomplishments by standards that are not only disconnected from the basic reality of our humanity, but which are probably detrimental to our well-being. Our obsession with “development” and “production” and always more stuff—any stuff will do—has made us think that more factories producing more products (even the word itself flaunts its indiscriminate meaning) for more people to buy and put in more—and bigger!—houses that are further from our jobs convincing other people to buy things they don’t need that we must have more cars to drive further every day and create new externalities and new risks that need to be insured against with policies from companies like Allstate. How far down to the foundation for that house of cards? Welcome to the Western way of life. Cash, checks, and credit cards accepted.
Robert Kennedy had a good point in 1968 and someone else needs to keep making that point in 2009 because few people appear to have been listening 41 years ago.
Bonus points if you can spot the goofy pop-culture allusion in the title of this post and the geeky medieval philosophy allusion that’s embedded with it—and how both of them relate to the body of the post!
Excellent.
You’ve been “Dugg.”