Can We Be Less Mean?
Last week I offered up Part 1 of this two-part response to David Brooks’ Atlantic essay “How America Got Mean.” Setting aside the question-begging title of his essay, I argued that we might want to look at deep institutional and cultural factors rather than trending social developments. We can’t get the prescription right if we misdiagnose.
If his assumptions are off, what makes the essay worth reading? I think it’s the identification of different fractures in our social system that portend negative consequences. The strength of the essay is that rather than focusing on material factors — those which might admit of comparatively easy fixes — Brooks focuses on the problems of character formation. “We live,” he writes, “in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.”
I think that’s largely right (and, if I might add, the impetus behind the creation of the Ford Leadership Forum), and I also think he correctly identifies some of the reasons why this is the case. He mentions our inability to teach basic social and ethical skills. We might call these our inability to teach manners and etiquette (we have held at the FLF manners and etiquette seminars to address this deficiency). And, as is typical of Brooks, he highlights our deficiencies at giving people a sense of purpose in life. As sympathetic as I am to this claim, I think it is overplayed. Pursuing purpose is sort of like pursuing happiness: the harder you pursue, the more elusive it becomes. Its presence arises organically as a result of a well-ordered soul. One recalls that Viktor Frankl found meaning and purpose in Auschwitz.
Brooks grounds his approach in “moral realism,” which we might define as “the crooked timber of humanity” school. Given how we are bent as human beings, we need to create at a civilizational level rails, safeguards, and channels of expression for and against our darker angels. In a healthy civilization, all the institutions of society work together, each in their own sphere with their own unique functions, to create the kinds of human beings capable of acting fully and honorably within. A failing civilization no longer produces the best versions of what we might become as human beings, and does not hold up to us exemplars of human excellence. Since these paradigmatic examples are essential to character formation, cutting them down to size, as inevitably happens in egalitarian democracy, leaves us bereft of moral instruction. As a result, age becomes increasingly therapeutic: adjusting the self to the demands of society, trying to gather the fragmented pieces of the self without any outside point of reference, and subjectivism as the moral command of the day. We become egoists, constantly engaged in self-spelunking. Psychology replaces theology and philosophy; the therapist replaces the priest. And, as Brooks points out, when “you are raised in a culture without an ethical structure, you become internally fragile.” That fragility is manifest everywhere, and this probably means that while it’s possible we have become meaner, we have also become less resilient and less able to deal with disagreement. Subjectively speaking, the world seems meaner to us, even if it is not objectively so.
In a therapeutic age, social controls are set aside in favor of individual release, which alone, it is believed, can make the individual “feel good.” In a society predicated on individual release, however, the friction generated by individualized releases reduces civilizational structures to ashes, insuring higher levels of conflict, particularly since we lack coherent criteria to evaluate all these competing self-understandings. The center doesn't hold. Alienation results as we spin further apart from one another and is compensated for by a new tribalism. It is precisely in the midst of tribal disputes that philosophers have sought to articulate a universal standard of civilizational and moral principles, but in a therapeutic age we have no philosophy. The result is that we don’t have the means at our disposal to either assess or reject the reawakening of, for example, white nationalism in our midst. We are left simply with feelings of repugnance, and feelings don't do deal well with complexity or easily subject themselves to the judgments of reason. They're intractable. One result, Brooks notes, is that “a person’s moral stature is based not on their [sic] conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum,” which I would alter to say “membership in a tribe.” All tribes, furthermore, determine and maintain membership through a series of shibboleths, which means that the possibility of talking across tribes now disappears.
For me, the most interesting problem Brooks identifies is that we no longer encourage self-restraint as an essential part of a good character. No ethicist worth his or her salt has ignored the fact that proper human conduct is a struggle between effort and restraint, between action and repose. The greatest struggle in reality is not between principalities and powers but within ourselves between our rational and spirited faculties and our unruly natures. Those natures require careful disciplining. Plato compared our natures to a chariot driven forward by a pair of powerful steeds: unless the charioteer has a steady hand on the rein, the chariot will soon be destroyed. Reason governs through a firm, experienced, and strong charioteer. C.S. Lewis in a similar vein observed that the head (our cerebra) rules the belly (our viscera) through the chest — “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” It is the chest that keeps us from being mere brain or mere appetite. But already in 1947, at the high point of the so-called “greatest generation,” Lewis saw that our educational institutions were “producing Men without Chests.”
We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.Things have not improved since then. Self-restraint has been replaced by self-expression. Self-discipline has yielded to self-fashioning. Becoming a fully actualized self by conforming yourself to paradigms of human excellence has been replaced by an emphasis on “authenticity” and “being your true self” exactly as you understand yourself to be … and then requiring others to validate that self-understanding through “recognition” and “acceptance.” We have liberated ourselves from the forms of human perfection and have become shrunken and truncated in the process. We have paid a high price for our freedom.
If that’s true, then it’s possible that all our institutions have been irreparably infected by the disease of self-actualization (raised to an unquestioned cultural authority in Maslow’s risible hierarchy) that, on the one hand, leaves us feeling more lonely, isolated, and purposeless; and on the other hand, turns that anomie into a politics that is increasingly zero sum, vicious, and demanding of conformity. This is, alas, not a conformity to patterns of human excellence, but rather a conformity to the meanest (lowliest) expressions of individual self-fashioning. As Tocqueville might have put it: we are offering democratic solutions to problems created by democracy, and these solutions are therefore destined to failure because they drink from the same well.
It is therefore interesting that when Brooks tries to figure out how we can do better at moral formation, he turns to the past, to a less democratic time. He recalls, with more than a hint of nostalgia and also a requisite nod to the sexism and racism of our day, a time when America displayed a thick web of associations that both restrained and channeled our unrulier selves. He harkens back to 19th century German [!] educational theory and its instantiation in Scandinavian schools as a model for how we might go about things. He recalls the patrician ethos of the segregated English schools that would “turn out young men who were ‘acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.’” That’s actually pretty good.
I don’t see how any of this helps us in our current context, other than the important work of reminding us of some fundamental principles concerning human conduct. Tocqueville has an interesting passage in Democracy in America where he observes that one of the main character traits of Americans is their aversion to forms. Now, whatever else we have to say about manners, etiquette, dress, decorum, and so forth, they are the means by which we give form to the substance of human interaction. Table manners are ways that we give form to the fact that we human beings are creatures who speak, and we cultivate that characteristic in table settings. We bring our food to our mouths rather than, like other animals, our mouths to the food to enable us to speak to one another in the convivial setting of a shared meal. We cut our food deliberately and in a cumbersome way both to insure we take smaller bites but also to slow us down — both also conducive to conversation. In other words, the forms we created are there to reflect what we are. When we destroy those forms, we destroy both ourselves and our institutions in the process, meaning that we have to engage in the endless task of recreating both, but on our own terms with no criteria because we have rejected the idea that human beings are creatures of a certain sort.
Take another example, this one from personal experience: the embarrassing way a majority of college professors dress. Our mode of dress conveys something important about hierarchical arrangements, about authority, about the nature of learning as a laborious process. At commencement ceremonies for a doctorate, the candidate is hooded, representing both academic achievement and also the conferring of academic authority. In a reasonable world, faculty would wear those gowns and hoods in the classroom, thus signaling to the students their authority and in the process reassuring the students that they were in hands they could trust to direct them properly. It would also reinforce the truth that academic achievement is hard work and takes a long time to master.
But when professors start dressing like students not only is their authority diminished, but the trust of the students is violated as well. The lines of authority now scuttled, no one has a clear idea of who knows what, nor can the students trust that the person in the front of the room can properly lay his hands on the reins to guide them to knowledge and understanding. So we should not be surprised when the unkempt professor goes a step further and decides that there is no good purpose for him to engage in lecturing or teaching at all, the next logical step being that since no one person can claim to know more than any other, we might as well put them in small groups so that they can express “what they think” or, more accurately, what they “feel” about any particular topic. But such an approach will never lead us to knowledge; it will either only clarify our opinions or create a conformity of opinion. But it will be a waste of time and money.
Brooks tends to focus — as Americans have for the last century and a half — on our schools as the place where these pathologies can be rectified. He rightly suggests that
…character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.Fair enough, but his solution is that “elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills.” Permit me to be skeptical. Even if it were the job of the schools to develop these characteristics, how would they go about it, and what kind of learning would be sacrificed in the process? “We could have courses in how to be a good listener.” Does he actually believe that would solve anything? The way you become a good listener is by becoming a good listener, just as the way you become a good friend is by becoming a good friend, and none of these objectives can be formalized or the process taken over by other social institutions. Heaven help us if the schools take from friendship the task of making friends. The schools have a hard enough time teaching math.
The spontaneous areas that are mainly responsible for moral development don’t respond well to formalized intervention. Completely missing in his essay are parents, those most responsible for the moral formation of young people. Without the character formation that takes place in families, both with their demarcation of authority and the moral demand of learning about the I only in the context of its interaction with the We, the whole social system is without a foundation. Brooks' indifference to family life undercuts his whole essay. I suspect he does this in part because he wants easy solutions, and nothing is easier than saying schools should be better, and nothing harder than saying parents should be, especially since we count on parents to be the exemplars of virtue a free society requires.
Parents alone provide children affirmation in the context of correction, opportunities for expression within the demands of discipline, self-giving as well as self-restraint. In the soil of self-confidence parents will plant in their children seeds of self-doubt, the germ of self-reflection that alone can sprout into other-directedness. How to make persons capable of self-reflection is about the knottiest problem that we can face, but note: the state has no interest in helping make such persons. The main interest of the state is to create people who are compliant and obedient. We can’t, however, have a free and just society without persons capable of self-reflection, which means we depend on the slow grinding of character against the jagged and hard rock of otherness that occurs mainly in family life, and then in friendships, and then in our churches and schools and golf club memberships, and these alone can prepare us for political life. For all Brooks’ incisive warnings about the lure of politics, it’s curious that he resorts to it as the solution for the problem it has created. One thing we can say with some certainty: institutions responsible for dismantling things cannot be counted on to put them back together.
We talk a great deal about civilizational crises and “threats to democracy.” The religious respect we have for democracy may blind us to its inherent weaknesses, and even blind us to the ways it becomes its own gravedigger. This, at least, is what Tocqueville believed, and he was not the only major thinker over the last 200 years who believed that as the fate of the West played out that it would end, as Nietzsche prophesied, in a “long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm”; a “monstrous logic of terror” that would result in “an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth.” Weber believed that our politics had devolved into “a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now." And Martin Heidegger believed that our civilizational crisis was so extreme that “only a god can save us.”
Because I do not share their view of history and human action, neither do I share their pessimism (or their passivity), although I take it very seriously. I hold to the idea that since humans make history and social life, it is in our power to change it as well, although I would not be so immodest to suggest that we fully know what we are doing or that there are easy fixes. Too often we are toddlers trying to rebuild an engine.
In many ways the serpent’s temptation is to convince us that we can easily change our mean estate if we try this “one thing.” The lure of the easy fix is irresistible. We would do well to resist, however, for we fail at knowing ourselves — the first rule of philosophy — and all-too-often forget that “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” We are easily prone to catastrophic mistakes that can be nearly impossible to recover from, like the driver who, after having one or two too many, thinks a shot of Red Bull makes him competent to drive. Having removed many of our guardrails, and now careening on the edge of cliffs, we would do well not to hand the wheel over to others who have given too much evidence of insobriety. All of which is to say that democracy, like charity, begins at home.
Discussion Questions:
Are there political solutions to cultural problems? What role might law play?
Do we expect too much from our schools?
What difference does our view of human nature make with regard to how we view the problem of “meanness”?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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