A Better Explanation for "How America Got Mean"
A response to a recent article by David Brooks in The Atlantic
Recently during a routine check-up, my wife noticed signs posted around her doctor’s office reminding visitors to mind their manners and that disruptive behavior would not be tolerated. She asked her doctor about these signs; he told her that in the wake of the pandemic, their office has occasionally dealt with irate patients who lash out in anger at the clinic’s staff.
There isn’t a good way to quantify this and compare it to times past, but at least anecdotally, it does seem Americans today have developed something of a mean streak. We’ve all seen clips of airplane passengers flipping out at flight attendants and fellow travelers. It is not unusual anymore for restaurant managers to expel belligerent diners. This summer has been filled with stories about audience members throwing objects at onstage performers. School board meetings across the country have at times descended into shouting matches. Officeholders find themselves the targets of death threats.
None of this was unheard of ten years ago, but when doctors feel the need to post signs reminding patients voluntarily coming to their office to chill out, it’s fair to think something’s changed. That’s a disturbing development many of us are likely concerned about. When someone is mean to another person, the recipient of the mean behavior may feel degraded; if the badgering is bad enough, they may choose to remove themselves from the situation, as many nurses, teachers, and public servants have. As meanness takes root in society, people begin to assume relationships are oppositional rather than cooperative. (Even if a relationship was already competitive, the difference between treating a competitor with kindness vs. meanness is a matter of respect.) Finally, social trust and social stability are based on our shared commitment to civility and compassion. We need to be able to come back to those values when things get heated and tempers flare. We are right to worry about what we as Americans might do to each other if we allow meanness to pollute our society.
David Brooks observes as much in a recent article for The Atlantic titled “How America Got Mean”. In addition to the previously mentioned uptick in rude behavior at restaurants and medical clinics, Brooks also cites the recent surge in hate crimes, rising murder rates, and a drop in charitable giving as evidence Americans are growing mean-spirited. It seems to be tearing at the fabric of American society. As Brooks writes, “We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy.”
Diagnosing the source of this problem, Brooks eliminates the usual suspects—social media, the decline of social organizations and civic groups, multiculturalism, economic inequality and insecurity—and settles on a culprit that is pretty predictable if you’re familiar with Brooks’ work: America’s failure to provide its citizens with a moral education.
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
I sympathize with Brooks’ argument. We don’t do a good job as a nation teaching morals and ethics. Most people learn the basics about those topics one way or another, although I’m not sure how many people deeply internalize those lessons. Schools shy away from teaching the topic because it engenders far too much controversy: Just as many parents would get upset if a teacher taught a supposedly objective value subjectively as if a teacher taught a supposedly subjective value objectively. That leads to the watering-down of moral education. Students learn perfunctory precepts that don’t help them navigate (or even sometimes recognize) the profound moral crises they’ll encounter in their lives.
Like Brooks, I think we could do a much better job teaching moral reasoning in America. That would require confronting students with the sort of moral dilemmas they might confront in a free, individualistic, multicultural democracy. For example:
If you are free in this society to believe, do, and become anything you want, how should you live your life? By extension, what constitutes a good life?
What use is freedom? How is freedom used well?
How should you treat others? Given the way people have been treated historically in this country, what should you take into consideration when interacting with others?
What makes something fair? How do you treat others fairly?
What use is authority? How is authority abused?
What are the dangers of groupthink and following orders? How do you know when to dissent? What might be the consequences of staying silent or dissenting?
What are the habits of a good citizen? What do citizens owe one another?
Brooks and I would agree that our students could use more “soulcraft” in this country.
But Brooks is pulling a bit of a bait and switch in his article. Brooks lures you into his piece by promising to explain why Americans in our era have become meaner. His answer is that midway through the twentieth century, American society grew more individualistic and self-centered, diminished or overhauled the older institutions that normally taught moral education, and embraced moral relativism. I’m not going to argue that didn’t happen—it’s actually a pretty powerful description of what has happened in the United States since the end of World War II—but people have been making that same argument since the 1970s. It’s hard for me to believe we are only now in the 2020s paying the price for cultural shifts set in motion nearly eighty years ago.
Brooks also overlooks important features of his idyllic pre-World War II America as well as recent American history. To begin with, the concerns he raises about the effects an individualistic, democratic, capitalist society can have on the moral formation of individuals were voiced by people like Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emile Durkheim in the 19th century. That suggests what Brooks is describing is endemic to liberal societies. (“Liberal” is used here not to signify left-wing American political thought but political and moral systems that emphasize personal, political, and economic freedoms.) Brooks might counter by pointing out that there were more religious and cultural institutions in the past to balance out liberalism’s amoral tendencies, but I’d also need to be convinced American life back then—whether out on the frontier or in the overcrowded tenement neighborhoods of the nation’s industrial cities—was somehow gentler. (Brooks does note his story is rather different when it comes to the treatment of minorities, but I think it’s high time we quit treating racism as a bug rather than a feature of the history of American democracy.)
There’s also my sense that, up until a few years ago, American society was generally becoming nicer. To begin with, if Brooks is going to cite rising crime rates as evidence of a meaner society, then he should explain how his theory fits with the dramatic drop in crime that occurred from the 1990s through the 2010s even though the same conditions that led to the coarsening of American society today existed then as well. Additionally, consider these observations:
While mean behavior hasn’t been completely eliminated in professional sports, it is now seriously frowned upon. Over 100 years ago, during the age of Ty Cobb, baseball was a brutal sport; for example, players would sharpen the spikes on their cleats to try to injure opponents on slides. Rules now prohibit the sort of rough play characteristic of Cobb’s era. Watch a game and you’ll see opponents laughing with each other on the base paths. When I was a kid, basebrawls in MLB were fairly regular (and celebrated) affairs. A few weeks ago, when the Guardians and White Sox cleared the benches, about three punches were thrown and the managers needed to be restrained. Yet to my memory, that’s been the only major brawl of the season. A similar trend has happened in the NBA. Play can still get rough, but the hard style of play identified with Charles Barkley and Detroit’s “Bad Boys” has been legislated out of the game to the point that accidentally hitting an opponent in the head can earn a player a flagrant foul. The most notorious player of the current era—Golden State’s Draymond Green—seems to be friends with most of his opponents. The competitive juices still flow, leading players in all sports to lose their temper at times, but for the most part, sports are more sportsmanlike.
Mainstream comedy has become gentler. Punching down and belittling people is now frowned upon. Insult comedy has mostly fallen by the wayside. Late night comedians like Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert (when he isn’t going after Trump and his cronies) are considered “nice.” Compare the jokes Jimmy Kimmel tells now to the jokes he told twenty years ago and you might think you’re watching a different comedian.
When I was growing up, bullying was something kids had to put up with in school. Teachers and principals might tell a bully to knock it off, but they’d also tell the kid getting picked on not to let it bother them or that they had earned the abuse coming their way. Heck, even the teachers were the bullies sometimes. In recent decades, however, there’s been an anti-bullying movement in schools accompanied by a deliberate effort to teach children to be kind to one another. Kids who are the targets of bullies are more likely to have students and staff who stick up for them. Students have been taught that using slurs connected to ethnicity, sexuality, intelligence, and body type are wrong and that they should be friendly with everyone rather than simply those in their cliques. This hasn’t eliminated bullying from schools, but it’s clearly marked bullying as wrong. (You can see this trend in teen films, too: In the 80s, bullying was often portrayed as part of the school ecosystem and sometimes even played for laughs. In today’s films, bullying is seen as aberrant and hurtful behavior.)
Those are just a few examples that lead me to believe we are not on some long descent into unkindness. On the contrary, as we have seen in our own lifetimes, it is possible for our society to become more kind. Returning to my own childhood one more time, when I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, it seemed children were conditioned to navigate a world that would assumingly belittle and demean them. Parents today seem to want their children raised in a kinder, gentler world so their kids aren’t burdened by the psychological distress that could hinder their development. To this end, many have worked to create a more compassionate society, one that accepts all individuals for who they are and that accommodates those who struggle with psychological issues (i.e., depression, low self-esteem, trauma, etc.,) that may weigh them down. It’s worth remembering that in the not-too-distant past these individuals and those who stuck up for them were often mocked as “snowflakes” for being too soft, kind, and compassionate. The problem wasn’t that society was too mean but that we were raising a generation of kids who weren’t tough enough.
To be clear: I am not arguing the United States hasn’t gotten meaner; all in all, it probably has. And I’m not arguing meanness in America isn’t related to liberalism or modernity or whatever you want to call it; those things probably give meanness in the United States its distinct flavor. What I am arguing is if Brooks is going to make an argument about why America has gotten so mean recently, he can’t just lean on a standard centuries-old critique of classical liberalism that conservatives dig out whenever they want to take a hack at 60s-era liberalism. He needs to focus more on the factors shaping the current moment. To that end, it would make more sense to examine the ways all the inconveniences and life-altering circumstances associated with the pandemic have shortened people’s fuses. One might also think about how meanness manifests itself in different eras and how social media gives meanness in our era its particular bite.
But come on, it doesn’t take a 6,000+ word think piece in The Atlantic to pin down the main reason Americans have become so mean lately. When a man runs for president (and wins) by demeaning whole groups of people, mocking his opponents, trashing journalists, and reveling in violence, people take notice. And when self-respecting Americans refuse to associate themselves with the man, the only people left willing to work with him are those who have no problem amplifying his meanness. And when that man is called out for his racist, misogynistic, uncivil, mean-spirited, bully-like behavior and he responds by arguing those critiques are examples of “political correctness” run amuck (when he’s actually just grasping at a reason to excuse his own bad behavior) he ends up empowering every American who would have otherwise faced social sanction for behaving the same way. And then meanness becomes not only a political but a social norm.
The MAGA movement itself can be read as an attempt to make America mean again: To fortify the position of those who fear their entrenched advantage is slipping away and to make life miserable once again for those who have historically struggled to gain a foothold in American society. It is about making America less cooperative and compassionate and more cutthroat and competitive. It is about ensuring the outcome of that competition is zero-sum (“I can only win if you lose”) and determined by stacking the deck in their own tribe’s favor. It is about kicking people when they’re down, mocking those who object as “snowflakes,” and dangling the threat of sabotage and force over the heads of opponents. And it is about treating mean words and deeds as proof of one’s devotion to the cause.
So read Brooks’ article in The Atlantic. It’s thought provoking. Just know it doesn’t really address what it sets out to explain in its title: How America got mean. For the answer to that query, consider another, more noteworthy article The Atlantic published in 2018 by Adam Serwer titled “The Cruelty is the Point”, which, as we know by now, it is.
Signals and Noise
Who you gonna call?
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