Symptoms of Decline
Chapin, Jim
Jim Chapin SYMPTOMS OF DECLINE Brief Notes on a Big Subject It is obvious that feelings of decline are now widespread in a way that they were not in the past. Without exception, everyone that...
...Or maybe it's not so strange...
...They are busy instructing their students in fancy language about the irrelevance of canonical texts that the students haven't read, repeating their own experience to a generation that knows nothing and cares nothing about it...
...Perhaps this helps explain the increasing verbal violence of our political campaigns...
...Or it might be * Secretary of State Richard Olney to Ambassador James Bayard, July 20, 1895: "To-day the United States is practically sovereign upon this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition...
...Markets are not always rational nor do they always reward competence...
...Indeed, one could almost suggest a "four-generation problem" first discovered by Henry Adams...
...He argues that whereas once Americans were 182 • DISSENT Symptoms of Decline assumed to be more efficient than the rest of the world, now we are assumed to be less efficient...
...And it is also a result of the politics of the sixties: if your ideas are somehow yourself, if the personal is political and the political is personal, any disagreement with someone must perforce be a personal attack...
...We may well have to re-enter the debate between Schumpeter and Lenin as to whether business society is by nature peaceful or warlike...
...The alternative "rationalistic" approach of Marxist analysis was always weaker in the United States than elsewhere, which explains why our native anticapitalism has taken such exotic forms...
...So far we have tried to compensate for the loss of wealth with maldistribution, and this may serve to continue to attract immigrants...
...To make up for this reality, they have adopted the contradictory message enunciated by Herron: "If you study English you will learn how to see through corporate culture while still qualifying for a job at IBM...
...American income has now stagnated for a longer period than ever before...
...It should be noted that it has long been a characteristic of both intellectuals and the upper classes to make pragmatic arguments for absolutes as a way of keeping the social order intact and the masses controlled...
...But if the mean income of families has not changed, the result must be a growing inequality...
...But whether in the name of religion or something else, this job cannot be done cynically: an elite that doesn't believe its own principles can't inculcate them in others...
...Where else but America would the "industrial" side of the "military-industrial complex" be stronger than the "military" side...
...The outside threat of Marxism not only kept capitalists "honest" but also put bounds on the nature of capitalist competition...
...In recent years law has become a way of securing a protected place outside the rough and tumble of interest-group politics: "Litigation is the grotesque offspring of regulation...
...The same nation that fears government power allows private corporations to fire people because they smoke or are overweight...
...In the absence of an objective critique, how does capitalism survive...
...It does not bother them that the criminalization of drugs has flooded the criminal justice system...
...The problem of the marketplace society is that the only part of the society that cannot be left to the market is the rulemaker of the market...
...The decline of urban public space, left to bureaucrats and criminals, would be its logical expression...
...Victory over domestic foes is more important than the national interest or even than reality...
...Or they may feel that "some people" cannot compete as well as they can...
...The domination of recent politics by legal issues and practices is the likely cause of the strange abandonment of our traditional pragmatism...
...How does one deal with fundamentalist Moslems, tree-worshippers, or racists...
...The same right-wingers who claim that a visit from an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) inspector violates civil liberties find no problem in applying urine tests and polygraph tests to the population at large...
...The moral aspect of our gridlock is a consequence of this division...
...Media coverage of elections and of politics has adopted the same metaphor...
...Anti-Marxism remains the best defense of capitalism, a negative defense indeed, one that rests on the old Condorcet principle that the job of conservatives is to "enlist nature in the service of inequality...
...The dominant style of education at all levels is an "evasive and non-communicating pluralism...
...In recent years the main feature of this education has been the mass creation of special groups of interlocuters who stand at society's gates...
...Where to find the unmoved mover...
...The United States political process is unique in the world for its domination by lawyers...
...The scholasticism of private writing in little-read journals impedes even business and law schools...
...They have "no interest in arriving at either truth or consensus...
...To quote philosopher Robert Adams: In the measure that we can see [societies] as decadent, it was their imperviousness that made them so...
...And it leaves even those who disagree with the direction of affairs little escape, for they must attempt to return to tradition with an attack on those who should be agents of that tradition...
...Conservatives called feudal killers budding entrepreneurs, liberals called Stalinist murderers social democrats, and centrists called SPRING • 1991 • 183 Symptoms of Decline corrupt oligarchs aspiring democrats...
...and the liberation of those most likely to be able to move upward...
...If the real goal of the mass of the people is social isolation, not community, then indeed we would be on our way to a new form of nomadic civilization...
...This debunking style is now a permanent side of mass American life...
...College teachers are hired to do one thing but promoted on the basis of another...
...Experience over hundreds of years has taught Americans in general that tomorrow will be better and Russians that it might quite possibly be worse...
...In the absence of a broad-based movement against inequality (of which Marxism was always a component), does democratic capitalism work...
...Even in Horatio Alger stories the capitalist problem was solved by the lucky break: Ragged Dick somehow met the millionaire, but now the model is winning the lottery, a model that allows nothing for human effort...
...q SPRING • 1991 • 187...
...The sad truth is that in 1990's America the degraded condition of the bottom of our society has not resulted in a social economy more advanced or more competitive than those of Europe or Japan...
...Indeed both sides regularly lie with statistics by setting different years for comparisons or using family income without mentioning that family size has gone down or per capita income without mentioning changes in distribution...
...In the end the problem remains the definition of America...
...If the ship is sinking, those in the bilge drown first...
...In other words, the best defense of capitalism is a denial of other possibilities...
...The willingness to ruin rather than let the other side rule is in part a result of habits developed when security and wealth seemed free...
...And this conception of sports was derived from and fed back into our conception of economic competition...
...by 1989 we had a net debt of more than $700 billion...
...It is an attitude to which two-tier economies, such as we seem to be developing in the U.S., are enduringly prone...
...It is possible to decline without falling, and it is possible to fall without declining...
...They have created a two-tier system, with a protected minority at the top and a seasonally constituted labor force doing most of the actual work...
...Those who have been the beneficiaries of this upward income redistribution no doubt feel entitled to it ("we work hard for our money...
...It is not . . . because wisdom and justice and equity are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States...
...Most of the self-help books stress that the key metaphor for men in corporations is professional team sports...
...But it is not just the bottom of a society that tests its nature: in some ways the worst part of a social order is when it wastes or, worse, perverts the talents of many of its potential "best and brightest," turning them into yuppie junk bond salesmen, corporate lawyers, or, for some of the brightest in American ghettos, drug entrepreneurs...
...Yet our formula for self-improvement is always more self-esteem, not more knowledge...
...a change in the class structure, which created many kinds of new middle-class jobs...
...Why...
...This may reflect the corruption of our discourse during the years of cold war, when intellectuals on both sides used any weapon at hand to defend or attack the policies of nation states...
...Almost no decline could lead to a fall...
...And the brutal history of how people were taught to function in capitalist societies has been forgotten...
...America might well have been living off immigrant vitality for the last century...
...Each has a metaphor that applies to all life: therapy, law, and transaction...
...Economic failure is treated more harshly in the United States than in most of the advanced world...
...We are still a society in formation...
...We take for granted that no one will do a good job...
...In these years the personal savings rate 184 • DISSENT Symptoms of Decline dropped 50 percent, real wages fell, and the national debt quadrupled...
...Even bright students spend most of their time trying to decipher this message, which is unconnected to any that they have heard before or will hear again...
...As for the United States, it is so isolated and strong that the Olney Fiat* still applies...
...Already there are hundreds of thousands of children in this country who are born drug addicts...
...Liberals are more concerned about the civil liberties of crack addicts and criminals than the safety of average citizens...
...There are many cases in history where both rivals collapsed simultaneously: Sassanian Persia and the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, the AustroHungarian and Russian Empires, and so on...
...That is a gain that can continue only if we continue to make that improvement a priority...
...In this period, it was easy to take for granted the effects of spreading order and literacy...
...In fact, this argument is unfair to actual Third World immigrants, who bring the bourgeois ethic here when they come and lose it by the fourth generation...
...The American political system has always been badly designed to deal with real internal conflict: consider that we were the only country that fought a war over abolishing slavery because we made it a local condition...
...By forcing their students to read things in order to "see through them," they are engaging in what Herron calls "pure—if coded—autobiography...
...As George Will suggested, we have "miniaturized" questions of ethics into a matter of small rules (Jim Wright's book royalties) rather than what it should be: the great matters of how we organize our society...
...The middle class declines, not just in numbers but in selfconfidence...
...Recent headlines in the United States suggest that we are going through a similar phenomenon...
...Also, during this period the environment was "free...
...Their poor are better off than ours...
...The primary social function of schools is as a credentialing agent for the middle classes...
...It may be that a community such as Elmhurst in Queens, where an incredibly varied population drawn from seventy-two different nations lives peacefully jumbled together, could be a model for the future world society...
...However, although Americans seem to be suffering at the moment from a loss of faith in the ability of the human mind to solve problems, historical expectations and roles, once learned, are not easily forgotten...
...For Americans, our victory in the cold war has resembled the end of a sporting event (which is what the cold war was for most Americans...
...The doctor, the lawyer, and the banker want to stand at the intersection of every human encounter...
...In a service society why we can't get any service...
...We are faced with the odd spectacle of the people who cried for relevance in the world of the sixties now dominating the campuses with a discourse that no one understands...
...Based on my younger son's experiences at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, English as a discipline no longer exists even at elite public high schools...
...For most of human history, indeed, liberty was a luxury good available only to the top of society, but such a restriction is no longer possible...
...One aspect of decline is new: the relative poverty of many Americans themselves...
...Finally, not all forms of decline go hand in hand...
...Had a foreign enemy created the South Bronx it would have been a cause for war...
...Capitalism abroad (and even here) has taken on some of the aspects of a cargo cult: if one worships at the right shrine, one will be rewarded...
...The expected compensation for many of these jobs has doubled in the past seventeen years...
...At the top level, a theoretically left-wing professoriat engages in the "mock subversion of an embittered proletariat...
...Even more, we should consider whether this is an appropriate fate for their children...
...This harshness might be justified (practically, if not morally) if it were linked to greater success for the United States than for most of the advanced world...
...One of the early signs of the collapse of the communist societies was the decline in life expectancy and health care...
...So it is that Americans are generically optimistic and Russians the opposite...
...The most important professions are the greedy triumvirate of doctors, lawyers, and bankers (the three described by bartenders as the lowest tippers...
...but because "we" did it to ourselves, it is seen as an act of "nature...
...The government's financial problems were not the heart of the matter...
...Americans have always used law as a substitute for ideology...
...Ancient ills such as drink, tuberculosis, and homelessness have reappeared cheekbyjowl with new ones such as AIDS, crack, and semi-automatic weapons...
...So far the people in first class are glancing downward and remarking on the stupidity of the people drowning below...
...It is an oddity of the present situation that now, in its moment of triumph, capitalism resembles the Marxist prediction of creeping immiseration, inequality, and bourgeois sham politics more than it did during the cold war...
...But the rising expectations of the upper class and the upper-middle class have not reflected this reality...
...We should at least ask if the penalty for their "failings" should be hunger, homelessness, disease, and death...
...By now advocates don't even care if their arguments are consistent: pro-abortion women have had no problem adopting a "view of private property as giving the owner laissez-faire rights . . . at odds with leftist positions on property as holding social responsibility" or in suddenly re-creating the idea of a "women's sphere" by calling abortion solely a women's issue...
...The last decade has shown (if demonstration was needed) that the right is as capable of generating abstract intellectuals and crackpot theorists as the left...
...Many of our characteristics as a nation are the habits of careless wealth, just as the British belief in "muddling through" came from their past wealth...
...yet somehow successive generations of Americans are disturbed by the ever-new discovery that we have a fragmented, irresponsible, and ungovernable polity...
...We could ignore our own failings in the exhilaration of the contest, but now the event is over and we have to come home and confront them...
...In their absence, all that is left is either force or unprincipled bargaining...
...It is this that explains humanities professor Jerry Herron's paradox: "All we specialists are presiding over a mess which might lead a person to wonder why the widest dispersal of professional culture in human history has produced not a literate society but an illiterate one, presided over institutionally by professionals apparently incapable of teaching what they profess...
...The cynicism at the top levels of academia has seeped down to lower levels and seeped out horizontally...
...The psychology of work seems to be drifting toward the psychology of "lotto...
...Characteristically Americans love change, but see their future only as an improved version of the past...
...The predatory fragmentation of the university mirrors the similar fragmentation of the general society...
...One result is that the already unique nature of American government, pervasive but weak, has been exacerbated...
...American students rank near the bottom of the world in skills but at the very top in self-esteem...
...The difference between our society and other advanced societies is not at the top (if anything our top is higher than theirs) but at the bottom...
...In recent years it has become clear that the "good old cause" of "negative liberty," with its unwillingness to cede power to anyone, means power ceded to everyone...
...When one debated Marxists, the issues had measurable outcomes, but when one debates the advocates of "ethnicity and nature" (the new equivalent of "blood and soil...
...It is because . . . its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers...
...Without exception, everyone that I have asked about whether America is in decline has said yes, regardless of his or her political stance, age, occupation, or social position...
...The United States government was set up to be inefficient (as any perusal of the Federalist Papers would show...
...At lower levels we have simply let public schools decay...
...Edward Luttwak complains of the "third worldization" of American culture, the decline of habits of competence and discipline...
...The extremism of legal decisions setting questions outside the political realm is shown by a recent comment of the Economist that other countries have managed to arrive at compromise positions on abortion but Americans can imagine nothing but all abortions or none...
...A culture without rituals that has lost any SPRING • 1991 • 185 Symptoms of Decline unifying force except the mass media has few ways to deal with its fears...
...The images of professional sports purveyed through the mass media have become basic to our modes of social organization (as evidenced, for example, in self-help books...
...In order to persuade someone, you have to start with some idea of the common interest or ethos to which you can appeal...
...This is no doubt true...
...Another sign of the declining belief in the efficacy of capitalist solutions is the rising popularity of fantasy and the declining popularity of science fiction...
...Despite setbacks, we need to remember that life has gotten better for a majority of human beings throughout this century...
...The end of these developments has a particular significance for American society because Americans have always believed that the decline of their institutions didn't matter as long as the quality of life of individual Americans was improving...
...The American fear of state intervention leads to a style of hidden intervention, which causes distrust...
...As late as 1981 America was the world's leading creditor nation, with net assets of $141 billion...
...But I have always found the discovery that the losers of society are losers to be unremarkable...
...Despite this ideologically determined opposition to government, the fear of a political class has not prevented its rise...
...As political scientist Joel Krieger puts it: "American cities . . . are without question the most deteriorated of all the cities of the advanced societies...
...But it might also be that Reaganism itself may have been only a symptom of a larger phenomenon...
...In amateur sports the key metaphor was the "rules of the game," but in professional sports and the mass media winning rather than rule-keeping is the key metaphor...
...Finally, capitalists have always needed governmental remedies for managerial folly...
...If the bourgeois world is seen as the SPRING • 1991 • 181 Symptoms of Decline only rational one, then only subjectivism can be a defense against it...
...who sets the rules for the players in the market...
...Once reason served as a check on appetite...
...A wave of palpable unease has spread across the United States...
...But the building or rebuilding of such structures and a clear cultural identity requires thought and contestation...
...For ideological fanatics, reality is interesting only insofar as it proves their theories...
...The self-appointed defenders of present-day America against the "declinists" tend to stress the collapse of our enemies, but historically, the collapse of one's enemies is not necessarily a victory...
...Unfortunately, these putative worshippers have no idea of how great is the ability of capitalists to take advantage of all the sacrifices made to them...
...Until about 1965 it was...
...The definition of capitalism as a rational endeavor certainly misses the irrational side of capitalism so obvious in the vast failures of the 1980s...
...Some of the best art the Western Roman Empire produced was in the fifth and sixth centuries...
...A decline may be relative or absolute...
...Capitalism prospered because capitalist metaphors had not yet taken over everything...
...The collapse of the legal system is as bad as that of the educational system (and not unrelated...
...It is the focus on abstract intellectual positions that leads to "slippery slope" arguments that make any loss a total one...
...The only way in which the United States has been able to reorganize itself is with an enemy: whatever social engineering we've had in our history has come during or just after the major catastrophes of war and depression...
...This gives a certain strange quality to discussions of American education...
...Since then, however, American individuals have been losing their ability and the desire to compete in any of the marketplaces, whether economic, intellectual, social, or moral...
...Human agency is replaced by a supernatural one...
...They have had enough power to continue increasing the starting salaries of lawyers, the average compensations of doctors, teachers, and bureaucrats, and the skyrocketing compensations of corporate executives...
...Professional sports and the law both operate in a system of short-term, results-oriented behavior in which rules are an impediment to be maneuvered around...
...The average income per American family has not grown since 1973...
...Whatever the consensus of America's past, it was built in times of extreme conflict, and more of such conflict, not less, will be necessary if our future is to be something other than decline...
...Education becomes therapy tempered by law and money...
...At this moment, while much of the world is searching for things that Americans have always had, Americans seem to be on their way to losing them...
...However, this is not a sufficient defense, for long, of any system...
...now it seems more a goad to it...
...And Americans are apprehensive about the next contest: we knew we could "beat" Russia in a military race but are very uncertain that we can beat Germany and Japan in an economic one...
...Abandoning the search destroys the entire system...
...186 • DISSENT Symptoms of Decline RUFFIANISM TRIUMPHANT: Design for a statue to be erected in New York commemorating the year 1872...
...Governments have been known to declare bankruptcy, reorganize, and pull out of their difficulties...
...It may well be that the illusion of progress in the years 1850 to 1950 rested on three temporary phenomena: the change from rural to urban settlement...
...But the attitude of "don't know and don't care" on the part of society's most privileged classes was deadly...
...Here, too, the American ethic may be more inspiring at a distance than close up: we may be a society incapable of replicating itself, dependent on other societies for our continuance...
...And that is not just a moral struggle but a practical one and therefore a political one...
...It is hard to get rid of, though by now it is simply an attitude signifying nothing and debunking nothing...
...It is possible that the weakness of our present institutions and the vacuity of our present ideas might produce a healthy reaction...
...The moral marketplace of hedonic capitalism is a very uncertain place to be...
...The language of these three professions uses traditional American phrases that have come to describe most American experience: "self-help," "rights," and the "bottom line...
...Because America has been synonymous with wealth for a quarter of a millennium, these changes are not insignificant...
...As high-stakes legal games become the center of political confrontation, the result is at once a confrontation leading to gridlock and the loss of the sense of moral seriousness of ideas...
...But what has resulted is what Theodore Lowi calls a "jellyfish" government, pervasive but weak, and easily captured by private interests...
...Despite everincreasing rhetoric about "community," it is possible that people everywhere and most especially in America may want only the life of individual consumption: a nation of couch potatoes...
...It is rather a series of private experiences, each teacher with some subjective message...
...Some of the sense of strain in the society can be seen in the continued multiplication of guns, the loss of public space, the disintegration of society even in the suburbs...
...Three parts of the national budget (interest payments and the two boondoggle areas of agriculture and defense) together increased 117 percent, while the rest of the budget stagnated...
...facts are unimportant...
...Gamesmanship" is something to be admired, so much so that it was held against Michael Dukakis that Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes were able to smear him successfully...
...Conservatives rejoice in Reagan deficits because they prevent social programs (although, as Daniel Moynihan suggests, it is "unpatriotic to destroy America in order to save it...
...In the absence of other restraints, cohesions, and organizing principles, the coercion of the marketplace becomes necessary and even valued...
...Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Vol.35 —January 4, 1873 that the decline of institutions has gone so far as to imperil the basic social structures necessary to provide for the well-being of individuals...
...The moral education resulting from this combination of events is an odd mixture of bad social science and sports-type coverage, which together disempower the value of systems and behavior...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
