You’re Right, You’re Right...

One of my favorite movie lines is from “When Harry Met Sally,” when Carrie Fisher’s character realizes (over and over) that the married man she loves is not going to get a divorce: “You’re right, you’re right, he’s never going to leave her,” she tells her long-suffering friends, who never thought he would.

I think of that line often when watching the world. For all my life I’ve been as certain as Carrie Fisher was that things would change for the better, that we would make progress against problems like poverty and its kissing cousin, racial inequality. 

We don’t casually lynch blacks anymore; now police simply shoot them. We don’t have open sewers in our cities; we have sidewalk homeless encampments.

I’m not saying things are as bad as they were a hundred years ago. Most of us have electricity and indoor plumbing now. But those represent technological progress.

Progress of the spirit, of character, has been more elusive. Racial hatred is as white hot now as during Reconstruction. Stinginess and indifference to the economic suffering of others is as hardened as it was in the Gilded Age.

The internet promised to usher in a golden information age. It did, but it also spawned Facebook and Twitter, where facts compete with cons on equal footing. With no trusted guiding light, no Walter Cronkite assuring us “that’s the way it is,” we are in something like darkness. And, as the Phantom of the Opera put it, “In the dark, it is easy to pretend that the truth is what it ought to be.”

Enabled by fake facts, Trump rode a wave of belligerent, aggrieved populism to become a modern George Wallace on a national scale; while Mitch McConnell played Machiavelli to the corrupt princes of what is still called the Republican Party, but which bears a greater resemblance to the white Citizens’ Councils of a century ago.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Our clothes are nicer now, our cars fancier; we have iPhones and YouTube. But we’re still the same as we ever were: tribal and driven by Darwinian urges. Scratch our pretty surface with a crisis or a grievance and you find base metal.

Our unchanging basic nature does make stories from the past relatable. I totally get how Ulysses felt when, after a perilous journey home from war, he found suitors to his wife lounging about his home. The Guillotines of the French Revolution, too, make bloody sense. It doesn’t take that much stress to jolt us into our own episodes of Breaking Bad.

My epiphany is not depressing to me. I wish we could improve (and maybe we have a little), but acknowledging that fundamentally we don’t seem to be able to is empowering. We might as well forget about enlightening our base brains and instead concentrate on how to enlist them to the causes our cognitive lobes find to be just.

This is basically the premise of capitalism. Let everyone pursue their own self-interest, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand will spread around the benefits. Even Smith’s invisible hand, though, is guided by base instincts now and then, routinely shoving more of its benefits toward the side of the table where the masters sit.

So we have taxes and regulations to try to smooth that out. They work okay, better than most other approaches, until the people making the rules are permitted to make them mainly for themselves. Elections are supposed to be a check on that. 

We’re having a little trouble with elections lately.

Which is why what is happening in our democracy at this moment is so threatening. If we don’t have a practical way to throw out those who abuse their position in government, there is no invisible hand of equity. The only hand we’ll be left with is the one reaching into our pockets.

Depending on Others

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much we depend on others. Overall, we’re a self-reliant lot, but we need each other’s cooperation and support more than we like to admit. “You didn’t build that,” Barack Obama famously said in 2012. He was talking about how public infrastructure gives each of us a leg up when we want to start a new enterprise.

His point almost seems quaint now, at a time when for most of us starting a new business is taking a back seat to staying alive. The essence of his thought, though, is more important now than ever. To stay alive in a pandemic, we have to depend on one another.

On our families, friends and neighbors to wear masks and be sensible about where and with whom they gather.

On our legislators to rush emergency aid to those caring for the sick and those who have been forced out of work and can’t afford to put dinner on the table.

On our fellow citizens to pull together, to do the equivalent of buying war bonds, for this is indeed a war.

So, how’s that going?

Don’t want to wear a mask? Grab your assault rifle and surround the home of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. Or if you’re not into that level of militant vigilantism, just have family and friends over for the holidays, because, you know, that’s what you’ve always done. 

Maybe you’re a Republican in the Senate, considering your political future, which seems to occupy much of the time of many senators. Get behind Mitch McConnell’s opposition to giving aid to suffering state and local governments. Why should you help those wasteful Democrat-run blue states? What did they ever do for you?

You’re not a fancy politician, you say, just an average Joe. Don’t despair. Go to Facebook and troll those vote-stealing, socialist Democrats. You’ll find plenty of company.

We’re an independent lot, we Americans. We don’t like to be told what to do. We’re reacting to Covid restrictions like we do to soda bans.

We’ve always been free to eat unhealthily, and we’re seeing the result of that in staggering obesity rates. Many are insisting on being free to gather and not wear masks, and we’re seeing the result of that in staggering Covid infection and death rates.

You’d think we’d figure out that we’re only hurting ourselves. Maybe we’re slow learners.

All this leaves me wondering about my place in a society that seems hell-bent on libertarianism.  No matter what I think is best for the public good, if we won’t cooperate with each other, at some point it gets down to every man for himself.

Billionaire preppers have escape bunkers in New Zealand. Survivalists of more modest means have mountain redoubts stocked with shotgun shells and canned goods.

Maybe I should reread Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road for clues about how best to get through this.

The Downswing

After the Civil War, Reconstruction brought economic and political progress for former slaves, only to have both crushed by Southern white backlash. That same one step forward, two steps back happened again after decades of racial progress in the first half of the 20th century came to a halt following (ironically) the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The culprit, according to Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett in their book The Upswing, was again white backlash and a societal shift from communitarian values to selfishness. 

When we pull together, we all prosper; when we don’t, the disadvantaged get left behind. The course we take depends on the threats we perceive. When they are external, as they were in WW I and WW II, we put aside our differences to defeat the common enemy. If we see them as internal, however, from those among us who are not like us, for instance, our instinct is to weed them out. One might call the last four years under Gold Logo Man an attempt at a “Great Weeding Out.”

The thing about weeds, is they are persistent. Long term, it's hard to see how privileged gardeners can do much more than carve out small botanical sanctuaries for themselves.

What they are fighting is not weeds, but the diversity of our species, the very thing that enables us to survive plagues and pandemics, both viral and economic, that would wipe out a more homogeneous group.

Climate change is an existential threat, but it is not the only one. If we don’t nurture the diverse members of our society who give us the strength of heterogeneity, then even before the swollen seas of climate change swallow Miami, a great upheaval of the kind that inevitably follows the egocentric reigns of monarchies and despots will wash over us, leaving in its wake economic and political wreckage scattered over the landscape like the debris of ruined huts and foundered boats on a tropical beach after a tsunami.