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.