Too Much Individualism

I don't think Milbank understands the TEA Party very well, and in fact I think his proposal here is not very likely to work. Nevertheless, I am surprised to see that we seem to agree about the problem with American culture, even if we disagree about the solutions:

Liu observes that American culture now has an excess of individualism, short-term thinking and prioritizing of rights over duties. He calls for “a corrective dose” of Chinese values: mutual responsibility, long-term thinking, humility, moral character and contribution to society.

Now, I was just praising Jackie Chan on exactly this ground, so it may seem that we have some agreement about the solution set as well. Certainly Chinese culture currently has a stronger sense of the family as an institution that is (and ought to be) binding on its members: America has largely disposed of every binding institution except the State, following the logic of the Enlightenment philosophers from Hume and Locke to JS Mill -- to say nothing of Marx and those under his influence. We have come to see the world in terms of atomic individuals and their governments, so much so that the Democratic party now speaks of government as 'the thing we all belong to,' or 'the word for what we do together.'

Still, there are two things to say about this:

1) Chinese culture is not the answer. For one thing, as Milbank's article itself points out, Chinese culture isn't a hedge here -- it's breaking down on the same lines as we speak. For another, the authoritarian response that Milbank describes is very much at the core of Chinese cultural ideals. The boss in China is a very different figure than an American boss, as the fourth of these graphics relates.

Part of the reason is that Chinese culture is incompatible with direct confrontation between individuals, which is very much necessary to the American form of government. In order for a republican form of government to work, people have to speak the truth as they see it, and hash out their differences in conflict. A society that believes that politeness is built around not making others uncomfortable may be noble on its own terms, but it requires the authoritarian mode of government that Chinese culture produces not only in government itself, but in the family, and in the business world. Someone has to be empowered to make a decision binding on everyone else just because you can't have direct confrontations that would allow you to hash things out. If you don't like a proposal you can signal it by saying things like, "Maybe we could do that," rather than, "Yes, let's do that!" But you can't have the kind of frank exchange of views that is necessary for the traditional American city council that would allow you to come to a compromise position. You need someone to make the call, and you need a culture of submission to that call when it is made.

2) We have an American solution that is fully formed. It's just been abandoned. But America used to have stronger families, we used to have more of a sense of duty and community, we used to celebrate faith and religion.

Why did it fall apart? Industrial economics. The move from extended families to nuclear ones follows from the need of an industrial economy for mobile workers, which shatters the old model of families because it requires the children to move in different directions. The sort of small Protestant churches that were historically so prominent in America break up for the same reason. Only larger churches that one can belong to without being tied to a particular place can hold generations of people together if the families are going to break up and move in different directions every few years. The same holds for private clubs and other small cultural organizations.

An information economy makes larger families possible again, and stable churches and other community organizations, insofar as you do not need to move to be physically present at a given office, but such an economy isn't fully realized even here in America.

For the moment the philosophy of individualism is triumphant, in other words, in part because the forces that would resist it have been broken by the economy on which we all rely for survival. As we transition to a new way of producing, the old institutions may recover -- and if they do, they will be better positioned to reassert the more traditional modes of American thought on things like family and church.

In the meantime, individualism is so convincing to so many because it is the only way of thinking that seems to match the physical reality they encounter. It isn't obvious to them that this reality is a human construction, in part because the structure of the economy is beyond human control. It is wholly our production, but it is the force of so many of us acting at once that no group -- even a nation -- can really alter the basic facts about it to any substantial degree. Efforts at control fail to produce the intended results.

Now Milbank intends, when he talks about Americans thinking of themselves as belonging to a community, something like these 'efforts at control.' He thinks of the TEA Party as a kind of revanchist movement because he doesn't understand their economic points, which aren't about individualism per se but about eliminating government meddling with the economy (such as taxation, regulation and mandates) in order to allow the economy to flourish. This same economy has been destroying families and communities, but the only hope to recover lies in moving forward, not in trying to build dams. That's what they're arguing -- not that they should not be thought of as members of communities. Of course they don't think that. If they did, there wouldn't be such a profusion of community-oriented symbolism at TEA Party functions: religious communities, families, and of course the basic symbolism of belonging to an American political community that is captured in the tricorner hats and copies of the Constitution.

The solution, then, isn't to import other cultures to improve ours. The solution can only be to move forward with developing an information economy, while mindful of the need to build and sustain communities and families and churches. The solution is to push down power to localities when possible, states when not, and to diminish the role of the Federal government -- in that way, you'll get people working together to solve problems because the government will be operating at a scale they can actually affect with their efforts.

The introduction of "whiteness" is a red herring. The problem is not ethnic, and the solution is not either.