MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 28 Apr 2007
What's Wrong With
America?
Two
weeks ago, I was honored to be asked by one of my favorite organizations, the
League of Women Voters, to speak about global warming. I hadn't given a broad presentation on
this topic for several years, so I rummaged up some PowerPoint slides and put a
talk together. By the way, now
that I've organized this presentation, I'd be delighted to give it to any other
groups willing to listen (yes, this is the advertisement).
It's
fun to talk to the League because their intense interest in public affairs
brings good questions and discussion.
One slide showed America's enormous amount of global warming pollution,
25 percent of the world's total and (on a per capita basis) more than twice
that of the average European or Japanese, nations whose per capita gross
national products and qualities of life are at least as high as ours. This led one audience member to ask
"What's wrong with America?"
My
response described, as examples where we fall short, Europe and Japan's high
speed passenger trains (six times as energy efficient as cars) and other mass
transit, Europe's stiff gasoline taxes, and Germany and Spain's heavy use of
wind for electricity. But these
energy issues are mere symptoms.
What's really wrong with America lies deeper, in our culture.
In
his masterful book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond studies a score of ancient and modern
societies. The lesson of failed
cultures such as the Polynesians of Easter Island, the native American Anasazi,
and contemporary Rwanda, is that they chose to fail. It was obvious that the Easter Islanders were destroying
their future by cutting down their forests in order to build towering religious
sculptures, that Anasazi population growth was too rapid to be sustained within
the canyon they had chosen for their home, and that Rwandan population
pressures plus long-standing Tutsi repression of the Hutu would lead to
tragedy. But these cultures were
not self-critical, choosing instead to ignore the indicators and maintain
"business as usual."
So
it is in America. A few thinkers,
such as Morris Berman, author of Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of
Empire, are taking the needed look at
ourselves, but few are listening.
Careening
recklessly from disaster in Iraq to our deeply immoral global warming policy to
our "show me the money" political style, we not only approach
collapse but, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, we tend to take the
rest of the planet along with us.
What's
wrong with America? Consider our
response to the Virginia Tech murder rampage. These incidents are more prevalent in America than elsewhere
(there have been seven such campus mass shooting incidents since 1997), our per
capita murder rate is many times higher than in other industrialized nations,
our per capita gun murder rate is 35 times higher than Britain's, 8 times
higher than Australia's, and 170 times higher than Japan's. Something's wrong here. We surely need serious evidence-based
discussions of American violence, gun control, TV and video game violence, and
mental health care to help us figure this out. But media coverage, especially television news, has instead
featured personal stories and lurid violence.
This
preference for anecdotes over learned discussion is an example of a broader
American ailment:
anti-intellectualism.
Richard Hoffstadter, author of the 1962 classic Anti-intellectualism
in America, traces this cultural trait to
American religious fundamentalism, disdain of European values, and American
business. As evidence of the
destructive effects of fundamentalism, consider that roughly half of our people
believe that humans were specially and separately created, and 59 percent believe
"endtimes" nonsense such as the "rapture" that will lift
all true Christian believers bodily into heaven, leaving non-Christians to a
deserved final destruction. This
stuff rots our most human and most vital faculty, our ability to reason. Our disdain of foreign values is
obvious in our ignorance of global affairs and our refusal to learn from other
cultures. And the all-dominating
American business culture is obvious in our money-soaked national elections and
such materialistic and dysfunctional developments as the Pinnacle Hills
Promenade in Rogers and other cathedrals to the almighty dollar.
Self-absorbed
individualism is another American theme.
The damage this does to our social system was obvious to me during a six
month sabbatical in Stockholm in 1985.
I looked all around that city of over a million and could find
essentially no poor people. I saw
single women on city streets at all hours with no real concerns about their
safety. I saw an inexpensive,
clean, reliable, and extensive public transportation system that served rich
and poor with far greater comfort and speed than is possible in America's
car-centered system. I saw housing
in the central city made affordable by public subsidies for low-income
residents. These and much more are
possible through the willingness of Swedes to tax themselves for the public
good. We might regard their heavy
taxation as a loss of freedom, but it seems to me that freedom from the
constraints of poverty, the freedom to feel safe in one's own city, freedom to
travel where and when one wants, and freedom from the crushing ugliness of
America's decayed central cities, are far more precious than extra cash for
more TV sets, SUVs, and McMansions.
It's
obvious that America is not doing well.
We were once a great nation and can become so again. But to get there we must have the
courage to honestly assess where we are now, and to change what needs
changing.