NASA

I cannot abide and repeatedly object to the word “impact” –whether as verb or as noun — and to its variants, “impacted” and the grotesque “impactful.” It is acceptable, although inelegant, to write that the bat impacted the ball, or about the impact of a car on a pedestrian, or about an impacted tooth. It is not only inelegant but also logically and intellectually misleading to write about, say, the social impacts of a policy or how a technological device is impacting our culture Using “impact” to describe social or historical change impairs clear thought.

It is, alas, only one of the more blatant examples of how casual metaphors can undermine causal analysis.

The Grammar Part

The grammar guardians have been all over “impact” as a verb; it is really a noun. But they are giving ground to common usage. One writes, “the verb impact and its variants (impacted, impacting) will always be a teeth-grinding annoyance, but I’ll grudgingly admit, it is no longer considered incorrect.” The New York Times style rules allow using impact as a verb but only in limited fashion: “as a verb it means to strike with force. Do not use it to mean affect or have an effect; in that sense it is technical jargon.” The Times’s editors, it appears from a quick look, have kept the general use of impact to its noun form (as in these 2012 New Year’s Day headlines: “Baylor Feels Impact of Heisman Trophy” and “Financial Crises’ Impact Varies Widely”).

My objection, however, goes beyond such schoolmarmish fastidiousness; it is about the danger of implicit analogy, the misuses of metaphor, even of impact as a noun.

As far back as 1965, the 2nd edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage described the noun form of impact as a “vogue word” which “the herd” uses, often  inappropriately, to seem in fashion. Impact, says Fowler’s, “means primarily . . . a collision and, by its extension, its effect on the object struck.” Its “use figuratively in this last sense” is the problem. Fowler’s notes that impact is a metaphor that has been stretched senselessly, as this last example from the Times illustrates: Reporter “Amy Harmon . . . [covers] the impact of science and technology on American life.” It is precisely in reading about technology in American life that my complaint about “impact” developed. (The following discussion draws from Ch. 1 of America Calling.)

The Understanding Part

“Impact” is everywhere in the literature on the social consequences of new technologies. The way writers typically deploy the metaphor calls forth a mental picture: Like a cue ball hurtling on green felt, a new technology smacks into some part of society (say, business communications) and that “ball” in turn collides into another part of society (say, family life) and so forth, in a cascade of ricochets. This a vivid but a lazy way of thinking about technology and change.

Oberlin

The impact language often implies that the technology has an inherent property – cars are speedy, phones are instant, trains are mechanical – that is imprinted on people’s psyches by impact. One writer, for example, argues that, since electronic communications are “placeless,” so those media make people “placeless” or “rootless.” Many writers suggest that cold, metallic devices like telephones turn their users into cold, hard personalities.

What really happens with technological change is much messier and cannot be described with sweeping generalities. Entrepreneurs develop and market a new technology with particular uses in mind. Some customers are attracted. Those who adopt the new technology start adapting it to their own ends. Users alter other behaviors or have new experiences, with further consequences.

For example, early 20th-century automobile manufacturers sold cars as recreational toys, much like 19th-century bicycles. Some people, mainly farmers, found practical uses for cars and manufacturers responded by developing vehicles for those markets. Farmers used cars and trucks not only to take goods to market but also to shop in farther, bigger towns, bypassing and dooming village merchants. Many city people eventually bought cars to commute to work, dooming private streetcar systems in most cities. And so on. Profound consequences indeed followed the introduction and widespread purchase automobiles — suburban sprawl for one. But the automobile itself did not “impact” anything (other than fence posts, cows, and unwary pedestrians); people adopted and used the technology.

The “impact” metaphor hides these sorts of complexities. It allows lazy arguments alluding to social “billiard balls” colliding into other social phenomenon without really explaining what real people are actually doing. By ridding ourselves of the impact metaphor, we are forced to think harder and more clearly.

It’s Capital!

“Impact” is just one of Fowler’s vogue metaphors that constrict imagination and impair clear thinking. There are many others.

Take “capital.” The original meaning is financial: e.g., “money or assets put to economic use” (from here or here; and see the OED), or “already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services” (Wikipedia). Then came the metaphoric terms “human capital” (apparently referring to personal traits such as skills, education, and motivation), and “cultural capital” (artistic taste, music appreciation, etc.), and the most mutant version, “social capital” (trust, friendships, connections, club memberships, almost everything social). It has never been clear to me why anyone needed to hide lucid and precise concepts under the lumpy metaphor blanket of “capital.” Real capital can be loaned, financial capital earns interest, fixed capital depreciates, and so on. But I cannot loan you my education, earn interest on attending the opera, nor invest your church attendance in my start-up business. Calling those things “capitals” only obfuscates.

Altruism, Human or Otherwise

The original meaning of altruism is “devotion to the welfare of others, regard for others, as a principle of action; opposed to egoism or selfishness” (OED). It is a subjective, human orientation. Evolutionary reductionists appropriated the term to describe metaphorically animal behavior — say, army ants charging one another. This use of the word has become so pervasive that the animal version (“behavior by an animal that may be to its disadvantage but that benefits others of its kind”) is now listed by dictionaries as a second definition (e.g., here).

Perniciously, this metaphoric use has, by a sort of backwash, by reverse analogy, distorted our understanding of human behavior: If what the army ants do is “altruism,” then our explanation of animal altruism explains human altruism. Voila, sociobiology!

Beware the Metaphor

Analogies, metaphors, and similes are great rhetorical tools. (This post is full of them — like “rhetorical tools.”) But they are dangerous ones. Even when a writer is aware that he or she is deploying one — as Richard Dawkins is when he writes of “the selfish gene” — their use can displace more precise and accurate description. (Never mind the willful misuse of metaphors.) Even worse, when writers deploy metaphors without self-awareness, as is typically the case with “impact,” then the distortion is all the greater.

Let’s bring impact to its knees…. er, or something.

L.A. Times

GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been, as have other GOP candidates, castigating President Obama for presumably wanting to “Europeanize” the United States. On January 6, 2012, for example, Romney asserted that the President was “dragging ‘the soul of America’ toward a ‘European-style welfare state’.” Romney and others have accused the President of loving America too little and loving Europe too much. One question that this line of criticism raises (whether it does or it does not correctly reflect Obama’s views) is: What’s so bad about Europe?

In this post, I compare life for Americans to life for Europeans on a variety of dimensions. To simplify matters, let us look just at the U.S., Sweden (the country that most represents to Americans the European welfare state), and a large nation that conservatives also dislike, France. And then, let’s ask how the three nations stack up. Perhaps there are some things European that America might actually want to emulate. (I drafted this post before recent columns on the Europe question by Nicholas Kristof and by E.J. Dionne — both worth reading.)

Quantity and Quality of Life

First up: How long do people live? (Unless otherwise noted, the data come from OECD statistics, available online.) The graph below shows that the French and Swedes live longer than Americans do. Other evidence (pdf) shows that about 40 percent of Americans skip getting medical care or drugs because of cost, over three times the percentage in Europe.

Europeans also live safer lives. Rates of interpersonal violence are much higher in the United States. This graph shows the most accurately measured indicator, rates of homicide:

We also know that Europeans do not have to work as hard as Americans do. They have more legislated vacations and usually retire earlier. This graph shows how many hours a year workers in the three countries are on the job.

Here’s another dimension of social life: honesty. According to the agency that systematically explores corruption, the United States and France rank about the same, below Sweden.

Then, there is civic participation (source). Overall, Americans belong to as many associations per capita as do Swedes, although there are complications: Swedes are much more likely to belong to unions and Americans to belong to churches. When those two types of associations are set aside, there is, again, no difference between the two nations.

Over a variety of measures, then, the Swedes and French seem to have it as good or better than Americans do.

Money

But there is one area in which the United States is clearly superior to France and Sweden, one which Gov. Romney has stressed: On average, Americans make more money. And so, they can buy more than Europeans can.

We need, however, to temper this difference by realizing, first, that, as we saw above, Americans work more hours for their income. Second, there is great inequality in American income. The following measure, the gini coefficient, is the main way economists measure income inequality. The U.S. is the most economically unequal developed nation.

What the greater inequality means is that Americans who are well above-average in wealth can afford the best in the world – the best medical care, best schools for their kids, and the safest (gated) communities – but at the same time Americans who are well below-average get notably lousy medical care, schools, and dangerous neighborhoods. The French and the Swedes tend to be more bunched in the middle – in large measure because many of the good things in life, like medical care and childcare, are provided equally to all.

Opportunity

But the key difference, Romney stresses, is that the United States is an opportunity society. We may not have – we shouldn’t even want, he says – a society of equal outcomes; what Americans have is a society of equal opportunity.

For a while, the assumption that America had the advantage over Europe in the opportunity to move up the economic ladder could be asserted in public discussions without much challenge. But sociologists have known for decades that this is not true. Studies show that the chances of children moving up from their parents’ statuses were no greater or even lower here than in Europe. Now the news has finally reached the general media (e.g., here and here) and it is harder to make the equal opportunity vs. equal outcome claim.

The graph below is illustrative. It shows the odds that a young Swedish or American man whose father was in the bottom one-fifth of the national income distribution would himself end up in the top two-fifths of the income distribution (from pdf, table 12; French data were not available). Sweden seems to be the real “opportunity society” in this comparison.

Moral

All this is not to say that the United States is worse than France and Sweden. One could compile other measures that would be more to the advantage of the U.S. (For example, our hypertension levels are lower; our suicide rate is lower.) It is to say that the facile dismissal of European societies as some kind of failure is foolish.

And all this is not to say that the United States should become Europe; we couldn’t even if we wished to. But a wise leader would consider what we might learn from, what we might advantageously borrow from, the Europeans.

(This column was re-posted on The Berkeley Blog on January 19, 2012.)

Libr. U. Wash.

If one had to characterize American culture by one basic, core trait, it would not be individualism, but something deeper: the assumption that people are unique and sovereign individuals. This belief is novel – even outlandish – in world historical perspective. Yet, it determines much of American distinctiveness.

Every One

Each person is, Americans generally assume, a unique and sovereign individual: Deep down, below the layers of conformity that family and society have laid upon each of us, is a singular “true self” as idiosyncratic as a snowflake. We value the person who strips away that conformity, finds his or her distinctive nature,  and acts faithfully to it. Mr. Rogers of children’s public television would tell his viewers every day: “There’s only one you . . . You are very special . . .  Only you know what you feel.”

This unique person, we believe, ought to be and, in fact, is independent, self-governing, and ultimately self-responsible. We extol the “self-made man,” tolerate “no excuses,” and are embarrassed by “hand-outs.” Early American thinkers stressed how important it was that individuals attain what they called “competency” or “virtue.” These terms referred to the autonomy – and the duties – that came with having property sufficient to support a household (see, e.g., here). Only the “competent” and “virtuous” –  in those days they could only be well-to-do white men — could sustain democracy.

If anything, our emphasis on autonomy  has only increased since then. Over recent decades national surveys have asked Americans which key values ought to be taught to children. The proportion of respondents who choose traits such as independence and self-direction (e.g., thinking for oneself) has increased while the proportion picking characteristics like obedience and conformity (e.g., being popular) has declined (see here).

Contrast our American assumption of the unique and sovereign self to what most cultures in most times have assumed: that a person is in essence a piece of the social whole, largely interchangeable with others in his or her  family or clan; this social person acts out a standard role determined by God, fate, and his or her betters. Understanding people this way makes it seem sensible and moral to, for example, exact collective punishment; hurting an offender’s cousin is essentially the same as hurting him.

Not so in American culture. The central emphasis on the sovereign individual yields a variety of distinctive features today.

Fundamental Attributions

Psychologists who study cross-cultural differences have developed a long list of the ways that westerners differ from other humans — and Americans are the most “western” of westerners. In a recent, well-publicized paper, three Canadian psychologists asked whether we were “the weirdest people in the world” and, after reviewing the research literature, answered yes.

One way Americans are “weird” is our susceptibility to the “fundamental attribution error.” This is the psychological tendency to explain other persons’ actions as a result of their personal traits and wills – “He had that accident because he is a careless person and was in such a hurry” – rather than by circumstances – “… because the road was wet.” (At the same time, we are especially likely to see our own actions, if they end poorly, as a result of circumstances – “the guy cut me off” – so as to protect our elevated self-esteem.) This explanatory style follows from the notion that the individual, rather than the gods, luck, or rulers, makes his or her own fate.

The assumption of the sovereign person also underlies Americans’ emphasis on self-reliance, which shows up in our cultural expressions (see this previous post on Emerson and Thoreau), in our especially high tendency to blame the poor for being poor, and in our general resistance to government action.

This assumption underlies our conviction that everyone has, or should have, his or her own, self-crafted opinions. Teachers and professors, for example, require students to write essays with their individual, preferably idiosyncratic, take on issues. In other cultures, memorizing and repeating the views of the great thinkers makes more sense, but we want even preadolescents to give us their personal opinions on, say, war and peace, democracy, or the nature of the divine.

San Diego Sch. Dis.

Another fruit of this assumption is the American insistence on choice – on having the freedom to choose, on having many choices, and on choosing as central to what it means to be a person. Free adults make their own choices, we insist, and we know a person’s character by the choices he or she makes. (See, for example, this article and this video.) One study showed that American children did better on tasks when they were allowed to choose those tasks while Asian children did better when they were told that their mothers had chosen the tasks for them.

Even the development of economics as a discipline was different in America: our economists have insisted much more on the logic of free market choice than economists in Europe have (see here).

A last illustration: The sovereign individual assumption sustains the long-standing American preference for living on one’s own. When the finances make it possible, both the elderly and young singles try to have their own homes. The recent economic downturn has created a “crisis” of “boomerang kids,” whose return home is seen as a social problem (see, e.g., here and here). Elsewhere, it is normal or even preferred that youngsters live with their parents until they marry – or even after. We Americans see such young adults as not really adult; they lack “competence.”

This fundamental belief that the social world is made up of separate, distinct, independent, and self-determining individuals is exceptionally American and is one of the key elements of our culture that make us exceptional in other ways as well.

(This column was cross-posted on The Berkeley Blog on January 12, 2012.)

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that the GOP is the party of the white working class. This boldly erroneous assertion motivates sociologist Michael Hout to clarify the connection between class and political affiliation:

Smithsonian

The United States has more economic inequality than any other rich country and yet surprisingly lacks a coherent language for talking about class. Conversations quickly bog down in definitions. What distinguishes one class from another? Differences of wealth? Income? Possessions? In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks suggested that class is a combination of education and race – as others have (e.g., here)  — but Brooks moved the conversation to new ground with these three sentences:

The Republican Party is the party of the white working class. This group – whites with high school degrees and maybe some college – is still the largest block in the electorate. They overwhelmingly favor Republicans.

Identities

From a policy point of view Brooks’s claim is hard to figure. White high school graduates have little stake in the Republicans’ threats to shut down Washington over tax cuts for millionaires and a very big stake in the payroll tax cut that President Obama proposed but which House majority leader Eric Cantor and other Republicans opposed.

Parsing such interests and political battles is better left to the pundits. What sociologists can contribute to the conversation is evidence. Maybe Brooks’s claim that white high school graduates “overwhelmingly favor Republicans” is true in Iowa where whites of all kinds overwhelmingly support Republicans. Nationwide, however, according to the 2010 General Social Survey, only 29 percent of whites who graduated high school (and went no further in school) identify with the Republicans. The Republicans among them outnumber the Democrats by the slight margin of only 3 percentage points.

The figures below show the long-term trends. The red lines display Republican identification for white high school and college graduates from 1973 to 2010; the blue lines show corresponding trends in Democratic identification during that time. Whites who had only high school diplomas are in the first  panel; those with B.A.s (but no more) are in the second panel. (The percentages do not add to 100 because the figure excludes independents — who have rapidly grown in number — and “others.”)

WHITES’ POLITICAL IDENTIFICATION, BY EDUCATION, 1973-2010

If Republicans hold an overwhelming advantage in any group, it is among white college graduates. The Republican edge among them has slipped from 20 percentage points in 1992 to 11 percentage points in the most recent data, but that is as big a margin as the Republicans hold in any group defined by the combination of race and education.

Whites of all educational levels shifted dramatically toward the Republicans during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan, who was president from 1981 to 1989, rode this partisan change but did not cause it. The trend started before Reagan was elected and leveled off, for the most part, before he left office.  Key to the growing Republican identification over thirty years ago was the conversion of conservative, mostly southern, Democrats to a Republican identification. Democrats’ support for civil rights from 1960 onward pushed these whites away from their traditional party identification. At the same time, the Sunbelt boom made the Republicans’ opposition to regulation and taxes additionally attractive.

White high school graduates favored Democrats by as much as 15 points in the 1960s (see here for full analysis). The Democrats started to lose favor with white high school graduates around 1968. The Watergate scandal (1975-76) halted the slide briefly, but it resumed and continued even through the Clinton years. Democrats were never all that popular among white college graduates; these upper-status voters were as weakly committed to the Democratic party in 2010 as in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, nonwhite Americans favor the Democrats, giving them a substantial advantage of 40 points among high school graduates and 42 points among college graduates. Democratic identification decreased among nonwhite high school graduates in parallel with the trend for white high school graduates, dropping from 67 percent in 1973 to its current 50 percent. Among nonwhite college graduates, in sharp contrast, Democratic identification increased from 35 to 60 in the 1970s. Since then there have only been subtle changes for nonwhite college graduates.

Votes

These data measure survey respondents’ answers to questions about party identification. Actual voting trends largely echo these partisan trends. But whatever their avowed party loyalties, the fact that working-class voters turn out to vote at low rates blunts their political potential. The Census Bureau reports (pdf) that in the 2008 presidential election 55 percent of high school graduates voted; 77 percent of college graduates did.

Most nonvoters are people who do not identify with either party. Their low turnout makes high school graduates less attractive to politicians. Then, when candidates do not address the political interests of high school graduates, more of them get turned off and turnout drops yet lower, giving candidates even less incentive to appeal to them. Their turnout in presidential elections fell from 66 percent to 50 percent between 1964 and 1988. It has since rebounded to 57 percent.

In sum, the white working class is more a rhetorical or photo-opp base for today’s Republican party than a real voting base. The GOP still remains the party of the well-educated and well-to-do. You can see it in the polls; you can see it in the policies.

* Michael Hout is Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology & Demography at U.C., Berkeley.

ADDENDUM (1-9-12):

Mike adds a more detailed figure on whites’ political affiliation trends by level of education:

Back in 1964, however, then-Chancellor Edward Strong strongly resisted the movement – as did probably most Californians; they saw it as an anarchic uprising. Californians now have a different, hallowed memory of the the FSM; old photographs of heroes, posters, and other memorabilia are plastered all over the walls and tables of the cafe.

We have yet blunter examples of how history gets reconstructed in its retelling. Recent California law, for example, required that K-12 students be taught about the historical contributions of women, blacks, and gays. And then there is the Texas School Board order requiring that history textbooks “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.”

History is rewritten as much as it is remembered.

Collective Memory

Rewriting history is common. Here is a description of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War from the best-selling history textbook of 1911: “Nearly 4,000,000 slaves had been liberated. Very few of them had any sense of responsibility or any capacity or capital for beginning a new life of industrial freedom. Their emotional nature led them to believe that prosperity was to be bestowed upon them without their effort . . .  They were, with few exceptions, utterly unfit for the exercise of political rights . . . [T]he rule of these negro [sic] governments . . .  was an indescribable orgy of extravagance, fraud, and disgusting incompetence . . .” (For more on this long-lasting textbook, see here.)

A leading history textbook of 2011, on the other hand, tells the story quite differently. It describes the freed slaves’ self-education campaigns, their serious participation in politics, and the far-sighted reforms that the black legislators passed.

These are further examples of the creating and re-creating our “collective memory.” (An excellent book on the topic is Kammen’s, Mystic Chords of Memory.)  In a few earlier posts, I described the struggles over defining school history curricula, the proper way to celebrate the 4th of July,  the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, and the “authentic” character of neighborhoods  (here, here, and here). For a time, the status of Abraham Lincoln was also up for debate – was he a liberator? or, as many claimed, a tyrant? – until he was enshrined in that sacred memorial on the Mall (see here).

A similar set of issues arises on a quite different topic: global peace. Some activists stoke our concerns about war by stressing the horrors of modern conflict, evoking the notion that we have lost a peaceful past. Yet, the evidence is clear that the world has moved into an unusually peaceful era in the last few decades (see, e.g., here). One war is one war too many, of course, but somehow the image of a descent into ever-more-terrible war better grabs attention and stokes concern, and so there is value in constructing a “memory” that war has been spiraling up.

Academics are (largely) interested in what “really happened.” Most people are probably interested in what the moral and political message of the past is – or should be. And so we will always be constructing and reconstructing collective memories to serve in our collective struggles of today.

(This column was cross-posted in The Berkeley Blog on January 4, 2012.)

(spiritualpracticefoundation.org)

There were and are other signs of a make-your-own religious boom. Outside of the standard religious structures, we see the excavation of old, pagan traditions like Wicca and the construction of hybrid, New Age faiths and Eastern blends with practices such as yoga and Kabalistc mysticism. Inside standard religious structures, variants such as independent churches, new liturgies and rituals, and even re-defined theologies have emerged. Some religious leaders describe all this as “cafeteria-style” faith: take what you like and disregard the rest. (And there is a Wikipedia entry for “Cafeteria Christianity,” too.)

Such religious inventions may well have burgeoned in recent decades, especially since the 1960s. Getting good numbers to test that assumption would be difficult, especially when so many “new religious movements” are informal and some even hostile to becoming formal institutions. But one thing is clear: This is not new.

Old Time Religions

The 19th and 20th century witnessed the creation of many American-born religious movements that remain with us such as Scientology, Krishna Consciousness, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Reconstructionist Judaism, and yet earlier, Christian Science, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Disciples of Christ, and Seventh-Day Adventism.  Yet, many more, whether invented here or imported, have come and gone – or come and stayed under the radar.

1850s Prayer Meeting (Lib. of Cong.)

During the early 19th century, in particular, America was Awash in a Sea of Faith, as an important book by Jon Butler is titled (subtitled, Christianizing the American People), by which he means that America was flooded by all sorts of religious campaigns and frenzies. Some, like the Mormons and the Baptists, developed into major and lasting institutions; many more flared up and burned out. Many “faiths” of the day were roughly Christian; others were magical, quasi-pagan, or cult-like folk beliefs. It would take until late in the century before most Americans were conventionally “churched” in the way we take for granted today, a convention that really did not solidify until the 1950s.

Even Sheilaism, a self-defined individual faith, is not new. For example, in the early 19th century, a Mrs. Lucy Mack Smith of New Hampshire decided, as others like her occasionally did, to follow her own reading of the Bible rather than her church’s interpretations. Eventually, she persuaded a minister to baptize her as, in effect, a Christian of her own individual denomination. Her son Joseph later founded the Mormon faith.

“No Religion” Faith

In 2002, Michael Hout and I published a study that drew remarkably widespread attention and replication. We tracked the increasing percentage of American survey respondents who, since about 1990, chose the last option in this question: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” In 2010, 18% picked that option, up from 7% c. 1990. Recently, Robert Putnam and David Campbell expanded on these findings and arguments in American Grace.

Critically, the increase in the “no religion” answers is only weakly tied to atheism. In the 2008-10 General Social Surveys, for example, 66% of those who chose the “no religion” option nonetheless said that they believed in a higher power or God; 20% of them said that they had “no doubt” of God’s existence. And 54% of them said that they probably or definitely believed in “life after death.” (Rather than being a thought-out rejection of theism, the increase in “no religion” answers is largely a rejection of organized religion and a reaction against its growing identification with the political right.)

I suspect that many, perhaps most, of these “no religion” Americans are really “new sort of religion” Americans, seeking a way of keeping faith in something beyond the corporeal despite their skepticism toward organized religion. This may lead them to join others in new “spiritual” practices or even to a Sheilaism of some kind. In these ways, they’d be true to a long American faith tradition.

(This column was re-posted on The Berkeley Blog on December 22, 2011.)

(Michigan.gov)

At the same time, many of us (sometimes the same people) worry that all that buying is highly wasteful and highly polluting. Making, shipping, and shopping for all those goods are literally ruining the planet. Critiques of consumption as being immorally wasteful go back centuries (see this earlier post). So, is spending our salvation or our doom?

Consumer Revolution

Historians have often written about the coming of  modern “consumer society,” which they typically define as a society in which the mass of people, not just the elite, buy luxury goods like leisure clothes, furniture for entertaining people, and special treats (in the 18th century, tea and sugar). Scholars have disagreed about when this consumer society emerged, some placing it around the mid-20th century, some about 50 years earlier, some yet earlier, on and on, all the way back to 1700s and even before that. Some have argued that it was the widespread demand for such “baubles” in the 1700s, not new mechanical inventions, that generated the industrial revolution in England and the U.S.

Americans have valued such consumption for ages. Part of the complaint the Revolutionaries had against the British monarch was that he impeded trade and twisted the system on behalf of British exporters; Henry Ford boasted that his wages allowed average workers to buy cars themselves; Herbert Hoover ran on “A chicken in every pot; two cars in every garage;” the New Deal pushed Americans to buy homes, toasters, and other appliances to move the economy; and so on. American unions, according to one line of interpretation and in contrast to European unions, cut a deal, blessed by government, with major firms: We’ll give you labor peace and free rule over the workplace; you give our members high wages so they can buy the goodies of the American Dream. In other words, the argument is that the American unions traded workers’ control of their labor for a pottage of consumer trinkets.

Kalamazoo Mall1960 (K. Pub. Library)

Yet, Americans have for ages also felt guilty about consumption. The Puritans were so down on luxury and display that they barred Christmas celebration and gifts. What we now call sustainability was a theme in back-to-the-land movements of the 1800s as well as the 1970s. Social reformers and intellectuals have long pleaded that Americans should seek the unencumbered simple life (see, e.g., here). The climate crisis has made the pleas all the more urgent…. but not, it appears, more heeded.

An Out

Is there a third way between spending binges to drive the economy and penny pinching to save the planet? One way might be to shift the spending away from today’s baubles – the plasma TVs, SUVs, disposable toys, and such – to recyclable, less polluting goods. Moral entreaties to make that transition don’t work much, but focused taxes such as energy tariffs could.

A broad, long-term strategy would be to move Americans’ spending from private to public goods, so that fewer dollars go into newer-bigger-better commodities and more dollars go to, say, infrastructure repair, park maintenance, K-12 education, and public preschools. That would require considerably higher taxes and a larger government as well.

Other democracies have gone this route. And the average citizen of those countries probably lives better (certainly lives longer) than the average American does. But public goods have not been so popular here. The politically effective slogan that you know better how to spend your money than Washington does means: You should be able to buy the new dishwasher or car or game system you want rather than have the government use your money to hire more employees or prettify a park. Americans are hearty consumers, but getting them to consume pubic goods via government is a hard sell.

In this context, we have to decide whether to root this season for more spending or less spending.

(This column was re-posted on The Berkeley Blog on December 14 2011.)

It is striking that this essay has been for so long a feature of American high school and college reading lists, since it forcefully, if biliously, presents a harshly individualistic version of American culture.

Only What Rejoices Me

Emerson argues against conformism, going along with the crowd, submerging one’s identity. Americans applaud such sentiments. But he goes on to argue for an almost hermit-like, Ayn Rand-ish selfishness: “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature,” he wrote. “I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. . . . I will do strongly . . . whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints.” Emerson rejected any suggestion that the individual “make other’s conditions [his] own” or submit to any group.

That included submission to or even much concern for family. “Why should we assume [responsibility for] the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?”

Emerson’s protege, Henry David Thoreau, followed in this vein. Walden (1854), another part of the American canon, is celebrated as a proto-environmentalist memoir, but seems at least as much a declaration that one Thoreau alone was better than others together.  “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools. . . . Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf. . . . Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are . . . hindrances to the elevation of mankind” (unless Thoreau needed to borrow a comfort; his cabin was near Emerson’s and his mother’s homes).

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849) is a landmark reference in the Ghandian-King tradition. But it appears that Thoreau was willing to go to jail to defend his moral and intellectual superiority, not to sacrifice for the unfortunate, nor to fight for social justice. In the book, Thoreau mocks the man who might care about helping widows and orphans and goes on to say, “It is not a man’s duty . . . to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong,” but just to “wash his hands of it.” Being true to oneself, as Emerson would agree, is all that matters.

Properly Understood

Many an American student has dutifully labored through these texts without absorbing the radical individualism they entail. Just as well, for these views do not really reflect America’s complex individualism. American culture is a full-blown product of western individualism but combines it with a commitment to voluntary community. Emerson and Thoreau’s antecedents in New England worked to forge strong communal ties. In his famous 1630 speech to Puritans sailing toward Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop preached, “We must be knit together in this work as one man . . . [W]e must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes . . . our community as members of the same body.”

Early Americans struggled to resolve the tension between hyper-individualism and this sort of religious hyper-communalism. In the end, they developed a culture of voluntarism, one in which a person best reaches his or her personal ends together with others in freely chosen fellowship, often manifested in our grass-roots churches, associations, and clubs. (For more on this, see Chapter 4 of Made in America.)

To take the Emersonian message undiluted is to accept a libertarian and solipsistc individualism that is neither faithful to American history nor a route to a just society.

Comment:

Michael Kimmel noted, in an email, that Emerson and Thoreau’s stance against community was also a quite “gendered” claim of masculine independence, the myth of the “Self-Made Man.”

It is an odd claim, since the efficacy of electoral politics is evident all around us. The problem for the discouraged is that sometimes they just don’t have the votes to effect the change they want – which is especially likely to be true if they don’t vote.

Votes Matter

Electoral politics certainly have worked for conservatives. Particularly with the election of Reagan in 1980, the 1994 Gingrich Congress, Bush in 2000, and the 2010 Tea Party extravaganza, conservatives have achieved many goals: unions were throttled; tax rates for the affluent and business were slashed; even the mildest gun control has been taken off the table; “welfare” as it existed for generations was ended; the Supreme Court took a couple of steps to the right as did their decisions; and so on. These accomplishments largely came via elections. (One might suspect that corporate money played a more direct role in some cases. Perhaps, but not on issues that were financially neutral.)

To be sure, not all conservative dreams have materialized. Roe v. Wade stands; Social Security and Medicare remain unprivatized; and the EPA is still operates. But the center of Washington politics is now moved so far to the right that Obama’s efforts to return to Reagan policies gets him labeled a socialist.

So, why are so many on the left insisting that electoral politics do not work? Perhaps they do not work for the left. But even that assertion is not persuasive. Electoral politics were key to passage of fundamental civil rights legislation, protection for women in the workplace and home, and environmental regulations. That Obama won in 2008 almost certainly helped forestall far worse economic suffering for average Americans and the election brought the first major expansion of health care in 40 years — albeit each achievement by a thin congressional margin.

The Cost of Abstaining

Such unrealistic discouragement about electoral politics may explain the Great Abstention. The graph below, which I generated from census data, shows the difference in vote turnout, by age group, between 2008 and 2010. Between those two elections, the percentage of citizens aged 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 who voted dropped by over 25 points, just about cut in half. The drop in turnout for those aged 55 and older was only about 10 points, or about one-seventh the 2008 balloting.

In actual numbers, the 18 to 34 group lost over 15 million votes between the presidential election and the congressional election, while the 55-plus group lost about 5 million votes. Given their presidential preferences in 2008, we can roughly estimate that, between these two age groups, abstention in 2010 cost the Democrats about 13.5 million votes and cost the Republicans about 6.5 million votes – a net loss to the left of 7 million votes, or more than 7 percent of the 2010 electorate.

No wonder the GOP and the Tea Party celebrated a landslide.

Voting does not work for you – if you don’t vote. Not voting does work – for the other guy.

Compared to What?

The major problem with the claim that electoral politics do not work (ever or any more) is the missing part of the argument: compared to what? What is the alternative route to, say, tighter bank regulations, affordable quality child care, or fairer taxes?

I have heard flights of fancy, for example that people can make change by setting up some sort of alternative community – actually, I heard that in the ‘70s, too. Personal growth for some; continuing stress for most. Or that a sufficiently large mobilization could bring the “system to its knees.” That seems to work in some political systems – perhaps because parliamentary governments more easily fall or perhaps because some countries have a cultural history of popular action dating back to food riots against the king. But in the United States the likelier responses to large-scale mobilization (say, like the action at the 1968 Democratic Convention) are a backlash and popular demand to restore social order, even at the point of a gun.

What is the realistic alternative to the “ground game” – to registering your voters and getting your voters out? In our system, not much.

The U.S. Census Bureau is terminating the collection of data for the Statistical Compendia program effective October 1, 2011. The Statistical Compendium program is comprised of the Statistical Abstract of the United States and its supplemental products . . . .

The notice goes on to explain that the elimination was a result of fiscal cutbacks and it advises readers to scour footnotes of old tables for the sources of the data and go there.

This budget-cutting – criticized by some on both the left and right – is annoying, but it is just one several trends in making access to information about our society more difficult, more costly. And thereby making it harder to understand what is happening in America.

No Need to Know

For years now, social scientists have faced efforts in Congress to curtail funding of social science research. The behavioral science part of the National Science Foundation budget is a favorite target. It seems to survive – barely – each round.

What has not survived is the “long form” part of the decennial census. For several censuses in the late 20th century, one of every six American households received a long version of the form. This version asked questions about important social topics ranging from the respondents’ national origins and the languages they spoke at home to their occupations, commuting, housing, and income. It was attacked as too nosy and unconstitutional and, justly or not, eventually dropped beginning in the 2010 census.

To make up for the loss of so much critical information about our society, the Bureau of the Census has started using the “American Community Survey,” which reaches a couple of million households each year. The ACS is valuable, but in various ways it cannot give us the same coverage and accuracy of the old long-form census. And, it too now faces attacks trying to shut it down.

Keep It Private

Social research has been boxed in from another angle by what many scholars consider a too-obsessive concern about privacy. For example, my colleagues and I found that it extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain decades-old information about neighborhoods  – for example, the proportion of the workers living in a particular census tract in 1960 who held professional jobs. The fear, baked into U.S. Census rules, is that with enough such general data we might be able to identify a particular person in a census report 50 years ago and find out, say, how much money he made.

Social scientists on campuses have been struggling against zealous IRB’s –  university Institutional Review Boards — that must approve any research conducted by faculty on human subjects. Designed quite properly to prevent harm to subjects of studies, particularly subjects of medical treatments, the IRBs in many places have expanded their mission to closely supervising social science research. Some, for example, treat the posing of survey questions – say, asking respondents’ opinions about social issues – or even the gathering of historical records as if they were in the same category as injecting people with drugs. This zealotry sets up great hurdles that delay or derail social studies. Doctoral students, in particular, can have careers crippled by these restrictions. (See statements by social science organizations here in 2001 and here in 2011.)

(At one time here at Berkeley, the local IRB, according to some reports, entertained the idea of “social harm”: research that might impugn a social group — for instance, showing that women get more emotional in some settings than men — ought to be stopped. That would pretty much stop social research altogether. Update: Zachary Schrag reports that, indeed, in 1972 Berkeley’s IRB Chair proposed a social harm policy. )

Know-It-Alls

Various motivations seem to lie behind these efforts to curtail social science research – concerns about privacy, suspicion of government, suspicion of scholars, cost-cutting – but they combine to increasingly blind policymakers and the public to what is going on in America.

(By the way, journalists are not restricted nearly as severely in interviewing informants or using uncovered private information. And corporate data-gatherers are hardly restricted at all in gathering social information and mixing it in with other data such as individuals’ credit records.)

These restrictions on social science may also reflect yet another attitude held by some, both left and right: the conviction that there is no need to gather the data, because they already know the answers.

(The column was cross-posted on The Berkeley Blog on November 28, 2011.)