Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.
Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.
No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress.(...)
Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.
The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.
In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.
Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.
Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.
All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.
The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.
Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.
How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.
Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.
No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress.(...)Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.
The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.
In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.
Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.
Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.
All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.
The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.
Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.
How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.
by Marilynne Robinson, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Doña Ana County, New Mexico, 2017; photograph by Matt Black/Magnum
