|
The We2K problem
By Renee Loth
People see every event through their own prism:
How does this affect me?
We're all spinning centrifugally into
our own orbits
|
When 12 jurors - most of them black women - found O.J. Simpson not guilty in the most spectacular domestic violence trial of the century, analysts concluded that the jurors identified more with being black than with being women. ''Race trumps gender,'' they declared. A few years later, when it came to judging Bill Clinton, race and gender trumped everything else.
For taxpayers, the miserly cop-out called cafeteria government is all the rage. Voters reject the old homily, ''there but for the grace of God go I,'' and choose a personalized menu for their tax dollars, approving funds for schools but not welfare; police but not schools.
Savvy businesses take advantage of technology to narrowcast their products and services to consumers with increasing specificity. Thanks to the Internet, everyone can have a personal shopper.
Whatever happened to ''We the people?''
Much of human history has been driven by the desire for self-determination, among individuals and communities. The struggle to be free from slavery is perhaps the most heroic example. But at the end of the millennium, in a technologically sophisticated consumer culture, those impulses have been trivialized into a kind of do-your-own-thing narcissism.
People see every great social event through their own prism: How does this affect me? Is it good for women? Bad for gays? Good for business? The center doesn't hold because it has lost its gravitational pull, leaving us all to spin centrifugally into our own private orbits.
This trend has been lamented by thinkers of the right and left. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. attacks the proliferation of identity movements in his polemic, ''The Disuniting of America,'' claiming that ''the cult of ethnicity'' threatens assimilation, integration, the whole American idea. In his study of demographic change in California, the journalist Dale Maharidge describes ''a banana-republic society, rife with race-baiting and hatred.'' Harvard professor Robert Putnam notes that the number of people who bowl for a hobby is up, but the number of bowling leagues is down. ''Bowling alone'' is the symptom; social isolation is the disease.
It was not always thus.
The first indulgence of a post-scarcity society is the luxury to define oneself as one chooses. In the days of craft guilds, there was no tortured adolescent search for self - indeed, there was no adolescence. A young man did what his father did, whether blacksmith, baker, or candlestickmaker. Now we try on and discard identities as if they were hats.
The idea that our lives are not preordained is the very essence of modernism. The death of determinism was proclaimed at the end of the last century by Nietzsche and his friends, but it took about 60 years for the concept to trickle down from the intelligentsia to the masses. When it did, a generation embraced free will with alacrity. Thus we had college majors in Sanskrit, organic farming, and witchcraft. Thus black studies, women's studies, Jewish studies, gay studies, addiction studies. Different strokes for different folks.
World War II probably was the last truly unifying event in American history, if you don't count waiting in line to see ''Titanic.'' In the years just after the war the verities were clear, beamed into American living rooms with comforting authority by the three major networks. Everyone watched Jack Benny. Everyone drove a car with tailfins. Everyone lusted after a house in the suburbs, a Barbie-doll waist, and two biological children.
But such uniformity is not a natural state. It is fashionable to support equality of the sexes, but the truth is that some gender differences are as immutable as color-blindness, and it is futile to suggest otherwise. And many women took a hard look at what true equality with men might mean - early heart attacks, indifferent relationships with their children - and said no thanks.
It was only yesterday on the great millennial timeline that anyone even tried to organize nations with a common lanuage, currency, and purpose. In the 1600s, before the French Academy was established to enforce linguistic purity, people in what we now call France spoke Breton, Gaulish, Provencal, Celtic, Basque, and Catalan. No wonder Francophones shudder at the idea of ''le popcorn'' or ''le airbag'' slipping into their beloved language. One need only look to the Balkans - or to Boston - to see the innate power of tribalism when the thin unifying gloss of nationalism, or a Red Sox pennant race, is stripped away.
The great accelerant in this cultural crackup has been technology. Rather than shrink the world, communications advances have steadily increased the distance between people. From the invention of the telephone, which obviated the need for a personal visit, through the answering machine to the fax and the e-mail message, technology just keeps giving us more and more ways to disconnect.
That old dinosaur television is still in the act, with its hundreds of channels, each aimed at an increasingly thin demographic sliver. The market segments everyone. Last spring you could hear a popular Mexican beer touted in commercials as ''the drink-o for Cinco de Mayo.''
Cocooning, cubicles, convenience appliances - if everyone has his own snowblower, why get to know the neighbors?
And yet. Viewed from a slightly different angle, identity movements are not examples of arrogant self-actualization but a kind of desperate longing for connection, a salve against loneliness and isolation. We are not solitary hunters by nature but members of distinct tribes, with a strong need for belonging. Street gangs like the Crips and Bloods still hold a powerful attraction for people seeking a ''family,'' even though - or perhaps because - the church, the Elks, and the union hall are no longer dominant.
Alarm over the disuniting of America, at least as it pertains to Schlesinger's ''cult of ethnicity,'' may be overstated anyway. It's true that we are not Japan, where commuters wait serenely in line for the bullet train wearing identical suits. We are by contrast a pluralist, polyglot population.
But the trend in this country has always been toward assimilation; new immigrant groups adjust to America more than America adjusts to them. Both democracy and capitalism have tended to heighten the magnetism of the dominant culture. We are rewarded in the public schools and on the corporate ladder when we decide to fit in. Even after 30 years of black pride there aren't many who would try wearing a dashiki to golf with the CEO.
What is odd is that at the end of the millennium, both these quintessential American ideas - democracy and capitalism - have become forces working against uniformity. Relentless niche marketing finds a target audience for every product, reducing a generation's rock anthems into jingles for sneakers, and community-building institutions like the shops on Main Street or even newspapers into ''The Daily Me.''
Politically, meanwhile, the democratically-elected power elite is busy attacking the very concepts that bring us together: public education, libraries, social security, affirmative action. The things that for 200 years - or at least the last 60 - helped make America a cohesive nation are being systematically dismantled as part of the attack on government.
There is no reason to panic just because some people are celebrating Kwanzaa or putting salsa on their all-American hot dogs. But the clustering of America is a concern for one important reason: when it becomes exclusive and defensive, it can be an obstacle to people acting in concert.
The challenges facing us in the next millennium - social, economic, and especially environmental - will require a comprehensive national effort. The problems, not to mention the solutions, are likely to be confusing, expensive, and inconvenient. Not having a sense of ''we'' makes taking united action particularly difficult.
Precisely because it comes only once every thousand years, the turning of the calendar in December could hold the power to draw our gaze away from our own reflections, if only for a moment. The New Year presents an increasingly rare opportunity to get our crazy-quilt society to focus on a single common purpose. We should - to use an expression as old as the millennium - seize the day.
Renee Loth is the deputy editorial page editor of the Globe.
|
