Weighing the National Character

One hears much admiration from politicians of the American “national character,” by which seems to be meant the aggregate of prevailing values of the majority of the population. I gather that Americans tend to regard their national character as comprising such things as freedom, independence, individualism, and self-reliance. One thinks of Daniel Boone or Marlboro Man.

In fact we no longer have these qualities and probably never will again. Generally we now embody their opposites. Modern society has become a hive of largely conformist, closely regulated and generally helpless employees who depend on others for nearly everything. The cause is less anything particularly Americans than the technology that governs our lives. The United States just moves faster in the direction in which the civilized world moves.

Character springs from conditions. Consider a farmer in, say, North Carolina in 1850. He was free because there was little government, self-reliant because what he couldn’t do for himself didn’t get done, independent because, apart from a few tools, he made or grew all he needed, and an individualist because, there being little outside authority, he could do as he pleased.

All of that is gone, and will not return. Freedom has given way to an infinite array of laws, rules, regulations, licenses, forms, requirements. Many make sense, may even be desirable in a complex world, don’t necessarily make for a bad life, but they cannot be called freedom. Various governments determine what our children learn, whether we can paint the shutters, who we must sell our houses to, who we can hire, what we can say if we want to keep our jobs, where we can park, and whether and how we can build an outbuilding.

People who live infinitely controlled lives become accustomed to such control. Obedience becomes natural. And so it has.

Although we speak of democracy, in fact we have little influence over the circumstances of our lives. All matters of importance—what values our children are taught, for example--are determined by remote bodies over which we have no power. When jurisdictions are large, the effort needed to change things that powerful lobbies do not want changed is prohibitive. And of course we vote for candidates, not for policies. Once elected, they do as they please.

Individualism has withered under the pressure of the mass media and a distaste for eccentricity. Self-reliance died long ago. We depend on others to repair our cars, grow our food, fix the refrigerator, and write our operating systems. The habit of reliance on others has reached the point that even the right of self-defense has come to be regarded as wrong-minded.

The gain is that these things are usually done better than we could do them ourselves. The loss is that we are utterly dependent on others. As things become more technologically complex, the reliance on specialists grows. Almost anyone could learn to repair a flathead Ford, but today’s Corolla is vulnerable only to a trained technician. Of course it’s a better car.

Most poignantly, we are become a nation of employees, fearful of losing our jobs. Prisoners of the retirement system, afraid of transgressing against the various governing bodies before whom we are helpless, unable to feed ourselves, we are at least comfortable. We are not masters of our lives.

Dense populations and the complexity of machines and institutions lead inevitably to regulation, which leads to acceptance of regulation and therefore of authority, which becomes part of the national character. This we see. In my lifetime the change has been great. In rural Virginia in the Sixties, you could walk down the road with your rifle to shoot beer cans, swim in the creeks without supervision and life guards and “flotation devices” approved by the Coast Guard, and generally be left alone. Now, no. Regimentation has grown like kudzu. We obey. The new generation knows nothing else..

At the moment we see a great increase in regulation in the guise of preventing terrorism. Other pretexts could have been found and, I suspect, would have been: fighting crime or the war on drugs or something. The result might have been a drift rather than a headlong rush toward control. But sooner or later, technology determines politics. The computer, not the Constitution, is primary.

I suspect that the concern about terrorism is just a particular manifestation of a growing obsession with safety. Not too long ago, Americans were a hardy breed—foolhardy at times, but the one comes with the other. Now we see attempts to eliminate all risk everywhere. Cities fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and remove diving boards. We require that bicyclists wear helmets, fear second-hand smoke and the violence that is dodge ball. Warnings abound against going outside without sun block. To anyone who grew up in the Sixties or before, the new fearfulness is incomprehensible.

The explanation I think is the feminization of society, which seems to be inseparable from modernity. The nature of masculinity is to prize freedom over security; of femininity, security over freedom. Add that the American character of today powerfully favors regulation by the group in prefe4rence to individual choice. Note that we do not require that cars be equipped with seat belts and then let individuals decide whether to use them; we enforce their use. The result is compulsory Mommyism, very much a part of today’s America.

Does technological civilization inevitably lead to totalitarianism? Certainly the general fear, in combination with technology, makes a sort of soft Stalinism easy. Just now we move toward national ID cards, smuggled in by linking records of drivers’ licenses. Passports, scanned and linked to data bases, provide a record of our travels. Security cameras proliferate. Some of them read the license plates of all passing cars. Email can be monitored, phones easily and undetectably tapped. Now the government is experimenting with X-ray scanners for airports that provide near-pornographic images of passengers. Whether these will be used for dictatorial ends remains to be seen. Historians may one day note that surveillance, when possible, is inevitable.

What then is the national character today? I think we are first an obedient people. We submit. We are comfortable with authority, and seem to be most comfortable when we are told what to do. We prize security, safety, and predictability. Increasingly we accept being treated like convicts at airports and elsewhere. We want to be taken care of. We can do few things for ourselves. We expect government to decide much that was once regarded as outside of government’s ambit. And we are to the marrow of our bones incapable of rising against the creeping tyranny. So much for Marlboro Man.

I disagree with the basic premise of this article. It is completely overwrought.

Are we different people today than we were in 1850? Yeah. Absolutely.

But people worked their asses off to be able to have someone work on our car...to not have to break our backs with manual labor...to have a roof over our heads, heating and flushing toilets.

We don't have entire families of eight people living in a one room 18 x 18 log cabin with packed earth for a floor and a hole in the ground to store our perishable items in.

We don't have to mourn the loss of five kids (our our entire family) to disease, our wife to childbirth, and our husbands to broken bodies due to physical labor before they die of old age at the age of 40.

We gave all that up for technology and effort saving machinery.

This guy thinks it was great to have your entire family working dawn to dusk, eating sparse meals when they could get them in hard times, and shivering at night under a threadbare blanket with the warmth of your children and wife to keep you warm.

We still have what it takes...our men in the Middle East prove that to us. We just don't need to prove it in the general population.

The way I put this is that Anglo-Saxons have made a fetish of the rule of law.

Now, there really is another model to this, and I am going to tell you what it is.

Imagine a system in which privacy were a fundamental right, like a Constitutional right. Thus, you may be sitting out on your porch where people can see you, but if they snap a picture of you in your private life, that's an invasion of your privacy. Likewise if they collect information on you in databases.

In such a system, there could be no question whatever of publishing peoples' tax returns if you get ahold of them. Even in court cases, you could not demand the other person's papers as part of "discovery". That would be an invasion of privacy, and the law would PRIVILEGE privacy over other things, including the ability of those who might want to sue to gather evidence.

Now, the government might surveil for terrorists, but other aspects of privacy, such as, say, demanding Presidents answer questions, under oath, about sexual affairs, would be verboten. The law would hold individual privacy superior to the ability to pursue lawsuits. Of course this would lead to a higher degree of extramarital affairs and tax evasion than in the United States - a strong right of privacy which primed investigatory authority would make strict governance much more difficult.

Under such a regime, private property, especially the home, would be practically sacrosanct. It would be easier, probably, to have contraband because the police would be very, very constrained about when they could come in and what they could do. Simple probable cause will not do. The police must always go to a judge.

National security concerns would prime privacy, but law enforcement would be strictly segregated from and lesser than national security. Thus, to find TERRORISTS they might tap everybody's phone, but if, in the process, they find a prostitution ring or ten and a bunch of drug smugglers, that's not going to be prosecuted by the intelligence services, because what they are doing - listening in to discover TERRORISM - is technically illegal. Saving lives from bombs trumps the law, but only that. Regular law enforcement is not superior to privacy rights.

Of course, under such a regime of private property rights and mini-home-castles, Kelo-style eminent domain would be quite impossible. The downside would be that a little old lady in an old shack could, if she were stubborn, bollix up the building of a new shopping mall forever. She couldn't stop an AIRPORT, because that's truly governmental, but confiscation for PRIVATE use? Unheard of!

Another piece of this privacy-respecting system would be a greater degree of personal security in employment than is enjoyed in America. In America, you are your employer's property. If he doesn't like what you do in your spare time (so long as it's not a "protected right", like gay sex), he can fire you. But under this alternate system, the employer has no right to interfere with your private life, and indeed can only fire you for fault, and not his subjective standard of failure to perform either, but am indpendent legal standard, with labor courts to adjudicate wrongful discharge. "Employment at will" would not exist. Indeed, in a reversal of employee dependence on employer, the employee would be secure in his job unless he were deliberately insubordinate or grossly incompetent. And it would be an assault of private life for the employer to read the employee's e-mails even sent from work. Obviously there would be problems from this, including a difficulty in supervision, but certainly the personal liberty of the individual would be much more strongly protected.

Such a system would be practically the mirror opposite of ours.
And that is why the French and the Americans have such a great deal of difficulty understanding each other. I described for you France. That is the structure of France, with the peculiar legal preference for PRIVACY, to the detriment of everything else.

The American system is more economically efficient because people are under much closer supervision and far tighter legal and employer control than in France. French people are a lot freer, precisely because the rules of society are structured with a strong prejudice in favor of personal privacy, prohibition of clandestine intrusion (it's illegal) and job security making one far less beholden to an employer's good graces (although still subject to employers' authority: insubordination will still get you fired in Paris).

Two systems, two very different approaches. Mirror opposites in many ways. America is far less free and THEREFORE far more efficient. France is far freer in private life, and THEREFORE far less efficient. The closer men are reduced to being standardized machines following standard rules and subject to monitoring, the more raw output can be extracted from them. The more personal liberty and privacy (which, in a surveillance culture, amounts to the same thing) that men carve out for themselves, the greater diversity of conduct (and the greater indulgence in personal sin) they engage in. This makes them more independent, but less productive for that very reason: they are more difficult to steer.

Which is better? It depends on the relative values one places on productivity, money, privacy and individual freedom of action.

The closer men are reduced to being standardized machines following standard rules and subject to monitoring, the more raw output can be extracted from them.

Then why has almost every truly significant technological innovation of the last 50 years come from the Anglo-Saxon countries if 'men are reduced to standardized machines' here? Why are the world's top 20 universities in the US and UK (except for one in Japan?). And speaking of freedom, I tought the French have specifically made certain forms of speech illegal? What about gun ownership? Do they need licences?

The French do some things right, like their health care system, but in many ways their approch to life, avoidance of risk-taking and seek for 'pleasure' over anything else, does not move the world forward.

A great strength of the English-speaking peoples is their reliance on self-organization and the free market. To look at one example, the British or the Americans have never attempted to regulate and standardize the development of the English language the same way the French try to do even today. The result is that English adapts, with great success and acceptance, to people and changing societies, not the other way around.

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