America Is Having a Moral Convulsion - David Brooks

 David Brooks's essay is at least a decade or more late but yet it is never late... 

In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,” the lowest number the survey has recorded since it started asking the question in 1972. Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.

Is mistrust based on distorted perception or is it a reflection of reality? Are people increasingly mistrustful because they are watching a lot of negative media and get a falsely dark view of the world? Or are they mistrustful because the world is less trustworthy, because people lie, cheat, and betray each other more than they used to?

There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful. The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception. Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be. Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.

Thus the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam argues that it’s a great mistake to separate the attitude (trust) from the behavior (morally right action). People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place. As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time. I’d add that high national trust is a collective moral achievement. High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

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On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system. In state after state Republican governors sat inert, unwilling to organize or to exercise authority, believing that individuals should be free to take care of themselves.

On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy. Power to the people has meant no power to do anything, and the result is a national NIMBYism that blocks social innovation in case after case.

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In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy. In the emerging value system, “privilege” becomes a shameful sin. The status rules flip. The people who have won the game are suspect precisely because they’ve won. Too-brazen signs of “success” are scrutinized and shamed. Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.

From self to society. If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group. Each person speaks from the shared group consciousness. (“Speaking as a progressive gay BIPOC man …”) In an individualistic culture, status goes to those who stand out; in collective moments, status goes to those who fit in. The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”