But both the leftist critique and the old guard overlooked something.
Geographically, the USA was outlandishly lucky.
Isolated from enemies and gifted with abundant natural riches and endowed with a political and economic system that it inherited from Britain, the USA grew like a hothouse flower.
Brooks's critique is identical to the 1960s' critique of Australia's great good fortune (although Australians never caught on that this was meant as a criticism of Australia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
The Lucky Country is a 1964 book by Donald Horne. The title has become a nickname for Australia[1] and is generally used favourably, although the origin of the phrase was negative in the context of the book. Among other things, it has been used in reference to Australia's natural resources, weather, history, its early dependency of the British system, distance from problems elsewhere in the world, and other sorts of supposed prosperity.
Horne's intent in writing the book was to portray Australia's climb to power and wealth based almost entirely on luck rather than the strength of its political or economic system, which Horne believed was "second rate". In addition to political and economic weaknesses, he also lamented on the lack of innovation and ambition, as well as a philistinism in the absence of art, among the Australian population, viewed by Horne as being complacent and indifferent to intellectual matters. He also commented on matters relating to Australian puritanism, as well as conservatism, particularly in relation to censorship and politics.Brooks contends that American individualism could flourish only in such a sheltered environment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/us-coronavirus-history.html
But here’s what has struck me forcefully, especially during the pandemic: That whole version of the American creed was all based on an assumption of existential security. Americans had the luxury of thinking and living the way they did because they had two whopping great oceans on either side. The United States was immune to foreign invasion, the corruptions of the old world. It was often spared the plagues that swept over so many other parts of the globe.
We could be individualistic, anti-authority, daring and self-sufficient because on an elemental level we felt so damn safe.First, just how individualistic are Americans?
To understand American individualism, one must first study diversity in the USA.
IIRC, Madison wrote about the three main types of diversity:
- ethnic and racial diversity
- diversity of wealth
- diversity of opinion
What we mean by that is ethnic diversity.
The USA might seem ethnically diverse, but one actually finds rampant assimilation -- especially among discontent, over-educated left-wing academics from racial minorities.
In terms of wealth, no society in the world is more tolerant of diversity of income than the USA.
Arguably, income inequality in itself does not bother most Americans.
What Americans want is equality of opportunity and high rates of social mobility.
What might be eroding social cohesion in the USA today is not absolute inequality, but relative inequality and a sense that social mobility has stalled.
Socially and culturally, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that democracies like the USA are the most conformist and homogeneous places that suffer from the tyranny of the majority.
Regardless of their social class and ethnicity, Americans tend to dress the same (t-shirt, jeans, sneakers) and adhere to the same basic ideology.
According to Tocqueville, no society has less diversity of opinion than the USA.
Ideologically, Americans adhere to a variation of a theme -- namely, liberal democracy -- along a very narrow political spectrum (this includes pseudo-socialists and pseudo-fascists).
Americans who do depart from the majority in their beliefs (e.g., in religion) simply withdraw into a private realm along with like-minded believers.
So Americans tend to behave like teenagers, with an ostentatious display of rebellion towards authority coupled with a slavish conformity to their peers.
The point is that American "individualism" is highly qualified.
In fact, it is a form of essentialism to identify the USA as unchangingly individualistic.
Historically, adherence to individualism varies over long periods in the USA.
The 20th century really began in the 1920s in the aftermath of WW1 and its destruction of the old order and amid a giddy new prosperity.
A historian once pointed out that in the first page of a google search of "American photographs 1920s", two-thirds of the photographs have only one or two individuals.
This changed in the Great Depression.
A google search of "American photographs 1930s" was two-thirds comprised of photographs of three or more people.
The photos are of poor families or people protesting.
The photographs from the 1940s were also group oriented, only the photos were militarized.
Likewise, 1950s photos were two-thirds of groups (three or more people), but these were conservative, domesticated, conformist photos.
That's thirty years of collectivism, albeit under three rather different ideological regimes.
Photos from the 1960s were two-thirds made up of just one or two people -- a return to the individualism of the 1920s.
Sociologically, "individualism" is a social role that children are socialized into.
To suggest that only in a protected environment individualism can arise might be to engage in a kind of romanticism.
Romanticism asserts that there is a natural and real self that is suppressed by society.
In fact, the feeling of being oppressed was an aspect of the experience of Baby Boomers who grew up in affluence.
Some of them did rebel, to the dismay of the older generation.
But this was also a society in which creativity was being promoted as a driver of consumer capitalism, and rebellion and individualism were becoming valued.
That is, the Baby Boomers were socialized into an individualism which was at the time a functional requirement of the system.
Brooks writes that the SARS2 pandemic is the first time that the USA has been "invaded" and represents a radical new threat to American individualism.
Yet the USA, like all societies, has periodically been subject to pandemics, such as the one that struck in 1968.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
The 1968 pandemic was caused by an influenza A (H3N2) virus comprised of two genes from an avian influenza A virus, including a new H3 hemagglutinin, but also contained the N2 neuraminidase from the 1957 H2N2 virus. It was first noted in the United States in September 1968. The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States. Most excess deaths were in people 65 years and older. The H3N2 virus continues to circulate worldwide as a seasonal influenza A virus. Seasonal H3N2 viruses, which are associated with severe illness in older people, undergo regular antigenic drift.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu#Mortality
For this pandemic, there were two geographically distinct mortality patterns. In North America (the United States and Canada), the first pandemic season (1968/69) was more severe than the second (1969/70). In the "smoldering" pattern seen in Europe and Asia (England, France, Japan, and Australia), the second pandemic season was two to five times more severe than the first.Brooks writes about the new American reality.
In this atmosphere, economic resilience will be more valued than maximized efficiency. We’ll spend more time minimizing downside risks than maximizing upside gains. The local and the rooted will be valued more than the distantly networked. We’ll value community over individualism, embeddedness over autonomy.To some extent, this seems like a retread of what was said about the post-9-11 new American reality.
The sober, grounded post-9-11 worldview did not last.
Just like in the post-Vietnam war films from 1970s and the film noir of the 1950s and Dennis Leary's "Rescue Me" of the 2000s, the survivors will be forgotten.
It was always like this in the USA.
After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Americans went about rebuilding the city.
Unlike other societies, there was no grieving for the dead or any commemoration of the dead in music or literature or the arts.
Rebuilding was simply treated like a business.
That's also how Americans approached WW2, like a job that has to be done and then is to be forgotten as soon as possible.
The American orientation is toward the future and is unsentimental and impersonal.
This ruthless, matter-of-fact orientation is consistent.
Whether the USA must take individualistic or collectivist form in order to complete the task is secondary.
Getting the job done is a cold, utilitarian imperative.
That's the message in "The Godfather, part 2", where Michael laments that for his father, everything was personal, but for himself, everything becomes business.
One sees this in comparing American and European newspapers in the time of SARS2.
European newspapers display the daily death counts at the top of their front page.
There is none of that in the USA.
One must search through an American newspaper to find the daily death rate, or go online.
Instead, American newspapers display the Dow Jones up by the banner.
In sum, American individualism is not the product of a society sheltered from a harsh outside world.
Rather, American individualism is a product of the harshness of American society.
As Tocqueville wrote, life in America resembles life at war, where everything is in a constant state of change and flux and obsolescence, and all is expendable.
The ruthless nature of American society is not a capitalist conspiracy, despite what romantics say.
It come from deep within the hearts of the American people.
It is the ultimate expression of DEMOCRACY.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out
