David Brooks has a piece in the current Atlantic, where he ponders a genuinely important question: How America got mean. Before he gets to his answer (something about moral education that’s comically okay boomer), Brooks proceeds to rattle off some causes that are actually plausible—social media, extreme inequality, rapid demographic change. He doesn’t let these distract him, however, because he really wants to talk about his boomer idea. It’s textbook David Brooks. Was that mean?
Right now I am reading The Age of Anger, a 2017 book by novelist, essayist, and historian Pankaj Mishra, and I think he offers a much better answer.
Mishra argues that modernity, meaning the decidedly Western secular culture that evolved and spread around the world over the last two centuries or so, has destroyed human wellbeing and made civilized society impossible. It’s fair to say therefore that modernity has made us mean, because we all now recognize on some level that it is built on lies, whether we’re aware of this or not. Modernity dictates what is important, what we are supposed to desire—material wealth, influence and power, freedom—and it pretends to teach us how to acquire those things: hard work (and also luck); following the rules (and also breaking the rules). Right there we can start to see the problem.
More importantly, modernity has produced once again a profound inequality across all those things—wealth, power, freedom—that’s reminiscent of the gilded age. It’s obvious that either what we are told to desire is a lie, or the supposed route to acquiring those things is. Probably, we conclude, both are lies.
Understanding that life is a lie has made us mean.
Modernity has its heroes, and these days a lot of those people are bombastic assholes. This is something that does seem relatively new. It’s a golden age for assholes, as Sam Harris recently observed on his podcast. Anyway, it is obvious to everyone that there’s no connection between moral virtue and success. Moral virtue is for suckers and cucks, we are told by those same assholes. Modernity has paved over the disconnect by defining virtue and success as the same thing.
Chasing this concept of virtue, which is not virtuous at all, has made us mean.
Success in the modern world is a zero-sum concept. It is measured only in relative terms, in comparisons to other people. One can only be successful relative to other people, which means that other people must fail. People explain it as Social Darwinism, as if it is a law of nature. Supposedly that is a discredited concept, but it is still a deep part of the modern ethos, at least in terms of how most people believe they should function. Margaret Thatcher (probably someone Brooks admired) famously declared that there’s no such thing as society, which is one operating principle of modernity.
Selfishness as a full-fledged religion has made us mean.
For the people who fail, as they must, it used to be that they could blame it on bad luck or karma or divine providence. Depending on which tradition we’re talking about, a cosmic force might bend towards justice, with rewards (or punishment) awaiting us after death. But either way, on some level it is a comfort to believe that powerful supernatural forces are responsible for our failures. Modernity has scrapped all that, however, which means that the cause of one’s failure either is one’s own personal shortcomings or bad choices, or due to someone else’s incompetence or malice.
Failure, defined in modernity’s terms, makes us mean.
Beside the point
It is tomato season, the brief stretch of weeks in July and August that constitutes the time when tomatoes are worthy of the name. This only time I’ll eat a B.L.T. sandwich.
I once heard someone describe a B.L.T. as a “tomato sandwich seasoned with bacon,” and I am one hundred percent on board with that statement. I am about to have my second one of the day.