Why is Everyone so Mean?
Reading 08.27.2023
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 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 theory. 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 describes the reactionaries and ressentiment that define our current era of politics and culture. In a sense, he argues that modernity, meaning global capitalism plus 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 follows that this has made us mean, because we increasingly recognize on some level that it is all built on lies. 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 (or perhaps mainly luck); following the rules (but also breaking the rules). Right here we can start to see the problem. Modernity has produced once again a profound inequality across all those things—wealth, power, freedom. I say “once again” because of how it echoes the gilded age.
It’s obvious that either what we are told to desire is a lie, or the promised route to acquiring those things is. Probably, we conclude, both are lies. Understanding that life is a lie has made people 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, and it has become obvious to everyone that there’s no connection between moral virtue and success. In fact it seems like the opposite may be true. Moral virtue is for suckers and cucks, we infer from highly successful assholes. Some of them straight up say this.
Chasing success has replaced aspiring to virtue, and this has made people mean.
But 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 call it Social Darwinism, as if it is a law of nature. Supposedly it is a discredited idea, but it is still a deep part of the modern ethos, at least in terms of how most people believe they ought to function. Margaret Thatcher (probably someone Brooks admired) famously declared that there’s no such thing as society, which might be the entire operating principle of modernity.
Selfishness as a full-fledged religion has made people mean.
For people who fail, as some 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. And given these two options, it’s no surprise that most people choose the latter and blame the government, or immigrants, or wokeism, or another scapegoat of choice.
Failure, defined in modernity’s terms, makes people 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.