The Social Animal (48 page)

Embarrassing revelations surfaced. Call girls appeared in the press with interesting stories to tell. The Ethics Committee met. Late-night comics made jokes. Resignations were handed in and the former presidential aspirant found himself at a think tank sitting around in the afternoons shooting the breeze with Harold.

Harold also noticed that certain ideas in the wider scientific culture had scarcely penetrated the policy-making world. He found that whether on the right or the left, people in this world shared certain assumptions. They both had individualistic worldviews, tending to assume that society is a contract between autonomous individuals. Both promoted policies designed to expand individual choice. Neither paid much attention to social and communal bonds, to local associations, or invisible norms.

Conservative activists embraced the individualism of the market. They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon individual economic choice. They adopted policy prescriptions designed to maximize economic freedom: lower tax rates so people could keep and use more of their money, privatized Social Security so people could control more of their own pensions, voucher programs so parents could choose schools for their children.

Liberals embraced the individualism of the moral sphere. They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women, and matters of birth and death. They embraced policies designed to maximize social freedom. Individuals should be free to make their own choices about abortion, euthanasia, and other matters. Activist groups stood up for the rights of individuals accused of crimes. Religion, in the form of crèches and menorahs, was rigorously separated from the public square so as not to impinge on individual conscience.

The individualism of the left and right produced two successful political movements—one in the 1960s and one in the 1980s. For a generation, no matter who was in power, the prevailing winds had been blowing in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and personal freedom, not in the directions of society, social obligations, and communal bonds.

Harold also found that his new colleagues shared a materialistic mind-set. Both liberals and conservatives gravitated toward economic explanations for any social problem and generally came up with solutions to this problem that involved money. Some conservatives argued for child-tax credits to restore marriage, low-tax enterprise zones to combat urban poverty, and school vouchers to improve the education system. Liberals emphasized the other side of the fiscal ledger, spending programs. They tried to direct more dollars to fix broken schools. They expanded student-aid subsidies to increase college-completion rates. Both sides assumed there was a direct relationship between improving material conditions and solving problems. Both sides neglected matters of character, culture, and morality.

In other words, they split Adam Smith down the middle. Smith wrote one book,
The Wealth of Nations
, in which he described economic activity and the invisible hand. But he wrote another book,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, in which he described how sympathy and the unconscious desire for esteem molded individuals. Smith believed that the economic activity described in
The Wealth of Nations
rested upon the bedrock described in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
. But in recent decades, the former book became famous, while the latter was cited but never applied. The prevailing mentality treasured the first but didn’t know what to make of the second.

Harold found that in Washington the highest status went to those who studied things involving guns and banks. People who wrote about war, budgets, and global finance strode around like titans, but people who wrote about family policy, early-childhood education, and community relationships were treated like pudgy geeks at a frat party. You could pull a senator aside and try to talk about the importance of maternal bonds to future human development and the senator would look at you indulgently, as if you were raising money for a group-therapy farm for lonely puppies. Then he’d go off to talk about something serious—a tax bill or a defense contract.

Politicians themselves were intensely social creatures. They’d made their way in the world with these brilliant emotional antennae, but when it came to thinking about policy, they ignored those faculties entirely. They thought mechanistically, and took seriously only those factors that could be rigorously quantified and toted up in an appropriations bill.

Harold believed that, over the course of his lifetime, this mentality had led to a series of disastrous policies. These policies had produced bad effects for a common reason. They rearranged the material conditions in positive ways, but they undermined social relationships in ways that were unintended and destructive.

Some of the mistakes had emanated from the left. In the 1950s and 1960s, well-intentioned reformers saw run-down neighborhoods with decaying tenement houses, and vowed to replace them with shiny new housing projects. Those old neighborhoods may have been decrepit, but they contained mutual support systems and community bonds. When they were destroyed and replaced with the new projects, people’s lives were materially better but spiritually worse. The projects turned into atomized wastelands, ultimately unfit for human habitation.

Welfare policies in the 1970s undermined families. Government checks lifted the material conditions of the recipients but in the midst of a period of cultural disruption, they enabled lonely young girls to give birth out of wedlock, thus decimating the habits and rituals that led to intact families.

Other policy failures came from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Walmart decimated local shop owners, and the networks of friendship and community they helped create. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away.

Abroad, free-market experts flooded into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They offered mountains of advice on privatization but almost none on how to rebuild communal trust and law and order, which are the real seedbeds of prosperity. The United States invaded Iraq, believing that merely by replacing the nation’s dictator and political institutions they could easily remake a nation. The invaders were oblivious to the psychological effects a generation of tyranny had wrought on Iraqi culture, the vicious hatreds that lurked just below its surface—circumstances that quickly produced an ethnic bloodbath.

Harold’s list of failed policies went on and on: financial deregulation that assumed global traders needed no protection from their own emotional contagions; enterprise zones based on the suppositions that, if you merely reduced tax rates in inner cities, then local economies would thrive; scholarship programs designed to reduce college-dropout rates, which pretended the main problem was lack of financial aid, when in fact only about 8 percent of students are unable to complete college for purely financial reasons. The more important problems have to do with emotional disengagement from college and lack of academic preparedness, intangible factors the prevailing mind-set found it hard to factor and acknowledge.

In short, government had tried to fortify material development, but had ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it. Government was not the only factor in the thinning of society. A cultural revolution had decimated old habits and traditional family structures. An economic revolution had replaced downtowns with big isolated malls with chain stores. The information revolution had replaced community organizations that held weekly face-to-face meetings with specialized online social networking where like found like. But government policy had unwittingly played a role in all these changes.

The result was the diminution of social capital that Robert Putnam described in
Bowling Alone
and other books. People became more loosely affiliated. The webs of relationship that habituate self-restraint, respect for others, and social sympathy lost their power. The effects were sometimes liberating for educated people, who possessed the social capital to explore the new loosely knit world, but they were devastating for those without that sort of human capital. Family structures began to disintegrate, especially for the less educated. Out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed. Crime rose. Trust in institutions collapsed.

The state had to step in in an attempt to restore order. As British philosopher Phillip Blond has written, the individualist revolutions did not end up creating loose, free societies. They produced atomized societies in which the state grows in an attempt to fill the gaps created by social disintegration. The fewer informal social constraints there are in any society, the more formal state power there has to be. In Britain you wound up with skyrocketing crime rates, and, as a result, four million security cameras. Neighborhoods disintegrated and the welfare state stepped in, further absorbing or displacing the remaining social-support networks. A careening market, unconstrained by the traditions or informal standards, required intrusive prosecutors to police them. As Blond observed, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bipolar nation, a bureaucratic centralized state that presides over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.”

Without a healthy social fabric, politics became polarized. One party came to represent the state. The other came to represent the market. One party tried to shift power and money to government; the other tried to shift those things to vouchers and other market mechanisms. Both of them neglected and ignored the intermediary institutions of civil life.

In socially depleted nations, many people began to form their personal identities around their political faction. They had nothing else to latch on to. Politicians and media polemicists took advantage of the psychic vacuum and turned parties into cults, demanding and rewarding complete loyalty to the tribe.

Once politics became a contest pitting one identity group against another, it was no longer possible to compromise. Everything became a status war between my kind of people and your kind of people. Even a small concession came to seem like moral capitulation. Those who tried to build relationships across party lines were ostracized. Among politicians, loyalty to the party overshadowed loyalty to institutions like the Senate or the House. Politics was no longer about trade-offs, it was a contest for honor and group supremacy. Amidst this partisan ugliness, public trust in government and political institutions collapsed.

In a densely connected society, people can see the gradual chain of institutions that connect family to neighborhood, neighborhood to town, town to regional association, regional associations to national associations, and national associations to the federal government. In a stripped-down society, that chain has been broken and the sense of connection gets broken with it. The state seems at once alien and intrusive. People lose faith in the government’s ability to do the right thing most of the time and come to have cynical and corrosive attitudes about their national leaders.

Instead of being bound by fraternal bonds, and occasionally responding to a call for joint sacrifice, a cynical “grab what you can before the other guys steal it” mentality prevails. The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts required for fiscal responsibility. Neither side trusts the other to hold up their end of any deal. Neither party believes the other would honestly participate in truly shared sacrifice. Without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match.

Harold believed that the cognitive revolution had the potential to upend these individualistic political philosophies, and the policy approaches that grew from them. The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.

Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior. They can either create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them. While the rationalist era put the utility-maximizing individual at the center of political thought, the next era, Harold believed, would put the health of social networks at the center of thought. One era was economo-centric. The next would be socio-centric.

The socio-centric intellectual currents, he hoped, would restore character talk and virtue talk to the center of political life. You can pump money into poor areas, but without cultures that foster self-control, you won’t get social mobility. You can raise or lower tax rates, but without trust and confidence, companies won’t form and people will not invest in one another. You can establish elections but without responsible citizens, democracy won’t flourish. After a lifetime spent designing and writing about public policy, the criminologist James Q. Wilson arrived at this core truth: “At root, in almost every area of public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers or voters and public officials.”

On his wall, Harold had tacked another quotation, from Benjamin Disraeli: “The spiritual nature of man is stronger than codes or constitutions. No government can endure which does not recognize that for its foundation, and no legislation last which does not flow from this foundation.”

Everything came down to character, and that meant everything came down to the quality of relationships, because relationships are the seedbeds of character. The reason life and politics are so hard is that relationships are the most important, but also the most difficult, things to understand.