Hang Loose

There is a story on the NPR website, "Why 'Tight' Cultures May Fare Better Than 'Loose' Cultures In A Pandemic." The general gist of the piece is simple; cultures with stricter social norms, greater restrictions and harsher disciplinary measures, which are considered "tight," have significantly lower case counts per capita than societies with more relaxed norms and fewer rules, or "loose" cultures. The working theory is that in tight cultures, people are more willing to accept limits on their actions for the greater good. As can be imagined, when NPR interviewed Michele Gelfand, the lead author of the study, she characterized the United States as too loose for its own good. She held out the idea that cultures should be "ambidextrous," tightening and loosening as befit the situation. No real-world examples of such cultural ambidexterity were offered, however. Nor were there any real hints as to how this would work, other than bromides like "leadership" and "sacrifice."

The piece struck me as something of a missed opportunity in it's "we can have our cake and eat it, too" attitude, since it cast the course of the SARS-2 CoV pandemic in the United States as a result of current inflexibility, rather than the result of a long series of choices that lead the nation to its current state. If "[t]ight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory," it seems unrealistic to presume that cultures that haven't had that sort of history can act as if they have on the basis of a single event, even if it is a relatively long one. Which, in the grand scheme if things, the current pandemic hasn't been.

And the characterization of tight and loose cultures also stood out for me. Because tight cultures could also be seen as those with very far-reaching and consistent social norms across the whole of the society. Looking at it in total, I don't actually believe that social norms are more relaxed and that there are fewer rules in the United States; they just don't have the same reach. Social norms in the Seattle area, where I live now, are as rigorously observed as they were in my previous hometown of Chicago. It's just that the norms are different between here and there. Professor Gelfand holds up New Zealand as a nation that's gotten it right. But New Zealand is roughly the same area and population as Colorado. Taiwan, likewise, is very small, although it has a large population. The United States is in the top four in both land area and population. And it lacks the ethnic homogeneity of India or the controlling government of China to enforce a single set of norms and rules on the whole of its population. And while Professor Gelfand says that "We shouldn't confuse authoritarianism with tightness," she also notes that "Tight cultures have a lot of order and discipline — they have a lot less crime and more monitoring of [citizens'] behavior and [more] security personnel and police per capita." Maybe it's just me, but I'm sensing a correlation there.

It's possible, and honestly, I suspect, likely, that the course of the pandemic in the United States is a foreseeable outcome of a society that's made up of a disparate groups of people from around the world and who live in a vast area that's been relatively free of serious existential threats for the past two centuries. Maybe there's nothing wrong with taking the bad with the good in this case. I understand that when people are alarmed, they are clamorous to be led to safety, as H. L. Mencken put it. And that they can resent factors that stand in the way of this. But I don't know that it's reasonable to expect that the distance and diversity of the United States can be ground out of the populace on short notice. And a year is, in the grand scheme of things, very short notice. Many much less significant changes than everyone suddenly deciding to trust whatever some "leadership" tells them to do have take much longed to come into being, even if it took some time to actually notice the differences. It's understandable that people want to always have the best of all possible worlds; to have all of the advantages, and none of the downsides, of everything. But that's not a realistic way of looking at life. Nor is it a useful one.