Sunny Side Up

Dreaming

There are, I suspect, any number of definitions of The American Dream. Many of them seem to boil down to living a life of relative ease; having enough wealth to not need to worry about day-to-day expenses and providing a respectable standard of living for one's family, but not necessarily so much wealth that working becomes entirely optional. A job leaves time - time during the day to relax, regular time where one doesn't have to work that day, time to enjoy the fruits of years of working, and time to get away from it all, at least for a while.

But as time has worn on, it's becoming clear that many understandings of The American Dream are, put simply, unsustainable. From before the United States was a nation until perhaps sixty or seventy years ago, The American Dream was built on the ability to exploit places, and people, without anyone really having to be concerned with taking long-term care of them. There was always more land to push into, or more people whose wealth could be taken in order to provide the mainstream with a standard of living that was noticeably, if not spectacularly, better than the generation prior.

And now that engine is exhausted. There are no more virgin lands to claim, and no more large populations to be left in poverty. At least not domestically.

One of the problems the United States faces is the idea that it is grasping and rapacious isn't really in dispute. While critics may see the nation as constantly looking for wealth to steal from others, people who understand themselves as the country's defenders often argue that other people around the world don't deserve the wealth they have. Neither, when viewed neutrally, is particularly flattering.

As an American, I've found it interesting to watch the nation turn on itself. At least, more openly than had been the norm. Although the nation's past has certainly had its moments, and that fact leads me to believe that the warnings that this time may be the last are somewhat overblown.

Nothing, however, lasts forever. Especially not things that are built on a foundation of their always being more just within reach. It's a pattern that, although I have only a limited grasp of world history, appears to be repeated over and over again. One part of American Exceptionalism may be the belief that the factors that have played out throughout recorded history don't apply. The calamities that have befallen other nations in the world were the result of their own lack of foresight and wisdom. And therefore, It Could Never Happen Here.

If humanity does not scale well, perhaps the reason is that a group of people may only grow so large before people lose the ability to see one another as just as intelligent, hardworking and thoughtful as themselves. But it's remarkable the degree to which a species, or a nation, can succeed, even without that trait.

Debate Delayed

The Quick and Dirty: The problem with the debate over political violence in the United States is that it comes years, if not decades, later than it should, and addresses symptoms, not causes. Because the competing narratives have incentives to cast those who disagree as being deliberately unreasonable, the underlying problems that people are responding to aren't being addressed, let alone fixed, in a way that they likely would be if the debating parties viewed each other as rational actors, responding to something that they genuinely consider dangerous. It's not difficult to find an "extreme" position that people would oppose, even if it won an election, or a position that, were it to win an election, would cause people to suspect that something was afoot. The problem is that a lot of people seem to believe that only positions odious to them would fall into such categories.

The Long Form: As the Left and Right of American politics develop larger constituencies that are mutually hostile to one another (and increasingly hostile to those whose support they find lacking), conversations concerning political violence in the United States has become more and more common.

Generally speaking, the media outlets I read/listen to tend to be "center-left." Genuinely centrist media is pretty thin on the ground, in part because politically-loaded commentary tends to drive audience share, and centrism isn't known for its strident partisan attacks on the political wings. I have no real interest in more straightforwardly Leftist ideals and commentary, and the center-right media in the United States that strikes me as actually worth reading, is not so much so that it's worth paying for; media that both leans right and is supported by something other than direct subscriptions tends to quickly devolve into, at best, a somewhat mild version of "own the libs," which is still too negative, and too personal, for my tastes. (The more more stereotypical "right-wing media" is, of course, right out.)

Center-left commentary on political violence tends to be worried, with a slight tinge of hysteria. I suspect that this is because the American Left also tends to be the most worried about (certain forms of) gun violence and perceives the outbreak of political violence in the United States as being a steady stream of Columbines, Route 91 Harvests and Pulse nightclubs, as armed White sexists, ethno-nationalists and other forms of bigot undertake one shooting spree after another, with the lobbying arm of the American firearms industry running interference for them.

The article and podcasts that I have read and heard recently tend to have a focus on the expending range of actions that the presumed armed and dangerous are now understood to be worthy of a violent response. But missing from this aspect of the discussion is a worldview that sees threats all around itself.

The partisan nature of the debate asserts itself in the usual way; there is an assumption of what the underlying reality of everything is, and that assumption is never really questioned. And right now, one of the assumptions being made is that people are either "committed to democracy" or they aren't and the American Right's commitment to democracy is fading, while it's still alive and well on the Left.

If you've read this far, you're likely aware that I'm going to posit that this view is overly simplistic and self-serving. When I speak to people who I understand to be Left-learning (and who often self-identify that way) they tend to be less than 100% committed to democracy (however they happen to define it). They, too, believe that it's sometimes proper, or even necessary, to fight for what one understands to be right when it is threatened by others, even if that threat comes in the form of a lawfully-held election.

After all, the American Revolution was simply a form of political violence. And while it's true that Great Britain had a monarch at the time, Parliament existed. It's taken for granted that the colonists had legitimate grievances with the English Crown and that the rebellion and subsequent war were legitimate ways to act on those grievances. What tends to be lost in all of this is the idea that this understanding of legitimacy wasn't universal, let alone objective and self-evident.

As the United States devolves into political camps that see each other as hostile, and, more importantly, deliberately malicious, those camps are going to make threat assessments that come back as dire and existential. Okay, so the American Left sees the Right as having devolved into outraged hysteria over trivialities, manipulated by self-interested political actors who should know better. This is different from the Loyalist position (which is now regarded as obviously wrong) during the Revolution precisely how?

See No Evil

Perhaps it's simply a natural state of affairs, but as one who doesn't believe in supernatural Evil, I eventually stopped believing in human evil. I'm one of those sorts who sees more or less everyone as attempting to bring about a world that they understand will be better for everyone involved. It may not be perfect, and it may be an omelet that requires breaking more than a few eggs, but people are, as far as I'm concerned, looking to make the world an objectively better place. (Of course, as someone who doesn't believe that there's any sort of objective "better" in matters like this, I consider that to be a taller order than people give it credit for...)

It's not a perception that squares with most people's perceptions of the world and/or human motivation. I think that this stems from the fact that Thomas Nagel is right about most people; they understand their interest and harms as something that should carry moral weight with others. Injuries aren't just bad for them as individuals, they are objectively bad, period. And this extends to those people whom they like and care about. And so they don't see any real reason why others would seek to harm them outside of intentional wrongdoing. The idea that people act out of the best of intentions doesn't carry much weight in situations like this, because they can't see any way in which the harms caused by others could lead to what they consider a better world.

But if there isn't an object, self-evident standard for what makes a better world (and, again, I'm one of those people who believes that there isn't) then perhaps it's easier to see how something that seems pretty heinous could strike someone as a good idea. Or, perhaps more to the point, it's easier to see how something that seems pretty innocuous could strike people as egregiously wrong.

I have, throughout the years, met any number of people whose conception of God comes across to me as little more than a violent control freak. Sometimes one with poor aim and a curiously high tolerance for collateral damage. But if this is one's idea of the very embodiment of a universal intellect, it makes sense that one would be highly sensitive to perceived violations. And if one further believes that the divine law is somehow self-evident to all, behaviors, even common ones, that strike one as immoral can come across as grave sins that put more than just the sinner at risk.

And that's a concept that I often find difficult to convey to people. If someone considers what would otherwise be private activity to place themselves and those they care about at risk, they're likely to stop seeing it as something that they should regard as private, or as acceptable. But religion isn't the only venue in which people come to these sorts of conclusions. There are any number of secular viewpoints that view what non-adherents to be acceptable actions as threats to individuals or communities, and thus worthy of being suppressed, by force, if necessary.

Once groups with mutually-exclusive outlooks find themselves in proximity to one another, conflict is going to ensue, with both sides seeing themselves as on the defensive against and aggressive enemy. But to an outsider who isn't motivated to take sides, it can appear to be simply a tragedy all around, one brought about by mutual distrust and misunderstanding.

Teachable

From time to time, I find myself going back through old posts. Usually because I'm going to talk about something that I've spoken of before, and either want to link to an older post, or find a quote or something that I included in one. A habit of mine in such situations is to correct typographical errors that I'd made in the initial writing. Spelling tends not to be a problem. My browser has a spell-checker built in, and so errors are flagged as I make them (and sometimes, due to the limitations of the built-in dictionary, when I don't).

I tend to think of the posts of this blog in the present-tense; that is to say, my initial impulse, on finding an error is not to remind myself that I made it years ago, but to be disappointed in the fact that writing this blog has not, in fact, turned the me of today into the more capable and rapid writer that I wanted to be.

Part of this, of course, is simply one of the pitfalls of being a writer through trial an error. And so maybe I should stop doing that. Blogging has Caught On, and that means that one can take classes on how to do it better. So maybe I should take one. Or three. Other than the cash outlay, it can't hurt. And maybe it will move me towards the sense of mastery of the subject that I seek. In the meantime, I'm going to keep at it; it's become something of a compulsion, I think. But I do enjoy it, even if I don't devote as much time to it as I used to.

As I've grown older, and mellowed, I've found that I devote less time to exploring the world around me, and maybe that's the problem. When I first had this idea, some 20+ years ago, I'd originally thought of doing an advice column, or something similar. I'd also toyed with making the space a general Explainer on the United States (hence the subtitle "just another random American"). But a lot of these posts are simply my observations of the world around me. So maybe I need to be a better observer, to be a better writer.