Cultural meltdown. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1999 by James Q. Wilson

By "The Great Disruption," Frank Fukuyama means the social transformations - many of them unfortunate - that occurred throughout the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s. He begins his book with a survey of increasing crime rates, the declining number of intact families, rising divorce rates, dropping fertility rates, and vanishing popular confidence in government - all of which suggest to him a loss in moral order and social capital. This, of course, is familiar territory.

Two arguments in The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order(*) stand out, however. One has to do with the source of the great disruption, the other with what may become of that disruption in the future. Let me start with the second, because there I think he is quite right.

Fukuyama believes that social capital and social order cannot simply disappear. The Great Disruption will be replaced to some degree by a Great Reconstruction. The restoration of some measure of social capital will occur because there is a floor of sorts below which human society cannot fall. That floor is made up of human nature. People are inherently sociable - they value human contact. They are also inherently familial - they belong and respond to families, whatever the condition of those families may be.

Because they are inherently social, people will live together in communities over long periods of time. If people regularly deal with one another, they can solve certain problems that each acting alone cannot solve. We cooperate with one another not because we could not do better by pursuing our own interests but because we must live with people who also have interests. The famous game, the Prisoner's Dilemma, is easily solved if it is repeated among the same people. The participants quickly realize that they will do better if their first move is a kind one - say, keeping a promise, obeying a contract, protecting a friend - followed by moves in which they copy whatever the other person does. Both sides realize that being nice to one another pays off better than taking advantage of one another because a bad move by one player will be followed by a bad move by the other. This strategy, called Tit for Tat, is not the only solution to the game, but it is the one that ordinary people, in regular contact with one another, will choose.

You need not study game theory to appreciate sociability. We are kinder to people we know than to people we do not know. We may be ruder to family members than to strangers, but we take in family members, and not strangers, when they are in distress. As the old adage has it, home is where, if you go there, they have to take you in. We fight hard to defend our buddies in the platoon even though throwing down our guns and running the other way may make us safer. We support whatever team we join - on athletic fields, in fraternities, in street-corner gangs, in armies - even when we do not know the other team members very well.

There is, of course, a dark side to our sociability. We can be led by it to commit atrocities in the name of friendship, fight unjust wars in the name of patriotism, and attack innocent people in the name of gang solidarity. But the root of our sociability - caring for our infants and protecting them as they grow older - is inherently desirable, and thus is something that people will not easily surrender. We may for awhile tolerate single-parent homes in the name of freedom of choice, but in time, we will fight back when the costs of freedom become too high. We may explain away crime as the result of impersonal social forces, but in time, we will begin to define it as an evil choice that society must stigmatize and resist. No matter how willing we are to provide equal treatment to women, or to regard children as miniature adults, when a crisis occurs our instinct will be to protect the women and children.

Fukuyama does not use all of the examples I have given, but I suspect he would agree with my argument, one that I think he has made. For example, consider how society solves the problem of the tragedy of the commons. On a plot of open land, many farmers send their cattle to graze. Each farmer is tempted to let his cattle graze all they want, even though if every farmer pursues such a strategy, the pasture will soon be destroyed. Many people think that this problem can be solved only by a government that coerces the farmers with formal rules. But as Fukuyama notes, Elinor Ostrom has gathered thousands of accounts of this problem and shown that the solution has chiefly depended on informal norms and village habits.

Fukuyama is saying that the Great Disruption can go only so far before society - that is, individual people - will correct the imbalance and reassert a common morality. He is right about this, though he may be too optimistic in his estimates of how much progress has been made in recent years toward social renewal. He says that in the United States, "levels of crime have returned virtually to where they were when the Great Disruption started." I am afraid not. The robbery rate in 1996 was three times higher than the robbery rate in 1960. If anyone were told in 1960 that crime rates would be under control when that rate had tripled, he would have been thought mad. Fukuyama takes comfort in Farrakhan's Million Man March in Washington and the advent of the Promise Keepers, but it is not clear that either movement has had much effect. He notes the popularity of the radio talk show hosted by Laura Schlessinger - a no-nonsense woman who encourages marriage and self-control - but he says nothing about the national media's hostility toward her.