Y2K America

Public Interest, Spring, 2000 by Alvin Kernan

LIKE most people, I typically discount jeremiads like David Bosworth's "The Spirit of Capitalism, 2000," which describe a deep and possibly fatal corruption in American society. After all, the people I know all seem to lead sensible, quiet lives. In business, the people I encounter seem to know what they are doing and are about as helpful as one can reasonably expect. But it is when I encounter some bureaucratic or technological snarl, like a telephone answering system that offers endless choices but never the one I need, that I feel that the world no longer makes sense. And so, something about Bosworth's indictment of Americans for a lack of "moral adulthood," for never having grown up, rings true, as does his description of a society in which "toleration gives way to decadent license, civil solicitude to venal solicitation, as everything becomes 'good' and anything 'right.'"

But the disease appears to me to be more in what we might call our "public world" than in the private realms of family and the individual psyche. Most of our information about the world, at least most of mine, comes from the media, newspapers, TV, films, magazines, books, and omnipresent advertising. These, with the exception of some of the books, do indeed present a horrific scene. The maniacal violence of movies, TV, and rap music; the false promises of politicians running for office; the destructive myths of advertising that promise happiness with a new car or a six-pack of beer; the courts that so pervert "justice" that the "rule of law" becomes an absurdity; the flagrant way in which Wealth bribes Politics and calls it "freedom of expression"; the special interests that lobby for the "right to bear arms," even as schoolchildren assassinate their classmates; the boobs who rush to the talk shows to tell the sordid details of their strange, typically sad lives. Everyone can add to amazing spectacle of a wo rld gone mad with sex, violence, power, and money. No wonder, seeing only this, that the European and Asian governments try to protect their societies from becoming Americanized. But this is not the whole of America, or even the heart of it; this is that strange public world on which, as on some gigantic stage, some of the most bizarre people the world has ever seen will do literally anything to raise their "name recognition" for the sake of fame and fortune.

Bosworth is right in his perception that there is some kind of sentimental rot, some age-long childishness, that is at work on our people, though perhaps it has not penetrated as deeply into the core as he fears. Have you ever winced when abroad at the silliness of our teenagers compared to their European peers? Have you ever wondered how many occasions of phony concern there are when you see aisles and aisles of specialized greeting cards for sale? Can anyone really care that much and that often?

Bosworth sees this "rash and rational immaturity" as the product of excessive, corrosive capitalism. We have become, he says, a nation of efficient producers and mindlessly excessive consumers who have lost our spiritual bearings. But in my opinion, the disease is not so much modern capitalism as it is excessive democracy. Not the old meat-and-potatoes kind of democracy that rid us of kings and priests, and for the first time made political and legal equality at least a possibility for every person, but a particularly virulent kind of super-democracy, Y2K democracy.

DEMOCRACY in America has always been an exuberant, overreaching idea that has extracted the last full measure of hypocrisy from its citizens, and in times of prosperity, like our own, it promises more than it can (or should) deliver. Everybody has a right to go to college, or to receive every possible medical treatment without regard to expense, or not to be disliked because of race, sex, or creed. Relativism is, as Bosworth points out, our reigning philosophy, and in a radical democracy, Everyman is as good a thinker as Otherman. All men must be equal in fact, even though the evidence is clear--nothing could be clearer--that they can't be.

This leveling hyper-democracy has grotesquely distorted and perverted some of our most basic, time-tested values and institutions: Law, government, education, the family, art, the army, and the media are bloated with excessive democracy to the point where they are close to ceasing to function. Lawyers grow rich ensuring that every client gets his "rights" protected in personal injury cases and endless appeals; pornography is sold publicly under the name of "freedom of expression"; students are admitted to college not on the basis of their intellectual abilities but by affirmative action; the armed services are measured not by their ability to make war but by their enlistment and treatment of women and homosexuals.

Let it not be thought that I am an antidemocratic royalist or fascist autocrat. Quite to the contrary. I believe that democracy has already worked miracles in America, and will do more if its principles are not carried to such an extreme that it destroys itself.