Disconnect: Why Americans Don't Understand the World and How We Can Learn

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Contents

Introduction: What the Obama Presidency Means for Global Civil Society...........................vii1: What's Our Problem?...........................................................................12: Sister Schools: Writing Plays, Shooting Baskets in Chicago and Casablanca.....................223: Sister Cities.................................................................................484: Their Sisters' Keepers........................................................................765: Ethnic and Religious Identities...............................................................916: Hidden in Plain Sight: The New Immigrants.....................................................1127: Dreamers......................................................................................1348: Making Connections............................................................................1649. Conclusion: Athenians and Americans...........................................................187Bibliography.....................................................................................192

Chapter One

In February 2003, I noticed an article on the education page of the Boston Globe describing the Blue Pack Project, whose purpose was to deliver a backpack of school supplies to individual children in Afghanistan. An accompanying photo showed three smiling girls proudly holding their packs, standing before a larger group of children. The plan was to raise $2 million, which would fund 200,000 packs for Afghan children at ten dollars each. The national project was almost half completed, and some money had been raised locally - $500 from middle school children in Wareham, a small community near the Rhode Island border, $1,000 from Brandeis University, and some from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.

I thought this was an outstanding idea. The United States, having occupied Afghanistan, ought to contribute to its civic and educational future. Contrary to the famous post 9/11 headline that asked "Why Do They Hate Us?" I felt confident that Afghans probably hated the Taliban and would welcome the arrival of peaceful Americans bearing a Marshall Plan. In the press, experts were pointing out that if the United States turned its attention away from the place, the Taliban or traditional war lords would re-emerge, just as they had done after the Russians left in 1991. The notion that American students should help their Afghan friends go to school seemed to be just the right idea.

I was puzzled, however, by the timing and modesty of the project. What had taken so long to initiate it? The invasion of Afghanistan had begun in October 2001 and was finished by the end of the year. Now, over one year later, President Bush was beating the drums for the invasion of Iraq that would begin the following month. Afghanistan had been out of the news for months. And why was it left to the non-profit Academy for Educational Development to promote the campaign, rather than the United States Department of Education? How did they come up with a $2 million goal? That's a fraction of one American community's school budget. Why 200,000 bags? Wouldn't Afghanistan, a country of 26 million people, have about four million school age children aged six through sixteen? And what explained why, among the scores of school districts in the Boston metropolitan area, some participated and others did not?

In the days after the airplanes crashed into the towers, I imagined that the government would appeal to every American, even first graders, to help rebuild Afghan society. Was this the plan?

The article listed a web site. Through the website, I got in touch with the local office. I explained that I wanted to volunteer, and made an appointment to visit at a downtown address, which turned out to be an advertising agency. What might I do as a volunteer? The young woman project director looked at me blankly. What did I mean, "volunteer?" Her incomprehension suggested to me that she thought I was acting inappropriately for my age. I was old enough to be her father, but not a retiree, and she already had a boss. I said I'd do what the other volunteers were doing. There were no other volunteers, she explained. I pointed out that the newspaper article listed a website for those who wanted to get involved. What were the other people who responded doing? Well, she said, nobody had responded. She just seemed mystified by my behavior. We agreed that she'd get back to me after speaking with her boss. She never did. I e-mailed again, a few times, inconclusively, and finally gave up.

What made our response to September 11 so misguided? How did we fail to rebuild Afghanistan and instead invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda terrorists? Why do we ignore the crippling world poverty that constitutes the moral challenge of our times? The answers lay both in rapidly changing recent developments and in cultural traits rooted deep in our past.

Apparently, my failed effort to volunteer for the Blue Pack Project was typical of a wider problem. I had inadvertently wandered into a late Twentieth Century phenomenon famously described by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam argued that the fabric of American civic life had worn thin during the last third of the century, and that this diminished political democracy and social life. We are abandoning community for individualism. Political scientists, sociologists, journalists, philosophers and others have worried about this general trend for some time. Many describe themselves as "communitarians," and while they often disagree among themselves, they agree that American community life is deteriorating.

Putnam made an enormous media splash. He chose as a symbol of the times the seemingly unimportant statistic that membership in bowling leagues had declined. We are still bowling, he found, but we are bowling alone. We are therefore losing "social capital" - the ability to find meaning and connection through voluntary association. Putnam dramatized this situation with an anecdote. He told the story of a man who donated a kidney to a friend whom he had met through their bowling league. One of the men was white and the other African American. Without the bowling league - metaphor for an activity through which we develop social capital - they would never have met in our segregated society.

Putnam postulated that various areas of communal life were weakening. He showed that the percentage of voters had dropped from 63% in 1960 to 49% in 1996. According to public opinion polls, in 1966 only 34% of the public agreed that "the people running the country don't really care what happens to you," but by 1997, 57% thought that was true. The mood of cynicism affected civic life too. Despite the attention paid to the new political energy of religious conservatives, Putnam found that mainstream religious activity was declining. Union membership had drastically shrunk as well, not only because of economic factors, but also due to the growth of individualism. While Americans doubled their contributions to charity between 1960 and 1995, as a percentage of income, the relevant statistic, it had gone down. There were some countervailing trends but these were overshadowed by breakdowns in every form of social interaction, from card-playing to having people over for dinner. Putnam identified many causes for the diminution of social capital, and none of them likely to go away.

Putnam's Harvard colleague, the sociologist Theda Skocpol, called attention to the political implications of his thesis. In Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Social Life, Skocpol argued that the government should play an active role in reviving civic institutions, because they are fundamental to the health of a free democratic society. While communitarians tended to see government and private associations as antagonistic, Skocpol saw an important positive relationship between them. She dramatized her argument by describing the grave marker of a Maine farmer, a Union veteran who had been a pall bearer for Abraham Lincoln. William M. Durgin's tombstone announced not only his service in war, but also his membership in the Grand Army of the Republic, (the Union Army veterans' group), and the Odd Fellows. To Durgin, his membership in these organizations was as important as being a pall bearer for the president. This was a sign of the health of the Republic. By contrast, Skocpol reflected, neither she, nor anyone else, would place their membership in the American Sociological Association on their gravestone.

Skocpol celebrated the role of these class-bridging institutions. She argued that they did more than develop the "social capital" which so absorbed Putnam's attention, but that they also contributed to the political health of the nation. In this, she followed the famous French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1840 classic Democracy in America marveled at the health of American democracy and praised the American citizen's tendency to join private groups.

In a perceptive conclusion, Skocpol recalled how the American Legion had argued for the GI Bill, which was passed during the Truman Administration. This bill, which was both immensely popular and widely effective, guaranteed to veterans low-interest loans for home mortgages and access to higher education. Despite the conservative orientation of the Legion, the fact that its broad membership wanted the bill compelled it to argue against fiscally conservative Republicans in Congress, and assure its passage. Like similar civic associations, Skocpol pointed out, the Legion now has declined in membership. She contrasted the passage of the GI Bill to the failure of liberals to pass health care reform during the Clinton administration, even when public opinion polls showed that pluralities of Americans favored the extension of health care insurance to the uninsured. Where was the broad-based, class-bridging popular civic association to insist on health care reform?

The problem, Skocpol asserted, was that such organizations had been supplanted by advocacy groups headed by middle class professionals who spoke only to each other, and who distrusted the public. While advocacy groups might show expanded membership lists, in fact they were run by central national offices without local chapters. Even the fund raising for these groups is usually conducted by professional direct mail companies and paid solicitors. Dana R. Fisher, another sociologist, buttressed this conclusion in Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. Fisher showed that the paid youthful canvasser has replaced neighborhood based committees in advocacy for human rights and the environment.

I am particularly disturbed by the breakdown in relations among social classes. As a part-time college professor who holds a working class day job, I don't need to read a book to see that idealistic international projects are largely the province of upper-middle class professionals. This is nobody's fault, but it's a worrisome trend that few organizations bring people together across social class lines, especially in relation to civil society international initiatives.

Many factors contribute to the breakdown of civil society. Each of these problems limits our ability to calmly consider the international challenges that the nation faces. They help explain why neither the Bush administration nor its Democratic rivals called for a mass public campaign to re-build Afghanistan after September 11.

The most important contributor to civic apathy is the corruption of politics by Big Business. This is an old story in political life, reaching its first apogee in the Gilded Age, but it is particularly acute today. Corporate lobbyists pump billions of dollars into the Washington atmosphere in the form of media propaganda and campaign contributions. Some of it is illegal, like the bribery uncovered in the Jack Abramoff and Randy "Duke" Cunningham scandals. But more significant is the legal, overt influence of lobbyists on politicians at all levels of government. The candidates take money from powerful lobbyists and this self-reinforcing relationship between Big Business and government leaves the public apathetic and dispirited. Corruption is much worse in most developing nations and leads the American public to think that it is best not to enable them with foreign aid.

Rampant consumerism, a constant phenomenon of American life seems to have grown exponentially worse over time. Americans spend billions on gas guzzling vehicles when they could spend less on small fuel efficient cars, in contrast to European consumers. Among others, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has argued that our dependence on foreign oil has crippled our foreign policy options in the Middle East, and contributed to the rise of oil-revenue based kleptocracies (Nigeria and Russia) and theocracies (Iran). Yet politicians fail to seize upon this issue as a foreign policy matter because they pander to, rather than shape, public opinion.

Our narcissistic consumerism limits popular consciousness about our responsibilities to the developing world as a whole. Americans waste hundreds of billions annually on liquor, cigarettes, illegal drugs, gambling, lotteries, brand name clothes and cosmetics. Billions of dollars go to advertising costs for the competing products. We spend $125 billion annually on weddings, and $44 billion to travel to and attend sports events. While we are obsessing over clothing, gadgets and baseball scores, we have lost sight of the two billion of the world's six billion people who are getting by on $2 a day.

A third long-term factor in contemporary life that affects our ability to consider foreign policy matters is the contradictory revolution in information technology. On the one hand, humans now have the most powerful technological tool for learning about the world ever in our history as a species. The internet is more comprehensive than whole libraries, and it is available in some fashion to billions of people. Only the most isolated cannot access on-line technology. In its infancy, the internet contributed to the collapse of dictatorial regimes in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and it can be a powerful weapon for good in the hands of the world's children.

On the other hand, many commentators note that the new electronic media also isolates us. As we watch more DVDs and pay more for cable packages, we stay home more, rather than go out to places in which we become a collective audience. The experience of attending a public meeting has become increasingly rare, Putnam showed. In The Gutenberg Elegies essayist Sven Birkerts argues that the immediacy of electronic media has shortened the attention span of his students, made it more difficult for them to reflect upon their experience or to use their imagination to place themselves in a historical setting unlike their own. What modern professor has not observed a student distracted during class by a silent instant messaging device? It becomes difficult for students to sort out important information (how many people live on Earth? who consumes how much?) from the unimportant (why did Brad and Jen split?)

A related problem is the commercialization and diffusion of mass media outlets. The trend began with talk radio. Relying only on the spoken voice, talk radio's format encouraged angry confrontation to get listeners' attention. Cable television has made it easier for Americans to be better informed about the world than ever before, but the breakdown of the media markets into smaller niches has discouraged the habit of dialogue and encouraged consumers' reinforcement of their previously held beliefs. The competition among these varying outlets promotes polarization rather than contemplation. The battle for market share has given us a parade of talking heads that are often selected for their ability to shed heat rather than light.

Recent political policies have also served to weaken civil society. The Bush administration's faith-based solutions to domestic societal problems substitute religious institutions for secular institutions in which all may participate. It encourages people to think of themselves as members of a denomination first, and as American citizens only incidentally. In addition, this approach runs counter to the doctrine of separation of church and state, and rewards the president's political base with cash.

Promoting faith-based initiatives at home had unintended consequences for the public consciousness regarding international relations. It implied that, just as government was inadequate to address social problems at home, so was government-sponsored foreign aid inadequate to promote civil society abroad. It sent a message that private citizens who want to contribute abroad should do so through their church. Unfortunately, there is a major problem in delivering aid, especially to non-Christian nations, through explicitly Christian institutions. It inevitably seems to the recipient that the aid carries a religious message. American missionary activity shows the public face of Americans abroad not as American citizens, but as Mormons, Methodists or Baptists. Missionary activity has fractured many Latin American rural communities as some residents convert to Protestant denominations bearing material aid. I am not suggesting that this activity be curtailed by government fiat, or that Americans should abandon faith-based international projects. I am suggesting that faith-based interventions contribute to anti-American sentiment and need to be countered by a stronger presence of American aid, in countries that wish to receive it, by government and non-denominational NGOs.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Disconnect: Why Americans Don't Understand the World and How We Can Learnby Mark Robert Schneider Copyright © 2009 by Mark Robert Schneider. Excerpted by permission.
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