by Rushworth M. Kidder
Here’s this week’s quiz question: In hard economic times, do Americans tend to become (a) selfish, competitive, and fragmented, or (b) caring, cooperative, and unified?
You can make the case either way. On one hand, higher unemployment could lead to desperation, family tensions, fraud, and street crime. Economic pressures could promote a bootstrap individualism, bent on surviving through hyper-competitiveness even at the cost of others’ failure.
On the other hand, a tough economy could beget compassion, solidarity, and a new appreciation for nonmaterial pleasures. A barn-raising frontier spirit could reemerge, where progress depends on helping each other and where sharing becomes the means to survival.
The answer probably lies somewhere in between. But the folks at the Washington-based Campaign for Community Values are beginning to pick up an encouraging trend: Rather than wedging people apart, “the economic crisis has brought people together,” says Seth Borgos, director for Research & Programs for the Campaign’s parent organization, the 40-year-old Center for Community Change in Washington.
For two years the Campaign, a national coalition of more than 300 grassroots organizations examining core values, has been charting what Borgos calls “a change in the moral temper of the country.” Speaking to a group of funders in Michigan last week, he put it succinctly: “There’s a change in the way that Americans are thinking about the relations between the individual and the community.”
Borgos says he first detected the shift in 2005. Even now what he’s sensing are faint signals, not yet widely reflected in the polling data. The Gallup Organization, for instance, has tracked a steep decline since 2005 in those who feel “satisfied … with the way things are going in the United States at this time.” It also finds that many believe “the state of moral values in the country is … getting worse.”
But Borgos, working largely with low-income people of color, sees something more hopeful. In prior years, he says, the “dominant theme” within his conversations about values tended to reflect a “go-it-alone, extreme individualism” that “crowded out interdependence and shared values.” Recently, he’s finding a greater interest in the values that lean toward the community — not so much in spite of the financial crisis as because of it.
“For us,” he says, “the financial crisis is a metaphor about interdependence.” As the financial crisis spread outwards from a low-income lending debacle that had roots in these very neighborhoods, he explains, it became increasingly clear that “the story of the crisis is that we’re all connected — our fates are shared.”
That perception of a shared fate could have bred disillusionment and anger, targeting those atop the economic pyramid. Such anger can explode into street demonstrations, like those that recently have fragmented Iceland, Greece, and Central and Eastern Europe. “If you don’t do the patient work of finding commonality around values,” Borgos says, “people do tend to fragment.”
Instead, he feels, the current crisis has caused communities to coalesce in new ways, returning to “a core-values base” that fosters unity and combats political polarization.
Could this change be a bellwether for broader change? If so, it would come squarely up against America’s long love affair with individualism. During the nineteenth century, that theme drove Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay on self-reliance and permeated Walt Whitman’s sprawling poem, “Song of Myself.” By the latter part of the twentieth century, excessive individualism undergirded such self-help screeds as Robert J. Ringer’s 1977 best-seller, Looking Out For Number One, as well as scholarly studies like Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 study of separateness, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In between, in the 1950s, individualism produced not only “The Lone Ranger” radio series but the craggy cowboy image of the Marlboro Man, widely viewed as one of the most effective ad campaigns ever launched in the United States.
But even a cowboy can fall into disfavor. These days, that word is less often used to praise a rugged individualist than to denigrate a renegade executive riding roughshod over employees, shareholders, and communities. If the shift Borgos sees toward community values is as real and significant as the change in our views of cowboys, we may be at one of the nation’s key turning points. And the turn could come suddenly. It was not so many years ago, after all, that anyone expressing a communitarian impulse risked being branded as a Communist. Now, with two decades separating us from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and with Communism posing a lesser existential threat to individualism, the bias against community may fade more rapidly than ever.
Or at least recede. At some fundamental level, the individual and the community will forever be in tension. Our toughest policy choices probably will always straddle the divide between the needs of the group and the needs of the self. That’s as it should be — although, in proportion as the moral case on each side is compelling, the challenge of finding a solution can be agonizing. That challenge has been made more difficult by an imbalance favoring individualism, which too often pits personalities against one another in ways that damage rather than sustain the community.
How fitting, then, if a financial crisis in part brought on by the moral failures of the richest of the rich — Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi schemes, Wall Street managers’ multimillion-dollar bonuses — were to find its solutions in some of the nation’s poorest communities? How satisfying to think that, when barn-raisers finally begin overtaking bootstrappers, they will do so in some of the very neighborhoods where subprime lending first began. How comforting that, in the hardest of economic times, what emerges is the soft power of ethics.
©2009 Institute for Global Ethics
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