Building cultural cohesion - The super power recipe to success.
One thing I learned recently about the Apollo program is that it wasn’t just about proving that America was superior to the USSR’s Communist system. It was more specifically about proving that America could outdo the Communists even at what they’re supposed to be good at – heroic centrally coordinated state-sponsored infrastructure projects. During the 1950s there was a real fear that the Communist system might be better in certain ways, and the Apollo program was designed to put this to rest.
Today we’re facing a similar challenge. With the rise of China as the next great superpower, there are again questions about which superpower’s system of government and culture is better. While China is importantly failing on the human rights, they’ve proven that it’s possible to build a nationwide high speed rail network that would be the dream of America’s progressive faction, do world-class research in all major disciplines, and rapidly stop a new and unknown pandemic (albeit in a very heavy-handed way). While there are many reasons to be sharply critical of China right now, they are demonstrating power and competence in the same way that the US demonstrated power and competence half a century ago with the Apollo program.
Compared to the Apollo program, dealing with the COVID pandemic is easy. It doesn’t require a high-tech approach or spending 2% of GDP for years. Even relatively poor countries in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia have handled it with ease. It’s just a basic coordination problem that requires some rudimentary central planning and a high rate of cooperation by citizens. By the end of March, the early successes of countries like Taiwan and South Korea had showed the world a perfectly reasonable solution that didn’t aggressively impinge on people’s freedoms or require totalitarian control, so there really wasn’t any question about how to solve it.
Almost every developed country and most developing countries have a good handle on COVID by now, but the US does not. Why? I believe it comes down to two major factors:
- broken institutions, and
- a lack of cultural cohesion. We need to fix both if we want to remain a superpower, or even just be a decent place to live.
A lot has been said on (1) so I’m going to focus on (2), especially since it’s Independence Day weekend.
Even countries in the middle of a divisive culture war can usually unite around a common enemy. Surely America could do the same? What happened? In part, because the virus hit Democrat-led areas before it hit Republican-led areas, the lockdowns felt like a response to a serious issue to most Democrats and like an overreaction to most Republicans. It doesn’t have to be this way though. We have mass media in part so we can feel empathy when our fellow citizens are suffering 2000 miles away. When planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, the whole nation mourned.
Now the cultural gulf within the US is so vast that there were people in rural areas who looked at the mass death from COVID in New York City in March and April and dismissed it as a hoax or something that could never happen to them. Note that the same cultural distancing happened in the other direction in the early 2010s, when rural America was facing an opioid addiction crisis the size of the AIDS crisis, and urban America barely noticed.
Society goes through periods of greater and lesser social cohesion, and right now we are at a low point. Too much cohesion is bad – it leads to stifling of creativity, suppression of dissenting views, and oppression of people who don’t look or act the “correct” way. However, too little cohesion is just as bad. It leads to a lack of care for other people in the group, and an inability to coordinate even when there’s a real crisis.
What we need to do now is find some sources of cultural cohesion that most Americans can get behind and emphasize them. It can even be something simple and bland like hamburgers, 4th of July fireworks shows, or pop songs. In order to build cohesion, we can’t make it too difficult to get into the club. I think one big mistake that the Left has made in the US is that it’s found reasons to reject even relatively bland cultural icons, with a culture of looking for any flaws, however small, in how someone has spoken or behaved. Note that I’m not talking about Confederate statues in government buildings here; those should have gone away a long time ago as they represent people who literally committed treason to preserve the institution of slavery at a time when the rest of the developed world had long abolished it. I’m talking about ideological purity tests.
Just about everyone has done or said things that they now regret or has some views that are out of step with the cultural mainstream, and just about every cultural symbol has a complex and muddled history. We need to realize that everything is on a continuum, and that it’s important to focus on the biggest issues instead of attacking everything with a flaw. Someone who told a cringey joke on camera two decades ago and now regrets it is not the same as Harvey Weinstein.
Cultural growth is important, but in order to be sustainable it needs to happen at a pace that someone in rural America who is working two jobs and barely has enough time to spend with their kids can keep up with.
This also isn’t to say that people should avoid speaking up about controversial topics for fear of reducing cohesion. Quite the opposite – it’s underlying cultural cohesion that enables us to successfully tackle big cultural shifts. For what it’s worth, the current protest movement underway in the US is largely peaceful and enjoys a good amount of public support. 67% of Americans said they support the Black Lives Matter movement in a Pew survey conducted in early June. Americans can unite around deeper principles like pushing back against a pattern of unjust actions by authority figures. I think the police action against George Floyd was such a clear-cut case of murder that it cut through all of the “but he broke the law…” counterarguments that came up in past cases of police brutality and made it starkly clear to everyone regardless of race or political affiliation that there is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. We just need to be careful to make sure it stays on its core message and doesn’t alienate its current broad base of support until true reforms such as the removal of qualified immunity for police are achieved.
We also need to get the most divisive figures, the people who are actively encouraging this culture war, out of power. I applaud the group of Republicans who have come out publicly in favor of Biden as an alternative to another four years of Trump. If Democrats ever end up with a similarly divisive figure, we should remember to do the same thing.