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Javier E

The Happiest Country Depends on Your Definition of Happiness - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619441

happiness definition culture history

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • n order for the World Happiness Report and other international happiness indexes to compare self-reports of happiness, they have to assume that people around the world define happiness and answer happiness surveys in roughly the same way. If this assumption does not hold, then happiness indexes are about as reliable as a ranking of music quality based on how much residents of each country say they like their local songs. This would indicate something about each country’s enthusiasm for their musical styles, but would provide little information about what music is objectively “best,” given differences in people’s traditions and tastes.
  • On first pass, the ways people around the world say they experience happiness have some obvious commonalities. One 2016 study of 2,799 adults in 12 countries found that in all the nations studied, psychological definitions of happiness—“an inner state, feeling or attitude”—dominated all others. In particular, people worldwide said they found happiness in achieving “inner harmony.”
  • Inner harmony might sound universal, but it can mean very different things in different places. For example, while shooting a documentary film in Denmark on the pursuit of happiness two years ago, I found that the Danes often described inner harmony in terms of hygge, which is something like coziness and comfortable conviviality. Meanwhile, I have found that Americans tend to define it in terms of their skills meeting their passions, usually in the context of work.
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  • 49 percent of Americans referred explicitly to family relationships in their definition of happiness, while Southern Europeans and Latin Americans generally conceived of it in terms of oneself: Just 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexicans, and 10 percent of Argentines talked about their families in their happiness definitions.
  • Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”
  • In large countries, even comparing people within the same borders can be difficult to accomplish accurately. Happiness is defined very differently in northern versus southern India,
  • research shows that the United States is home to significant regional differences in personality characteristics. For example, people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions tend to display more attachment anxiety (“When will you call?”), while the western states breed more attachment avoidance (“See you when I see you”).
  • in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck, but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.
  • Even the words we use to talk about happiness have different connotations in different tongues. In Germanic languages, happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate. In fact, happiness comes from the Middle English hap, which means “luck.”
  • cultures vary widely in their definitions of happiness. Therefore, it is impossible to say that one country is happier than another in some absolute sense, and a single index of “the happiest countries in the world” is not instructive.
  • Maybe Finland is the happiest country by one definition; it is almost certainly not by another. Countries should be classified more than compared.
  • handy way to get started on that task is to distinguish between two ways of focusing on happiness. The first is an “inner” or “outer” focus on happiness—that is, on introspection versus interaction with others. The second is a “relation” or “task” focus—people-oriented versus doing-oriented. This gives us four major models for well-being, based on survey research from around the world.
  • 1. Happiness comes from good relationships with the people you love.This is a combination of the “outer” and “relation” foci. In this model, friends and family are who deliver the most happiness. A good example of a country that fits this model based on how the population tends to define happiness is the United States.
  • 2. Happiness comes from a higher consciousness.This is a combination of the “inner” and “relation” foci, and is the model for highly spiritual, philosophical, or religious people, especially those who place a special importance on coming together in community. Southern India has been found to be home to a lot of people who follow this model.
  • 3. Happiness comes from doing what you love, usually with others.This is a combination of the “outer” and “task” foci—that is, a dedication to work or leisure activities that are deeply fulfilling. This is your model if you tend to say “My work is my life” or “I love golfing with my friends.” Look for it in the Nordic countries and Central Europe.
  • 4. Happiness comes from simply feeling good.This is a combination of the “inner” and “task” foci. It is the model for people who prioritize experiences that give them positive feelings, whether alone or with others. It’s a good way to assess your well-being if, when you imagine being happy, you think of watching Netflix or drinking wine. This model is most common in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South Africa.
  • Just as different places have different definitions of happiness, so do different people. Understanding that diversity can help you understand yourself—to see whether and why you are a misfit in your home, and what you might do about it, whether that’s moving, joining a new community, or simply making peace with your surroundings.
Javier E

Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616581

politics history crisis culture US trust anomie polarization progressive progress

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion
  • Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
  • A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
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  • In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.
  • Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
  • Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g
  • When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
  • This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society
  • under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still
  • We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
  • The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.
  • The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.
  • Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice
  • A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.
  • I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.
  • Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.
  • The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.
  • The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”
  • Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.
  • We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos
  • The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.
  • The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.
  • The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.
  • For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations
  • Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.
  • moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.
  • This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.
  • It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them
  • Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.
  • Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.
  • Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations
  • gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.
  • When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.
  • Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.
  • People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
  • Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.
  • As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”
  • During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions
  • In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.
  • By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.
  • Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi
  • sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate
  • In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
  • In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.
  • In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”
  • Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.
  • There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.
  • Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.
  • Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.
  • Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons
  • As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.
  • high national trust is a collective moral achievement.
  • High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.
  • Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.
  • Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust
  • In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.
  • People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.
  • In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.
  • The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.
  • this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.
  • “They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”
  • the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.
  • In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted
  • Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
  • A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.
  • Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.
  • Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.
  • “values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away
  • Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
  • the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.
  • By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth
  • First, financial insecurity
  • As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
  • Next, emotional insecurity:
  • fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
  • Then, identity insecurity.
  • All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.
  • liquid modernity
  • Finally, social insecurity.
  • n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?
  • Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
  • In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
  • Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.
  • People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse
  • Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent
  • People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”
  • In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed
  • People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.
  • fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.
  • When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.
  • By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.
  • From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession
  • These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.
  • The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest
  • “low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic
  • Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
  • Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them
  • The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.
  • The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.
  • In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.
  • In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.
  • Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.
  • South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.
  • For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.
  • On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system
  • On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy
  • In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
  • In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”
  • Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil
  • 55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths
  • Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.
  • This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.
  • institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.
  • By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,
  • Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.
  • People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.
  • The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
  • The Failure of Society
  • The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”
  • Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
  • While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed
  • in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.
  • Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value
  • When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
  • The Crack-up
  • This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.
  • The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent
  • By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001
  • In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.
  • By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.
  • The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
  • The Age of Precarity
  • Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.
  • The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.
  • This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.
  • From risk to security.
  • we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers
  • In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
  • From achievement to equality
  • In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy
  • Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.
  • From self to society
  • If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.
  • The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”
  • From global to local
  • When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.
  • From liberalism to activism
  • enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
  • Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.
  • liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle
  • The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.
  • The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
  • How to Rebuild Trust
  • Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
  • In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
  • But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.
  • As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on
  • After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.
  • The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.
  • Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?
  • I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.
  • The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.
  • The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?
  • social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.
  • Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.
  • Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.
  • For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust
  • But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.
  • By David Brooks
Javier E

The Segmentation Century - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-segmentation-century.html

segmentation divergence convergence US Europe trust culture economics universalism

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • In 1949, Reinhold Niebuhr published a book called “Faith and History.” Niebuhr noticed a secular religion that was especially strong in the years after World War II. It was the faith that historical forces were gradually bringing about “the unification of mankind.”
  • Old nationalisms would fade away, many people believed. Transportation and communications technologies would unite people. Values would converge. This optimistic faith was at the heart of many postwar projects, first the United Nations and then the European Union. The idea was to create multilateral bodies that would hasten the process of convergence, harmonization and peace.
  • Unfortunately, this moral, cultural and political convergence never happened. In the decades since, people in different nations, even people within nations, have become less alike in at least as many ways as they have become more alike.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • On the whole, European nations still have very different understandings of the rule of law and political order, different work ethics and conceptions of citizenship
  • The failure of convergence is most striking in Europe. True, a tiny sliver of European society is becoming more transnational. But only 2 percent of Europeans live in a different European nation than their country of citizenship.
  • The United States is a single nation with a common history, a common currency and a strong identity. Yet the country has become more polarized, not less. The country has become more difficult to govern, not less.
  • Less than 40 percent of Danes believe that work is a “very important” part of their lives, compared with roughly 65 percent of the French. More than 80 percent of the Croats believe that a parent’s duty is to do what’s best for their children, even at the expense of their own well-being. Only about 55 percent of Germans agree.
  • 73 percent of Germans think that economic conditions are good right now. In France, 19 percent think that, and in Spain it’s 6 percent.
  • people in most Western nations are becoming more distrustful of their neighbors, not less. There are huge variations across nations, but levels of social and political trust have been declining almost everywhere except the Nordic countries. If there’s convergence, in other words, it’s in our increasing agreement that we don’t trust each other.
  • The euro crisis is not a crisis of debt. Total European debt levels are not that high. It’s a crisis of legitimacy. Debt burdens are divergent across nations, and Europeans with one set of habits and values do not want to bail out Europeans with other habits and values.
  • we face the likelihood that the euro will crack up. This is not an outcome to be desired. The ensuing recession and chaos could be horrible on both sides of the Atlantic. But we should prepare for a crackup because the underlying sense of shared identity required for the euro’s survival is not there.
  • The most popular major European politician is Angela Merkel, who is holding tough on more bailouts. She has 80 percent approval in Germany, 66 percent approval in Britain and 76 percent approval in France.
  • The larger issue is, how will the world cope with its own segmentation? How do you govern amid divergence? If multilateral organizations can’t bind nations, do we simply resort to an era of regional hegemons — or chaos?
  • The first step, surely, is abandoning the illusions of convergence and the schemes based upon them. In 1949, Niebuhr questioned the naïve belief that history drives toward unity. He cited the book of Psalms: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.”
Javier E

'Childhood has been rewired': Professor Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones are damaging ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ones-are-damaging-a-generation

social media smartphone kids suicide mental health psychology culture crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl
  • He is working on a book, due out next year, and is ready to share his thesis.
  • his message is quite horrifying.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair
  • For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’
  • The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words.
  • But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’
  • a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
  • irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media
  • boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago
  • Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality.
  • And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
  • ‘It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’
  • So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.
  • Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people
  • Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’
  • I ask if he thinks all platforms are equally dangerous
  • if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.
  • ‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’
  • If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,
  • ‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why
  • TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’
  • Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
  • why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14
  • we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
  • he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out
  • His third rule: no phones in schools.
  • What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’
  • ‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.
  • Rule one, he says: no smartphones before the age of 14.
  • ‘Give them a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones. They texted each other
  • Rule two: no social media before 16
  • In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).
  • finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.
peterconnelly

Two maps show NATO's growth and Russia's isolation since 1990 - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...wing-isolation-since-1990.html

maps russia isolation nato

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Russia has become increasingly isolated from the rest of Europe over the last 30 years, and maps of the continent illustrate just how drastic the change has been.
  • Russia first attacked Ukraine in 2014, after a civilian uprising ejected a pro-Russia leader from the country. Ukraine sought military training and assistance from Western countries afterward but had not been admitted to NATO.
  • Countries in NATO are bound by treaty to defend each other. Like Ukraine, Finland shares a long border with Russia.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Though Sweden and Finland want to join their Nordic
  • neighbors in NATO,
  • admission
  • could take many months or be blocked entirely.
Javier E

Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-europe-remigration-immigrants

and germany far right europe

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
  • Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities
  • Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.
  • “They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”
  • Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.
  • this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.
  • The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.
  • The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.
  • While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.
  • they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”
  • She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)
  • The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union
  • Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”
  • “The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.
  • “By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”
Javier E

Bernanke review is not about blame but the Bank's outdated practices - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...s-outdated-practices-drlv8vvn0

central bank UK policy history economics

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Bernanke’s 80-page assessment, the result of more than seven months’ work, is the most comprehensive independent analysis of a big central bank’s performance since an inflationary crisis hit the world economy in early 2022. He offers a dozen recommendations for change at the Bank, the strongest of which is for the MPC to begin publishing “alternative scenarios” that show how its inflation forecasts stand up in extreme situations, for example in the face of an energy price shock.
  • The review lays bare how the Bank and its international peers all failed to model the impact of the huge energy price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the disruption in global trade during the pandemic after 2020 and how workers and companies would respond to significant price changes.
  • In choosing Bernanke, one of the most respected central bankers of his generation, to lead the review, the Bank has ensured that his findings will be difficult to ignore. The former Fed chairman carried out more than 60 face-to-face interviews with Bank staff and market participants and sat in on the MPC’s November 2023 forecasting round to assess where the Bank’s forecasts and communication were failing short, from the use of computer models to the role played by “human judgment”.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In his review, Bernanke compared the MPC’s forecasting record with six other central banks — in the Nordic countries, New Zealand, the United States and the eurozone — and found the Bank was particularly bad at understanding dynamics in the jobs market and had consistently forecast far higher unemployment, which had not materialised. Its other errors, on forecasting future inflation and growth, put it largely in the “middle of the pack” with its peers.
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