One of Alexis de Tocqueville’s more memorable observations from his tour of America in the 1830s has come in for extensive use in our current electoral season. “The greatness of America,” the French aristocrat opined, “lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” No exalted City on the Hill exceptionalist tropes from that astringent observer; in his eyes, American democracy was a far humbler, indeed more workmanly project, the success or failure of which he believed would be instructive to other aspiring democracies, including his own native France.
In addition to its striking contrast with today’s bloated campaign sloganeering about American greatness, Tocqueville’s characterization of the true strength of American democracy has proved remarkably prophetic. America has undergone many repairs, some quite extensive, and one of which proved nearly fatal. To say that the current challenges are as great as those that led to the firing of mortars on Fort Sumter would be hyperbolic, but it is not wrong to say that the cultural resources we bring to the tasks of our moment are greatly diminished. The deep beliefs, commitments, and ideals that were once shared by Americans, at least as objects of common aspiration, are now either missing or hollowed out. The causes of this are many, of course, including the decline of religious faith and observance, the hyper-marketization of all values, the loss of trust in once highly regarded institutions such as the press and higher education, conflicted understandings of science, disregard for facts, and even the relativization of truth. Some of the effects of this are painfully obvious. The Fox News viewer and the MSNBC viewer could not be more foreign to each other. But at deeper levels we now inhabit different planets in a quantum cosmos in which each observer’s position determines the reality from which facts are formed. When former presidential aide Kellyanne Conway claimed that the Trump White House was entitled to “alternative facts,” she was merely asserting a now-universal entitlement. None of this bodes well for a society or a nation whose functioning depends on reasoned compromise among reasonably well-informed citizens.
The essays that make up this issue’s theme—“In Need of Repair”—begin with social theorist James Davison Hunter’s “Culture Wars: The Endgame,” a sobering diagnosis of what characterizes our common culture today: “It is not a culture rooted in a shared positive vision of what America is, should be, can be. Exactly the opposite. Our emerging common culture is chillingly nihilistic.” Describing the effects of this cultural turn on our politics, Hunter notes that “nearly all partisans share a common culture rooted in identitarian tribalism, fueled by ressentiment, and guided not by differences over shared ideals but a fervid determination to annihilate the opposition—indeed, the evil enemy—in the never-ending contest over position and power.”
In this “time when ‘hanging together’ as Americans is proving to be a huge challenge,” as historian Olivier Zunz writes in his essay “The Age of the Average—And What Its Loss May Mean for the Future of Democracy,” it is useful to recall how something close to the American Dream was realized in the decades following World War II. Without idealizing that period, and even acknowledging its enduring social inequities, Zunz explains that “when we invoke the average, we often think of compromise, conformity, even mediocrity, but I do not mean this at all. I want to retrace how, not so long ago, in this age of the average, an increasingly educated citizenry invested in multiple communities of inquiry. Are we capable of doing the same in our disunity—and also under a new scientific paradigm?”
One of the challenges of operating under our new scientific paradigm is the dominance of digital technology, a dominance so ubiquitous that it leaves its users, as Zunz observes, “in danger of becoming passive recipients of algorithmically generated outcomes.” Science and technology writer Nicholas Carr makes clear just how acute that danger is in “All the Little Data: What It Means to See the World as Information.” Although we talk endlessly about Big Data, Carr claims that “it’s the little data, at least as much as the big stuff, that shapes our sense of ourselves and the world around us as we click and scroll through our days.… In coming years, as digital sensors proliferate, as more and more objects turn into computer interfaces, and as AI gets better at reading our interests and intentions, the ever-swelling data stream may become our dominant train of thought, our all-purpose apparatus for the work of sense-making and self-making.”
More striking evidence of the dominance of the digital is the increasing submission of one of our essential institutions—health care—to the rulings and dictates of algorithms, particularly under the newest medical paradigm, called “precision medicine.” As ethicist Paul Scherz details in “The Pathologies of Precision Medicine,” this new approach is “moving medicine away from the guiding imperatives of patient care and the cure of illness to an overriding concern with the prediction of health risk.” In addition to often turning healthy people into anxious “patients-in-waiting,” algorithmically derived projections of a possible illness or condition increasingly displace the judgment of the clinician. “If the practitioner rejects the machine’s recommendation and the patient suffers an adverse outcome, as some will in any case, the practitioner will be open to greater scrutiny,” Scherz writes. “In the face of such threats from management and courts, practitioners will become ever more likely to acquiesce to what the system predicts.”
The United States, like much of the rest of the industrialized world, is contending with the collapse, or at least the dysfunction, of many of its vital systems and institutions, from our penal system (addressed in Hedgehog Review managing editor Leann Davis Alspaugh’s probing interview with the celebrated prison journalist John J. Lennon) to our approach to philanthropy (as sociologist Aaron Horvath argues in “Philanthropy by the Numbers”) to the less tangible but no less vital institution that we collectively call humor (see critic Martha Bayles’s “The Humor Is Almost Lost on Us?”). For his part, social entrepreneur Elias Crim in “Toward a New Politics of Care,” asks whether we are able “to reimagine an economy premised not on waste but on care” and even more, to discover “a new and ecumenical zeal for tikkun olam, the repair of the world, and the new politics that would come with it.”
At the bottom of each of our system dysfunctions is a distinctive cultural disorder emerging from the many pressures of our rapidly modernizing world. But as in the case of another institution in need of repair—organized religion (see political philosopher Firmin DeBrabander’s essay “The Vast Dechurching and the Paradox of Christianity’s Decline”)—it is often when the weaknesses of our systems are most exposed that we can begin to restore and cultivate what is most valuable about them.