What Kind of Country Do We Want?

This article, from the New York Review of Books, is excellent in my opinion. I know the various crises of the times discourage profound thought about broad, societal issues, but I think the author, Marilynne Robinson, manages to encapsulate an underlying malaise that is related to everything that is happening right now, including the simmering anger and fear we are seeing. The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated a problem we already had.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/what-kind-of-country-do-we-want/

There are so many important things said in this fairly long article, it's hard to focus on just one, but I can't paste the whole thing here, so I'll limit it to a few segments.

...In recent decades, which have been marked by continuous, disruptive change and by technological innovation that has reached assertively into every area of life, a particular economics has become a Theory of Everything, subordinating all other considerations to some form of cost-benefit analysis that silently insinuates special definitions of both cost and benefit. If neither of these is precisely monetizable—calories might have to stand in for currency in primordial transactions—personal advantage, again subject to a highly special definition, is seen as the one thing at stake in human relations. The profit motive has been implanted in our deepest history as a species, in our very DNA...

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...All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this...

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...Never mind. We are left with the certainty that a civilization can be wholly described by its economy, and that ours is exhaustively and triumphally capitalist—making anomalous the many well-established features of the culture to which the word “public” might attach: schools, lands, and, more generally, public works, public services, the public interest...

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The article discusses the change in the purpose of public education from producing educated citizens to vocational training for companies that are unwilling to invest in educating their own workforce (after all, it's much more profitable to have a disposable workforce that can be hired and fired at will). Consider that much educational reform in recent decades has been promoted by people like Bill Gates. Of course, corporations did not amass their wealth overnight, and short-term thinking doesn't generally lead to long-term profitability either.

The cult of cost/benefit—of the profit motive made granular, cellular—not only trivializes but also attacks whatever resists its terms. Classic American education is ill-suited to its purposes and is constantly under pressure to reform—that is, to embrace as its purpose the training of workers who will be competitive in the future global economy. What this means, of course, is that universities and students themselves should absorb the cost to industry of training its workforce. Since no one knows what the industries of the future will be, a wrong guess about appropriate training could be costly, which means it would be all the smarter, from a certain point of view, to make colleges and students bear the risk. If this training produces skills that are relevant to future needs, their cost to the employer will be lowered by the fact that such skills will be widely available. In any case, the relative suitability of workers will be apparent in their school history, so industry will be spared the culling of ineffective employees. Those who fail to make the cut will be left with the pleasures of a technical education that is always less useful to them, skills that will be subject to obsolescence as industries change. Certain facts go unnoticed in all this. The great wealth that is presented as endorsing an American way of doing things was amassed over a very long period of time...

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There is a lot more in this article, but it articulates something I've been wondering and worrying about for a long time. We as a society have increasingly embraced frugality and a shift in the distribution of wealth away from workers, all in the guise of efficiency and "running things like a business." The system of higher education in this country is both a victim and a perpetrator of this, as administrators increasingly "streamline" operations and attempt to discourage or cut programs and approaches to study that are deemed inefficient. I certainly see it at the community college, and the shift to online forced by Covid-19 is greatly accelerating this. But this push to make colleges and universities more like businesses isn't just coming from without, from the business community itself, but from these programs within universities. Every other program of study, from the arts to the hard sciences, are being affected.

Other public institutions are affected too, of course, and the prevailing argument is "we just can't afford it" anymore, and that we will cease to be competitive if we support a robust public sector and pay our workers wages that are comparable (in real terms) to those we once did. Yet our GNP has been growing steadily over the past several decades (with brief and temporary declines during recessions). The GNP will likely recover after Covid-19 too, but I am betting salaries and our public institutions will not. More economic insecurity among the working, and even professional, classes paired with a reduced social safety net will amplify the social and political divide that is already plaguing our country.

So, as always, the question is what can we do about this?

...All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one. The authenticity of our understanding must be demonstrated in our attempting to act justly even at steep cost to ourselves. We can do this as individuals and as a nation. Someday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful.

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