The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (22 page)

Reclaiming Our Mental Balance

In sum, America has become a media-saturated society, the first in history. Our days are filled with on-screen work; then we spend hours at home each day glued to TV sets, DVD players, video games, Internet chat rooms, and Facebook pages, with the flood of electronic media trumping every other activity and form of social interaction. We are a technology-rich, advertising-fed, knowledge-poor society. The media networks and social networking outlets are owned and operated by enormous business conglomerates that are ever more closely aligned with the political system. The economic self-interest of these corporate giants, and the owners behind them, ensures a relentless stream of corporate messages, personalized advertisements, and deliberate scientific misinformation on subjects such as climate change.

The logic of profit maximization, combined with unprecedented
breakthroughs in information and communications technology, has led to an economy of distraction the likes of which the world has never before seen. The end result is a society of consumer addictions, personal anxieties, growing loneliness in the midst of electronic social networks, and financial distress. This is true of the super-rich as well as the rest of society.

Despite great American affluence, our decisions as consumers of goods, services, and bytes are not delivering the well-being and peace of mind we crave. Americans urgently need to regain our footing. The starting point is that we must recognize the snares that the economy has set for our own psyches. We must begin by reclaiming our balance as individuals, consumers, citizens, and members of society. Let us begin on that task in the next chapter.

PART II
The Path to Prosperity

CHAPTER 9.
The Mindful Society

This chapter and the ones that follow propose some workable steps toward a new American economy, a healthier society, and a more ethical basis for the study and practice of economics itself. These steps start from a simple premise: that the problems of America begin at home, with the choices we are making as individuals. Through clearer thinking, we can become more effective both as individuals and as citizens, reclaiming power from the corporations. The American economy itself continues to be productive and technologically dynamic. The problem is not the breakdown of productivity but the way we are living with that productivity. The relentless drumbeat of consumerism into every corner of our lives has led to extreme shortsightedness, consumer addictions, and the shriveling of compassion. When we are distracted, we allow the lobbyists to run away with power that rightfully belongs to the citizenry. As individuals, we need to regain the balance of our own lives between work and leisure, saving and consumption, self-interest and compassion, individualism and citizenship. As a society, we need to establish the right relationship of markets, politics, and civil society to address the complex challenges of the twenty-first century.

The future belongs not to the Tea Party but to America’s youth, who are the most progressive and diverse part of American society
today. The change will start mainly with the so-called Millennial Generation, those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine in 2010, who are socially connected, Internet-savvy, and searching for a new mode of social involvement and political engagement. Obama was to be their man, but unless he dramatically alters course, he seems more likely to be a transitional figure than a transformative one.

We need deeper changes than those on offer today, changes that restore our personal balance and the foundations of our trust in society. We need a
mindful society
, in which we once again take seriously our own well-being, our relations with others, and the operation of our politics.

The Middle Path

Two of the greatest ethicists in human history, Buddha in the East and Aristotle in the West, hit upon a remarkably similar prescription for the long-term happiness of humanity. “The Middle Path,” said Buddha in the fifth century B.C., would keep humanity balanced between the false allures of asceticism on the one side and pleasure seeking on the other. Two centuries later and half a world away, Aristotle gave his fellow Greeks a similar message, that “moderation in all things” was the key to
eudemonia
, or human fulfillment. Aristotle, like Buddha, sought a path between two more extreme views of his day: the Stoics on one side and the Epicureans on the other.

The essential teaching of both Buddha and Aristotle is that the path of moderation is the key to fulfillment but is hard won and must be pursued through lifelong diligence, training, and reflection. There is nothing simple about moderation: the snares and distractions that lead us to extremes are everywhere. It is easy to become addicted to hyperconsumerism, the search for sensory pleasures, and the indulgence of self-interest, leading to a brief high but long-term unhappiness. It is easy to adopt a self-defeating philosophy of disregard for others. The escape path of asceticism or isolation
from society is no more satisfying. The solution is a middle path, built on the hard work of self-knowledge. Neither Buddha nor Aristotle had illusions about the ease of this middle course. As Aristotle said, “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”
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Ancient ethics, therefore, begins with a sense of fragility—of our psyches and our search for happiness. Each of us is thrust into a world of temptation, desire, and illusion, and we must find a lifelong path in the midst of these allures and traps. All of these insights were already necessary two millennia before TV and Mr. Bernays’s powerful methods of propaganda. How much more vital these messages are today, when much of the economy is organized precisely to set those traps.

The middle path of Buddha and Aristotle is currently challenged by the crude libertarianism of the free-market Right, which holds that the freedom of the individual is the only valid aim of ethics and government. In this crude view, individuals know what is best for themselves and should be left alone, untaxed by the state and unbothered by ethical responsibilities toward others, as long as they don’t cause direct harm to others. These ideas are expressed by the Tea Party movement and by many of America’s richest citizens, who would absolve themselves of any ethical responsibility toward the rest of society.

There are many errors in libertarian philosophy, but the biggest of all is its starting point: that individuals can truly find happiness by being left alone, unburdened by ethical or political responsibilities to others. Buddha and Aristotle knew better. Without accepting social and political responsibilities, the individual cannot actually find fulfillment. Happiness arises not only through the individual’s relationship with his wealth, as some economists simplistically assume, but through his relations with others. A society of compassion, mutual help, and collective decision making is not good just for the poor, who may receive help, but also for the rich, who may give it.

Politics provides an integral part of each individual’s sense of purpose. Remove the role of government, and the individual loses his bearings. There can be no lasting happiness in anarchy. Take away an individual’s moral responsibility, and he or she descends into loneliness and disorientation. Compassion, cooperation, and altruism are essential to human well-being. Being a responsible member of political society—by asking not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country—should therefore not be viewed as a coerced concession of the individual toward society, but as an essential way in which each individual finds personal fulfillment. Our well-being depends fundamentally on our recognizing and nurturing our basic duality: as individuals, with distinctive tastes and aspirations, and as members of a society, with responsibilities to and values shared with others.

America still has time to rescue itself, so great are its resources—human, technological, and natural. It has been running down its wealth, but the wealth remains very high, enough to sustain us with a very high quality of life as we prepare for the future, if we take care to look ahead collectively. For that, however, we will need to escape from the compulsions of the present. First, we will need to break free from the relentless and mindless propagandizing of the media, where the main message is that we should concentrate on shopping and our quest for higher personal income.

We will need, in short, to achieve a new
mindfulness
regarding our needs as individuals and as a society, to find a more solid path to well-being. Mindfulness, taught Buddha, is one of the eight steps on the way to self-awakening. It means an alertness and quiet contemplation of our circumstances, putting aside greed and distress. Through sustained effort, mindfulness leads to insight and to an escape from our useless cravings.

That mindfulness should start with each of us making the effort to regain control of our personal judgments as individuals who must balance consumption and saving, work and leisure, individualism and membership in society. Our mindfulness should then extend to
a more considered understanding of our social relationships and responsibilities: as workers, citizens, and members of the community. Mindfulness, I would suggest, is crucial in eight dimensions of our lives:

• Mindfulness of self:
  personal moderation to escape mass consumerism
  
• Mindfulness of work:
  the balancing of work and leisure
  
• Mindfulness of knowledge:
  the cultivation of education
  
• Mindfulness of others:
  the exercise of compassion and cooperation
  
• Mindfulness of nature:
  the conservation of the world’s ecosystems
  
• Mindfulness of the future:
  the responsibility to save for the future
  
• Mindfulness of politics:
  the cultivation of public deliberation and shared values for collective action through political institutions
  
• Mindfulness of the world:
  the acceptance of diversity as a path to peace
  

Beyond the Craving for Wealth

Mindfulness of self means that we once again take time to understand the sources of our own happiness. Americans today routinely assume that higher take-home pay and consumption of goods are the keys to happiness and therefore that tax cuts are the quintessence of well-being. Yet experience and reflection tell us something very different. The greatest benefits of higher income accrue to the poorest households, to enable them to meet their unmet basic needs. For the middle class and especially for the rich, many factors other than income are far more important for personal happiness. Good governance, more trust in the community, a happier married life,
more time for friends and colleagues, and meaningful and secure work all rank as far more important than another few percent of personal income. Yet many of these sources of long-term happiness can be achieved only through
collective action
, including politics, not through individual decision making in the marketplace. Even more telling, many of the uses of personal income today—for television viewing, fast foods, cigarettes, gambling, long commutes, and the like—are behaviors that often bring “buyer’s remorse” (a regret about the level of consumption and a desire to cut back) rather than true satisfaction.

There is also a huge difference between having more income (or wealth) and relentlessly craving more income. More income—if properly deployed—can be a source of personal happiness and security, but devoting one’s energies in a narrow-minded way to gaining it can be a source of endless frustration and unhappiness. The difference could not be more important. Having more income gives a mild, and mostly temporary, boost to satisfaction, holding other things constant. Aggressively orienting one’s life toward becoming rich, however, leads to prolonged and measurable unhappiness. Individuals with a high “materialist” orientation, for whom earning and spending money are a central aim of life, are systematically far less happy and secure than nonmaterialists.

The good news is that only a modest level of income is needed to meet basic needs. Once a society achieves that level of income across the society, there is the opportunity to refocus many of the society’s energies toward sources of well-being that can’t be reached by the market alone. Consider life expectancy, a key measure of well-being. By the time a society reaches a per capita income of around $3,000, life expectancy is generally 70 years or higher (compared with 78.3 years in the United States in 2009). Many countries much poorer than the United States either exceed or are very close to the U.S. life expectancy. Chile, for example, with a GDP per capita of $9,400 in 2009, roughly one-fifth of America’s at $46,400, has a life expectancy of 78.7 years, slightly higher than in the United States. Costa
Rica, Greece, South Korea, and Portugal are considerably poorer than the United States in per capita GDP, but have life expectancies that are higher.
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Similarly, though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States (as we saw in
chapter 2
) but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration:

Basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.
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