Four Americas: Getting to the Bottom

Collaboration is radical not compromise

Thinking involves categorizing. And our categories make a difference as to how we see, construct our world, and act. An excerpt of a book by George Packer in the Atlantic Magazine presents four categories to define the factions in which Americans divide themselves in order to provide some insight into the polarization that threatens American democracy. “Ideal types” are a tool sociologists use to understand a social order by distinguishing its components. Packer’s four categories do that and make us think.

Packer is searching for a reconcilition among four American tribes in order to solve the debilitating divisions in American society among Free Americans, Real Americans, Smart Americans, and Just Americans. He suggests that Free and Real Americans are the base of the Republican Party while Smart and Just Americans are the base of the Democratic Party. But I’m thinking that cutting it this way won’t “cut it.” And neither do many of the categories that pundits use, liberal/conservative, socialist/capitalist, left/right, classical/progressive. These categories made into the shields and swords of opponents, conceal much more than they reveal. They divide much more than they unify. Nevertheless, I think it useful to discuss Packer’s tribes and critique them to find a more unifying approach to reconciliation.

William Galston in reviewing Packer’s book describes and critiques the meaning of the factions. The idea and passion for equality underlies them all. Yet I suggest that it’s the idea of freedom that’s of issue in Free America, the idea of righteousness in Real America, the idea of happiness in Smart America, and the idea of power in Just America. By probing the true meanings of these ideas and acting on them, rather than balancing the factions which claim them, may be a better way to go. In other words, the preferred strategy is not compromising with error. It is pursuing a search for truth over the error in all four factions.

It might be useful to take Packer’s categories and discuss and critique them to discover the fallacies and the possibilities for human community ineach of them.

1. The error of the “don’t tread on me” Free (I prefer Libertarian) Americans is the definition of liberty as the absence of boundaries — especially those of others or society on me. Ironically such a negative definition achieves the Marxist, Ayn Rand aspiration of the “withering away of the State.” It is the fallacy of individualism and, as most social ethicists would argue, contrary to human nature and condition. Putting human individual self-interest over public interest is the “original sin” underlying human cruelty and self-destruction. But as Packer points out (as well as most social ethicists and theologians) true freedom requires boundaries including the convening of a public without discrimination or exclusion by ascriptive characteristics to set those boundaries. The ability to create, participate in, and shape the polis or political entity through speech and action, is the essence of freedom founded on the human capacity to engage and assume the perspectives of others. It is a fundamental principle and ideal of the human endeavor.
2. The error of Real (I prefer Jingoistic) Americans is what has been called the fallacy of the absolute and naïve realism. This is the confusing of our expressions (e.g., propositions, doctrines, symbols, beliefs, memes) with the reality we intend in our world. In theological terms it is idolatry — a lack of distinction between symbols and reality. This error neglects or denies the relational aspect of human being and thinking. Naïve realism is thus connected to individualism and the ascriptive tradition as in #1. It is also a failure to recognize the diversity of belief systems and cultural memes and the fundamental capacity of human being to know reality through human symbolic behavior. Naïve realism contradicts the teaching in classical thought of the difference between substance and accident and of analogical vs univocal thinking. It underlies the resentment of others or outsiders and the plurality of lifestyles and beliefs. Naïve realism becomes the enemy of critical thinking that recognizes and identifies the perspectival, relational, discursive, and never complete aspect of human thinking
3. The error of Smart (I prefer Arrogant) Americans is elitism, disrespect of those considered inferior, based on a narrow notion of happiness or a definition of success as wealth. Many are born in circumstances where education is valued, where books and study were encouraged at home and school, and where a well-paying job or career is expected and usually available through family and school connections. The error is in the definition of happiness as a private achievement of material gain rather than a public achievement of well-being. These opportunities and advantages set them apart physically and psychologically from those who are manual laborers and especially the working poor who often have a wisdom and through an education through common sense — the sense of being in and for the commons. Public happiness means the ability to participate and draw recognition, in the shaping of community and the public sphere with or without wealth. The fallacy is the division of winners and losers and basing that judgment on the quantity of private property.
4. Just (e.g. Righteous) Americans are those who through religious revelation, higher education, and/or material wealth are true believers in their superiority, their convictions, and their constructs for a perfect society — which they might describe as the Kingdom of God, social democracy, anti-capitalist or anti-socialist. Their fallacy is in their understanding of power as hierarchical and forceful. They confuse power with authority, the ability to do violence, and/or the accumulation of wealth. As such they make power a means to an exterior end rather than the condition of human being, freedom, and fulfilment.

These fallacies in the notion of freedom, morality, happiness, and power are due to ignorance philosophers teach. Ignorance is dispelled through education and education is achieved in the interaction of truth seekers in the marketplace of ideas and the personal struggle with their own beliefs.

Religious or spiritual teachers often consider the state of fallacy a “sin” — which is a translation for “missing the mark” or pursuing a path to perdition. To overcome personal sin and the sin of the world, spiritual directors encourage humility, confession, and service to others.

These are not so different perceptions and prescriptions. Socratic education is getting beyond the shadow ideas by knowing that we do not know for certain and working with others to understand. Religious practice of humility means getting closer to the ground and seeing the world as the poor and children see it. Confession is admitting the missing of the mark in one’s own person and in one’s own world. Both philosophic and spiritual teachers search with others for ways of life that achieve true freedom, righteousness, happiness, and power for humanity.

I do not identify with or see myself or many others in Packer’s four tribes. I am not looking for the compromise of balance among these tribes. And I think that the division in factions leads to false conclusions, defensiveness, and leaves a lot of us out. I am looking for collaboration based on the human experience in and beyond beliefs and dogmas, one that discovers a unity in plurality, communion through community, dynamic tension in human here and now presence which is a transcendence that is accessible to all.

The four or more tribes will reconcile not by holding absolute their stories and origin myths over and above the others but by renewing the common human story so that it can account for and include the others and thus transcend them all. Recent scientific historians, philosophers, and artists who try to tell the “whole” story of a people, nation, or humanity with all its dark and bright episodes to rediscover the “soul of the people” or the unifying “principles” of human existence or the “better angels of our nature”

I feel that the way beyond the conflict is not by joining one or more of the tribes and proselytizing their stories, but by seeking the shared humanity that clarifies what freedom, morality, happiness, power, and yes, truth and equality are.

Ultimately politics, the shared activity of community building in specific times and places, will shape the unifying story for our nation and world. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to community organizing know that the effort starts not at the top in some authoritative revelation or dictation. It begins at the bottom in the here and now with those with whom we have been thrown. It begins with listening to and appreciation of others’ stories. It begins with sharing the experiences we’ve had, our relationships with family, friends, mentors, our sufferings, desires, and victories in life, all the things that make us who we are. This simple listening will lead to common understanding and social action to fulfill our shared destiny to which our Universe calls its creatures. It will challenge our ideologies and beliefs, form local publics, places where we can hold ourselves and each other to account. It will transform us from patients to agents, from objects and things to conscious subjects in the creation of our world.

We have been given the capacity to interact, to engage, to learn, to actually undergo other persons’ symbolic activities, their mode of painting the world, their desires and drives for meaning, their hopes for the future. That capacity is who we are. That drive is what overcomes the fallacies of individualism, of the absolute, of objectivism, and of righteousness. It propels us beyond the tribes. the parties, the factions, the dogmas, the creeds to a story of humanity in process towards integrity in diversity, community in individuality, personal fulfilment through social action.

We start at the bottom — at the ground, with the people and places, here and now.