The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [72]
Reviving Compassion
The most difficult challenge in America today is mindfulness of others. The social safety net is frayed. The poor are suffering while the politicians discuss cutting the social safety net even further. Mindfulness of others is typically far stronger within an in-group than across racial or ethnic divides. Religious fundamentalists, for example, are more likely to harbor racist sentiments than are adherents to mainline religious denominations. Sociologists have long surmised that the greater racism among white evangelical Protestants reflects the stronger in-group bonds within fundamentalist religious families and communities.9 The problem has been exacerbated by the residential stratification of the society. As we have noted, the nation has increasingly sorted its communities according to race, class, and even political ideology. Any kind of realistic understanding of the lives of “different” others has suffered accordingly.
I have already discussed the American “poverty trap.” The result is a system of handouts, in which the poor are not helped enough to overcome poverty but just barely enough to survive in poverty. Thus, a society that disdains handouts ends up living by them rather than promoting true solutions with lasting value.
Instead of these endless meager handouts and ancillary high social costs (such as crime and punishment), a society truly mindful of others would address the needs of the poor in a way that attempts to end the poverty trap rather than simply to react to it. Yet in the short term that would require more public funding so that poor children of this generation could enjoy the benefits of a healthful diet, quality preschool and public school, and assured access to higher education enjoyed by the children of more affluent households. They would then be much more likely to grow up with higher skills and incomes, able to impart those same benefits to their own children. The vicious circle of intergenerational poverty could thereby be ended or at least greatly attenuated. The increased funding would prove to be temporary, mainly for this generation of poor children. Their children would not need the same degree of help. The long-term costs of ending poverty would almost surely be far lower than the status quo of simply “managing” poverty.
Mindfulness of others goes far beyond the question of alleviating poverty. Americans, we have seen, have retreated from the public square to the private space, often to watch TV for hours each day in individual bedrooms, not even as a family. We have become a country of strangers. And that estrangement is accompanied by falling trust. We are, in the words of the sociologist Bob Putnam, “hunkering down,” especially in the major cities, marked by ethnic groups that don’t know and don’t trust one another.10 Markets cannot overcome the distrust. Indeed, markets have facilitated the sorting. We need new social norms and more participatory political processes—such as greater democratic decision making within local communities—to get strangers talking and working together once again.
Addressing the Ecological Overshoot
Throughout human history, ethicists and gurus have appealed to humanity to respect nature as the irreplaceable font of life and indeed to understand human destiny as part of the web of life. When the vast majority of humanity lived as farmers, the vital role of nature was obvious. The harvesting of rainwater, the cleaning of irrigation canals, and the replenishment of soil nutrients all meant the difference between life and death. Natural climatic variations, such as prolonged droughts, often spelled the downfall of vast civilizations. Cities and entire regions had to be abandoned as life-giving waters dried up.
Our age is fundamentally different in two regards. First, today’s global society is much further removed from nature than in the past.