Readers: The following is from the final galley proof of my forthcoming book. Four best-selling authors have graciously agreed to take a look. Cross your fingers for killer blurbs!
Thanks must go to my amazing publishing team:
, Jennie Cohen, Ryan Scheife and Jess LaGreca. This can not be done alone, this publishing thing.If you or someone you know is a book industry pro or book reviewer on Netgalley, my book is on the platform.
And now…your free excerpt…!
Ch. 34 The Rights Enabled Consumer In Social Retreat
Since the civil rights era, many Americans have discussed the “individual” in the public sphere as a rights-bearing entity, a bundle of rights. At the time I gave this speech, in 1990, very few beyond the religious right talked about obligations to society or community, even in the simple way of John F. Kennedy at his 1961 inauguration—“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
The continuing fight for equality of treatment and opportunity for ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQ individuals, immigrants, non-English-speaking residents, and others fuels our modern concern with expanding the right to be an autonomous, equal, and equally empowered citizen. It’s a massive project of inclusion.
For many of the disempowered subpopulations I just listed, discrimination and hate speech make them suspicious of the state, the police, large pools of strangers, and even groups as small as their own neighborhoods and school districts.
In addition, as I’ve narrated at various points in this book, escaping the suffocating lifestyle constraints of traditional families, towns, and religious groups is something we usually celebrate in the name of individual freedom and autonomy.
For the stigmatized, especially, the local community is always at risk of being the source of their biggest problems in life—hate, violence, and denial of opportunity.
For those who define the individual primarily as an autonomous, rights-seeking being, this all makes sense. But it is also part of a tragic view of communities in America as historically, irrevocably flawed. Community becomes disappointing, hypocritical, brutal, and full of betrayal.
The result is a persistent, understandable belief: The local community and society tend to infringe on my freedoms and my right to autonomous movement, achievement, and expression.
So, why try to rebuild it?
Some members of stigmatized groups find it more sensible to retreat socially into their families and carefully curated, narrow communities of “people exactly like me.” And among the stigmatized I would also include poorly educated white people shut out of acceptance among the urban elite (even when they are wealthy). This tribal tendency is incredibly normal human behavior—curating circles with minimal lifestyle variation. But it is a defensive form of tribalism, a reaction to a broader culture that doesn’t take their suffering seriously as a communal responsibility to solve. Insensitivity toward the problems of minority groups is an extension of our insensitivity to the average stranger’s problems. Americans largely hate listening to the failure of groups of self-described “victims” in a hyper-individualistic society. It annoys us because it exposes the lie behind our way of life—that individualism as a way of living ever had mass applicability.
Ironically, the more we are left to fend for ourselves, the more most people seek to find the smallest possible tribe to nestle inside of psychologically. Only the white, male, affluent neurodivergents like me seem happy to fight alone for our fortune. It’s easy for us to fall for the fallacy of self-reliance.
At the same time as the civil rights movement, the entire American middle class accelerated the overthrow of conservative, ancient human ideas that have limited human autonomy for millennia in both classical civilizations and tribal communities (marriage is mandatory, having kids is mandatory, divorce should be mediated by elders, helping family is compulsory, taking care of babies is women’s work, etc.). And Americans did this incredibly fast as a society.
This delinking from tradition and community permitted the appearance of something else—the fully realized, autonomous consumer.
This leads me to the other concept that individual Americans act on in their everyday lives—the individual as a bundle of consumer preferences. It is the inner-directed individualist playing with their own desires versus the external individualist fighting for inclusion and respect in the public sphere. This concept of the individual as a bundle of consumer preferences is absent from most philosophical conceptions and most academic political science as well but it is real and inextricably linked to a postindustrial consumer society dependent economically on citizens buying virtually everything they need and even more, everything they simply want.
If we combine both latent concepts, we see the American individual as a rights-enabled consumer interested in defending her lifestyle autonomy against any confining claims by family or community. These two concepts love each other deeply because, without socioeconomic autonomy, we are extremely limited in what and how we can consume.
The result of training up a nation of rights-enabled consumers is a bewildering number of lifestyle combinations I discussed at the beginning of the book. I suspect no museum is large enough to “display” them all. And they are most likely increasing in number as time goes on.
One major result of lifestyle diversity is the emergence of market niches to serve them—everything from black television, road cycling and gluten-free eaters to LGBTQ travel, nightclubs, and even nudist resorts.
More important than all this lifestyle diversity is what it yields in our everyday encounters with strangers and new acquaintances—at work, on the sidelines of our kid’s soccer games, and at the bar.
It is much harder now than two hundred years ago to bump into a stranger near your home and be “on the same page” about most lifestyle decisions (marriage timing, sexual orientation, home value, who is the dominant partner in the relationship, car preferences, sexual practices, interest in extended family, recreational passions, TV preferences, etc.). You will quickly bump into a choice the stranger has made that contradicts one you have made. I think most of us know the modern problem of making lifestyle assumptions about new strangers in our lives. Oops. We get it wrong very quickly.
Some of those who recognize this awkward truth caused by lifestyle diversification also remain confused about how many “contravening” lifestyle choices a new acquaintance can have . . .
Before we don’t feel like continuing the conversation
Before we don’t feel like having them over for a beer
Before we don’t feel like spending the two hundred hours or so it takes to form a close friendship
And does it matter that we may increasingly bump into people with lifestyle choices we don’t like, agree with, or just don’t understand (e.g., reading romance fiction, practicing nudism, transitioning to another gender, becoming a Substack author instead of doing premed, continuing to drink Bud Light, single parenting, seeking random hookups, engaging in polyamory)?
The list you just read deliberately had examples on a continuum of triviality (your continuum probably varies from mine). But all these lifestyle choices are non-majoritarian. Most Americans don’t make these choices. Many of these non-majoritarian choices can easily hide behind the veil of privacy and concealment we learn to don early in our lives.
A group of us defiantly believe that our sacred veil of privacy is essential to getting along with all this lifestyle diversity (trivial or not). Don’t ask, don’t tell has quietly become our de facto code of stranger interaction.
By not communicating much about our lifestyle behaviors, we can skim the surface with colleagues, even with some of our weak friends. We avoid the awkwardness of “too much information.”
I’m not here to divulge research on how tolerant we all are of lifestyle diversity in America. That’s a huge empirical task I leave to large teams. I doubt there is a hidden tribe of Super Tolerants who Buddhistically accept all, no matter what they divulge about their behavior. There is little in human history to suggest we tend to behave this way when encountering lifestyle diversity that suggests some of our most basic choices (i.e., marital practices) are optional.
Yet, I want to raise a troubling question for which you may not be ready.
Is it just too easy in modern America to write off someone for a bit of lifestyle diversity you disagree with, don’t like, or don’t understand?
I think it’s easy to do this. I’ve even done it myself. It is amazingly easy with a Facebook stranger trolling your post. Still easy with a cousin. And even with a colleague.
I suspect this ease of dismissal over lifestyle divergence is one reason we have fewer close friends than ever. But my larger concern is that urban communities unravel if we cannot even tolerate the lifestyle diversity implicit in what Robin Dunbar calls the outer rings of our 150- max social connections. These “weak ties” are invaluable to us as social actors and connect us to everyone else’s social networks.
If we become accustomed to dismissing strangers and weak ties too quickly, without trying to accept and include them, we retreat to our island of three to four close relationships inside a potentially narrowly conceived racial, ethnic, and gender tribe of our own making. And we just stay there. Or we spend more time alone, consuming media. This degree of retreat is also something incredibly new in human societies. Few members of the premodern, preliterate tribes I’ve studied lived in groups of less than fifty to one hundred nearby relatives, people who were often within earshot all day long.
Our society, on the other hand, allows the disgruntled to live alone, collect social security, and watch TV for years.
This kind of extreme social retreat works against feeling obligated to serve a broader community. Because to feel that obligation, we need to accept and tolerate minor to moderate lifestyle differences on a regular basis. To serve the community, we must believe those with other lifestyle behaviors deserve our aid. We simply must be able to be obligated to the annoying. Isn’t this what marriage becomes if we’re honest with ourselves? If we can love the annoying spouse, why have we become so stingy with that love?
The more we make things like drinking Bud Light or single parenting deserving of social rejection, the more we turn down our scope of empathy in an era when, ironically, we need more of it than ever to stay connected enough to make local communities function.
A consumer society of rights-seeking individuals tending toward lazy social retreat and dilettantish consumption does nothing to build empathetic communities. Instead, it encourages the faux tribalism we see all around us but downplays its shallowness as normal. Then, we all return to our Netflix binging.
This leaves an alienated society of seemingly autonomous individuals competitively choosing their way through life (the next promotion, the next relationship, the next potluck, the next Netflix series to binge, the next new consumer object). Yet, the more lifestyle intolerant we are, the more we’re vulnerable emotionally to the consequences of a layoff, a failed relationship, or rejection by a child following a wildly divergent lifestyle.
Hate and tyranny love weakened families and communities. Dictators love societies full of people who focus their days on buying things and consuming media more than feeling obligated to interact more and more deeply in their social networks. Such individuals are defenseless against a corrupt state.
Cycles of reciprocity sustain local communities, preferably face-to face ones. Unidirectional philanthropy and charity do nothing to keep them going. This “aid” separates people experiencing poverty from the well-off.
The obligation to get enmeshed in your local community is the most challenging thing to ask of Americans today. And it is not restricted to helping people experiencing poverty (a difficult thing for the inexperienced to do well).
It starts with your friends and colleagues. And your close family members. We must find our way back to being reciprocally obligated to these folks first. That’s probably all we need to do to jump-start local communities, thanks to the overlapping nature of all social networks on the planet.
Added Thoughts
Social retreat occurs not by reclusion into caves. It occurs when we prefer individually curated consumption over socially engaged work and play.
Remote work has only accelerated inadvertent social retreat among today’s professional elite, the ones who vote most routinely and tend to fund both political extremes.
This tragic irony is not inevitable. But, we have to overcome the forces of retreat. They are the forces of seduction and temptation, not repression. This only makes our retreat more tragic and inevitable.
Our inability to stop checking mobile phone app feeds puts the lie to any notions of pure self-control. “The average adult checks their mobile phone every 12 minutes.”
Humans aren’t built for self-control. We evolved for social control. We are calmer within the bosom of social control mechanisms. This primordial urge is why we also fall for dictators again and again. And again.
But in a nation experiencing greater and greater social retreat, we are escaping the grasp of traditional social control mechanisms like shame, accountability, mutual respect, reputation, etc.
The trailer for my new book is out…press the play button…you know you want to…:)
Nice trailer -- very cool idea, and a provocative summary of your thesis. As I mentioned in our conversation, I think you have rural America pegged incorrectly, especially in statements like this: "And among the stigmatized I would also include poorly educated white people shut out of acceptance among the urban elite (even when they are wealthy)."
As you know, I am a native Montanan, and while there are large pockets of poverty and desperation there that might fit your characterization, there are also many viable communities. How diverse they are is perhaps another question, and some of that goes back to how Western states prohibited slavery from their inception, less for moral reasons and more to protect the plantation economy from colonizing the frontier. It's probably fair also to say that problematic attitudes about race persist in these places, too.
But the people I know in Montana who live in healthy community with one another are not all poorly educated. Many of them have built viable economic models for themselves in the void left by corporate timber and mining companies, and those models are now far more durable than the old boom/bust economies were. Individualism is baked into the core of Montana identity, and so there is a deep ethic of personal responsibility. But I don't think that the low tolerance for lifestyle difference is nearly as evident. I might be saying this with some rose-tinted lenses as a summer interloper who hasn't lived yearround in the community for more than twenty years. But I know that if I were to move back, I'd have a very different experience than the one I'm having now in central Pennsylvania, where the behaviors map quite accurately onto your framework.
Great piece James and a reminder to dive into your book you so graciously sent me. I agree with Josh on the one element that I’m currently experiencing a robust and engaged experience in my own local community—it’s part of why I remain here despite the weather and much of the political climate that I so freely disagree with.
Can’t wait to read more.