Through the widest lens of history, America since the 1980s looks like the most golden of golden ages. The peace and prosperity of this era is unparalleled compared to the rest of the world and the history of our species. Americans became healthier, better fed, longer-lived, safer, sent fewer young people off to war and forged one of humankind\u2019s greatest technological revolutions.<\/p>\n
But through the narrow lens of our everyday lives, the picture has felt different and tougher. Social science shows that Americans on the whole have found it harder to garner contentment, connection and optimism during these prosperous years \u2014 and it has felt that way.<\/p>\n
This fluke of modernity has come to be called the prosperity paradox: beyond minimum level of material security and means, human contentment and happiness has not increased in proportion to increased material well-being \u2014 income, wealth, consumer options, luxury and \u201cstuff.\u201d This phenomenon isn\u2019t actually local or recent. It began sometime after World War I and has afflicted all advanced industrial countries to varying degrees.<\/p>\n
Despite wheelbarrows full of statistics that prove that humans have never had it so good, we don\u2019t feel so good.<\/p>\n
We are now coping with an extreme political reaction to the progress paradox. The period that symbolically began with Ronald\u2019s Reagan\u2019s declaration of \u201cmorning in America\u201d feels like a series of nightmares in America. Americans who are terrified of Barack Obama and others terrified of Donald Trump are equally discontent.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s rise has been understood as the irate response of America\u2019s largest single identity group, white working- and middle-class people. They feel they have suffered as economic inequality has ballooned because of the corruption and warped values of America\u2019s professional, educated and political elites. There is truth to this, but it is truth seen through a narrow lens.<\/p>\n
We know this because we know that this kind of discontent comes from much more than a lack of material well-being or economic capital. What matters much more to acquiring satisfaction is social capital \u2014 the web of our personal relationships, connections to kin, ties to community and binds to institutions and traditions.<\/p>\n
So far, the tragedy of modern life is that it has become harder to accumulate social capital, not easier.<\/p>\n
American historians, social scientists and artists began to understand the assault on social capital after the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, the violent unrest over civil rights, segregation, Vietnam and then the corruption of Watergate.<\/p>\n
For a time, Americans really did buy the picture of the post-World War II years as a golden era, ushered in by the Greatest Generation, Americans who learned through war that we\u2019re all in it together.<\/p>\n
That picture cracked up by the mid-1960s. Books like \u201cThe Man in the Gray Flannel Suit\u201d and \u201cThe Lonely Crowd\u201d captured the oppressive conformity and sterility of the times felt even by the \u201chaves\u201d in society. At a stunning pace, Americans rejected traditional organized religion, traditional family structures, value systems from their ancestors and the codes of capitalism. By the 1960s, many of America\u2019s \u201chave-nots\u201d were in full rebellion over segregation, poverty, women\u2019s rights, gay rights and Vietnam.<\/p>\n
As the smoke from the 1960s cleared, a few visionaries saw a social crisis. One was historian Christopher Lasch. His famous book, \u201cThe Culture of Narcissism,\u201d argued that Americans were floundering to replace the rejected old, shared and inherited belief systems. Americans increasingly turned to me-centric, ready-made pop therapies, cults, evangelisms, self-help doctrines and increasingly partisan or parochial political factions. None of this worked very well.<\/p>\n
Then a political scientist, Robert Putnam, wrote \u201cBowling Alone,\u201d a book that documented the swift decline of the community institutions Americans leaned on to garner social capital and fend of isolation: churches, booster clubs, Girl Scout troops, PTAs, and, of course, bowling leagues. He argued that the invisible infrastructure of organic communities was falling apart.<\/p>\n
I tried to write the story of this strand of thinking about America\u2019s spiritual challenge in a book titled, \u201cWhy We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium.\u201d I tried to help understand why so many Americans had come to literally hate many aspects of their own culture \u2014 politics, government, commercial entertainment, Wall Street, big business, the medical system and so on.<\/p>\n
The book was published a few weeks before Barack Obama was elected in 2008. After the election, in every interview and book reading, I was asked: Don\u2019t you think Obama and the wave of hope that elected him will improve things? Despite my growing admiration for Obama, I grumpily said that I didn\u2019t. America\u2019s \u201cprogress paradox\u201d was too deep, not something repairable by legislation, policy and charismatic leadership. It would take generations of new institutions, new traditions and new sources of kinship \u2014 if that. My cheery optimism didn\u2019t help book sales.<\/p>\n
I certainly did not foresee something as extreme and bellicose as Donald Trump. As fearful as I am about what he might do to our country \u2014 our security, values and common cause \u2014 I am far more concerned about the enduring tragedy, the difficulty of finding contentment and kinship in the modern world. For now, that can only come from one Thanksgiving at a time.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Dick Meyer is Chief Washington Correspondent for the Scripps Washington Bureau and DecodeDC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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