I went to fetch bagels and do a bit of food shopping this morning, a bit further away than normal. Partly I wanted to take stock of the aftermath of the storm that rolled through on Tuesday. (A lot more damage than I expected.)
About a half-mile from my destination, I saw a car weaving at high speed threading the traffic behind me, on a busy four-lane road. I kept my eye warily on it as the car approached, with my turn coming up on the left. I was already driving over the speed limit, but this person was rapidly overtaking me at what I estimated to be 75+ mph, in a 45mph zone. The driver slammed into my lane with almost no distance between us and accelerated hard ahead, skidding uncontrollably over the double-yellow line into oncoming traffic in the process.
Traffic psychology is a fairly well-studied subject.1 A lot of us treat our cars as extensions of our bodies without having to think about it—and we form strong moral opinions about other drivers precisely because all we know about them is what we see them doing with a multi-ton vehicle that can quickly kill and maim people if it’s handled badly. In this case, I found myself forming three theories about the recklessness I was seeing. 1) Someone late for their shift at work. 2) Someone with a genuine emergency, medical or familial or otherwise. 3) Someone having a terrible day who was overwhelmed by rage or sorrow.
To my surprise, the driver braked hard ahead of me in the turn lane for the shopping center that I was going to. The driver immediately tailgated a car in the parking lot until she got to her parking space, right at the same bagel shop I was going to. She didn’t run to the shop, which immediately cast doubt on my theories: not late for work, not in an emergency, and not visibly having a terrible day. The theories got demolished over the next twenty minutes. She ordered a breakfast sandwich, I ordered a breakfast sandwich. I read the paper on my phone, she read something on her phone. Calmly, without any visible distress, not even being so damn hungry she couldn’t wait to eat. No emergency, no job shift, no I-can’t-control-myself. Just someone who drove like a maniac to have a bagel sandwich, for no obvious reason. Seeing a real human being rather than a faceless driver didn’t provide me any clarity.
I am sure most of you have similar stories to tell. (I hope you are not the driver in someone else’s stories.)
As it turns out, you’re not imagining it, either. As it happens, the news story I was reading while covertly studying my fellow driver was documenting that American drivers are becoming, once again, more deadly than in many other countries, and deadlier than they used to be after a long period of declining mortality on American roadways.
This trend puzzles many experts. In the course of the Times article, they try on many theories. As is often the case since 2022, there’s a thought that a lasting change in our overall emotional and behavioral settings as a result of the covid-19 epidemic might be responsible.2 The major observation is that the havoc on the roads is substantially a by-product of drivers going way too fast relative to the amount of traffic and the design of the streets and highways they’re travelling on, and not because those drivers are obviously impaired by alcohol or drugs. The cars are (mostly) safer than they’ve ever been.
Some of the experts seem to stick to epistemologically familiar ground for social scientists in seeking explanations. They’re looking for a single major variable not just to find a cause they can evaluate through rigorous study but to find something we can do about the problem. For many experts, it’s no good identifying something through inquiry that isn’t tractable to government policy-making or institutional action. And yet, others in the NYT article seem to recognize that behind those speeding drivers is something vast and attitudinal that we don’t know how to touch. As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution put it, “The worst part is that we feel helpless—unable to find ways to improve matters”.
Driving lethally fast joins a huge menagerie of American problems that I brood over, where I see the same basic challenge to conventional thinking among policy-makers and experts looking to craft feasible solutions. I’ve written several times about rising suicide rates among American serving military and veterans since 2001; many times about “deaths of despair” involving suicide, addiction and poor self-care producing rising mortality among middle-aged Americans, especially white men; and often about forms of disengagement and conspiratorial delusion in our public culture.
I think there’s a connected explanation for all of this: a crisis of agency and meaning in American life. It isn’t just some experts who feel helpless. Most of us do, but the powers-that-be, the leaders in our institutions and communities, either can’t or won’t recognize the signs.
Military leaders and the therapeutic experts they employed went looking for causes of suicide that they could act upon, but couldn’t or wouldn’t consider that perhaps fighting in seemingly endless wars that couldn’t possibly be won as they were conceived, that involved all sorts of deception about the costs and consequences of those wars that ordinary soldiers were asked to be complicit in, wars that Americans at home barely knew or cared about beyond pro-forma “support the troops” messages, that all of that was enough to create a major spiritual and emotional void for most troops, that all of that was a fertile ground for despair. Stress, trauma, and for what? What did any of it amount to, and what did any of it mean? Americans have been in a race to forget that any of it ever happened just so we can go ahead and do it again as soon as possible.
What do we have to look forward to, any of us?
A planet heating and racked by intensifying weather catastrophes that nobody seems able to seriously impede.
A political system that is profoundly unresponsive to what most of its citizens actually want, that’s about to re-run the worst election that any of us remember, where there is no vision beyond incremental policy tinkering or lunatic authoritarian fantasies of retribution and purification.
Workplaces where we get glad-handed assurances of how much we matter but in fact have no sense of belonging or control, where we feel disposable, in industries that might not even exist any more in a decade—and often not because there’s something better or something more innovative but because private equity annihilated a brick-and-mortar business for a few quick bucks or because some hucksters moved fast and destroyed things for the sake of cashing in on an IPO. Try thinking about what you’d tell an eight-year old kid about what they might grow up and be someday and you realize that most of the names you might give to careers are already dead and that none of the security that once seemed to be at least possible exists any longer. Try to help a kid imagine their adult future, and you’re either be a gigantic liar or have a hell of an imagination.
What are we building that we can feel excited about or proud of? Where are there huge new transportation systems being built, or new buildings that will serve the public good? Who is making new parks? We are getting better at getting rid of bad monuments, but not so great at building new kinds of beauty to brighten everyone’s lives. What services are getting better in our lives? Our hospitals are disappearing, our libraries are closing, the malls are shuttering. About all I can see that’s gotten better and seems to be holding the line is food.
What huge problems can we reasonably imagine the future might solve? With many diseases and medical conditions, we’ve either hit a point of nearly intractable complexity or we’ve hit a point where major medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies don’t think there’s enough money in solving those problems so they’ll stick with the products people will pay for. The kind of concrete, in-the-world technologies that improve human life seem to have given way to Wi-Fi equipped juice machines and social media apps. There’s a few bright lights out there to hope for: more and better renewable energy technologies, for example. But even they seem to hit limits that aren’t about design, but funding and policy. What’s coming in science? Astronomy still seems to reliably produce exciting new discoveries, and biology as well, but even there some of the bloom feels off the rose as far as everyday life and public culture goes—there’s no gosh-wow enthusiasts for science whom are widely trusted and viewed with general approval.
It’s wrong to idealize the mid-20th Century American past too much. Whatever was good about it applied largely to white men only, whether we are thinking about relative degrees of political consensus within formal institutions or prospects for employment and social mobility. But if we were to extract the good parts from the bad parts (always with the uncomfortable thought that the bad parts might have been what made the good parts possible), think about it this way:
It is much harder to think you are part of a society heading for a better future.
It is much harder to believe that your children will be better off than you are, either materially or otherwise.
It is much harder to think that we will live in a more just society, a more equitable society, a society more given to mutual support and respect for one another.
It is much harder to think that your life matters. That you are making a difference when you vote, when you go to work, when you love and live in community and society. Writing to your congressional representative seems a childish affectation of a vanished past. Going to community meetings or committee meetings feels, at best, like a chance to talk past people and be ignored by the people making decisions. It takes enormous effort to even get the slightest bit of common sense out of vast organizations.
Much of the world feels opaque to us: we don’t know why things happen. Even experts and leaders don’t know. Much of the world feels secret to us, full of concealed off-shore bank accounts and hidden abuse.
Life happens at scales that none of us are psychologically capable of taking in. We are building tools that we cannot even remotely pretend to control in precise or highly planned ways, we are tinkering constantly with systems that have powerful and devastating consequences that nobody really understands, whether that’s the fiscal management of economies or responding to pandemics.
To exercise self-care and care for others, you have to feel there’s meaning to your life and the lives of others, and you have to feel you have agency in your life, our lives, such that you are worth caring for and so that others are worth caring for.
We are in an acute spiritual crisis. This is normally something said right before the speaker calls readers back to religion. But religion has been measured by people in this crisis and found wanting. Americans are dechurching and there’s nothing the churches can do to reverse that other than create an authoritarian theocracy. (Given that right-wing white evangelicals are among the most rapid dechurchers, I don’t think even they want to be called back to the pews. They just want to scourge the rest of us.)
What I mean by spiritual is that what ails us is not a set of social problems that call for policy solutions. It is a deeply interconnected feeling that the future no longer calls to us with hope and possibility. Some of this is the end of empire, some of it is the end of easy and unquestioned racial domination. (And indeed, up until 2016, one of the brightest and best things to hold on to was that we were at last a society where access to voting was real, that our mainstream culture was finally creating space for diversity, and our institutions were increasingly willing to make social change a serious priority. All of that too is now at risk.) But some of the spiritual crisis goes beyond one set of privileged people feeling their privilege at risk.
I understand that insisting that so many things are connected in such a vague way feels like intuition rather than evidence-based, feels like the quintessential case of that’s just your opinion, man. Or perhaps feels, if not a prelude to come back to worship, to engage in glass-half-full optimism, whether of the “no really, we beat Malthus, life is getting better” kind or the “Enlightenment science and philosophy rulez, dood, stop being such a leftist bummer” type.
Obviously I am not in that optimistic frame of mind myself, but I also feel pretty confident that this is not the geist of American life at the present moment and that you can’t get people into that frame of mind by showing them charts of global GDPs or encouraging them to read about the Royal Society back in the glory days. It’s not just a matter of messaging: a lot of the crisis comes from really, genuinely, no-fooling-bad trends that affect most Americans in negative ways, either in real material terms or in terms of their psychological expectations. The thought that you just have to see things as being actually good is most appealing to people who are in really good situations, who don’t really understand how it looks out there, like George H.W. Bush being baffled by how grocery scanners worked with universal-product codes. Turd-polishing suggests itself most to people who don’t have shit all over them.
If I say that religion has nothing to offer to a spiritual crisis, and that upbeat messaging can’t turn us around—or even spreading the good word of the truthfully good things in global and American life—then is this just wallowing in despair for the heck of it?
No. I think there are answers. It’s just that they have to be as big and interconnected as the things that ail us. The way many social scientists work isn’t going to cut it as an answer. We cannot cure a crisis that is driving us to death (or to kill and threaten others) one small and feasible reform or regulation at a time. We cannot whack-a-mole our way to a better world.
What we need is massive-scale social reform that is consciously intended to intervene in the basic infrastructure of 21st Century society. We need a tax structure whose avowed goal is the redistribution of wealth. Profits from corporations that go past a certain magnitude have to come back to workers, to customers, to societies. Personal wealth past a certain point has got to come back to society. We need a state that is built for the public good, not captured by an endless series of transfer-seekers and oligarchs. We need to rethink how governments and major civic institutions operate: they need to be in communities and responsive to them, whether we’re talking police or social workers or teachers or doctors.
We already know one part of the big answer: it’s something like social democracy, which for all of its complicated flaws and challenges, works.
But the other part that we also need is a new imagination of what we can be. Our discourse about social justice has gotten increasingly confined to smaller and smaller spaces of struggle, and yet more and more prone to what Olufemi Taiwo incisively terms “elite capture”—driven by struggles over terminology and language, dominated by assertions of expert knowledge about propriety and social manners rather than broad ethical sensibilities widely shared across the society. I feel often as if we’re stuck in a space where successive generations are trying to relive the triumphant narrative of the civil-rights movement by envisioning identity categories needing the same liberation while at the same time we are running headlong away from struggles too big and too complicated to yield that same sense of accomplishment.
We need a world that is once again tractable to our agency: where our scales of action and everyday life are manageable and where our citizenship has real, visible and inescapable loops between our leaders and representatives and ourselves.
We need to believe in a future that is better technologically, scientifically, institutionally, economically, and socially—to envision progress, perhaps for the first time ever, in terms that resonate broadly with everyone and address suffering and loss everywhere, in every life.
That is not just a matter of saying three times really loudly that we believe it: we will need to see that this future has enemies, and that for the moment, the enemies are winning. In fact, running up the score so much that most of us just want to sit on the bench and let the game be over once and for all.
This is about the point where an incremental, pragmatic, basically centrist person says, “All the things you’re talking about would be nice, but they’re not happening. We need to settle for what we can achieve. For better seat-belts in cars or for road designs that discourage people from speeding. For nudging and incentivizing and priming. For Leviathan with a few happy faces painted on his warty hide.” (Leaving aside, as always, the point that at least as far as social democracy goes, some of this actually exists in the real world already.)
It depends. If you really want fewer people to die from fast cars and self-neglect, if you want people to join together in hope, if you want to think that the future is something we decide on rather than something outside of human control, then what I’m talking about has to happen. How? I am, as always, without much to say on that point. I only know what has to change, not how we might actually accomplish that.
See Vanderbilt, Tom. Traffic : Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about Us). 1st ed., Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, for a readable overview of the field up to that time. There’s been further work that extends (or challenges) some of his synthesis since then.
As something of an aside, let me say that the more that explanations of various negative trends in American health and welfare end up with that attribution, the more that we have got to consider that the mainstream advice of public health officials about the pandemic woefully under-assessed the collateral damage of their prevailing counsel.
A great post. My intuition, which applies to crazy drivers and many sorts of bad behaviour, is to go back to Margaret Thatcher’s line “there is no such thing as society.” She meant it in the context of methodological individualism: there is no “social welfare” over and above the sum of the welfare of individuals. And yet I think there was something prophetic there, that increasingly people don’t *think* in terms of being in a society. Road traffic is, for the most part, a truly remarkable accomplishment when people drive as if they are part of a collective enterprise to get us all where we need to go without crashing into each other. Increases in rule-breaking - speeding, not waiting your turn at a 4-way stop, passing by two lanes merging to sneak in further along, unsafe left-turns - are all a turn to a Hobbesian state of road nature.
I have no data on any of this, I recognise when I’m just blether. But still...
Alternatively, what if what's going on is at least partly brain damage from COVID?
I think part of what's going on with the language-chopping from social justice is despair about being able to evaluate actions, but at least we can get the language right.
I think it's a symptom of something going wrong is the number of people who believe aliens aren't visiting because we're too disgusting for them to want to be around us. I don't think this is plausible-- aliens visiting is extremely unlikely, we study ants without making moral judgements about their wars-- but I do think there's a serious loss of self-valuing going on. I can't put a finger on it, but I think part of anti-immigrant sentiment is that people on both the right and the left don't understand that American culture is actually still attractive.
Maybe perfectionism is an underlying problem-- a belief that ordinary life can't be good enough compared to hyperreal images.