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Why are we having such a hard time, collectively, getting a handle on coronavirus infections?
Why haven’t we had the success South Korea has had at tracing contacts, or that Germany had in testing? After all, we’re The Greatest Nation on Earth, or something like that. We landed on the beaches of Normandy and on the moon. Our scientists developed the atom bomb and the polio vaccine. American Exceptionalism is a deep source of pride. Why are we falling down on this?
Is it as simple as Trump’s failures? Honestly, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
But the Germans, master testers, have a reputation as master bureaucrats and lovers of order (Ordnung muss sein, and all). The Koreans, and Asian cultures generally speaking, to broadly characterize them, strongly value the community over individuals.
And our uniquely American triumphs are not those of organizational skill. We pride ourselves on grit and innovation and entrepreneurship and ambition that’s even a little bit overboard.
Here’s — seemingly wholly irrelevant to anything — commentary on “The Answer to Why Humans Are So Central in Star Trek” by Emmet Asher-Perrin:
“Don’t you ever wonder why so many Federation starships in Star Trek suffer weirdly-timed meltdowns? Sure, it’s television, but shouldn’t there be a real reason for all the shenanigans? For all that really weird engineering?
“There is. And that reason is simple–humans are ridiculous. And wonderful. But also ridiculous.”
The article cites Tumblr commentary on Vulcans and humans; recall that in the Star Trek universe, the Vulcans are stronger and smarter than humans and, prior to “first contact,” more technologically advanced, but it is on the Earth that the United Federation of Planets is headquartered. The user roachpatrol imagines a conversation in which a Vulcan is asked, “why do you let [humans] run your federation?” and answers,
“This is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up.
“This is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.”
This, the Vulcan continues, called into question countless established scientific theories and it was that outcome that explained “why we let them do whatever. . . they want.”
(Friends with some expertise in the matter could not identify a specific episode to which this was a reference.)
Substitute “American” for “human” and you have a certain characterization, however rough, of a skill set that has led to (some of) our successes, and also our failures. But this is not the skill set of diligent careful plodding that aids in fighting a pandemic.
What’s more, this inventiveness, this entrepreneurial and improvisational spirit — also portrayed in the 1980s TV series MacGyver, where the title character’s ability to improvise his way out of tight situations led to that name becoming a verb to describe that action — seems to be in short supply as well.
Yes, we’ve got workplaces and schools and houses of worship making do via videoconference and livestreaming. We’ve got women firing up their sewing machines to donate fabric face masks to hospitals and caregivers and to sell them online. We’ve got restaurants transforming themselves into grocery stores. But it all seems lackluster, so inadequate to the task at hand.
Have we lost our American pluckiness and ambition and problem-solving?
Back in June of last year, researcher Lyman Stone published a report at the American Enterprise Institute about which I provided some comments. America, he said, was aging. Once we were notably younger than the “Old World” — both in terms of the median age of the countries’ inhabitants and the countries’ history and government itself. Now, the age gap is narrowing and our institutions have aged as well. Our institutions have become inflexible. Not only do we take it as a given that our elders will command a disproportionate share of our resources due to their political power, but, as Stone wrote, “we have become a society of control, command, and regulation more than liberty, opportunity, and bold endeavors.” We had become “a more rigid and regulated America” — and at the time Stone identified housing regulation/zoning, occupational licensing, and the educational-industrial complex, among other issues tied to this change. A nation of oldsters by age and culture, we’re no longer willing to take risks. We’re too ready to regulate, with stipulations on everything from how close a storage shed may be to the lot line, to requiring a cosmetology license for hair-braiders.
But even though we have shifted to a greater fondness of bureaucracy, and have lost some of the dynamism we have prided ourselves on, we hadn’t become particularly good at bureaucratic administration. And that’s a worry — if we lack the cultural characteristic which would be particularly helpful in such a circumstance, but are also losing the the ability to innovate our way out of this as well.
Now, at the time I first read Stone’s analysis, I was not entirely convinced that he had found the clear unifying explanation of these various trends that he thought he had. What’s more, Stone did not claim to have any solutions grander than addressing some of the symptoms to the underlying problems, and readers themselves may disagree with my characterization of Americans’ inventiveness as “lackluster.” But is it nonetheless perhaps appropriate to at least discuss whether this is a relevant issue?
As always, you’re invited to comment at JaneTheActuary.com!
