A recent NY Times OpEd, The Downside of Liberty, has generated quite a bit of discussion. It was written by Kurt Andersen, - an American author and host of the award-winning public radio program Studio 360. The OpEd’s main thesis is that ever since the late 1960s, a radical American individualism has been unleashed on multiple fronts.
“What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.”
“ . . . A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed. Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits, with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.”
Is is generally assumed that while liberals love the ’60s legacies of social freedoms, - e.g., civil rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, - conservatives hate them and blame these social changes for whatever they don’t like about contemporary life. Conventional wisdom would say that liberals won and conservatives lost the culture wars of the the sixties. Not quite, says Andersen, going against the prevailing narrative.
This selfishness, extreme individualism or whatever we want to call it is nothing new. “From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal,” writes Andersen. After all, our most cherished document promises us all Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness - “individualism in a nutshell.”
He then attempts to temper our radical individualism by observing that none other than Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of our Declaration of Independence, was concerned with the selfish tendencies he saw in the young country. In a letter sent in 1814 to his friend Thomas Law, Jefferson wrote: “Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”
Let’s examine Andersen’s thesis. To put in context the various changes the country went through in the sixties, let’s take a look at the previous three decades.
From 1929 through 1945 the US, and much of the world, went through some pretty rough times, first with the Great Depression and then World War II. Not surprisingly, after such turbulent years, people were looking for stability so they could put their lives back together.
The fifties followed, a period stretching roughly from the end of the war to the early 1960s. A sense of conformity prevailed in American society. Traditional roles were reaffirmed, with men expected to be the breadwinners and women assuming their proper place in the home. This conformity was helped along by the emergence of television, whose new programs reflected the social patterns that all were expected to follow.
The fifties was not only a period of social conformity. It was also characterized by business conformity. For most of its history, the US has been regarded as the quintessential entrepreneurial society. It has been viewed as a land of opportunity, but also a place where people have to rely on their wits and work hard to achieve prosperity. But, things changed in the period following WWII. The entrepreneurial capitalism of the pioneers, immigrants and industrialists, became a kind of managed capitalism that relied more on large institutions, - in both business and government, - to get things done.
We saw the rise of a bureaucratic corporate culture more interested in preserving its organizational power and managing orderly prosperity. Instead of innovation and individualism, we got The Organization Man that William Whyte wrote about in his classic 1956 book, where well-rounded team players were viewed as more valuable than creative, but potentially disruptive men.
Whyte wrote about the shift he saw all around him in the fifties, from individual creativity and economic dynamism toward the complacency and uniformity then advocated by business, government and American society in general. Following the pain and chaos of the Depression and World War II, people were hungry for stability, and the corporate culture promised to provide “a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies - television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food - and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family.”
He saw this quest for stability in return for the sublimation of individuality as a dangerous Faustian bargain for everyone involved. He worried about “the growth of bureaucracy . . . the desire for lifelong security, the foolish belief that raw talent was no longer particularly necessary, and the way the ‘system’ was stamping out individual thought.”
This sense of conformity and traditional roles that pervaded the fifties is generally regarded as the breeding ground for the explosive social revolution that followed, starting in the mid 1960s. But it makes sense that the similar complacency and uniformity that pervaded business in the fifties eventually led to a rebellion against large, bureaucratic institutions in favor of a more entrepreneurial economy, where innovation, creativity and animal spirits would no longer be sublimated.
I have not thought of this transition to a more entrepreneurial economy, including a more aggressive style of capitalism, as the flip side of the sixties social revolution. But, upon reflection, I think that Andersen makes a very interesting point, especially when you consider both sides of this coin as reactions to the social and business conformity of the fifties.
And, just like Andersen invoked Thomas Jefferson to help make the case for balance between radical individualism and the common good, I would like to invoke Adam Smith to similarly advocate for a balanced approach to business and capitalism in general.
Adam Smith is the 18th century Scottish philosopher and economist, who is considered the father of free-market, free-trade capitalism. Smith is most famous for The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 and generally regarded as the first work of modern economics. He is also well known for coining the metaphor of the invisible hand, which captures his claim that “by trying to maximize their own gains in a free market, individual ambition benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions.”
Smith was not an advocate of survival of the fittest style of capitalism. In his other major big work,The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that sympathy, the human ability to have strong feelings of concern for another person, is required to achieve beneficial results in society.
He believed in a balanced approach to capitalism. On one side is the fierce competition and self-interest inherent in open, free markets. On the other is the supportive community behavior and sympathy found in well functioning societies.
In the end, both democracies and free market capitalism should be viewed, not in ideological terms, but as pragmatic frameworks of checks and balances to help us deal with our complex social and economic lives. And, it all works best when we balance our tendencies toward radical individualism with the proper sense of concern, sympathy and moral duties for those around us.