My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3 #39, March 30, 1998

ALL BY MYSELF

It seems to me that one of the things that makes it hard for us to solve social problems in America is that we tend to see them as the failures of individuals. We are as unlikely to see the societal dysfunction that contributes to individual failure as we are to see the ways in which society encourages and contributes to individual success. It is a problem inherent in our glorification of the self-made man, the lone person who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps.

To be sure, we have produced far more such men than most societies; in fact, many of our heroes, like Andrew Carnegie, were castoffs from other countries, immigrants who used their abilities and our freedom to make something of themselves. It's a good and useful cultural myth, that gives young people something to aspire to.

It is, however, a myth that does not acknowledge the social support system that makes an Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg possible. Those exact same people, raised in more rigidly stratified societies, or cultures of low trust, could not have achieved what they did in America. Our talents are amplified or compressed by our communities in ways we don't begin to understand.

The same culture that makes us so bad at maintaining extended families makes us good at leaving, good at taking risks, good at seeing opportunities beyond our small families and towns. A country so vast it didn't seem it could ever be used up gave Americans a sense of limitless opportunities, to stake claims on free farm land, to find gold lying around, to make fortunes selling goods to settlers and miners. More, we had our myths, our shared stories of sharp Yankee peddlers, larger-than-life lumberjacks, Abe Lincoln going from splitting rails to holding together the Union, Horatio Alger's stories of young boys turned tycoons with only a bit of Pluck and Luck. For Americans, where we're born has always been a starting point, not a destination. It's a culture that encourages big dreams.

It's also a culture that is in the habit of lending a helping hand. DeTocqueville in the 1830's observed, with astonishment and envy, the American capacity for "spontaneous association." Whether for a community barn-raising, a crusade against slavery, or an effort to save widows and orphans from starvation, we have been, and still are, people who band together to get the job done. Jonas Salk may have been a solitary genius, but his work was funded by women working together, collecting money door to door so that some day all our children would be safe from polio. The individual genius of our entrepreneurs is healthily supplemented by trade associations and chambers of commerce, people working together to promote the well-being of entire industries and business communities. It is not always remembered that Horatio Alger's heroes had not only pluck, but mentors--kindly older men offering them a job, and teaching them the skills to make it to the top.

In our worship of the individual, it's easy to ignore the extent to which a strong middle-class value system helps him succeed, creating a shared knowledge base and a level of trust that political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in his book Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, refers to as "social capital." Adults pass on their knowledge of the world and their value systems, informally within families and scouting groups and sport, formally in books and schooling and computer programs. Children grow up assuming that as grownups they too will get up every morning and go to work, and that they too will be expected to give good value for money, abide by the rules, defer immediate gratification and plan for the future. Which means Bill Gates and his ilk could assume customers that would buy, not steal, his products, an educated work force that would show up on time and get the job done, distributors and merchants who would not cheat him, and institutions willing to loan him money when he needed it.

Another invisible agent behind any individual success is government, which provides certain preconditions for achievement more easily appreciated if you ever visit a third world country that lacks them. Governments create a physical network of roads, airports, bridges, and controlled waterways, that allows us to assume raw materials will arrive on time, and our products will be delivered to our customers on time. In fact, most of the things we assume without even thinking about it, like abundant clean water, are the result of government projects--dams, community wells and reservoirs, water treatment facilities, sewage treatment.

Government is both a provider of learning and a generator of knowledge. The great majority of our workforce is trained in public schools, and learns from books and journals in publicly funded libraries. Most of our college graduates come out of public universities, their educations made possible with scholarships and loans from public funds. The flourishing business and professional development of the 1950's and '60's was a direct offshoot of the investment we made in sending veterans to college on the GI Bill. Most of our research is done at public hospitals and universities and government institutes, and available for free to private enterprises that will use it to create new drugs, new technologies, new ways of building and manufacturing.

But if our bright ideas are to succeed, they need the protection of law. We rely on government to protect our patents and copyrights, and put the arm on countries that manufacture cheap copies of our software and movies and CDs. And while we may like to complete our business deals with handshakes, we like knowing that a written contract, enforced by law, encourages people to follow through on the promise of that handshake.

The self-made man really didn't do it all by himself. Many other people, unknown, invisible, and unacknowledged, helped make the bootstraps he pulls himself up by.

And the destructive corollary of our glorification of individual success is our assumption that failure is also individual, that in a country as rich and free as ours, failure is a willful choice. Thus, confronted with an immense social problem, such as the emergence of a self-perpetuating underclass, we tend to say, in effect, "You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out." When we make our sporadic attempts at reform, we try to fix individuals without noticing that the social networks that should help them are barely functional. That's why I think welfare reform in its present form is not going to work, and it's why next week I want to talk about a way we might fix welfare by rebuilding the community.