What the individual can do

No amount of Government programs could do every thing that needs to be done; and no President, in four years or a hundred, could end all the evils and right all the wrongs that exist in the U.S. today. But a strong President, in touch with the needs of the country, can do much to relieve the anguish that now grips the American spirit. His leadership can bring new understanding between the races; his resolve, or lack of it, can set the tone that guides the public actions of his countrymen.

It is doubtful, however, that by itself even a strong President's moral presence could make the country whole again or cure the sense of anomie that afflicts so many Americans today. More and more people feel that they are helpless at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

All too often, reality bears them out. What, then, can anyone do? Big Government or big business or big cities cannot be done away with. A nation of 200 million or 300 million--as the U.S. will be in another generation--cannot survive without a vast bureaucracy and without a multitude of laws. The day is long gone when a family could simply pack up to avoid being hemmed in by complexity. Even as technology opens up vast new worlds, extending man's powers and perceptions a thousand-or millionfold, many long for the simplicity of an earlier era. Yet there is no escape.

A sense of concern

Nor need there be. Today's individual in search of influence could do worse than seek what Philosopher Josiah Royce, more than half a century ago, called the "Great Community." In the days before World War I, Royce feared the consequences of a mindless technology. The answer, he declared, was not the destruction of machines, but the expansion of man. Man, he said, should look upon himself as part of a great community and develop a hierarchy of loyalties extending from his family, to his own community, to the great community of all mankind. Cynics might look upon this as a sophisticated version of "the power of positive thinking." On the other hand, what alternative is there?

As countless people have shown, the individual need not really be powerless. The machine can be made to stop and change direction. James Ellis, a dynamic lawyer, mobilized hundreds of citizens to bring order to Seattle's over-rapid growth (see box following page). Ralph Nader may not be everyone's hero, but he set the giant automobile industry on its heels, and now seems ready to reform the federal regulatory agencies, which have been shockingly negligent in their concern for the consumer-citizen.

Harold Knapp, a systems analyst who lives in Germantown, Md., was bothered by inconsistencies in the newspaper accounts of a rape case, and undertook his own time-consuming investigation. Largely because of his concern, three men were saved from the gas chamber. In New York City, 250 youthful executives are giving up much of their leisure time to help black and Puerto Rican entrepreneurs open businesses in the slums. In California, James Lorenz, a bright young lawyer, has forsworn a more profitable law practice in order to establish a statewide legal-aid service for Mexican-American farm workers.

Fighting city hall

In the past year, hundreds of young people dropped out of college to help the cause of Eugene McCarthy and campaign against a war that they considered unjust. They may have felt at the Chicago Convention that their efforts had come to naught, and they may be disillusioned with McCarthy's recent behavior; the fact is that their efforts played a considerable part in persuading Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the election and seek peace in Viet Nam. The episode showed, among other things, that the most effective protest is not mindless violence and the shock tactics of obscenity, but disciplined, organized effort.

Americans might seek, for example, to decentralize their governing institutions on all levels and bring government closer to the people. As a politician's phrase, this has lost all meaning, but it could become at least a partial reality. Decentralization might turn into just another slogan, and the idea carries obvious dangers. But given the right balance between necessary central administration and local authority, decentralization could do a great deal to enhance the individual's feeling of importance.

The citizen must also ensure for himself power of redress against the bureaucratic machine. The feeling that only the rich and powerful can win against edicts from government offices is very often justified. Some countries have found the solution in an "ombudsman," an independent official who investigates citizens' complaints and curbs overzealous or arrogant bureaucrats. Americans might follow this example; create ombudsmen at all levels of government, who will help them fight city hall. City hall, wherever it is, will resist, but the effort must be made. One solution would be to form public-interest pressure groups to counter the lobbies and private-interest groups that inevitably will be out for their own game. Americans have not watched their elected representatives closely enough or set standards for them that are half as high as they should be. In the end, the truism cannot be denied: People get the kind of government they deserve. Ultimately, they also get the kind of country they deserve.

Just what kind of country Americans want is, of course, the big question--and the answer remains curiously elusive. Americans have traditionally stressed optimism, a faith in the future, what John Kirk calls "progress, pragmatism, respect for achievement, a belief that rising wealth and expanding technology would ultimately dissipate most individual and social problems." Yet Americans have seldom examined those values long enough to see the possible inner contradictions. In part, they were too busy carving for themselves a share of the country's peerless abundance. Men with fabulous opportunities for self-advancement had no time for self-inspection.

From the start, the American Dream has contained as much egotism as it has generosity. In a day of European despotism, it was daring to proclaim that "all men are created equal," and understandable for divines to celebrate Americans as God's chosen people. Yet the Founding Fathers excluded the Negro from the national equalitarian ideal, and the discrepancy made the white man's prejudice particularly enduring. If all men are created equal except the Negro, then it becomes logical to assume that blacks must be inherently inferior. When the perfectibility of man is a national theology, imperfection is unendurable.

Today, the American ethic prevents whites from blatant prejudice. Surely the fact marks a considerable advance in national maturity. Yet the old contradiction clearly lingers. Equality and freedom--the vast majority of Americans will unhesitatingly support them, but not necessarily meaning the same thing. The black militant upholds freedom from ghetto living and discrimination, but not the freedom of the white majority to govern the country. The blue-collar worker and the suburban home owner enthusiastically cheer equality, but not necessarily if equality means a black in one's labor union or next door.

Common protest

This is what many a white middle-class American feels--a type that today is often truly alienated. Such attitudes recall Thomas Merton's mordant lines: "Listening is obsolete. So is silence. Each one travels alone in a small blue capsule of indignation." Is it still possible in America today to establish communication between the capsules? Is it still possible to find any shared beliefs and desires between the indignant extremes?

If there is an emerging moral consensus in the U.S. today, it seems to revolve around a longing for a sense of participation and understanding in the performance of the individual's life in relation to the society around him. George Wallace's supporters, like those who followed McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, shared a common protest against what they felt was their own impotence to control the conditions of their government and even existence itself. Old rightists, new leftists, black militants, and those of the Nixonian center all occupy, in some sense, an ironically common ground. Their yearning, often merely nostalgic, is for a society in which the scale of life permits relevant personal action--which is why the doers like Seattle's James Ellis are so significant. And yet, however valid the longing, it is too frequently reflexive and unreflective--a protest, ironic in the American tradition, against the rapidity of change.

The notion--often myth--of individualism has stood for many different things in American life, from the self-sufficiency of the early agrarian society, to the rapacity of the robber barons, to the business and success ethic (with its underside, the fear of failure). New Deal liberalism through Lyndon Johnson's day saw individualism as requiring the paternal protection of the Federal Government. Lately a longing for individualism has reappeared in reaction against the welfare state, the vast corporation and the city, where people are crowded together in lifeless apartment buildings like celluloid headstones. As with the desire for relevance, this feeling cuts across the conventional ideological lines. The political conservative's idea of individualism is likely to be curiously close to the conception among the New Left. Thus Karl Hess, Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign speech writer ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"), now expresses sympathy for the aims and methods of the Students for a Democratic Society. "They're following the precept of the Declaration of Independence," says Hess. That precept is "that if the government steadily encroaches on the freedom of the individual, then it's the right and the responsibility of the people to overthrow the government."

There may be intriguing possibilities in such ironic agreement of extremes, including, perhaps, some new political formations and a half-aware alliance against old-style liberalism. There is probably something like incipient agreement in America about the need to fulfill--really fulfill--some of the primary values upon which the country was established. Nor is that concensus entirely sentimental. The upheavals of the '60s have awakened Americans to an extraordinarily high level of national awareness. Yet the question remains whether this is nearly enough.

Toward community

One article of the American faith that retains significant value is the work ethic. A Gallup poll indicated that while only a minority (36%) of the nation favors a guaranteed annual income for the poor, fully 78% approve of Government's providing guaranteed work. This again may be a symptom of Americans falling back upon a basic common denominator of personal relevance. The belief in earning an honest buck, no matter what the larger implications of the job itself, is the original American ideology peeled down to the core. The ethic endures, although many of the disaffected youth will continue to protest against the meaningless and numbing work of their fathers.

Significantly, patriotism apparently remains high. If asked what other country he might prefer, the average American still draws a blank. Rarely in the past--or present--have Americans hated America enough to commit treason, renounce citizenship, or stop longing for God's country while abroad. In that sense, patriotism thrives not only among the more demonstrative flag wavers, but also in unexpected ways among dissenters and antiEstablishmentarians. Even if the disaffected young bitterly criticize American institutions and values, they reflect the traditional patriotic view of the moral and providential nature of the American destiny. The insistence that one's country should be Utopia is a patriotism of sorts--perhaps, in the long run, the best kind, for it may ensure that the present discontent will ultimately draw Americans together in seeking the Utopia they want.

It would be ironic, though common in human experience, if things had to get much worse before Americans finally decided that strife had gone too far. What seems hopeful, however, is that Americans are already drawn, more than in the past, to Royce's vision of community and an end to the dehumanizing aspects of technological society. "A sense of community is not the only good," concludes a new study of U.S. life prepared under outgoing HEW Secretary Wilbur Cohen. "But, as the present divisions in our society reveal, it is very much worth asking whether we have as much as we need." It is also very much worth answering "No"--and setting more community as the American goal. It may be a small beginning, but is there any other if the nation is to be truly healed?

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