As the second quarter of the 21st Century opens, any and all of the norms that give order to society – at home, abroad, or in the commons – are vulnerable. If you’re sick, you can’t just call a doctor; if a prowler is in your yard, you can’t just call the police; no news report is necessarily true; starting a war no longer gains global condemnation; genes are engineered; conversation may not be with a human. And on and on, in education, banking, physics, and everything else. Dysfunctions and disruptions – and discomforts – not only abound, but compound on each other. A new cellphone software causes an old phone to freeze, and the replacement phone features new features that will need repeated software updates. A new technology renders defense systems obsolete and the remedies require rare earth ingredients which are concentrated in an adversary’s territory which raises trade and political tensions which triggers an arms race. And so on.
In a word, we live in the shadow of chaos, ongoing now or potentially impending. Chaos is hardly new in human experience, but humans have been devising countermeasures, social orders, since before civilization was a thing. Even as societies and institutions have built up normal expectations for day to day safety and sustenance, any prospect of erosion revives a primal fear.
We are tempted to blame today’s chaos on someone or some particular development. Energy crisis, global warming, drugs, Donald Trump, socialism, capitalism, “woke” politicians, deteriorating education, and many more causes have had their role, or at least have been blamed. Polarized political partisanship is a major culprit in America, and many, even among “both” of the political camps, are beginning to say so. Still, the zero-sum trench warfare of America’s alienated partisans keeps escalating. Nothing holds value except as it serves their partisan interest, and basic standards of conduct deteriorate. When basic standards die, when principle loses sway, society faces chaos.
Chaos swamps any fix or reform that addresses a particular dysfunction, institution, or behavior. Term limits will not fix politics; sinking drug traffickers’ boats will not stop drug use; speech restrictions will not undo hate. People need, first, to share a basic moral outlook, which only then can be reinforced in rules, institutional practices, and enforcement. And that spirit needs to carry over into daily life. New laws, awareness campaigns, ethical arguments, or social movements, if they do not cohere around shared premises, will have piecemeal effects at best, and those fragments can add to the chaos.
America has a bedrock premise to orient any construction of new norms. The nation conceived itself as a People, characterized as “we,” who hold certain truths, as we declared independence. Those truths are of universal, equally endowed, unalienable personsal rights, and that governments exist to secure those rights, acting by consent of the governed. Any effort to restore standards and norms in American society and institutions must rest on general comity, in those tenets of our national self-conception. Any institutional reform will need to fit with that ethos, so that if may also fit with other institutional fixes, and set an overall ambience that carries our founding spirit. Only in such an ambience will formal reforms actually move people to that extra effort, that extra thought, beyond “the rules,” to make things work.
Public discourse is rife with proposals to fix our nation, our society, and the world, but in their own, often isolated sectors and issues. We need to orient them, by a restored comity in our founding, in a discourse of conciliation rather than dispute, social rather than political, couched in personal terms rather than organizers’ slogans. And our first premise is our common national heritage, of principle in rights and government to secure them rather than blood, party, church, or ideology.
Common Conviction 