Apocalypse.. Not!

In keeping with our recent discussion on doom-mongering, this article by Alison Stein Wellner puts paid to the notion that we are increasingly mobilizing ourselves toward the Apocalypse.

It’s one of the most durable perceptions about America: The United States is a nation on the move. From the days of “manifest destiny,” when pioneers forged their way westward, to today, as technology loosens the geographic tether, the American people appear congenitally restless. Unlike other stodgy countries, we’re a young nation, modern cowboys and cowgirls, lonely but rugged, isolated and independent, charting our own course. We’re entrepreneurial, pursuing opportunities wherever they take us. What could be more quintessentially American?

An article in the July 14, 2005, Economist describes “restlessness in the midst of plenty” as one of our nation’s “most remarkable features.” Since people often relocate to find better jobs, the story suggests, geographic mobility fosters economic mobility. Except when it has the opposite effect: “The wider worry is that America’s great sorting-out could damage the country by producing a stratified land of haves and have-nots, and creating more class divisions.”

The ills allegedly caused by rising mobility don’t stop there. In his 2000 book Restless Nation, the independent scholar James Jasper blames increased mobility for everything from environmental degradation to lack of respect for the government to high divorce rates. He suggests broad changes in federal housing policy, among other measures, to encourage people to stay put. The Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project, blames mobility for the unraveling of the American family, the decline of urban neighborhoods, and the destructive influence of the mass media. Without strong social ties, he writes in his 2001 book Private Pleasure, Public Plight, “the dominant force…becomes the mass media, especially television, and whatever meanings and values these media impart. Far from maximizing human choice, this situation [of mobility] represents an apogee of cultural coercion in which [a] citizen is every bit as much a puppet as under a doctrinaire political totalitarianism.”

All this might be very troubling, if not for the fact that increasing geographic mobility is a myth. If anything, Americans are more likely than ever to stay put. You might think that basic fact would give the social critics and policy makers pause. But it hasn’t stopped them from asserting that rampant mobility is destroying the environment, undermining the family, and increasing anomie. More important, it hasn’t stopped them from proposing intrusive, coercive, and expensive measures to curb a problem that doesn’t exist.

You may wonder why so many of us have a penchant for seeing doom in our future, and decline from a Golden Age in our present. You may look at it as a nefarious scheme by the "Nanny" professions, both secular and religious, to justify their intrusive apparati of social control. Yet why are these beliefs so widely held by people? And why today, with all of the benefits of material and social progress that we enjoy over our ancestors?

Wellner offers a few thoughts:

One reason the mobility myth persists, Fischer argues, is that it jibes with the widely held idea that we’re in the midst of “a fall from grace.” (You’d think we’d have landed by now—we’ve been falling for centuries.) If we’re increasingly mobile, we’re a less stable society than we once were, which fits nicely with the fall-from-grace theme. This sort of anxiety is epitomized by Vance Packard’s oft-cited 1972 book A Nation of Strangers, which describes “a society coming apart at the seams” thanks to mobility. Packard connects increasing mobility with the disruption of male-female relationships, the unraveling of traditional religious beliefs, and the crushing speed of technological change. Mobility is an easy scapegoat for complex changes in the American social fabric.

Related to this habit is the common tendency to pine for the good old days. “When people think back,” says Fischer, “they often interpret the past in terms of their own personal biographies, so the past was innocent and fun and stable, like childhood. They remember the past through rose-colored glasses, and an image of stability is part of it.”
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Above all, the mobility myth is politically expedient. Conservatives can use the notion that our society is becoming less stable because of increasing mobility to advocate programs that encourage traditional families and to push for taxpayer funding of faith-based social service organizations. Liberals can cite increasing mobility to justify funding for various social programs, including elder care and family care initiatives. Neither the right nor the left has an interest in debunking it, and so the myth endures.

Ah, the Good Old Days! Stephanie Coontz did an excellent job of debunking them in her book "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap". Yet this isn't a recent obsession. All civilizations had a myth of a Golden Age of the past, whether it was the Greeks, the Hebrews, or the Hindus. Why is such pessimism about the future so widely held across times and cultures?

My own explanation, for what it is worth, is that civilization, or large scale settled life, put mankind in social groups vastly larger and more complex than the small clans in which he had evolved. Man's social "software" allowed him to keep track of every relationship that he held with the members of his band, and his social rank with respect to them. So he could always precisely identify his rightful place in the group. Large groups, which spanned familial clans or even ethnic groups, blew away his ability to understand his place in the society. Thus was born the age of free-floating, unfocused anxiety. Man's social calculator continually returned a red , flashing "register overflow" message. He needed a reason to explain this anxiety, this sense of things not being quite right. And thus mythology was born, and it's handmaiden, religion. And we all became pessimists.