The permanent problem in a nutshell

Good luck facing the permanent problem without this guy.

If you follow celebrity news at all, you know that the man-bites-dog stories are the ones about stars who never let fame go to their heads. The generational athletic talent who never sees a trace of scandal throughout a long career. The dazzlingly handsome movie actor who sticks happily with the same woman for decades. The rock star who stays away from drugs and groupies to focus on this craft. They are the boring outliers in what is otherwise a never-ending parade of titillating dysfunction.

Why do celebrities misbehave? Like the dog in the raunchy joke, because they can. They cheat on their spouses because the opportunities are endless. They abuse drugs because someone is always willing to supply them at a moment’s notice. They can’t say no to their worst impulses because almost nobody ever says no to them. And because they can get away with a lot. Rules get bent for them all the time. When they screw up their relationships, there’s no shortage of ready volunteers to step in. They can stumble from one scandal to the next so long as they still have the talent and crowd appeal. “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

The tabloid-fodder lives of celebrities are a function of expanded opportunities to stray from the straight and narrow, and diminished incentives not to. When these external, circumstantial supports for good behavior lose their force, people are forced to rely more on their own internal capacity for self-control — their ability to prioritize higher goods over lower ones and consistently choose the hard right over the easy wrong until it no longer feels hard. The frequency of train wrecks under these conditions is sobering: do you think you’d do better in the face of all that temptation?

Well, here’s the thing: our mounting material plenty is having similar effects on society as a whole. In the past, external circumstances did considerable work in encouraging us to cultivate virtues and steer clear of temptation. Now the temptations are multiplying and the incentives to develop our higher selves are fading. We are being thrown back on our internal resources — and all too many of us are floundering.

Squandering our potential

Let’s look at three basic elements of individual well-being: physical health and fitness, cognitive development and performance, and the quantity and quality of personal and social connections. In all three cases, our achievement of material plenty has significantly raised the ceiling of possible well-being and widened the opportunities for achieving it. At the same time, though, the dramatically more comfortable, convenient, and entertainingly distracting circumstances of modern life have made it much easier to ignore those opportunities and squander our potential.

Thanks to the triumphs of modern medicine and public health, we now can expect to live long, relatively healthy lives. But notwithstanding having unparalleled access to healthy and delicious food, we massively overindulge in easy wrongs to the tune of a 40 percent obesity rate. We’re not just fatter, we’re also much physically weaker: despite all the money spent on gym memberships and home workout equipment, a number of studies have found that grip strength is declining over time. And our vision has deteriorated as well, thanks to spending so much of our childhood in comfortable indoor settings (the relative lack of exposure to bright light apparently affects eye development). The percentage of Americans suffering from myopia has basically doubled over the past century (from roughly 20 to 40 percent), and the trend long ago went global.

When the world was poor, hard physical labor was unavoidable — and so, of necessity, people developed strong, lean bodies and maintained sharp eyesight. Our great gains in physical comfort have come at the expense of bodily deterioration. Of course, when the world was poor, infectious and chronic diseases ran rampant, and that all that physically arduous work frequently resulted in death, maiming, and chronic health problems. Accordingly, physical well-being has increased dramatically on net — even as we squander much of our physical potential.

Since physical vigor is not nearly as important to our life prospects as it once was, the fact that we fall so far short of our potential physical well-being doesn’t detract that much from our ability to enjoy satisfying, fulfilling lives. And since we’re talking about the realm of the physical, there’s always the possibility that we can find technological fixes: vision correction keeps getting better and more convenient, and semaglutide may help us get past the obesity epidemic.

By contrast, maintaining strong personal relationships is, as it has always been, absolutely essential for a well-lived life. But here again, the increasing ease of modern life has made it easier for us to ignore our long-term interests in favor of more fleeting pleasures. When the world was poor, our personal relationships fulfilled urgently practical functions. Our spouse was a partner in economic production, our kids helped out on the farm when they were young and helped take care of us when we got old, and our neighbors were an insurance policy in the event of hard times. Now we rely on the market or the welfare state for our practical needs, and our face-to-face relationships have devolved into just another set of consumption options in a sea of expertly marketed alternatives. Far too often, the marketing wins.

Our progressive liberation from physical drudgery has greatly expanded the time and energy available for developing our minds. And as we began our ascent out of mass poverty, external circumstances lent further encouragement to realizing our cognitive potential. For a blessed but far too brief historical interval, the state of technological development — specifically, steadily declining printing costs — made reading for pleasure the most accessible and diverting form of entertainment on offer. All forms of pleasure-seeking will inevitably bring out the scolds, and reading was no exception: the popularity of novels among female readers in particular occasioned widespread hand-wring about its addictive time-wasting, unhealthy overstimulation of the nervous system, and dubious effects on moral character. In fact, however, “deep literacy” — the hard-won capacity for sustained engagement with complex texts — is a cognitive superpower that unlocks new levels of intellectual sophistication and rigor.

Capitalism eventually came up with other, more immediately stimulating and less cognitively demanding forms of entertainment — but you had to leave your home to go to the movies, and you could still read while the radio was playing. With the rise of television in the 1950s, though, pleasure reading met its match — and it’s been in decline ever since.

Even as capitalist consumption’s encouragement of cognitive development was starting to wane, the encouragement given by capitalist production was revving into high gear. This dynamic traced back to the takeoff of industrialization in the late 1800s and the emergence of large business enterprises. These new corporate giants were increasingly reliant on employee brainpower throughout their organizations. On the factory floor, workers were called upon to operate and maintain complex and expensive machinery — and so the demand for literate workers rose steadily. Meanwhile, the task of administering business enterprises’ complex and far-flung activities summoned into existence an entirely new class — professional managers — and greatly expanded the ranks of professionals in finance, accounting, and law needed to coordinate the intricacies of business life. The growing demand for brainpower resulted in massive investments in education: first, the high school movement in the first half of the 20th century, then the boom in college education following World War II. Average years of schooling for American adults rose from eight years in 1900 to over 12 years by 1980.

The rise of secondary and tertiary education represented a major cognitive uplift for society. Completing 12 years of school and getting a high school diploma became the norm, with graduation rates exceeding 75 percent by 1980. And the postwar college boom greatly expanded the numbers of those exposed to real intellectual sophistication and analytical rigor. We can see the results in the “middlebrow” phenomenon that peaked in the 1950s and ‘60s, with the middle-class hunger for intellectual self-improvement reflected in the popularity of such things as the Harvard Classics, the Book of the Month Club, and home encyclopedias. And we see it in the “Flynn effect” — the rise in raw IQ scores over the course of the 20th century.

As college campuses swelled during the 1950s and ‘60s, the initial effect was for students to adapt to the higher intellectual level of academic life. Over time, though, as the percentage of high school grads going to college continued to rise, academic life began to adapt to the inevitable drop in admission standards. College assumed a new function as the primary credentialing body for entry into the meritocracy, and kids understandably wanted to obtain that credential with as little effort as possible. And increasingly commercialized universities, operating on the principle that the customer is always right, steadily gave in. Now we are at the point where a significant fraction of undergrads are flatly incapable of doing what was once considered to be college-level work; even at elite institutions, professors now regularly complain that students simply can’t do the reading that previous generations were able to handle. Not coincidentally, the 21st century gave rise to a “reverse Flynn effect” as raw IQ scores started to fall.

For physical and social development, then, external incentives for virtuous behavior steadily weakened since the outset of industrialization; for cognitive development, by contrast, external incentives sharpened during industrialization only to start tailing off in the post-industrial era. At the present time, we have reached the point in all three cases where external circumstances are increasingly enabling dysfunctional conduct.

The task before us

Approaching our current state of affairs from this angle allows us to see our contemporary conundrum with particular clarity:

At the same time that the possibility of a well-lived life has never been more widely available, the ease with which we can squander that possibility has never been greater.

This characterization of the current dimensions of the “permanent problem” gets to the heart of the seething frustrations that underlie our 21st century malaise. Objective, material conditions have never been better, but the gap between what we actually have achieved and what seems possible to achieve has grown so large that reality, however impressive by historical standards, nonetheless seems contemptible.

This characterization also allows us to summarize the specific, concrete nature of the “permanent problem” at the present time — both for us as individuals and as members of a larger society. Recall that Keynes described the permanent problem as the challenge to “live wisely and agreeably and well” amidst the blessings of material plenty.

For individuals, then, this broad formulation of the permanent problem can be concretized as follows:

The key to a flourishing life in the midst of material plenty is to develop the internal awareness and discipline needed to identify and pursue higher goods and avoid the temptations of immediately appealing but ultimately unsatisfying pursuits.

Please don’t take me for a perfectionist zealot. Part of a well-lived life, in my view, is not taking yourself too seriously, and that includes recognizing that lower pleasures are a part of life, too: in proper proportion, they add zest and simple, uncomplicated enjoyment. By all means, cultivate a well-managed vice or two among your virtues.

But the determined, effortful cultivation of virtuous habits of thought and action is essential. It is through this process of character formation that we achieve the self-mastery that we need to build and exercise our physical, mental, and social capabilities. To engage in projects that challenge and stretch us, to foster and tend to the vital relationships that fill our hearts, and to open ourselves to experiences that we enjoy in the moment and treasure for a lifetime.

It falls to each of us as individuals to make the choices that, for better or worse, ultimately constitute our lives. But we do not make those choices in a vacuum. We are social creatures, cultural creatures, enmeshed in webs of shared meaning that guide us in the choices we make. Our chances for individual flourishing are thus greatly aided if the surrounding culture is conducive to learning how to make good choices.

At the societal level, then, the permanent problem now confronts us with this great challenge:

The key to a flourishing society in the midst of material plenty is the development of a strong cultural foundation that supports self-mastery and the prioritization of higher goods.

Just saying this explicitly and clearly is enough to make clear why, despite our amazing technological and organizational capabilities, things feel so broken at present. At the root of so many of our problems is the fact that the cultural foundation for human flourishing has been steadily weakening and fracturing.

Our cultural blind spots

The extent of cultural disrepair is by no means uniform throughout society. Rather, it is much more pronounced among ordinary people than it is among the well-educated professional and managerial elite. Obesity and other lifestyle-related health problems are much more severe; the retreat from marriage and breakdown of the two-parent family are much more advanced; TV watching and passive video consumption take up a bigger chunk of the day, and screen use by kids is considerably higher. Here we see the interplay of dynamics pushing in opposite directions: even as rising wealth generally reduces incentives for self-restraint, the emergence and expansion of the professional and managerial elite has created external conditions — access to higher income and status, conditioned on academic success — that continue to incentivize the development of discipline and conscientiousness in well-educated households.

Even so, today’s moral disorientation transcends the class divide. Consider this David Brooks writeup of the 2008 book Lost in Transition on the challenges of contemporary adolescence:

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

This kind of widespread moral illiteracy helps to explain the embrace of highly impoverished views of what the good life entails. When asked what was necessary for a fulfilling life, 75 percent of respondents ages 18 through 40 said making a good living; only 32 percent said marriage. Meanwhile, when asked what was most important for their children, 88 percent of parents said financial independence; marriage and kids, meanwhile, were mentioned by only 21 and 20 percent, respectively.

The cultural transformation that has brought us to this point has been described from many angles. I offered a generally flattering portrait in my The Age of Abundance, arguing that mass affluence had allowed people to ascend from the base of Maslow’s pyramid — i.e., preoccupation with physical security — in pursuit of belonging, meaning, and self-realization. Here I followed the findings of political scientist Ronald Inglehart, whose World Values Surveys revealed a global shift with rising incomes from “survival values” to “self-expression values.”

Both of us accentuated the positive in our account, and there was a sound basis for that emphasis. Much of the considerable social progress that has occurred over my lifetime — the achievement of full legal equality for blacks, the broader decline in overt bigotry toward ethnic minorities, more equitable treatment and greatly expanded economic opportunities for women, the retreat of sexual repression and greater tolerance for sexual minorities, greater concern for the natural environment — reflects the influence of this cultural shift.

But there has been a dark side as well. Philip Rieff captured an important part of it in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic, arguing that the old religious commitment to things outside and greater than ourselves has been abandoned in favor of an inward psychological focus on the contents of our own skulls. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (also, by the way, the wife of Irving Kristol and mother of Bill) charted the shift from old-style “virtues” to contemporary “values” through a process she called “de-moralization”: the loss of belief in a shared moral order, replaced by a mushy relativism of competing personal preferences. Allan Bloom hammered away at a similar theme in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. Robert Bellah and his coauthors of Habits of the Heart documented the rise of “expressive individualism” and the consequent impoverishment of moral vocabulary and sensibilities. And Christopher Lasch railed against the culture’s descent into narcissism. It is noteworthy that these analyses have issued from all points of the ideological compass.

A new book by Ryan Avent, published just last week, sheds further light on what has happened to us (check out my recent podcast for further discussion). The book is called In Good Faith, and it argues that the social unraveling so distressingly obvious all around us reflects the inadequacy of what he calls our “Modern Faith”:

What is this Modern Faith? It is, in a nutshell, a supreme confidence in the correct systems. It is the faith of an engineer, or of a country with faith in engineers. Its core tenet is that successful societies are the most rational ones, those with the right systems of social organization: liberal democracy and free market capitalism. It is the belief that places with the right systems will do best, and that there is not much more to producing a good world than getting those right systems in place and allowing them to do their work, guided by a technocratic elite – the clerics of our Faith.

The Modern Faith isn’t wrong about the importance of systems and incentives: the famous nighttime photo of the Korean peninsula puts that question to rest. But it is guilty of dropping vital context — namely, the particular and, by historical standards, highly exotic web of cultural meaning that has allowed people to cooperate for mutual benefit across all kinds of dividing lines that previously separated “us” from “them.” Accordingly, the effectiveness of the great institutions of liberal modernity — the market economy and liberal democracy — varies widely with the extent to which people in a particular place share that exotic web of meaning. (This study of parking tickets received by U.N. diplomats offers a small but wonderfully telling example of the larger point.)

The Modern Faith ignores the deep dependence of impersonal systems on internalized values and norms consistent with good institutional functioning. Which, it turns out, is a major part of its appeal. Here’s Ryan again, starting with a discussion of the global triumph of liberal democratic capitalism at the end of the 20th century:

It helped transform liberals’ faith in liberalism into the Faith in the all-powerful systems of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, with little room left over for other ideas about what might make a place free or good or well governed over the very long run and in the absence of major rivals. The notion was simple, compelling, and allowed liberal societies to feel good about themselves. Crucially, it asked very little in return: since it was the system that mattered rather than the habits of the members of society themselves….

Indeed, do we not have a duty to help markets do their work by pursuing our own ends?... We have given ourselves permission, with the adoption of our Faith, to get ours.

Ryan argues that the Modern Faith is a dead end. Formal rules and incentives are woefully insufficient to channel raw, heedless self-interest into the public good; well-developed habits of self-restraint and other-regarding conduct are needed as well to keep people from overburdening the system by testing it at every turn. Our contemporary distempers are the fruits of our misplaced faith:

We put the onus for constructing and maintaining a virtuous world on valuable but rickety institutions that cannot bear the weight, and on an elite that suddenly finds itself without any respectable basis on which to act nobly and unselfishly, even when such actions are desperately required. We give ourselves permission to behave as our forebears would never have thought it appropriate to behave, when in fact we should be able, given our productive power and technology, to be more moral and selfless than ever before in history.

In my essays here and in my recent book, I have traced a similar dynamic of de-moralization and de-socialization over the past decades — but I tell the story a little differently. Although the Modern Faith is certainly well established among current elites, I think it’s too abstract to have generated much affirmative belief among most ordinary people. Instead, in my view an implicit version of it has been absorbed by a kind of osmosis as other sources of meaning and value have shriveled and disappeared. With the end of the “domestic sphere” created by the old sexual division of labor, the decline of organized religion, the fading of the old WASP elite and its notions of noblesse oblige, and the general retreat from face-to-face personal and community involvement, we have abandoned ways of life that called on us to rise above mere self-assertion and preference satisfaction. When all that’s left is the capitalist monoculture, it’s all but inevitable that we will live down to its base standards.

I’m no social conservative, so I’m not arguing that we need to return to the “good old days” — in many cases we had good reasons for abandoning the old ways of life as they then stood. Here Ryan and I agree: what we need is not “RETVRN,” but rather reconstruction. Here’s Ryan:

We need to find a way back from this intellectual dead end. We need new ways of thinking about how society works, ways that recognize the importance of systems like democracy and capitalism but that provide a more robust way of understanding when and how they function in the way we want them to…. We need to give ourselves reasons to live, to love life, beyond the promise of a new gadget tomorrow. We need a new Faith.

Ryan focuses exclusively on the need for new cultural beliefs and norms more conducive to flourishing, whereas my book’s ideas for a more hopeful future center on revitalizing technological progress and using that to institutionalize new, flourishing-friendly ways of life through what I call “economic independence.” But ultimately, as I made clear in the book, I agree with Ryan: a cultural shift is needed before the kind of economic independence movement I have in mind can take off the ground:

There are stirrings in the broader society: the boom in homeschooling, the increased interest in co-housing. But for these stirrings to translate into a coherent movement capable of effecting significant social change, what is needed is something like another Great Awakening — a spiritual movement to lead our wayward society back to neglected truths and abandoned virtues.

For those still blinkered by the Modern Faith, this kind of talk from Ryan and me sounds hopelessly, eye-rollingly woolly. I can understand, as I resisted and pushed back for years while such thoughts took up residence in my head and started to settle in. But once you see the gaping blind spots of the Modern Faith, you can’t unsee them — and you can’t unsee what has been lost while we were looking elsewhere.