Does America need more Bildung?
HOW AMERICA GOT MEAN
In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.
By David Brooks
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/
Bildung as an Answer to our Polarization Crisis
Because Bildung is exactly what we need today to remedy our political and civic crisis of extreme (affective) polarization. In many ways, affective polarization causes us to act in direct opposition to what Bildung proposes: We don’t feel galvanized to adopt further responsibility, unless it benefits our own group or interests. We don’t expand our moral and existential horizons, thus limiting our inner freedom and potential. We don’t continually grow and change, instead becoming ossified into partisan dogmas, and we don’t embrace novel encounters with differing perspectives, knowledge, or people, instead cocooning ourselves further into echo chambers of groupthink. Polarization destroys our civic development and growth as human beings, and that is a very bad thing for both ourselves and society at large.
What I am proposing is an All-American version of Bildung, which includes practices, philosophies, and communities dedicated to holistic civic engagement and personal transformation.
Does America need more Bildung?
It’s a German word that describes the way an individual takes personal responsibility towards family, friends, neighbors, and our planet.
Bildung promotes change, life-long learning, and emotional depth. It embraces knowledge, culture, art, science, new perspectives, new people, and new truths. And it demands everyone to be an active citizen.
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
https://the1a.org/segments/how-did-america-get-so-mean/
Comments
Post a Comment