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Social capital may be the answer to helping America recapture lost soul
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America has more or less recovered from the financial crisis that began in 2008, which saw tens of millions driven below the poverty line. The economy is thriving now and economists, despite threats of US re-engagement in the Middle East, are predicting steady growth.
But it is an uneven recovery. There’s a growing economic gap between the ultra rich and the poor, resulting in income inequality reminiscent of America’s gilded age. While the super wealthy get richer the middle class suffers from stagnation. Adding to all this is a veil of malaise that hangs above the country as if it’s the smoke from the debris of destroyed twin towers in New York since 9/11, and won’t go away.
This malaise has its roots in several camps. Former president George W. Bush started an unjust war in Iraq based on false data about weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the deaths of so many innocen Iraqi civilians.
At home, individualism, coupled with a hyper-consumerist lifestyle, has become an unsustainable American experiment. The resulting breakdown of family, and therefore family values, has become a national threat.
Furthermore, our sense of insecurity is profound since 9/11, and it resulted in rising anti-immigrant sentiments and xenophobia; the battle over whether America will remain a nation of immigrants or a country of singular identity has intensified. Abroad, the two wars that were supposed to have ended seem to go on indefinitely.
But on a grander scale, Americans, I fear, have lost a sense of centrality.
“Americans have always needed to know the point of it all ..,” essayist Lance Morrow once noted. “They need to possess an idea of themselves, a myth of themselves, an explanation of themselves.”
It’s perhaps fanciful to talk of soul and spirit, even as metaphors, but when a country loses its bearings and sense of direction, its soul, too, falters. If not quantifiable, it is at least discernible: in the form of collective insecurity and loss of confidence, and increasingly through collective anger, cynicism and shame.
Larger than economics
The economy may have revived, but the nation’s spirit lay in metaphorical limbo without an articulate vision of a new America. Money may measure a country’s wealth, but the country’s health is measured by something far larger than economics.
President Barack Obama, perhaps more than any other president since Ronald Reagan, had an opportunity to correct this by giving the nation a sense of direction. The role of a president in time of crisis, to be sure, is far beyond being a good technocrat. While a good and capable president can deal with the nuts and bolts of the economy, only an inspiring and charismatic leader can deliver his people out of the wasteland. Alas, so embattled with two wars abroad and a moribund economy, whatever his vision was, it never got off the ground.
Though, to be fair, he did point us in the right direction. A major ingredient of the cure lies in the area of “social capital.” A house can be built cheaply, for instance, when neighbors join in to help. Hungry folks can be fed more efficiently if volunteers show up at local soup kitchen, and so on.
Obama himself said the government stimulus package is not “a panacea.” He called on Americans to volunteer and share the burden. Amidst the crisis, Obama even urged Americans to play an active role in healing the country: “Prepare a care package for a soldier. Read to a child. Or fix up a local basketball court so the next generation can play and grow. Log on to USAService.org to find or create a project near you, then gather some friends and lace ‘em up.”
Of course, social capital has always existed, in good times and bad. In immigrant communities, strong social networks are precisely what keep many from dire poverty, and in some cases, from certain catastrophe.
Take the Vietnamese community. Long before the government managed to fully mobilize to deal with the Katrina disaster, an intricate social network — Vietnamese language media, Vietnamese-owned shopping malls, Vietnamese Buddhist temples and Christian churches — were already providing information and shelter to tens of thousands of Vietnamese fleeing from New Orleans and the surrounding region. As far as Dallas and Houston and Los Angeles, volunteers took strangers into their homes while others around the country gave money and sent care packages.
Alas, that tight-knit, social infrastructure does not exist on a national scale. How to replicate those types of social bonds and sense of collective responsibility for the entire country is the trillion dollar question. Yet it is a question that needs a good answer. America is now adrift and unmoored. Obama commands the rare thing called public trust and national (and international) good will. But historians may agree that he might have risked squandering much of it on articulating a vision of Americans helping themselves and remaking their society.
The next leader seems required to give equal weight to healing the soul of America as he or she does to mending America’s purse.
Andrew Lam is editor at New America Media and the author of Birds of Paradise Lost and Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.
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