"You Didn't Build That..."
Individuals, Communities, and the Binaries that Bind....
Back in the more innocent year of 2012, President Obama made an off-hand comment in a campaign speech arguing that business owners had not, in fact, built their businesses alone. Romney jumped on his inartful phrasing as admitting that Democrats don’t think individual effort or individual responsibility matters, though Obama clarified the point further at the end of his speech:
“The point is … that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
This should be a somewhat obvious - even banal - point. Anyone who has studied human social life, particularly the history of human social life, knows that humans are an intensely social species. As Aristotle famously points out in The Politics, while man is not the only political animal, we are by far the most political and we use that intense sociality for both good and evil.
Modern politics, differing as it does from Aristotle’s ideal of politics as a conversation about the good and desirable, has become polarized and therefore obsessed with binaries. And leave it to modern politics to create a binary where none exists.
Generally speaking, American conservatives tend to focus on individual effort and virtue while American progressives tend to focus on community responsibility. (There’s a lot of complexity here that I’m not going to get into, but this is a useful shorthand for the purposes of this blog post.) These general areas of focus have become - like the Obama speech and its interpretation by Republicans - a binary between boot-strapping individualists on the one side and communitarian progressives on the other.
In this case, as with many others, the binary between individual responsibility/effort/virtue on the one hand and community responsibility/assistance on the other simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Human Development Matters
The first and most serious problem is that neither the bootstrapping individualist nor the communitarian socialist can provide an accurate representation of how humans actually live in the complex 4D world. That is to say, it’s not an empirically accurate explanation of the human world. It’s also, as I’ll argue later, politically and morally dangerous because it distracts us from the actual policies that could help people out of pits in real-time, but let’s start with the empirical piece.
First, and often overlooked, all humans are born into a social group - the family - that has enormous implications for that person’s ability, virtue, and capacities in the future. From the genes our parents pass on to us to their decisions in our earliest years, much of what helps us turn into who we are is decided - by other people - before we have any capacity for choice at all.
Adding complexity, the family interacts with other social groups like our local community, our peer groups, our neighbors, and our teachers and coaches, and our broader national identity and culture, to create a complex web of associations that impact how we develop, the values we hold, and the kind of person we end up being. A lot of who we become is dependent on other people’s interactions with us and our families at the right (or wrong time).
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the city of Rochester, NY, where I grew up and where we now live. My children, the white children of a middle class college professor mother and Army Major father, live in a safe suburb surrounded by family and neighbors who are well educated. Since their infancy, they have been surrounded by a world of words, with educated parents who use a highly developed vocabulary to communicate with them and (literally) thousands of books at their fingertips. They have a large backyard and the freedom to explore it. They go to the public school down the street where they have access to languages, extra math help, and a range of curricular and extra curricular options designed to help them find and develop their talents. They are part of an active faith community and we talk about God and the universe and other Big Questions and invite their questions regularly. Almost every part of my children’s lives is set up to help their brains grow. Some of this was by conscious design, but a lot of it is a combination of accident, luck, and habituation - my husband and I are raising our kids the way we were raised.
In contrast, just five miles away, children grow up in very different environments. Deep in the inner-city, these children grow up with some of the worst gun violence in the country. They cannot explore their backyards because they don’t have one or if they do it’s not safe to be outside. Whether inside or outside, they may be exposed at much higher rates to heavy metals and environmental pollution that harm brain development. These kids often don’t have access to enough food or food that’s high enough quality to support brain development. They spend a lot of time with their peers rather than their parents, who are likely working or trying to find work or just not around (possibly because they’re dead or in prison). They don’t have people using complex language and expansive vocabularies because most people in their peer group struggled to graduate from high school. Their schools are riven with violence and gang activity and their teachers are overwhelmed by behavioral issues and children with deep trauma. Their time horizon is much shorter and more brutal and they are exposed to things my children don’t even know exist, such as sex work and drugs, from a very young age.
While this description hides a lot of incredible work being done by dedicated people in the city itself, the comparison between inner-city kids and suburban kids and their subsequent outcomes is pretty bleak.
What’s the difference between my kids and comparable kids downtown? Do my kids deserve their idyllic lives? Do my kids deserve the incredible blessings of stable family lives and stable communities and stable schools? Of course not. No child deserves anything more than any other child, at least not when these differences start.
It would be easy to blame all this on the parents, which many people do. But those same variables I discussed above apply just as much to my parents as to me. And a big part of the reason I’m where I am today is that I had the same benefits growing up that my kids now do. And the same goes for the struggling parent in the inner-city of Rochester. Chances are good they didn’t fall to that level from a comfortable middle class life. Just as I inherited benefits I didn’t deserve in the cosmic sense, many of these parents in inner-city Rochester inherited burdens they didn’t deserve either.
So what’s the point? The point is that there is no point in pitting individual responsibility against community responsibility because both matter and both are completely and utterly inextricable from one another because human individuality develops in a social environment and human communities are made up of discrete individuals, working to make their way through the world.
Will my children “deserve” all their eventual accomplishments, whatever they are? Do they build their lives or do other people build them for them? Both yes and no; or more accurately, these questions are meaningless.
Building Ladders for Those Stuck In Pits
From a policy perspective, the kind of individual you are is often directly the result of the kind of environment you grow up in, which is why we should care a lot more about stabilizing children’s environments than we actually do. This doesn’t mean that we prevent kids from failing or that resilience and grit don’t matter. I’m a big advocate for kids taking risks and learning to fail gracefully. But grit doesn’t require navigating one’s way through gunfire and addiction and poverty before the age of five. So in that sense, the conservative boot-strapping approach, when tied to cuts for early childhood programs and elimination of child tax credits, fundamentally fails to understand how human virtue is built.
At the same time, the communitarian progressives are also wrong when they argue that it is *just* social environments that impact who we become. Lots of people overcome deeply traumatic and awful upbringings to live perfectly normal and even exemplary lives. Should they have to do this? To experience deep pain and trauma? Of course not. But we have plenty of examples to show it’s possible. (The question of why some people overcome and others do not is a more complicated one that I have space to get into here, but maybe it’ll be worth a follow-up post).
Even more complicated for the communitarians is that the question of *which* community is responsible for who we become is a very difficult one to answer. We know that families are critical in children’s development, but collectivist solutions to the problem of the family often take the form of removing children from their families in the hope the community can do it better. In general, that’s not the case. From a community responsibility perspective, it’s not just about how to ensure individuals are enmeshed in supportive communities but it’s also to figure out which community is most needed at which particular point in time, which is quite hard to do, except in retrospect.
One persistent problem of human social life is that scaling social responsibility up is really hard to do well in part because perverse incentives will plague even the most well-meaning interventions, particularly the higher up the chain you go. It turns out that Adam Smith was right in the Theory of Moral Sentiments when he argued that we feel the most sympathy for those we know intimately and that sympathy is pretty important for helping people out of pits. The most impactful interventions are usually those at the local level, with those we know personally or could know personally, and whose progress we can track.
And it turns out that some things - poverty and violence and addiction and mental illness, as starters - are just really hard. They’re often really hard because they’re a complex amalgam of individual traits and community failures - over generations - and both need to be addressed - together in an integrated way - before we can see real benefits.
Neither side of the individual/community binary does a good job of addressing them in their fullness, because we need both strong individuals and strong communities to ameliorate these problems. And some, like chronic and serious mental illness, are very difficult for any community to deal with, no matter how strong that community is.
What’s the solution, you might ask? It’s not a solution so much as a reframe. Let’s start by rejecting the binary altogether. Humans evolved to live in groups and to resist those groups at the same time. Group membership impacts the way our brain develops from the womb. There’s no escaping it. But individuals still make choices and they use their talents and abilities - those talents and abilities that developed within a community - to challenge, support, and resist the group in unpredictable ways. This constant emergent interaction means that many of the problems of social living - friction, conflict, arguments, and debate - will never really be solved. And that’s ok. They don’t need to be.
What does need solving is the problem of pits. Pits like those faced by the kids in inner-city Rochester. Children should not grow up in poverty or exposed to heavy metals or constant violence. All that seems clear. Practically, we need to pay much more attention to infancy and early childhood than we do and we need to focus our energies at bottom-up efforts to empower families. We have lots of examples of policy interventions that work - child tax credits, visiting nurse services, community health clinics integrated with social services, harm-reduction programs for addiction - but because we’re constantly distracted by the false binaries our polarized politics waves in front of us, we lack the political will to work in a bipartisan and non-polarized way to actually make these changes.
And that’s a serious and real failure. Because providing stable homes for children will help them develop into the people who - for good or bad - will shape our 4D political landscape for generations to come.
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