Would a National Character Trait that Combined Immodesty with a Disregard for Facts Generate Dangerous Domestic and Foreign Policy?

15 March 2011

Has America’s national character gone off the rails in a significant way? — David Brooks wonders

Last week, columnist David Brooks wrote a thoughtful column about the rise of American immodesty and that trait’s contribution to our difficulties.

Brooks noted that Americans seem to have visibly boosted their self-approval over the decades. He characterizes the change as “self-effacement” to “self-expansion.”

For example, self-celebration in sports and among celebrities has dramatically escalated from restraint to narcissistic heights, since my childhood in the 1940s and 50s.

The heart of Brooks’ query comes after his observation that American child-rearing practices inundate children in uncritical praise that is disconnected from realistically assessed merit.

Paraphrasing him (perhaps with more directly expressed wording):

Does American over-consumption come from a need to adorn ourselves according to an inflated sense of individual status?

Is excessively confident partisanship due to our near-narcissistic sense of self-righteousness?

Could our declined sense of citizenship and community be due to an unrealistic sense of our individual and separated worth?

Would our diminished sense of accountability to future generations (in view of our own unique specialness) account for deferring our budget deficits to them?

Citation

David Brooks, The Modesty Manifesto, New York Times (10 March 2011)

The news media’s disregard for facts complicates these questions

American journalism contributes to the generalized irrelevance of facts in American culture. Journalistic media generate income by magnifying controversies, without attempting to uncover and highlight the facts pertinent to them.

Journalism’s unwillingness to fact check disempowers people who actually would like to know who is right, who is wrong, and who is lying:

Passive news reporting that doesn’t attempt to resolve factual disputes in politics may have detrimental effects on readers, new research suggests.

The study found that people are more likely to doubt their own ability to determine the truth in politics after reading an article that simply lists competing claims without offering any idea of which side is right.

Citation

Raymond J. Pingree, Effects of Unresolved Factual Disputes in the News on Epistemic Political Efficacy, Journal of Communication 61(1): 22-47 (February 2011)

The moral?

David Brooks’ column and Raymond Pingree’s research indicate that:

(1) As American individuals, we inflate our personal worth as compared to other people. This trait diminishes our sense of shared responsibility for the nation’s integrated good.

(2) American culture (as lensed through sensationalizing, fact-disregarding media) encourages us to ignore the influence that facts and reality should have. Fact-less opinion, not rational analysis, dominates.

This is not a bi-fold recipe for national policy success.

PeteFree.com

Would a National Character Trait that Combined Immodesty with a Disregard for Facts Generate Dangerous Domestic and Foreign Policy?