When the philosopher Satchel Paige warned us not to look back (because something might be gaining on us), he couldn't have imagined how prescient he was, even though his own career in baseball pointed the way to the world we would all someday inhabit. Restricted to the Negro Leagues for more than two decades, Paige finally broke into Major League Baseball in 1948. Within a couple of decades black ballplayers had become dominant figures in the majors, the Negro Leagues had ­collapsed—­and baseball had become a much more competitive ­place.

That will happen when barriers fall. Technology has some of the same effects: Newspapers find themselves competing with bloggers, traditional stores with Amazon, and singles bars with Cupid.com. Americans find that, thanks in part to technologies they invented or pioneered, they’re competing with workers in India, China, and other ­far-­off lands who are willing do the same work for a lot less money. Even individuals in need of a Little League logo or a personal webpage are finding people who can do the job for less in Bucharest or ­Bangla­desh.

Competition—­the reality but also the ­metaphor—­has somehow come to pervade modern life, much as we try to wish it away or pretend, as in ­five-­year-­olds’ soccer games, that it isn't really going on. In some cities, the preschool admissions process is as fraught as the mass version of musical chairs with which top universities fill their classes. ­Stepped-­up competition is apparent in the workplace as well. Companies are less willing or able to carry unproductive employees, but in today’s competitive business environment even productive workers can receive a pink slip when circumstances persuade executives that cutbacks make sense. Companies these days are less constrained by sentiment or tradition when considering whether to outsource, move, or shut a plant. A study earlier this year by economists Thomas Lemieux, W. Bentley MacLeod, and Daniel Parent found that “the overall incidence of performance-pay jobs has increased from a little more than 30 percent in the late 1970s to more than 40 percent in the 1990s.” Bonus, commission, ­piecework—­whatever you want to call it, pay for production makes work seem a lot more competitive. When Fortune magazine reported on white-collar workers “fired at fifty” who couldn't find comparable positions, the best advice from the experts was to embrace “involuntary entrepreneurship,” which of course means competing on your own without a company-provided pension, health insurance, sick days, or ­vacation.

Globalization has spurred many changes. Firms that once shuffled along in cozy domestic oligopolies now find themselves battling overseas competitors. Deregulation of airlines and utilities, the dismantling of trade barriers, growing Third World productive capacity, rapidly evolving technologies, the weakening of restrictions that kept banks pent up within states and out of the securities ­business—­these developments and so many others have helped foster a vastly more competitive commercial environment than existed a generation ago, an era well within living memory for many American workers, who recall a time when U.S. industrial might was ­unchallenged.

Even the home, ostensible refuge from worry and trial, has become a competitive arena. The overturning of traditional roles has meant that spouses may find themselves vying not just to see who can get out of doing the laundry, but for power, status, and renown as well. Consider the case of Ségolène Royal and her partner, François Holland, both ambitious French politicians and rivals for the same party’s presidential nomination. Surely, electoral jockeying made for some frosty breakfasts around their house (and in fact the couple recently parted ways). As for the rest of us, competition for filial affection has radically increased in many families thanks to the increased prevalence of divorce, in which parents sharing custody may find themselves in an ­authority-­eroding contest for the favor of offspring who all too easily play one off against the ­other.

How did we get here? As is so often the case in American life, we’re victims of our own success. Despite a remarkable amount of hand-wringing, given the circumstances, life in this country for most of us is better than it has ever been—longer, fairer, freer, and richer. And that’s what makes for so much competition. More of us than ever before consider that we have a reasonable shot at an Ivy League education, a beachfront property, or a partnership in a law firm. The same is true for less glittering prizes. Discrimination persists, of course, but there’s less of it. Newspaper help-wanted ads no longer specify gender or faith, and real estate ads (to say nothing of deeds) have dropped their restrictions as well. In the political arena everyone’s got a lobby, it sometimes seems, except the country at large, and the old, nowadays more numerous and healthier than in the past, compete all too effectively for resources against the young.

Another factor in the seeming competitiveness of modern life is the astonishing efficiency of modern markets, as well as the acceptance of markets as the prevailing metaphor for so much human activity. In the public realm such one-time monopolies as the Postal Service, the local public school, and the regional electric utility, now have to compete against (respectively) UPS and FedEx, charter and magnet schools, and alternative providers of electricity, with whom consumers can contract. Market ­participants—­that’s ­us—­have better information than in the past as a result of the ratings, rankings, and reviews that are cropping up everywhere. Users report their experience with products on websites such as Amazon and Epinions; professors and schoolteachers are bluntly rated on sites such as RateMyProfessors.com (which covers sexual appeal as well as pedagogy); and publications including 

Consumer Reports, U.S. News & World Report

, and various city magazines rate and rank for a living, so that sooner or later someone is likely to be anointed best dermatologist—or, for that matter, plumber—in Cleveland.

The irony is that it was competition, in the first place, that helped bring about the richer, fairer, ­freer—­and intensely more ­competitive—­society we have become. All the key forces at ­work—­social change, technology, and ­globalization—­are as plain as day on the baseball diamond. Time was, a young white fellow with a live arm, honed perhaps in sandlot games or by throwing against the barn wall, was competing only against others like himself. Today he’s competing against the best the world has to offer. Not only is the sport open to blacks and other minorities from this country, but a significant proportion of today’s players are foreign born. Besides the Latin Americans now so common in the big leagues, Korean and Japanese ballplayers are starting to turn up. (Professional basketball and hockey also draw on an increasingly global talent pool.) Foreign squads have been beating American teams in the Olympics and other international competitions for a while now, not just in baseball but in basketball as well. Free agency, meanwhile, has forced baseball team owners to compete for players, bidding up salaries so that now even a journeyman reliever earns a small fortune. Nor is milking cows any longer the primary builder of wrist strength. Just as travel and telecommunications technologies have made it possible to recruit more widely, advances in training, dietary science, and medicine have enabled players to hit the ball farther and throw it ­faster.

College admissions is another arena where competition has blossomed riotously. When I applied to college, back in the raccoon coat days of 1974, you had to complete a separate ­time-­consuming application for each institution; Yale’s was so daunting that I didn't even bother. I applied to five or six schools and visited none. Despite only decent grades and a mediocre math showing on the SATs, I got into some excellent institutions, and attended one without hysteria, consultants, or prep courses. My graying friends and I agree that we wouldn't stand a chance of admission into our own alma maters today. Students are much more focused and accomplished, and the marginal cost of an additional application has plummeted; the rise of the “Common Application” (often filed electronically) has made it easier to apply to many more schools than I did, and high school students are doing just ­that.

My graying friends and I agree that we wouldn't stand a chance of admission into our own alma maters today.

About those spectacular students: You can expect to see more manufactured greatness in the years ahead, and even tougher competition in many arenas, now that genius looks more likely to be made than born, at least in the eyes of those who study such things. Chess prodigies are proliferating, for example, thanks to ­computer-­based training methods, but in fact prodigies are proliferating in many different fields as a result of better training, determined parents, affluence, and, yes, tougher competition. “The standards denoting expertise grow ever more challenging,” Philip E. Ross wrote last year in 

, where he was a contributing editor. “High school runners manage the four-minute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only by virtuosi.” Ross reports on studies comparing tournament chess from 1911 to 1993 which found that modern players made far fewer errors, and that today’s top chess players generally are much better than the grandmasters of ­yore.

Circumstances and ideology these days are supporting all this competition. The collapse of communism almost everywhere (in China it lives on in name only, supported by something like a capitalist frenzy) has left one brand or another of the market economy as pretty much the only game in town. ­Pro-­competition ideologues (and such intellectual forebears as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman) are in the ascendance, and economists generally have expanded their turf across almost the whole of human activity (including such highly competitive arenas as sex), sharpening our understanding of competition’s role in our lives. Evolutionary biology, perhaps the other preeminently influential academic discipline of our times, also has competition at its core. Our view of courtship nowadays is as likely to be influenced by Charles Darwin as Jane Austen, and thanks to online dating (the sexual equivalent of eBay?), the Internet gods are playing nearly as big a role as ­Cupid.

Competition has also been rescued to some extent from the ­class-­based doghouse in which it dwelt for so long. In the bad old days, after all, trying too hard was considered poor form; success was supposed to come easily, like one’s wealth and position, and not require any of the sweaty striving associated with the lower orders. Those days are blessedly ­past—­we are all sweaty strivers ­now—­yet we remain ambivalent about this state of affairs. We feel nostalgia for the ethos of good form, and for the freedom from class anxiety we might have felt in a more static society. Who among us has not referred, at some point, to competitive modern life as a rat race? Which of us has not vowed, sooner or later, to foreswear it, presumably in favor of a return to our natural state of romping in the meadows with the butterflies? We want our kids to do well, yet competition is something we want to shelter them from. That’s why, in northern California, some high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students are experiencing white flight among families who find the academic environment a mite too . . . hectic.

For all their rhetoric, business executives don’t seem to like competition much either, and in this at least they frequently have unions on their side. Remember 

(1951)? Alec Guinness plays a man who anticipates glory and riches for inventing an indestructible fabric, only to discover that labor and management are united in their fervor for his scalp. Executives and commentators have often complained of “cutthroat,” “murderous,” or “ruinous” competition. Many corporate ­mergers—­such as the recent acquisition of Wild Oats Markets by Whole Foods ­Market—­are initiated by executives who hope in part to make markets less competitive by joining one-time rivals. Even our own government is dubious; while antitrust laws exist to suppress anti-competitive practices, a host of other government ­initiatives—­such as costly federal farm ­policies—­work to suppress ­competition.

More than one liberal intellectual is ready to call a halt. In his book 

 (1986), Alfie Kohn urged us to embrace cooperation and get our kids to play ­non-­competitive games. Some schools have taken this idea to heart by embracing a euphemistic grading system to avoid the nakedly hierarchical A through F that most of us ­old-­timers remember (rest assured, the kids know very well that ­NI—­“needs improvement”—­is about the same as a C). David Callahan, in 

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

 (2004), answers his own implied question by blaming an excessively competitive society. In the realm of baseball, for instance, Callahan cites the case of an ­over­age pitcher in the 2001 Little League World Series, who mowed down the younger kids until he was unmasked. Yet the evidence for competitively inspired corruption is anecdotal at best; back in the halcyon days of 1919, after all, the 

World Series was tainted in the ­so-­called Black Sox scandal, and in 1951 the New York Giants won the National League pennant thanks not just to Bobby Thomson’s game-­ending Shot Heard ’Round the World but to the team’s premeditated theft of signs from opposing ­catchers.

Callahan is on firmer ground when he brings up the steroid allegations that have dogged slugger Barry Bonds. It’s still unclear how widespread doping has been in baseball, but if you watch a game or two from a mere 25 years ago on

, the change is striking: The earlier players seem downright Lilliputian by modern standards. Sadly, steroids are just another example of technology boosting performance in a competitive environment, and these phenomena are not limited to the majors. Nowadays the parents of some ­school-­age players are pressing doctors for rehabilitative surgery on perfectly healthy young elbows, in hopes that the procedure will deliver a couple extra miles per hour on a high schooler’s fastball (fortunately, it can’t).

We may be doomed to earn our bread by the sweat of our brows, but before we plunge into despair over a ­dog-­eat-­dog society that grows more competitive by the day, it’s worth keeping a few things in mind about ­competition.

 Think of the Roman gladiators! Or in our own country, consider Oklahoma: After it was snatched from the Indians, the future state was apportioned by means of a land rush, with settlers trampling one another to get at prime spots. Nineteenth-century business practices were truly red in tooth and claw, while total output per person was so much lower in those days that merely staying alive was a competitive scramble for most people. Larger family sizes, meanwhile, meant more competition for parental attention, food, and inheritable resources.

Life is not as competitive as the media might have us believe.

 It’s important to remember that our cultural elites live with so much competitive anxiety that their lives simply aren't representative. Most Americans have more leisure than they did a generation ago, even as the highest-paid earners work like maniacs. And competition of all kinds is worst in places such as New York and Los Angeles, where real-estate hysteria and preschool panic afflict even the rich and powerful. The media come to us from these places, and are produced by people who live in a culture of frenzied attention grabbing that sooner or later disappoints everybody. Reports from these precincts should be discounted by at least 50 percent.

It’s our nature. This is probably not a great argument for anything, but it’s worth noting that competition is at least as natural to us as cooperation. Hierarchies crop up almost everywhere, in every setting. Remember 

? Everyone was equal, sure, but some were more equal than others. It’s the same in real life, where, in the words of psychologist David M. Buss, “conflict, competition, and manipulation also pervade human mating.” The desire to ­mate—­and the imbalance between the most desirable partners and the many more people who covet them—“catapults people headlong into the arena of competition with members of their own sex,” even if they don’t always recognize that what they’re doing—angling for a promotion, applying eyeliner, cracking jokes—is competitive behavior.

Competition ­is—­dare we admit it?—good for us.

 The desire to win was surely one of the things that motivated Branch Rickey to break baseball’s color barrier by bringing ­an African-­American ballplayer to the Dodgers. In college admissions, competition is the handmaid of meritocracy, to say nothing of diversity. In the old days, places at Ivy League universities were bestowed like a birthright on graduates of the right prep schools, but nowadays spots are won as the result of a ­wide-­open national and even international competition. Students are still constrained by circumstances, of course, and the affluent always have an edge, even when admissions are ­need-­blind, just by virtue of their upbringing. Yet by any reasonable standard, the competition today is fairer as well as keener. At the same time, universities compete with one another for students and prestige, with the result being a remarkably varied and dynamic system of higher education that is the envy of the ­world—­and a stark contrast with a relatively uncompetitive K–12 system that performs poorly by international ­standards.

In business, meanwhile, global competition has raised American living standards, helped lift giant swaths of Asia out of poverty, and knit the world much closer together. Competition even fosters cooperation. The whole basis of the company is that those within will work together to best those without, taking advantage of informational edges and other advantages to compete more effectively. And management specialists now emphasize the need for companies to forge more collaborative relationships with suppliers, customers, and even sometime rivals. The cooperative spirit reaches far beyond business. The world’s biggest champions of competitive individualism are also its biggest philanthropists. Charitable giving by Americans totals 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product, more than twice the share of wealth contributed by any other nation. Competition spurs accomplishment. How many fortunes have been amassed, home runs hit, novels penned, all because of competition for money, status, or mates? Surely, culture has gained right along with the gene pool as a result.

American universities compete for students and prestige, creating a system that is the envy of the world, and a stark contrast with our uncompetitive public schools. 

The question, of course, is not whether to stamp out competition but how much to constrain it. It would be relatively easy to sand off the roughest edges of competitive modern society without altogether dulling its edge. Universal medical coverage and better K-12 ­education—­preferably accomplished in both cases by exploiting rather than eliminating ­competition—­would help not just the losers in competitive life, but the less victorious as well. Doping in baseball surely could be contained if owners and players shared the desire to do so; all it takes is for the fans to care more about cleaning up the sport than watching home runs. And the college admissions frenzy might be considerably eased if applications were rationed. High school students might be given 10 points, with each application costing at least one. Colleges could weigh an application’s seriousness by how many points were spent on it, just as ­early-­decision applicants today often get an edge.

One problem is that constraining competition usually means giving up something. Keeping out ­Wal-­Mart means paying higher prices. Erecting barriers to imports means a return to the poorly made clunkers Detroit turned out before Toyota scared the dickens out of everybody. ­De-­emphasizing grades creates the risk of encouraging ­mediocrity.

Yet it seems inevitable that as income inequality grows, so too will pressure to further tax (in the broadest sense) the winners for the benefit, at the very least, of the somewhat less victorious. Meanwhile, it’s probably wise to keep the competitive cast of our culture in perspective. Like traffic, it’s often unpleasant, but it’s a sign of success in a community rather than failure. It’s the price of dynamism, of openness, meritocracy, and flexibility and even freedom. It was competition that gave us the modern world. For better or worse, the modern world appears determined to repay us in ­kind.

 a recent public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, is a novelist and essayist living in New York's Hudson Valley. 

Mount_Everest_as_seen_from_Drukair2_PLW_edit.jpg

Competition seems to be hard-wired into humans, but is that such a bad thing? A look at where competing has gotten us. 

Strive We Must

People are forever debating which inventions have had the greatest impact on the world, but it’s safe to say that few make much of a case for corrugated metal. Now this humble yet versatile material has found its advocates in architecture writer Adam Mornement and engineer Simon ­Holloway.

 is just another oversized, ­design-­fetish coffee-table book, and in fact it is packed with ­full-­color images that will make it catnip to architecturally minded modernists. Yet from the outset it’s clear that the authors mean to present not just the accidental visual glories of ­shanty­towns (or the premeditated ones designed by pros) but the biography of a building material that crops up everywhere. Corrugated steel, mostly, as well as other wavy metals (the authors intend “corrugated iron” generically), can be found on hillside shacks in South Africa and South America as well as in iconic, ­industrial-­chic homes in Southern California and Sydney. Cheap, light, and sublimely reflective, corrugated iron shimmers sexily when new, burns only in slow motion as it ages (by rusting), and is even ­biodegradable.

“Corrugated iron is a material of the frontier,” the authors write. “It makes life possible in places that would otherwise be uninhabitable, whether due to extreme climate, inhospitable terrain, the scarcity of local building materials, or the sheer scale of demand for shelter.”

Invented in England in 1829, corrugated iron proved vastly stronger than its flattened ante­cedents and thus quickly found use in train stations, shipyards, and factories, which required great expanses of covered space without a lot of expensive and cumbersome support structures. Before long, empire and industrial revolution made it the material of choice for cheap, adaptable buildings that could be shipped in parts and rapidly erected to house gold miners, soldiers, stores, churches, and practically anything ­else.

The book is replete with fascinating repro­ductions of posters, catalog copy, and architec­tural renderings showing buildings such as the charming “East India Villa,” a prefabricated house clad in corrugated iron and marketed to emigrants headed for Australia. Colonization and war made the material ubiquitous, espe­cially in the form of the World War ­I–era Nissen hut and its famed American descendant, the Quonset hut of World War II. Corrugated metal also permitted “the epic scale of airship hangars.”

Despite its early role in London as a ­cutting-­edge material, corrugated metal has always had a somewhat raffish image, for it lacks the solidity of stone or the natural warmth of wood (though these shortcomings are somehow never held against vinyl siding). Shanties the world over are made from corrugated metal, and humanitarian organizations make extensive use of it to house refugees and people who live in disaster zones. Yet it has also won favor with famous architects, including Jean Prouvé, Frank Gehry, and Norman Foster. Corrugated iron is especially promi­nent in Australia, where Glenn Murcutt’s lyrical use of it to clad ­high-­design homes no doubt helped him win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture ­Prize.

 is a wonderful book, even if the authors are sometimes scarily indefatigable in their fervor for the subject, which is perhaps inevitable given that the book’s back flap says Holloway has a “great passion” for “researching and communicating the history of corrugated iron.” But if the historical text flags occasionally, the stunning color images hold our attention. Especially striking are the ornate chapel built in Scotland by Italian prisoners of war, the shockingly modern Sheerness Boat Store (c. 1860) in England, and the many photos of sinuous structures by Japanese architect Shuhei Endo, which are by themselves worth the price of the ­book.

I live in a corrugated-steel house and can attest that the stuff has its quirks. It tends to vaporize the geraniums by reflecting the sun’s heat, for example. And whatever you do, don’t forget to install lightning rods. As someone wrote of the British consul’s corrugated-iron house in Panama in 1855, it’s “a great target for all the artillery of heaven.”

, a recent public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, is a novelist and essayist living in New York's Hudson Valley. 

"Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier"

 by Adam Mornement and Simon Holloway, Norton, 2007. 

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Daniel Akst looks at a paean to an underappreciated metal: corrugated iron. 

Peddling Metal

Remember Jack Benny? Cheapness was his shtick; on his radio and television shows he occasionally made hilarious subterranean visits to his money, which was protected by locks, alligators, and an ancient security guard who, from the look of him, had last seen action at the Second Battle of Bull Run. “Your money or your life,” to the rest of us, is Hobson’s choice; to Benny, it was an existential crisis.

Ah, those were the days—a halcyon time when, the Depression still a fresh memory, Americans enjoyed both affluence and restraint. Willy Loman’s refrigerator payments notwithstanding, consumer indebtedness at mid­century now looks like a mere flyspeck, at least from the towering mountain of debt atop which we sit.

We have managed since Benny’s heyday to get a little carried away. Alan Greenspan and the Chinese gave us too much credit, unfettered bankers chose greed over sobriety, and consumers snapped up McMansions financed by loans they could never repay. In 1980, American household debt stood at what must have seemed the enormous sum of $1.4 trillion. Last year the figure was 10 times as large, only 24 percent of us were debt free, and more than half of college students carried at least four credit cards. Is it any wonder there were more than a million consumer bankruptcy filings last year? Or that the nation’s banking system came close to collapse? The result of all this excess is a people hung-over from its recent intoxication with spending and flabbergasted by the bill from the wine merchant.

So thrift, supposedly, is back, implying, as the dictionary tells us, “using money and other resources carefully and not wastefully.” (The word’s etymological connection to “thrive” may come as a shock to some big spenders, but not to the truly thrifty.) Personally, I’m not certain that the resurrection of thrift—heralded on the covers of Time and 

, among other places—is anything more than temporary. But as a lifelong cheapskate, I’m grateful that at least thrift no longer carries quite the musty and ungenerous connotations it once did. If we skinflints are the last ones to step out of the closet, it only means we can appreciate all the more heartily how nice it is to escape the smell of mothballs.

I’m talking here about real thrift, which for the most part involves 

. It’s not to be confused with the smug species of faux thrift that’s been in vogue for a while. You see it in shelter magazines and newspaper home sections, where rich people boast of furnishing their multimillion-dollar homes with zany castoffs and repurposed industrial objets. Or how about the children of one Joan Asher? 

 reports that after three had in­patient nose jobs—attended by a private nurse each time—the fourth had to suffer through an outpatient procedure after which she was nursed at home by mom.

Real thrift, the skeptical, calculating kind that can make a difference between being solvent and not, is not a matter of cut-rate rhinoplasty. The quotidian penny-pinching I’m talking about used to have a bad name indeed, in much the same way as “spinster” and “cardigan,” as we know very well from Jack Benny. Like his preening insistence that he was always 39—or that he was an accomplished violinist—Benny’s pretend niggardliness was funny but also geriatric, unsexy, and possibly even emasculating. Men do in fact make passes at women who wear glasses, but do women melt for men who hoard gelt?

Evolutionary biologists, who seem to know everything about everything, suggest otherwise. The males of many species, including our own, evolved to attract females by means of costly displays—for example, the tail of the peacock, which he drags around to demonstrate his vitality to peahens. Lacking such plumage, human males resort to exotic European automobiles, pricey dinners, vulgar wristwatches, and other forms of showiness. (Human females are supposed to be seeking signs in such ostentation that a mate will spend on them and their offspring. In the modern world, of course, women themselves earn and spend plenty, often supposedly in answer to their own evolutionary imperative to look young and beautiful.)

Spending and sex thus are inextricably connected. “Easy come, easy go” might well have been our motto on both fronts until relatively recently. During the boom, people spent freely and were implored to do so on every side by purveyors of every conceivable thing, in terms designed to penetrate directly to the unrestrained limbic brain. Sex, after all, sells, and thrift is the opposite of sexy. Kooky Scotsmen are thrifty. Flinty New England farmers are thrifty. Elderly pensioners are thrifty. Brad Pitt isn’t thrifty.

This lack of sex appeal is one reason modern life has produced no great constituency for saving. Like dentists and Jews, saving has often found itself the subject of negative stereotyping in popular culture. In 

 (1899), the novelist Frank Norris tars all three with the same broad brush in a melodramatic portrait of greed and its tragic consequences. 

 is a good example of how, in literature, the prudently thrifty (who are perhaps inherently too boring for drama) tend to be overshadowed by the fanatically miserly. From Shylock through Silas Marner and Ebenezer Scrooge right up to Mr. Potter (

), it’s clear that writers have always taken seriously St. Paul’s assertion that the love of money is the root of all evil. Financial profligacy, it would seem, is nothing compared with being a greedy skinflint.

To the extent that thrift produces wealth, it breeds envy. The thrift, future-mindedness, and sobriety of the Jews have fueled prodigious achievements and equally prodigious anti-Semitism, and the association of thrift with a despised minority probably didn’t do any good for the trait’s public image. Shylock was far from the last money­grubbing Jew to besmirch popular culture; a coarse and monied Jewish stock manipulator is at the center of Anthony Trollope’s 

 (1875), and lesser such figures flitted in and out of books and movies well into the 20th century. Before Harold Lloyd finds himself hanging from the hands of a clock high above the sidewalk in the silent classic 

 (1923), he encounters such a character practically salivating with greed behind the counter of a jewelry store. One wonders uneasily whether it was by sheer chance that Jack Benny—né Benjamin Kubelsky—chose a penny-pinching stage persona for himself. The man was by all accounts as generous in his private life as he was tight­fisted on screen.

There was a time, of course, when thrift was in favor. It was practically a matter of life and death for the Puritans and a cornerstone of their work ethic, along with temperance, diligence, and piety. They excelled at deferring gratification, and it is one of the great ironies of American history that their preternatural self-discipline and industry launched us on the path to such unimaginable riches that thrift would be forgotten in the stampede to the mall. (On the other hand, if you have to be a victim of something, it might as well be your own success.)

Benjamin Franklin, who was hardly puritanical in any modern sense of the term, nonetheless embraced thrift and famously reminded us that “a penny saved is a penny earned” even before the advent of income taxes (which have made a penny saved worth 

 than a penny earned). A relentless self-improver, Franklin as a young man “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” and as an aid in this venture developed a kind of moral spreadsheet, writing the days of the week across the top and listing 13 virtues along the side, so he could plot his failings by date and category in a grid. Frugality (“waste nothing”) was number five on the list.

Thrift was so important to Samuel Smiles, the great 19th-century Scottish self-help guru, that in 1875 he published an entire book devoted to it. Smiles’s 

 was a sequel to his earlier bestseller, 

, which appeared in the landmark literary year of 1859 (when readers first encountered John Stuart Mill’s 

). Smiles’s oeuvre, which also included 

, made the case for the overriding Victorian virtue of self-control, a characteristic then associated not with the timid but the strong. For in those days, people understood the connection between money and virtue. “No man can be free who is in debt,” Smiles tells us in 

. “The inevitable effect of debt is not only to injure personal independence, but, in the long-run, to inflict moral degradation.”

We have self-help gurus today, of course, and some of them (the ubiquitous Suze Orman, for example) even stress the connection between money and morals, but that’s not why they are known or attended. We simply want the advantages of financial security and a higher standard of living. The reward for good financial management is a big house, a nice car—all the things that come from bad financial management, without the debt.

How did we get here? The transformation of thrift from a virtue into something verging on a social disorder occurred sometime between the 1880s and 1920s, when America transformed itself from a nation of want into one of, well, 

. Unbridled economic growth (fueled by decades of self-restraint and invested savings) undermined the Protestant ethos of self-denial and reticence, while the rising merchant class did its best to change the country’s long-ingrained aversion to luxury. Consumer credit became more widely available, and religious denominations laid off the hellfire and brimstone in favor of a therapeutic approach to happiness in the present. Vast new big-city “department stores” leveled the full force of their merchandising grandeur at women, who understandably preferred to purchase items they had once laboriously made. Catalyzed by mass communications (which made possible the stimulation of mass desire through advertising) and the rise of an urbanized middle class, consumerism exploded.

The loud noise caught the attention of two important social theorists, one of them famous and the other largely forgotten. It’s yet another irony in the saga of America’s love/hate relationship with thrift that we live by the precepts of the thinker whose name hardly anyone remembers.

First, the one you know about. Thorstein Veblen, the peripatetic Norwegian-American economist (he died in 1929, shortly before the great crash that might have brought him grim satisfaction), is best known today for his theory of conspicuous consumption, which argued that a lot of spending is just a wasteful attempt to impress. In effect, Veblen explained consumerism in terms of status and display, bringing evolutionary ideas to bear on economics and consumer behavior to powerful effect. Reading Veblen is a little like reading Freud or Darwin, albeit on a smaller scale: Do so and you’ll never look at the world in quite the same way again.

As you might imagine, the iconoclastic Veblen took a dim view of all the conspicuous consumption around him, regarding it as a species of giant potlatch in which competitive waste had run amok. You might call Veblen’s the voice of thrift, and it is still heard today from leftist intellectuals who, from their tenured pulpits and Arts and Crafts homes, reliably denounce the spending of others. The truth is that nobody listens to these people, except to submit to their periodic floggings as a kind of penance for sins we have no intention of ceasing.

But there was another voice heard back when thrift was in its death throes—that of Simon Patten (1852–1922), like Veblen a maladjusted economist who had strong ideas about spending. Patten can seem naive and even crass to us today, for he used his pulpit at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to advocate the very thing that Marx feared: that business and consumer spending should sweep away all the old arrangements and remake the world according to the doctrine of plenty. And he imagined a large role for economists in the running of it.

America transformed itself from a nation of want into one of, well, wants.

Unlike Veblen, Patten came on the scene not to praise thrift but to bury it. The old values that “inculcated a spirit of resignation” and “emphasized the repression of wants” must be abandoned, Patten argued, adding, “The principle of sacrifice continues to be exalted by moralists at the very time when the social structure is being changed by the slow submergence of the primeval world, and the appearance of a land of unmeasured resources with a hoard of mobilized wealth.”

Patten was hugely influential in his time, especially in helping liberals to see that something like Adam Smith’s “universal opulence” should be a goal and not a cause for shame. His genius was in recognizing capitalism’s potential for realizing something like a modern Cockaigne, the mythical land of plenty that beguiled the suffering masses in the Middle Ages. Patten’s thinking opened the door to such later fulfillment-oriented intellectuals as Abraham Maslow and Herbert Marcuse, who implicitly (or explicitly) disparaged the idea of deferring gratification—a notion that would come to seem as pointlessly self-sacrificial as postponing happiness until the afterlife.

In important ways Patten and Veblen were both right about consumerism, but of the two Patten was the true radical. Beside his starry-eyed utopianism Veblen’s sour conservatism is plain to see. As things turned out, it’s Patten’s world we live in, even if we use the language of Veblen to understand it.

Patten and Veblen both died in the 1920s, a decade when affluence, technology, and changing social mores joined forces to drive a stake through the heart of pecuniary restraint. Since then, modern America has effectively banished thrift by foisting on the world those four horsemen of the financial apocalypse: the automobile, the television, the credit card, and the shopping cart. Besides costing money to buy and operate, cars opened up the landscape so that more Americans could have bigger houses on bigger lots. To fill them up, people enjoyed the dubious guidance of television, which helped them figure out what they should want. Credit cards enabled us to conjure money on the spot to pay for stuff. And the shopping cart, unthinkable in traditional department stores but indispensable in their demotic successors—Wal-Mart and Target—gave Americans a way to get all that booty out to the automobile, which they could use to drive it home.

Modern America has foisted on the world those four horsemen of the financial apocalypse: the automobile, the television, the credit card, and the shopping cart.

After the hardships of the Great Depression and the rationing and other deprivations of World War II (during which Americans saved roughly a quarter of their income), nobody was too focused on thrift, and I can’t say I blame them. Besides, spending stimulated the economy, which was something like a patriotic duty. In his 1954 study 

People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character

, David M. Potter said of the contemporary American that “society expects him to consume his quota of goods—of automobiles, of whiskey, of television sets—by maintaining a certain standard of living, and it regards him as a ‘good guy’ for absorbing his share, while it snickers at the prudent, self-denying, abstemious thrift that an earlier generation would have respected.” Or as William H. Whyte put it in 

 (1956), “Thrift is becoming a little un-American.”

Unfortunately, for a people who love money, we’ve become very good at making it disappear, a task to which we’ve brought characteristic ingenuity and verve. Reckless overspending was until recently a course open to practically every American, just like reckless investing. And suddenly we were all Emma Bovary, bent on financial suicide. “It is because she feels that society is fettering her imagination, her body, her dreams, her appetites,” Mario Vargas Llosa once wrote, “that Emma suffers, commits adultery, lies, steals, and in the end kills herself.”

He might well have been describing America, circa 2007. Four-dollar coffee drinks? Fourteen-dollar cocktails? Bottled water from Fiji, priced higher than gasoline? You’ve got to be kidding. Now that it’s safe to come clean, I will confess to having been a bit of a refusenik about all this for most of my, er, 39 years on this earth. Every stick of furniture in my house is second­hand, as are many of my family’s clothes, computers, bicycles, books, pieces of art, and other items. We’ve mostly had used cars, and we still have the new ones we bought in a single mad burst in 2001. The funny thing is, it’s amazing what a nice life you can have with a middle-class income and Jack Benny’s attitude about money.

More people are waking up to this particular old-time religion. Since early 2008 personal saving has crept back up a few percentage points above zero (much to the consternation of stimulus-minded economists), and some long-term trends are likely to reinforce today’s renewed interest in controlling spending.

It helps that conspicuous consumption, like tobacco, has fallen into social disrepute, a change that removes some of the pressure felt by many families to keep up with the Joneses (who may well have been foreclosed by now). Veblen was right that much spending is meant to be conspicuous, and if the display incentives surrounding consumption have changed, so will consumption.

Rising environmental consciousness ought to be a further spur to thrift, for what could possibly be greener—or more demonstrative of piety—than eschewing wasteful consumption? Although cutting global greenhouse emissions by building new power plants and the like can be expensive, many of the ways individuals can make a difference will actually put money in your pocket: eating less red meat, driving a fuel­efficient car, and taking fewer planet-warming plane trips, to name a few. The same goes for buying less stuff; making do with what you have or going second­hand uses fewer resources and of course reduces spending as well. A rising scavenger subculture threatens to erase the stigma that was associated with “garbage picking” when I was a kid, transforming shame into virtue. Like so many other things, this “freecycling” is abetted by Craigslist.

You’ll need to consider garbage picking now and then because in the years ahead we’ll have to pay not only for our individual and collective overspending in the boom years, but also for our gigantic national outlays during the ensuing crash to bail out banks, insurers, and automakers and stimulate the economy to stave off a depression. We’ve been paying for all this by borrowing, so expect to pay higher taxes to retire these debts. Speaking of retirement, have I mentioned Social Security and Medicare? Maybe I shouldn’t.

So do our straitened circumstances give Jack Benny any more sex appeal? It’s hard to believe he could make it on 

, but we might learn something from him nonetheless, for as any behavioral economist can tell you, there was method in his money-storing madness. From whom, after all, was he protecting his savings if not himself? Self-protective “commitment devices” like Benny’s moats and alligators are already being used here and there—deposits to your retirement account are defended by hungry tax collectors, after all—and if we’re smart, we’ll use them even more in the future.

Fortunately, thrift is far from the worst thing we can have thrust upon us. To be thrifty, after all, is to save, and to save is not only to keep but to rescue. Thrift is thus a way to redeem yourself not just from the unsexy bondage of indebtedness but also from subjugation to people and efforts that are meaningless to you, or worse. Debt means staying in a pointless job, failing to support needy people or worthwhile causes, accepting the strings that come with dependence, and gritting your teeth when your boss asks you to do something unethical (instead of saying “drop dead”). Ultimately, thrift delivers not just freedom but salvation—which makes it a bargain even Jack Benny could love.

 writes for a living--which enforces thrift--in New York's Hudson Valley. He is a contributing editor of the

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America’s enduring love affair with big spending is fetching up against some unromantic realities. But a lifelong saver assures us that there are worse fates than socking it away for a rainy day.

Saving Yourself

Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”—avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.”

We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it’s hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote 

, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”

Oceans of ink have been spilled on these developments, yet hardly any attention is paid to the one institution—friendship—that could pick up some of the interpersonal slack. But while sizzling eros hogs the spotlight these days—sex sells, after all—too many of us overlook 

, the slower-burning and longer-lasting complement. That’s ironic, because today “friends” are everywhere in our culture—the average Facebook user has 130—and friendship, of a diluted kind, is our most characteristic relationship: voluntary, flexible, a “lite” alternative to the caloric meshugaas of family life.

But in restricting ourselves to the thin gruel of modern friendships, we miss out on the more nourishing fare that deeper ones have to offer. Aristotle, who saw friendship as essential to human flourishing, shrewdly observed that it comes in three distinct flavors: those based on usefulness (contacts), on pleasure (drinking buddies), and on a shared pursuit of virtue—the highest form of all. True friends, he contended, are simply drawn to the goodness in one another, goodness that today we might define in terms of common passions and sensibilities.

The genius of friendship rests firmly on its limitations. Think of it as the moderate passion.

It’s possible that Aristotle took all this too seriously, but today the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and in our culture we take friendship—a state of strong mutual affection in which sex or kinship isn’t primary—far too lightly. We’re good at currying contacts and we may have lots of pals, but by falling short on Aristotle’s third and most important category of friendship, we’ve left a hole in our lives. Now that family life is in turmoil, reinvigorating our notion of friendship—to mean something more than mere familiarity—could help fill some of the void left by disintegrating household arrangements and social connections frayed by the stubborn individualism of our times.

Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it’s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should). The genius of friendship rests firmly on its limitations, which are better understood as boundaries. Think of it as the moderate passion—constrained, yet also critical. If friendship, as hardheaded Lord Byron would have it, really is “love without his wings,” we can all be grateful for its earthbound nature.

But we live now in a climate in which friends appear dispensable. While most of us wouldn’t last long outside the intricate web of interdependence that supplies all our physical needs—imagine no electricity, money, or sewers—we’ve come to demand of ourselves truly radical levels of emotional self-sufficiency. In America today, half of adults are unmarried, and more than a quarter live alone. As Robert Putnam showed in his 2000 bookBowling Alone,civic involvement and private associations were on the wane at the end of the 20th century. Several years later, social scientists made headlines with a survey showing that Americans had a third fewer nonfamily confidants than two decades earlier. A quarter of us had no such confidants at all.

In a separate study, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, authors of 

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

 (2009), surveyed more than 3,000 randomly chosen Americans and found they had an average of four “close social contacts” with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time. But only half of these contacts were solely friends; the rest were a variety of others, including spouses and children.

Here, as on so many fronts, we often buy what we need. The affluent commonly hire confidants in the form of talk therapists, with whom they may maintain enduring (if remunerated) relationships conducted on a first-name basis. The number of household pets has exploded throughout the Western world, suggesting that not just dogs but cats, rats, and parakeets are often people’s best friends. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who studies loneliness, says he’s convinced that more Americans are lonely—not because we have fewer social contacts, but because the ones we have are more harried and less meaningful.

Developing meaningful friendships—having the kind of people in your life who were once known as “intimates”—takes time, but too many of us are locked in what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has called “the cult of conspicuous busyness,” from which we seem to derive status and a certain perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another. Throw in two careers and some kids, and something’s got to give. The poet Kenneth Koch, whose friends included the brilliant but childless John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, laid out the problem in verse:

If time is a problem, so is space. Although Americans have been relocating less often lately, perhaps as a result of the recession, we still move around quite a bit—for work, sunshine, retirement, or to be near family—and this process of uprooting dissolves friendships and discourages those that haven’t yet formed. Few of us would turn down a tempting new job in a far-off city to stay near friends, possibly for the sensible reason that those friends might move away six months later anyway.

Divorce also takes its toll; most of us over the age of 30 are familiar with the social consequences that ripple outward from a split-up, as foursomes for dinner or bridge are destroyed and friends may find themselves having to pick sides. Marital dissolution usually costs each spouse some precious connections, including in-laws who might once have been important friends.

Our longstanding reverence for self-sufficiency hasn’t helped matters. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave us a sharp shove down this road with his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” and Cole Porter lyricized the uniquely American claustrophobia that danced off the tongues of a parade of popular crooners: “Let me be by myself in the evenin’ breeze/And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees/Send me off forever but I ask you please/Don’t fence me in.” Frontier-oriented American mythology is studded with exemplars of the lone hero, from Daniel Boone to Amelia Earhart, to say nothing of the protagonists of Hollywood westerns such as 

 (1952). Male buddy films date back to Laurel and Hardy, but their profusion in the past three decades—including box-office franchises ranging from 

—is a strong social contra-indicator, like the lavish outfits and interiors of movies made during the Great Depression. If something desirable is missing in life, people like to see it on the screen.

Friendship has also suffered from the remorseless eroticization of human relations that was bequeathed to us by Sigmund Freud. The culture stands particularly ready to sexualize men’s friendships since the gay liberation movement mercifully swept away taboos against discussing same-sex relationships. In 2005 

 laid claim to coining the term “man date” in a story—under a woman’s byline—about the anxiety two straight men supposedly experience if they brave a restaurant or museum together and run the risk that people will think they are gay. The “bromance” theme, once strictly a collegiate sport among scholars scouring the letters of passionate 19th-century friends for signs of physical intimacy, has since made its way into popular culture. The pathetic state of male friendship—and the general suspicion that men who seek close friends might be looking for something more—was captured in last year’s filmI Love You, Man,in which a guy decides to get married, realizes he has no one to be his best man, and must embark on a series of “man dates” to find one.

The irony is that straight men could learn a thing or two from their gay brethren, as Andrew Sullivan implied in his insightful book on the AIDS crisis, 

Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival

 (1998). Often estranged from their natural families and barred from forming legally acknowledged new ones of their own, gay men, Sullivan observed, learned to rely not on the kindness of strangers but the loyalty of friends: “Insofar as friendship was an incalculable strength of homosexuals during the calamity of AIDS, it merely showed, I think, how great a loss is our culture’s general underestimation of this central human virtue.”

We make this mistake in part because we’ve allowed our wildly inflated view of matrimony to subsume much of the territory once occupied by friendship. Your BFF nowadays—at least until the divorce—is supposed to be your spouse, a plausible idea in this age of assortative mating, except that spouses and friends fill different needs, and cultivating some close extramarital friendships might even take some of the pressure off at home. Yet the married men I know seem overwhelmingly dependent on their wives for emotional connection, even as their wives take pleasure in friends to whom they don’t happen to be wed. The Beatles’ immortal lonely heart Eleanor Rigby and novelist Anita Brookner’s socially isolated heroines notwithstanding, the fact is that all the women I know are better at friendships—spend more time on them, take more pleasure in them, and value them more highly—than any of the straight men.

Forgive me, guys, but we are lousy at this, and while it may seem to us that our casual approach is perfectly normal, in fact it’s odd. Among people whose lives are more like those of our ancestors, for example, friendship is taken far more seriously. In some cultures, close friends pledge themselves to one another in bonding rituals that involve the spilling of blood. The Bangwa people in Cameroon traditionally considered friendship so important that many families assigned a best friend to a newborn right along with a spouse.

“Friends do not live in harmony,” Henry David Thoreau said, “but in melody.”

There was a time when platonic friendship was exalted—if not idealized—in the West, perhaps in part because of religious paranoia about sex. The myth of Damon and Pythias and the biblical story of David and Jonathan resonated across the centuries, and in the Middle Ages knights bound themselves in ceremonies to comrades in arms. Cicero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, William Wordsworth—the list of Western luminaries who have waxed rhapsodic over friendship is long enough to fill anthologies from both Norton 

In the 19th century, friendship was the subject of panegyrics by the likes of Emerson, who wrote that “the moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuies vanish.” His buddy Henry David Thoreau, lamenting that to most people a friend is simply someone who is not an enemy, declared, perhaps wishfully, “Friends do not live in harmony, merely, as some say, but in melody.” Mary Wollstonecraft might have spoken for the lot when she noted that while eros is transient, “the most holy bond of society is friendship.”

A grain of salt is in order: Friendship, like baseball, always seems to send intellectuals off the deep end. Yet there is more biological justification for our predecessors’ paeans to friendship than for our modern-day tepidity. Friendship exists in all the world’s cultures, likely as a result of natural selection. People have always needed allies to help out in times of trouble, raise their status, and join with them against their enemies. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to conclude that a talent for making friends would bestow an evolutionary advantage by corralling others into the project of promoting and protecting one’s kids—and thereby ensuring the survival of one’s genes.

If we evolved to make friends, we also evolved to tell them things. Humans have an irrepressible need to divulge, and often friends can tell one another what they can’t tell anyone else, a function that has come in especially handy since the Protestant Reformation put so many beyond the reach of the confessional. Less grandly, trading gossip is probably one of the main reasons people evolved into such friend makers, since information (and reputation) have always been valuable—even in the evolutionary environment.

Alliances and inside dope are two of the ways people derive power from friendships, which is why tyrannies are sometimes so hostile to them. Private affiliations of all kinds are a countervailing force against the great weight of government, but Aristotle reminds us that friendship also maintains the state. Friendships, after all, entail mutual regard, respect for others, a certain amount of agreeableness, and a willingness to rise above the ties of kinship in order to knit society into a web of trust and reciprocation—qualities more likely, in a state, to produce Denmark than Iraq.

Living in a society of friends has many advantages. Friendship can moderate our behavior (unless, like the television mobster Tony Soprano, you happen to choose immoderate friends). Friends help us establish and maintain norms and can tell us if we’re running off the rails when others don’t notice, won’t break the news, or lack the necessary credibility. Both our relatives and our friends, the psychologist Howard Rachlin writes, “are essential mirrors of the patterns of our behavior over long periods—mirrors of our souls. They are the magic ‘mirrors on the wall’ who can tell us whether this drink, this cigarette, this ice-cream sundae, this line of cocaine, is more likely to be part of a new future or an old past.”

Indeed, the influence of friends and associates is profound. Social scientists Christakis and Fowler, working with data from the multidecade Framingham Heart Study, found that if you become obese, the odds increase by 71 percent that your same-sex friend will do likewise—a bigger impact than was measured among siblings. On the other hand, when you become happy, a friend living within a mile has a 25 percent greater chance of becoming happy as well—and even a friend of a friend has a 10 percent greater chance. Encouragingly for those who know a sourpuss or two, misery was not comparably contagious.

Friendship can even prolong our lives. For loneliness, the experts tell us, has to do more with the quality of our relationships than the quantity. And we now know that loneliness is associated with all sorts of problems, including depression, high blood pressure and cholesterol, Alzheimer’s disease, poor diet, drug and alcohol abuse, bulimia, and suicide. Lonely people have a harder time concentrating, are more likely to divorce, and get into more conflicts with neighbors and coworkers.

But of course friends are not vitamins, to be taken in daily doses in hopes of cheating the Grim Reaper. The real reason to prize our friends is that they help us lead good and satisfying lives, enriched by mutual understanding. This special way of knowing one another was once exalted as “sympathy,” and Adam Smith described it as “changing places in fancy.” As Caleb Crain made plain in his excellent book 

American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

 (2001), the 18th and 19th centuries were the heyday of sympathy, when the fervor of friends was evident in their letters as well as their comportment. Sympathy persisted in popular discourse and was studied as a scientific fact under various guises until, in the 19th century, Charles Darwin came along to replace cooperation with competition in the intellectual armament of the day.

Sympathy’s long-ago advocates were onto something when they reckoned friendship one of life’s highest pleasures, and they felt themselves freer than we do to revel in it. It’s time for us to ease up on friending, rethink our downgrade of ex-lovers to “just” friends, and resist moving far away from everyone we know merely because it rains less elsewhere. In Asimov’s vision, Solaria was a lonely planet that humans settled with the help of robots. People weren’t made to live there.

 We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 

forthcoming in January from Penguin Press.

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Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.

America: Land of Loners?

, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

the audacious manifesto known as the Port Huron Statement

, the product of 60 idealistic young Americans who traveled in June 1962 to a retreat at the base of Lake Huron to hash out their beliefs about social change. The conferees were serious sorts, conventionally dressed middle-class overachievers from good colleges, mostly, meeting at the height of the optimism prevailing during the Kennedy years.

But the young people gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, weren’t buying the era’s hopefulness; on the contrary, they were members of a two-year-old group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that was in the process of inventing the New Left. And these students were uncomfortable about plenty: the Cold War, the plight of “Negroes,” the power of corporations, the danger of nuclear Armageddon. The idea in Port Huron was to clarify and proclaim the new organization’s values and agenda. The meetings, some of which lasted through the night, were full of utopian fervor and shared passion. The resulting document — based on a draft written largely by Tom Hayden, a young radical who later become a California state senator, not to mention Jane Fonda’s second husband — might well be said to have launched the 1960s.

All these years later, everything about the Port Huron Statement remains youthful, including the tender mix of insight and naiveté throughout. But lo and behold, the 50th birthday of that fateful document is fast approaching. Its leftist masterminds — or at least, those who haven’t moved on to some great protest rally in the sky — are on Social Security. Yet judging from the continuing timeliness and insight of what they produced, they might as easily have met last week.

The Port Huron kids were concerned about economic inequality, which, measured by the distribution of income, is greater today than it was then. Their emphasis on the unchecked power of corporations echoes down to us in the controversial size and power of big banks. They were concerned about militarism, even though Vietnam wasn’t even on their radar, and their opposition to U.S. war making has been vindicated time and again in the half-century since, from Southeast Asia to Iraq. Nuclear annihilation was a bigger issue for them than proliferation, but certainly nuclear weapons remain firmly on the foreign-policy agenda and in the news.

The Huronites, if we may call them such, were frustrated that there was no truly progressive mainstream political party, a frustration that will resonate with many today who lament the shifting of the national policy conversation to the right. Partly to blame, in their view, was the parties’ lack of ideological purity — each contained liberals and conservatives. They saw this “party overlap” as a “structural antagonist of democracy,” complaining that it led to “organized political stalemate.” They had just the remedy, too: Drive most southern Democrats, who so often lined up with Republicans, out of the Democratic Party. If only one could shout back across time about the importance of being careful what you wish for. As it turns out, the southerners left the party after it enacted the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Now we have more ideologically consistent parties — along with more stalemate, not less.

That’s an especially bitter irony given Port Huron’s focus on broadening democracy. Above all else, the Huronites were determined that Americans should gain control of their own destiny through a democratic process that would supersede the power of government bureaucrats and corporations alike. Their own fervent deliberations embodied the group’s obsession with participatory democracy, which was inspired by the philosopher Arnold Kaufman, a teacher of Hayden’s at the University of Michigan.

In keeping with their faith in what might be called radical democracy, the young SDS members believed the very best about people — “we regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love” — and were desperate to turn back the tide of alienation they felt was engulfing Americans. “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.”

Those same words might have been written yesterday, and not just by some young radicals. On the contrary, they could as easily have come from evangelical Christians, academic communitarians, secular social critics (such as Jaron Lanier, author of the 2010 manifesto 

), or almost anyone recoiling from the radical individualism that many people feel has beset our vast and fast-moving society. Pretty much the only ones who couldn’t have penned those words, if you’ll forgive an anachronistic metaphor, are modern feminists, who would bristle at the use of “man” to stand in for the half of us who are female. In fact, for all its prescience and progressiveness, the single most striking thing about the Port Huron statement from today’s perspective is that it’s oblivious to women’s issues, even though some of the conferees were women.

The Port Huron Statement otherwise is a thoroughgoing expression of a certain worldview — an outlook present on one side in the political and culture wars that have sharply divided the country in recent years and brought Washington practically to a standstill. What most people don’t realize is that there was another important statement crafted by a conference of young idealists back in those days, one that encapsulates a very different worldview just as effectively as Port Huron embodies the progressive one. And while the founding document of the SDS is the far more famous of the two, the other is surely as significant. Each of these sharply contrasting texts can shed useful light on the other, and read together, they provide a crisply binocular view of the American body politic today.

Idealistic manifestoes and declarations, it should be noted, have always been important in American history. The Mayflower Compact proclaimed our specialness, and our special obligation to God. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution launched a new country based on a set of bold principles. In the post–World War II era, 

Barry Goldwater’s passionate acceptance of the GOP presidential nomination in 1964 (“extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”)

, John F. Kennedy’s stirring inaugural vow to 

 and Martin Luther King Jr.’s inspiring 

 all galvanized the nation and changed the course of its history.

While the counterculture, the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, and student radicalism define the 1960s for many Americans, in recent years scholars have demonstrated that there was more to the era’s politics than leftist agitation. “The untold story of the 1960s is about the New Right,” sociologist Rebecca E. Klatch insists in 

A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s

, a book that depicts the decade “as a time of ferment for the Right as well as the Left. Idealistic youth from one end of the political spectrum to the other formed movements to reshape American politics.”

In September 1960, just a few months after the very first meeting of SDS and nearly two years before the Port Huron conference, more than 100 young conservatives from 44 colleges and universities descended on the estate of conservative author and editor William F. Buckley Jr., in Sharon, Connecticut. The meeting was inspired by a suggestion from Senator Barry Goldwater, the up-and-coming Arizona Republican who was helping transform the GOP, that America’s youthful conservatives set up a national organization. Goldwater, don’t forget, was a ruggedly handsome and outdoorsy former fighter pilot who, for a while at least, was a magnet for young activists — including Joan Didion and Hillary Rodham.

The Sharon conference was almost a mirror image of the one that would come later at Port Huron. At both events, excitement was in the air. Idealistic young Americans gathered to reshape the future and reveled in being among like-minded people. While the SDS folks would retreat to a United Auto Workers camp to formulate their manifesto, the conservatives in Sharon brought forth not just a statement, but an organization — Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) — at Great Elm, the Buckley family’s 47-acre country seat, where parts of the vast main house dated back to 1763.

The Sharon Statement, at least at first glance, seems to be everything its counterpart on the left was not

. Drafted by M. Stanton Evans, a young Indianapolis newspaperman, the one-page document is a model of brevity and coherence, especially compared with the rambling 64-page Port Huron Statement. That length wasn’t just a matter of leftist logorrhea; Hayden, who reportedly had read the Sharon Statement, was himself a newspaperman of sorts, serving as editor of the University of Michigan’s student daily. The great economy of the Sharon Statement simply reflected its much clearer message: the less government, the better. The basic idea was to let people take care of themselves, a viewpoint not very difficult to elaborate then or now.

The Port Huron Statement is so much longer because its many earnest drafters had a much heavier lift. They were determined not only to perfect relations among “men” but to safeguard against the undue power government and business tend to arrogate to themselves — even as they demanded that the same inept and militaristic state they reviled somehow manage housing, capital allocation, and other things by now demonstrably beyond its competence. Since they shared with their Sharon counterparts a profound distrust of government, it’s fair to ask how they can have hoped to harness the unruly leviathan on behalf of the public good and the popular will. The answer? “By steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation, and to definitions of human needs according to problems easiest for computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic pileups must be at least minimized by local, regional, and national economic planning—responding to the interconnection of public problems by comprehensive programs of solution. Third, and most important, by experiments in decentralization.”

The Port Huron conferees, with their starry-eyed view of human nature and their desire to transform the entire world by simultaneously enlisting government while protecting people from it, produced a wildly utopian manifesto whose length speaks volumes about its contradictions and overreach. Yet on closer inspection, the Sharon Statement was perhaps no less utopian. Its tightly ordered vision of free people and free markets, with the role of government limited to protecting individual freedom “through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice,” narrows the public sphere almost to the vanishing point. Taxes, to the Sharon conferees, sounded not just like theft, but poison, at least when used for anything other than personal and national security: When government “takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both.” In the Sharon worldview, this made sense, for “when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

Even liberals will acknowledge that government meddling in commerce — Fannie Mae, anyone? — can make a mess of things, and the clarity of the Sharon vision is seductive. Yet surely schools play some role in the moral and physical strength of the nation, to say nothing of decently supported retirees or decently paved roads.

The differences between the Sharon and Port Huron manifestoes seem stark. The Sharon drafters might be said, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous formulation of 1958, to be concerned with negative freedom, or protecting the rights of individuals from external constraint, while the students at Port Huron focused more on positive freedom, or the ability to meet one’s needs and achieve one’s potential. Freedom to go to the supermarket counts for little, after all, if one lacks the money to buy food. The SDS adherents, perceptively, also saw freedom as embedded in community, recognizing that a society of self-interested pinballs bouncing off one another and their surroundings probably isn’t sustainable.

“If the Port Huron Statement was absurd to suppose that collective action can solve all the world’s problems, surely it was just as silly for the Sharon Statement to suggest that collective action can’t solve any of them.”

Similarly, the Sharonites seemed not to worry at all about the accumulation of private power, focusing instead on the threat from government, while the Huronites were somehow both fearful of government and in love with the potential of collective action. At the same time, they were all too conscious of the great weight of private (read: corporate) power. I say “too conscious” because they were sorely handicapped by the Left’s traditional fear, loathing, and sheer misunderstanding of the private sector, which — let’s face it — is the source of most of the wealth and innovation that make improvement in the world possible.

Yet the two statements — and many of their middle-class drafters — had a great deal in common, including a deep faith in the American people and their ability to govern themselves. At the same time, the drafters and their manifestoes were disillusioned with the cautiously liberal consensus that had prevailed during their young lives, and impatient with the pragmatism and compromise embodied by the Kennedy administration. They believed in pushing governance further down the democratic pyramid, and were suspicious of far-off technocrats and others who might exercise power over people. If the two statements were cast as a Venn diagram, their considerable overlap could be labeled libertarianism. Implicit in both is a kind of nostalgia: for a smaller, simpler polity than the United States had become, and for direct relations among people rather than between individuals and huge centers of undemocratic power. Most of all, the framers of both statements believed in political action as a way to advance what was essentially a moral agenda.

It’s not difficult to see the roots of our current impasse in these two ambitious documents. The emphasis on individual rights (Sharon) or participatory democracy (Port Huron), carried to extremes, leads to the kind of paralysis the commentator Jonathan Rauch has termed “demosclerosis,” in which it’s all too easy for determined stakeholders to protect special privileges or block needed public improvements, such as a subway extension or overhaul of the power grid, at great cost to everyone else. The emphasis on rights over responsibilities in both statements — how different from President Kennedy’s demand back then to “ask not what your country can do for you”! — may have helped justify the selfishness and narcissism of succeeding decades. And the uncompromising idealism of both statements probably contributed to the later breakdown of cooperation across the aisle in Washington. SDS grew increasingly radical as the 1960s wore on, and in 1969 its most revolutionary elements broke away, some of them eventually helping to form the violent Weather Underground, whose bombings and anti-Americanism helped alienate the very working-class voters the Weathermen’s erstwhile associates had hoped to enlist in combating capitalism. While SDS was defunct by the mid-1970s, YAF persists to this day, and the conservative movement it continues to support has scooped up those same alienated white working-class voters. Those are the voters who propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House, and whose defection has made life so difficult for the Democratic Party ever since.

Now that even the most basic government initiatives are contested, the top marginal tax rate has been slashed, and unions in the private sector have all but vanished, it’s easy to dismiss the Port Huron Statement as idealistic raving. The Sharon Statement, it would seem, has won the day. But assuming so would be a big mistake. All the important progressive changes of the last couple of centuries — abolitionism, women’s suffrage, civil rights for blacks and, later, gays — have bubbled up through social movements like those framed by the words written in Michigan 50 years ago. The massive antiwar campaign SDS would soon enough help foment was a prime example.

The historical fact is that half a century after Port Huron, hardly any advanced societies in the world look anything like the one idealized by the young conservatives who met in Sharon. What’s nearly universal instead is a never-ending effort to balance the rights of individuals with the needs that, in the modern world, it seems only government can meet. If the Port Huron Statement was absurd to suppose that collective action can solve all the world’s problems, surely it was just as silly for the Sharon Statement to suggest that collective action can’t solve any of them, even the ones right here under our collective noses. The challenge for us today, 50 years after Port Huron, is to embrace what was best about the SDS statement — its warnings against militarism, its emphasis on citizen involvement, and its insistence on equality — while bearing in mind that other statement, so that we can come to some agreement on the proper role of government in a bigger, more complex, and more interconnected world than the framers of either document ever imagined.

, a Wilson Quarterly contributing editor and former Wilson Center public policy scholar, is a member of the editorial board at Newsday. He is the author most recently of 

We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess

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The Port Huron Statement launched America's New Left in 1962. Today it seems naive and in some ways misguided — yet it raised questions that still agitate Americans today.

The Port Huron Statement: a Manifesto at 50

 (1922), it’s been said, James Joyce packed all of life into a single Dublin day. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he found room in the novel for Leopold Bloom to tackle the problem of technological disruption:

A pointsman’s back straightened itself upright suddenly against a tramway standard by Mr. Bloom’s window. Couldn’t they invent something automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention?

Notice Bloom’s insights: first, that technology could obviate arduous manual labor; second, that this would cost somebody a job; and third, that it would also create a job, but for a different person altogether.

Surprisingly few people have grasped this process as well as Joyce did. Aristotle pointed out that if the looms wove and the lyres played themselves, we’d need fewer people to do these things. The Luddites, active in 19th-century England, didn’t take the mechanization of textile making lying down. And in 1930, no less an economic sage than John Maynard Keynes fretted about temporary “technological unemployment,” which he feared would grow faster than the number of jobs created by new technologies.