The National Conference on Citizenship is always an important gathering of Americans who strive to improve our nation’s civic life. This year, the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University is an equal partner in sponsoring and planning the conference. It will be highly interactive and will focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I urge allies and colleagues to join us there. The official invitation follows:

Walter Benjamin was a radical social theorist in the high Continental tradition. John Dewey was an American pragmatist and a democrat. T.S. Eliot was a political reactionary. Despite their differences, they lived around the same time and sometimes made a very similar point: information is replacing wisdom or meaning.

I quote some passages to that effect below. I won’t supply a lot of commentary–let alone any solutions–but I do want to underline the urgency of their point. It’s estimated that people now produce and exchange 2.5 billion exabytes of data every day. All the words that people have spoken since the origins of the species amount to roughly 4 billion exabytes. That means that between now and Friday afternoon, we will create and share about as much new data as we have had time to speak since the early Paleolithic. I’m not assuming that speech is better than text or images, but this comparison underlines the astounding growth in volume. Meanwhile, wisdom seems more or less flat. We hope that increasingly powerful analytical tools can make sense of all the new data, but perhaps they just add another level of transient information.

1.  In “The Storyteller” (1936), Walter Benjamin argues that traditional storytelling took two forms: reports from far away and versions of local tradition. Both forms were oral and social, the storyteller interacting with a live audience. Both were intended to be useful, conveying a moral message or practical guidance and building a community.

The novel, Benjamin argues, undermined storytelling. It existed for many centuries but only grew into an important institution with the rise of the bourgeoisie, for whom information is a commodity with economic value. The novel’s rise was simultaneous with the development of the news media as purveyors of information, epitomized by the French center-right daily newspaper Le Figaro:

From our perspective, the nineteenth-century novel might seem a repository of profound meaning. For Benjamin, it was already a way-station on the route from meaningful stories (which were concise, ethically demanding, and social) to information as a commodity.

2. T.S. Eliot, “The Rock” (1934):

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness …
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

3. John Dewey, from The Public and its Problems (1927):

The physical agencies of publicity [of communicating with the public] which exist in large abundance are utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the ‘featuring’ of private incidents in a way which violates all the moving logic of continuity, and which leaves us with those isolated intrusions and shocks which are the essence of ‘sensations’ [pp. 168-9] …

‘News’ signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends on relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without coordination and consecutiveness, events are not events but mere occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening proceeds. … The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident, family rows, personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms of breaches of continuity; they supply the element of shock which is the strictest meaning of sensation; they are the new par excellence, even though only the date of the newspaper could inform us whether they happened last year or this, so completely are they isolated from their connections [179-80].

Let’s make these assumptions:

1. All the slots in a desirable institution are held by white men, most of whom are wealthy, and none of whom are out as gay. That would (for instance) be a rough description of the student bodies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ca. 1960.
2. Wealthy, straight, white men also tend to hold biased views of the other groups.
3. Most people want their children to have at least the same advantages (in both absolute and relative terms) that they’ve had.
4. People with social, cultural, or financial capital are quite good at obtaining advantages for their own kids. Just for instance, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the demise of paganism, France was run by Frankish bishops instead of the Roman landlords who had dominated Gaul. But it turns out the bishops were descended from the landlords, because the Gallo-Roman elite figured out how to weather even the profound disruptions of AD 300-600 and put their own sons on top of the new order.

Now let’s envision that the biased views mentioned in #2 (above) go away. Wealthy, straight, white men develop genuinely respectful, appreciative, egalitarian views toward all others. Meanwhile, the other groups come to believe that they have equal potential and rights, rather than internalizing bias against themselves. What happens?

Most women and most gay men are children of straight men. Therefore, if advantaged moms and dads simply form the opinion that their own daughters and gay children have fully equal potential and worth, then they will demand spaces for those kids at the top of the social scale. Social outcomes should change quickly as a result of attitudinal changes. The only obstacles are: (1) persistent bias, which may become implicit and subtle, (2) leftover policies and structures that discriminate, such as policies regarding parental leave, and (3) the reluctance of incumbents to yield their own places. To the last point: you wouldn’t expect tenured Ivy League professors or US Senators to resign to make room for women, but you would expect the gender ratio to improve with generational turnover, as long as attitudes truly change.

In contrast, most people have the same race/ethnicity as their parents. Therefore, even if all the white parents who dominate the preferred slots in a society come to believe that people of color are fully equal and entirely welcome, if they also succeed in obtaining slots for their own kids, then racial demographics will shift slowly, if at all. Attitudinal change will have little impact on outcomes. Absent major pressure from outside the system, all you’ll see is slow, incremental change as each family of color that makes it to the top holds a spot for its own kids.

As for class advantage, it presumably consists of having a better-than-average chance of attaining a desirable social role for yourself or your kids. In the list above, I assume that a society provides highly some desirable social slots (such as places in the student body of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), and that parents confer advantage in obtaining those slots. For instance, US parents who have attended college have an 82% chance of sending their own kids to college, versus a 36% chance for parents who didn’t complete high school.

But both of those circumstances are variables, not constants. A society can offer a steeper or gentler gradient of social advantage, and the correlation between parents’ and children’s advantage can be larger or smaller. In Continental Europe and Canada, colleges do not differ nearly as much in reputation and resources as they do in the US and Britain, which means that it matters less where you enroll. However, it is worth noting that even in Sweden, with a century of social democracy behind it, today’s upper class is substantially descended from the 17th century aristocracy. But Swedish women now earn 95% as much as Swedish men and fill 43% of the seats in the legislature. In Sweden, new attitudes toward gender (and sexual orientation) led to deep changes in individual choices and social policies. But new attitudes toward class didn’t dislodge Sweden’s most advantaged families.

Earlier this month, my family and I took the free and excellent tour of the Danish Parliament in Copenhagen. There were many serious insights to be gleaned about parliamentary government, unicameral legislatures, multiple-party systems, and the cultural norms that prevail in Scandinavia, such as egalitarian informality.

But I write not to share insights; I write to relate an anecdote. Although the embedded sideways video is not mine, it shows part of the same tour that we took. The machine in the background is a “paternoster”–like an elevator except that the doors remain always open and a sequence of boxes passes by continuously. You have to jump on and off. Characteristically for Denmark, this contraption is considered too dangerous for tourists and reporters, but MPs and their staff can ride it. As the guide notes, this makes it a good refuge from journalists (who otherwise are allowed everywhere in the parliament building, at will).

The guide–or one of his colleagues–once explained to some Danish 7th-graders that the paternoster goes up, over, and down. That means that if you ride it up on the left, soon you will be coming back down on the right, still standing comfortably upright. The oldest Member of Parliament at the time, who was also a minister in the government, heard this explanation as he rode up. A few seconds later, down he came on the left–standing on his head.

It is fairly hard to imagine this happening in the US Capitol.

We are just back from a vacation in parts of Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden. Although I’ve been in the region before, I am very far from expert on Nordic politics and economics. But it’s worth understanding the Nordic model–even if it looks a little rickety today and may depend on factors that couldn’t transfer to the US–because basic measures of human well-being are extraordinarily high in the five Scandinavian nations. For instance, Norway has the highest human development level in the world. I think the Nordic model represents a fusion of two contrasting impulses, a combination that is perhaps obscured in talk about social democracy or democratic socialism.

The (conservative) Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom makes the point. From Heritage’s perspective, Denmark is an odd mix, although its overall rank is high. Heritage considers Denmark very bad at “limited government,” because one aspect of the Nordic model is high taxation and spending. On the other hand, Heritage ranks Denmark very high on measures like business freedom, investment freedom, and property rights (as well as freedom from corruption, which everyone values).

I think the Nordic model boils down to competitive entrepreneurship in the global marketplace plus strongly egalitarian social policies for everyone in the home country. Scandinavians are out and about, learning foreign languages (95% of Swedes speak English), and studying and working overseas. Goods as well as human beings flow across their borders. Denmark’s international trade is 102% of GDP. I’m not certain how that number can be greater than 100%, but the ratio is obviously much higher there than in the US, where trade is 27% of GDP. You see imports everywhere in Scandinavian stores, as well as export-oriented businesses.

Competitiveness brings material benefits: high-quality goods and services selected from around the world. It provides opportunities for ambitious and talented people to create new things. An index of innovation ranks Sweden first in the world, and Finland and Denmark are also in the top 10. Competition also identifies and rewards excellence. The result is a lively, flexible, future-oriented society. Scandinavians are proud of their nations’ marquee industries and are notably patriotic without being bellicose.

At the same time, competitiveness hurts people–the people who cannot or don’t happen to win, who were doing fine before all the market “disruptions,” who value traditions, or who don’t even want to fight for success in market economies. Competition can also erode civic virtues and responsibilities, including concern for public institutions and shared resources.

That’s why the other side of the Nordic model is so important. At home, everyone has very extensive and unconditional economic rights, which cost a lot of money. The public sector budget is 55% of GDP in Denmark. The state also demands people’s time and attention. Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Denmark all rank in the top seven for voter turnout, they have among the highest rates of associational membership in the world, and their governments are rated as the least corrupt.

All of this is hard to build and maintain, and I have not mentioned the drawbacks and frailties of the model. My point is really an ideological one. There are genuine virtues to systems that we might call “neoliberal,” systems that involve property rights, competition, and globalization. Strongly democratic societies that protect everyone’s welfare also have virtues. And although these goals can trade off in some respects, it’s possible to pick elements from the neoliberal menu and others from the socialist menu without contradiction.