In addition to supporting the strong version of democracy that calls for a fully engaged citizenry, Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy also featured four other important core values.

Many Ways to Arrive at Truth. No aspect of pragmatic philosophy has been attacked more consistently than the popularized version of its theory of truth -- the version that equates pragmatic truth with “whatever works.”

Dewey rejected this simplistic definition, but he also rejected as much too narrow most other conceptions of truth prevalent in his day. He was eager to rescue truth from the logicians and scientists who equated it exclusively with formal verification. He disassociated himself from his own early religious upbringing where truth was identified with revelation and religious authority. And he wrote a scathing criticism of those whose definition of truth arose out of their obsession with a quest for a level of certainty that life cannot provide.

All in all, he was far less concerned with finding some abstract definition of truth than with discovering valid insights into how society can advance human flourishing.

Dewey was not a fluent phrasemaker. His labels were rarely vivid or memorable. Characteristically, he labeled his own broad conception of truth as “warranted assertability.”

Closely examined, this definition covers an immense patch of ground. You can assert truth claims about gravity or DNA because these are warranted by science. You can also assert truth claims about human living when these are warranted by poetry, art or everyday experience. In other words, there are multiple ways to arrive at truth.

Dewey was a strong supporter of science, but he didn’t believe that science has a monopoly on truth. He understood that we discover truth from many sources and forms of life. This is, I believe, an extremely important component of the ethic our society needs to counterbalance what the sociologist Robert Bellah labeled “our insane forms of individualism.”

In later years, Dewey relabeled his own philosophy “experimentalism.” For Dewey, the core source of pragmatic truth comes from experimenting with life, whether in the form of formal scientific experimentation or of everyday practical and esthetic experimentation.

A High Value Placed on Community. For John Dewey, our contemporary conception of self versus community would have made no sense. Dewey thought it impossible to conceive of the self as existing apart from community. He admired and internalized the definition of self that his colleague at the University of Chicago, social psychologist George Herbert Mead, had developed.

The Mead conception is that of a thoroughly social self. For Dewey as for Mead, the self and the community were inseparable.

Dewey conceived of society as organic and the individual as part of the organism. His view was that the only way individuals could give meaning to their lives was through the community. It is our membership in society that gives life whatever meaning it has.

I am not the first person to call upon Dewey’s thought to serve as a corrective for the overdose of individualism and the undervaluing of community that has overtaken American life. Bellah does so in his classic book Habits of the Heart. I find it comforting that other social scientists also discern the relevance of Dewey’s thinking to today’s wicked problems.

Respect for “Intelligent Conduct.” This was one of Dewey’s favorite phrases. It summed up for him the main purpose of adhering to the philosophy of pragmatism and refers to reflecting intelligently on one's actions in order to arrive at practical judgment. When the strong form of democracy prevails in society, when people feel that they truly belong to a community and their motivations are directed to making it flourish, and when they actively pursue truths that advance the public good, then “intelligent conduct” becomes the norm.

I am drafting this blog shortly after the riots in Ferguson, Mo., incited by the police killing of an unarmed black teenager. The entire episode reeks of unintelligent conduct. You could hardly ask for a more vivid display of the dysfunctionality that has overtaken parts of American society:

• In a community whose demographics are two thirds African/American, the Ferguson police force is almost completely white (50 out of a total of 53 cops).
• The police chief refused for days to identify the cop whose gun had killed the boy or to show any other signs of transparency in their investigation of the incident.
• To quell the protests that followed, the police armed themselves with military equipment suitable for fighting the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan, totally inappropriate for crowd control in an American city.
• In a stunning example of unintelligent conduct, the Pentagon had given military equipment it no longer needed for fighting terrorists to any city who wanted it for free. Ferguson’s police force used the Pentagon’s armored vehicles and other military equipment, compounding the Pentagon’s bad judgment.

Incidents such as these present a picture of American life that is the extreme opposite of Dewey’s vision. Dewey’ philosophy of pragmatism respects competence, achievement, practicality, civic discussion and public decision-making – all summed up in his pregnant phrase “intelligent conduct.” President Obama was making essentially the same point with his caveat: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

Our nation desperately needs a strong dose of this sort of intelligent conduct.

The Relevance of Philosophy to Everyday Life. Dewey took issue with the assumption of many academic philosophers that somehow their methods make them privy to timeless eternal truths. He had little respect for the traditional spectator role of philosophy. His philosophy has always totally engaged in what he called “the problems of men.”

He probably was overly optimistic about how successful philosophy might be in confronting and resolving society’s problems. Unlike the majority of American academic philosophers, he was willing to get his hands dirty and take on any and all problems that confronted our society over his long life. (He died in 1952 at the age of 93).

In his insightful book John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, political philosopher Alan Ryan speaks of Dewey replacing “…the image of the philosopher as a dealer in saving truths… with the image of the philosopher as cultural critic” exercising a strong social obligation to address practical problems of living. (p106).

This is the aspect of pragmatism that philosopher Richard Rorty and others were eager to rescue in the late years of the last century. Pragmatism seeks to liberate philosophy from its isolation in museum-like departments of academic philosophy. Rather, it positions philosophy as a disciplined way of putting first things first. As such, it is an indispensable tool for developing and strengthening a countervailing ethic to our overdose of individualism.

Public Agenda is pleased to announce a new partnership with WNYC – New York’s premier public radio broadcaster and producer – on the inaugural project for the Deborah Wadsworth Fund. This first project will provide an unprecedented look into what's really on the minds of residents of New York City and the tri-state region.

"Public Agenda's mission and the mission of public media are so much in sync," said Laura Walker, president and CEO of New York Public Radio, in a conversation with Public Agenda President Will Friedman during the launch of the partnership.

The collaboration was announced on November 5th, at a celebration of the Deborah Wadsworth Fund, a new initiative from Public Agenda that honors our former president and board member. Donations to the Fund will enable Public Agenda to help New York area residents have a greater voice in the public issues they care about most. (You can learn more about the Fund here and support it here.)

The first Deborah Wadsworth Fund project will consist of focus groups and a major survey with residents of the New York region. Through this research, Public Agenda and WNYC will illuminate the concerns, priorities and aspirations of local residents when it comes to the public policy issues our region faces. This research will provide a basis for WNYC programming and ensure that subsequent Deborah Wadsworth Fund projects address issues that area residents are concerned with.

"Our first step is to listen," said Walker, who noted that she expected issues including income inequality, public education, the future of climate change and politics to be on the list of residents' top concerns. The research will help Public Agenda and WNYC pull out the topics that matter most to residents, set a frame for discussion of those topics based on what residents have to say about them, and host public dialogue on them.

"This collaboration will elevate the priorities of the public in our area and promote dialogue about what they care about, rather than let partisan politics or interest groups set the agenda," said Friedman about the partnership.

We are about 40% of our way to funding this first project, which we hope to kick off in February 2015. The results of the research will guide subsequent on-the-ground work in the New York region. Each year, supported by contributions to the Deborah Wadsworth Fund, Public Agenda will help residents and local officials work together on solutions to the public issues residents care about the most.

Deborah Wadsworth was committed to making the world a better place, and we strive to continue her legacy. Please help us reach our initial goal and start work on the inaugural Deborah Wadsworth project! We also hope you consider an annual contribution to the Fund to sustain our work in communities around the New York region.

Please donate here today.

Click here for more information about the Deborah Wadsworth Fund and our collaboration with WNYC.

I’ve argued in these blogs that the great majority of Americans who believe the nation is on the wrong track are, unfortunately, correct in their suspicions.

The most obvious signs of being on the wrong track are the countless instances of our institutions pursuing their own self-interest rather than the public good.

As to the major cause of the nation’s derailment, I’ve pinpointed an inadvertent consequence of the nation’s shift from the 1950s ethic of sacrificing one’s own self-fulfillment for others to an ethic of celebrating one’s own self-expressiveness. Self-expressiveness and other forms of individualism are fine in their place, but they must leave room for values that also advance the public good.

My most consequential proposal is that the American public needs to develop and nourish a countervailing ethic to the prevailing cult of the self. This would be an ethic that preserves individualism while also enhancing the integrity and official mission of our institutions.

Bringing about an ethical transformation in our society poses a monumental challenge. If we were obliged to create such a transformation from scratch it might be nearly impossible to achieve. The task becomes far more doable once we realize that we don’t have to invent the sort of ethic that is needed: it existed and thrived in the early and late decades of the last century in the doctrine of pragmatic philosophy.

Some parts of pragmatic philosophy are now obsolete, but others are powerfully germane to our current situation. The most compelling aspects of pragmatic philosophy for today’s America are those advanced by the philosopher John Dewey.

Five aspects of Dewey’s philosophy hold the potential to form building blocks for a new ethic of civic virtue. These are:

1. Support for the Strong Versus Weak Form of Democracy
2. Many Ways to Arrive at Truth
3. A High Value Placed on Community
4. Respect for “Intelligent Conduct”
5. The Relevance of Philosophy to Everyday Life

Here is a brief elaboration of the first of these building blocks.

Support for the Strong Versus Weak Form of Democracy.

Many democratic theorists equate democracy mainly with voting. This reductionist view of democracy was particularly dominant in the years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

I think of the democracy-means-voting definition as the weak form of democracy. This is the kind of democracy that Bush was eager to develop in Iraq and other nations in the Middle East.

Inevitably, it failed to install the kinds of democracies Bush had in mind. Instead, it resulted in installing sectarian leaders like the Shi’ite leader Nouri el-Maliki in Iraq, electing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and voting Hamas into power in the Gaza Strip. These elections advanced conflict more than democracy; they destabilized their nations because of their extreme partisanship.

John Dewey, on the other hand, was an advocate of the strong form of democracy. In addition to voting, the strong form of democracy requires the rule of law and democratic institutions. But even these are not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient conditions for successful democracy. Essential to a thriving democracy, Dewey endlessly argued, is a high level of citizen engagement and participation.

Dewey recognized that our institutions are fully aware of the importance of voting and are prepared to take whatever action is needed to preserve its integrity. But he also recognized that our society is not nearly as conscious of the need to provide the public with the tools it requires for thoughtful democratic deliberation.

In the 1930s and 40s, Dewey engaged in a lively debate with the influential journalist, Walter Lippmann, about the public’s ability to contribute to shaping national policy. Lippmann, a thorough elitist, insisted on the public’s inability to understand the issues of the day, let alone contribute to resolving them. In response, Dewey championed active and constant public engagement as the heart and soul of successful democratic governance.

In my next blog I’ll identify the other four values and beliefs espoused by John Dewey that compositely constitute the kind of ethic the public needs to preserve but also that will help constrain the out-of-control aspects of our cult of the self.

My main thesis in these Rebooting Democracy blogs is that an unintended consequence of recent cultural change has encouraged many of our institutions’ leaders to subordinate the mission of their institution to their own personal interests. Our culture’s overemphasis on individual rights has been so sweeping and pervasive that it has inadvertently weakened our commitment to individual responsibility.

This is not a deep or universal form of corruption. All big companies aren’t evolving into Enron. All executives aren’t morphing into Andy Mozillo, whose company, Countrywide Insurance, flooded the nation with egregious “liar loans” destined to fail.

Similarly, all government agencies haven’t fallen into the Veterans Administration trap of putting their hospitals’ scheduling convenience ahead of veterans’ health and then lying about it. Our criminal justice system, our health care system, our schools and colleges still manage to get many things right.

Yet, it is as if the cult of the self and its rights has grown so deeply embedded in the culture that otherwise honest and responsible people don’t think twice about exploiting others as long as their actions are not blatantly illegal. I can’t think of a more ethically blind rationalization than the familiar lament: “I didn’t do anything wrong; I didn’t break the law.”

The frustrating aspect of this diagnosis is that it identifies a problem that is awesomely difficult to fix. Our society is skillful in addressing economic, technical or administrative problems. It is less skilled at addressing cultural and ethical problems.

Fortunately, we have a firmly grounded ethical tradition that we can call upon to come to our rescue. It is an authentically American philosophy that contains all the elements we need to construct a countervailing ethic to the cult of the self.

I am referring to the philosophy of pragmatism that dominated American culture throughout a large part of the 20th century. William James introduced the philosophy of pragmatism in 1907. Philosophy had not yet become a professionalized academic subject and James was eager to capture the practical-minded, problem-solving genius of America. He wanted to identify a philosophy of life that Americans could use in their daily lives – one that examined action from the perspective of the value it added to our lives rather than relying on abstract and irrelevant concepts of truth.

The philosophy of pragmatism constitutes an authentically and uniquely American tradition, one that has exercised great influence on European philosophy as well as on American thought.

Over the past century, the popularity of pragmatic philosophy has bounced around a great deal. It gained immediate popularity when first introduced by William James. As elaborated by John Dewey in subsequent decades, it dominated American thought from the pre-WWI decade through the 1920s and 1930s up to WWII.

During this same era, however, pragmatism got shoved aside in the philosophy departments of our nation’s most prestigious universities in favor of more technical and analytic philosophies coming from England and Germany. Richard Rorty, a brilliant and provocative American philosopher, resuscitated and revived pragmatic philosophy in the 1980s.

Two cogent criticisms have been leveled at pragmatism that contributed to its being sidelined. One is that its theory of truth is crass and unsophisticated. The other is that it lacks fundamental values and speaks only to methods.

European critics have been quick to issue these criticisms. For example, Bertrand Russell jumped all over William James’ metaphor of the “cash value” of ideas as the core of their truth claim. Russell pointed to this turn of phrase as evidence of America’s crass materialism.

New York Times columnist, David Brooks, recently wrote a scathing criticism of pragmatism, based largely on a 1940 magazine article by writer Lewis Mumford. Brooks quotes Mumford as saying that the pragmatic mindset is characteristic of “people who try to govern without philosophic or literary depth.”

His purpose in reaching back to an article written more than 70 years ago, Brooks states, is to critique our current leadership who, because of their own pragmatic mindset, also overlook the deep moral dimension of thought.

I have great respect for Brooks as an independent thinker – a conservative who doesn’t hesitate to criticize other conservatives when he believes they are wrong or to accept liberal perspectives when he feels they are correct.

But here we are, with Brooks damning pragmatism for its lack of a moral direction while I deliberately turn to pragmatism because of its moral dimension.

I don’t think there is any genuine confusion involved. Pragmatic philosophy harbors many conflicting elements. Its sprawling theories extend over more than a century of American thought, and include a wide diversity of thinkers. Brooks’ main source, Lewis Mumford, was probably reflecting the prejudices of the philosophy departments of leading universities of his time three quarters of a century ago.

My own main source of pragmatic philosophy, John Dewey, is one of America’s most morally conscious philosophers. Dewey acknowledged that many criticisms of pragmatic thought have merit. But I believe that Dewey took them into full account and transcended them.

John Dewey lived a long life and was incredibly prolific. Some of his thinking is no longer timely. But much of what he thought and wrote is responsive to our current need for a countervailing ethic to unrestrained individualism.

There is a way to nudge the nation back to public trust, self-confidence and optimism. It is to restore the “rising tide raises all boats” and democracy-friendly form of capitalism that dominated our economy in the decades following WWII.

If Main Street as well as Wall Street were once again to benefit from corporate profitability, Americans would have faith that the nation’s traditional social mobility (the American Dream) had been restored.

I am convinced that this is an achievable goal, especially if the public is fully engaged in making it happen.

It would constitute a huge win for everyone: it would raise public morale; business would regain the public trust it craves; our institutions of governance could once again be counted on to “do the right thing,” just as they had in earlier decades; our consumer-driven economy would achieve the higher levels of growth we need to sustain productivity and prosperity.

There is nothing mysterious about the strategy needed to make this happen. But it does require building a new national consensus about how to manage our form of capitalism.

Capitalism and democracy do not coexist automatically and effortlessly. We have learned from China and others how flexible capitalism can be. It can take many forms and flourish under both democratic and non-democratic governments.

It takes considerable effort to achieve and maintain democracy-friendly capitalism. We know from our own national history that, left to its own devises, capitalism drifts toward monopoly. It took our nation years of strife to channel capitalism toward competition rather than monopolistic trusts, greatly strengthening our free enterprise system.

We have, I believe, reached a comparable tipping point in the current tendency of our great corporations to put the interests of shareholders ahead of other stakeholders: customers, employees and the broader society. If you stand back and reflect on the fact that the interests of short-term traders take precedence over consumers, employees, citizens and the larger society, you see a travesty of democracy. And yet it is today the dominant doctrine of the vast majority of America’s corporations.

This is a relatively new development. I clearly remember that my firm’s corporate clients in the 1970s and 1980s believed that the main task of the company CEO was to balance the competing claims of all stakeholders, and not give priority to any one, certainly not shareholders.

This prioritizing of shareholders is wreaking havoc on our society. In an earlier blog, I wrote:

This means that a casual day trader with no stake in the company other than some shares he bought yesterday and may sell tomorrow is given precedence over all of the company’s employees, however committed and effective they may be. The company’s obligations to the larger community are likewise shoved to the side in favor of shareholders. The long-term interests of the company are subordinated to the trading manipulations of hedge fund managers who don’t give a damn about the company and want only to add to their unimaginably huge, tax-advantaged profits.

It is hard to conceive of a more irrational, shortsighted and frankly self-defeating doctrine for a nation that prides itself on maintaining a democracy-friendly form of capitalism.

This Wall-Street-first doctrine is largely responsible for the economic stagnation that has paralyzed middle-class worker incomes over the past 15 years. It is at least partly responsible for the persistently slow growth of the economy. It was a major cause of the Great Recession of 2008-9.

Our economy, unlike that of China and other countries, is mainly consumer driven. More than 70 percent of our GDP reflects consumer buying. That is why growth in company profits and consumer income marched hand in hand for so many years.

In recent decades, however, companies began to learn how to be profitable without relying on steady increases in consumer incomes. Through exporting jobs and reducing labor costs through technology, they were able to maintain their profitability without passing on these gains either to employees or consumers.

Of course, these practices began to stir up public resentment. Ordinarily, such resentment would have motivated business to restore the older balance. Instead, American business became obsessed with the doctrine known as “shareholder value.” This doctrine came to justify business practices that would otherwise have been plainly seen as unethical, irresponsible and in the long run unsustainable.

The gist of this doctrine is that the interests of shareholders always come first. They are to be given priority over the interests of employees, consumers, the larger society and any other stakeholder. The inference is that companies can’t be profitable unless they privilege shareholders.

But this is clearly nonsensical. Companies were quite profitable in the post WWII era when profitability depended on the rising incomes of average Americans.

These applications of shareholder value are utterly contrary to the intentions of the two economists – Michael Jenson and William Meckling – who first promulgated the doctrine. They were scrupulous in insisting that they were speaking about long-term shareholder value, not short term. And from a long-term perspective, their theory may have some merit. But short-term traders dominate Wall Street, not long-term investors.

It is my conviction that if the doctrine of shareholder value were to lose its credibility, business would be free to return to the sensible view that the role of the CEO is to find the right balance among the claims of all stakeholders, including shareholders. This would break the stranglehold that our financial institutions have over the majority of America’s great companies.

Indeed, I believe many thoughtful CEOs would put traders and shareholders after the company’s employees or customers. I was recently reminded of this more traditional point of view while listening to an interview with Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronics. George said flat out: Customers come first, employees second, shareholders third.

A new national consensus that all stakeholders are important to our economy and society is politically inevitable. Once average citizens understand that overprioritizing the interests of some traders and bankers are undermining the nation’s growth, productivity and social mobility, a new consensus will quickly form. Indeed, if we wait too long for it to happen, it will be difficult to prevent it from becoming extreme and punitive, rebalancing too far in the other direction.

If it can happen sooner rather than later, the nation’s economy would be free to return to the form in which it mightily thrived.

Public trust would be restored.

Public Agenda is partnering with AAAS to facilitate a series of dialogues between scientists and evangelical Christian pastors throughout the summer and fall. The purpose of the project is to improve dialogue, relationships and collaboration between these two communities, often viewed as staunchly divided. This blog is one in a series from our public engagement team, who write to reflect on their experiences moderating the dialogues. Read more about this project here and here, and download the discussion guide used during these conversations here. For more information, email Allison Rizzolo.

A few weeks ago in Atlanta, I found myself in a room surrounded by church pastors, evolutionary biologists, theology professors, mathematicians and a former Vietnam veteran turned evangelical Christian. I was there for the third dialogue in the Perceptions Project, which brings together individuals who self-identify as belonging to the evangelical Christian community or (though in some cases “and” is more appropriate) the scientific community.

Many of the participants seemed nervous at the start of the dialogue. Though I served as a co-facilitator and was not technically a participant, I admit that I too approached the conversation with a hint of reticence. Before boarding my plane to Atlanta, a friend told me to “watch myself” since he claimed that there was “no way those two groups could manage to be civil toward one another, especially down in the Bible belt.”

What I found, however, was quite the opposite of that presupposition.

The group certainly tackled some tricky topics – evolution, stem cell research, and abortion, to name a few. Still, the group my colleague Susan and I led was filled with some of the most empathetic, curious, and kindest people I had met in quite some time.

For example, one of the scientists in the room brought up the Institutional Review Board process. Through this process, scientists present their research projects to a group of their institutional colleagues, who determine whether or not that project is ethical and can proceed. The board is responsible for deciding whether the welfare of human participants is protected, among other things.

One pastor was shocked to learn that all scientists must go through this process, saying, “I had no idea that scientists actually cared about the sanctity of life.”

A biologist quipped “We have morals too!”

Within a moment, laughter filled the room. The participants began to ease up, and suddenly the stage was set for true, honest, and constructive dialogue. Everyone in the room seemed to start abandoning their preconceived notions of the “other’s” theoretical identity and began to view one another as real people who deserved credit for having their own unique perspectives, all varying in scope and range. Not one person in that room fit the mold of a cookie-cutter stereotype. And the truth is, no one ever does.

One of the biggest takeaways of Public Agenda’s partnership with AAAS is that no barrier is ever too big to break down. Participants exchanged business cards across communities and made plans to continue the conversation after the workshop was over – a true sign of a successful event. While some participants agreed to disagree, they did accomplish one major feat, as the beloved Aretha Franklin would put it:

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me…”

And that, in my opinion, is exactly what happened in Atlanta.

The irrationalities and dysfunctions I described in my last blog crept up on us largely undetected. In earlier blogs I theorized that they are mainly traceable to a psychosocial flaw, an unintended byproduct of our cult of the self.

I hasten to add that the American embrace of individualism has had many good consequences. Our culture has grown more pluralistic, more diverse, more tolerant, and less stifling and conformist than it was in the 1950s when I was coming of age. The flowering of individualism launched on the nation’s college campuses in the 1960s has enhanced our individual freedoms and enriched our life styles.

My concern is that, in seeking more space for self-expressiveness and individual rights, Americans have also grown more opinionated, willful and insistent that their voice be heard.

On the positive side, this outlook strengthens people’s sense of agency and reduces their feelings of helplessness. But if this form of entitlement is frustrated, it can fill people with resentment. And it can cause other values to be brushed aside without much thought to consequences.

The values that have suffered the most include an erosion of our communal ethics and our willingness to sacrifice for others, postpone gratification or place a high value on the well-being of the larger community.

The cult of self and the elevation of individual rights to the peak of our value hierarchy have pervaded all corners of American life. Deep elements of irrationality have dug their hooks into our institutions. It is as if individual willfulness has become so important that it trumps everything else.

The official mission of each of our institutions reflects the needs of the larger society, not the self-interest of those who manage them. Our political institutions are supposed to make our democracy work for all citizens, not just for some. Our economy is supposed to provide opportunities for all strata of the society, not just the top ones. Our criminal justice system, our K-12 education system, our colleges and universities are supposed to function for everyone.

For any institution to keep faith with its mission, however, requires that those who manage it follow an ethic that subordinates their own selfish interests to its larger purpose. Otherwise distortions quickly follow.

When the VA hospital system found itself deluged with ailing veterans requiring immediate attention, instead of addressing the problem directly, those running the show gamed the system, cheating and lying about waiting times. For some of the neglected veterans, the consequences were deadly.

Those who managed our most successful and trusted banks helped to bring on the great recession of 2008 by their irresponsible lending practices. These were designed to enrich the bank’s executives, not to serve the public good. Indeed, they severely undermined the health of the nation’s economy.

Individualism always requires constraints. The main problem with glorifying individualism is not its emphasis on the needs and desires of the self. Individualism is a core value of our society, and there is every reason to celebrate it. But individualism always needs a countervailing ethic that insists that individual desires not violate the integrity of others.

There is no contradiction between these two ethics. On the contrary, they reinforce one another.

What happened to America in the past four decades is that the cult of the self lost all sense of proportionality. It so thoroughly absorbed all the ethical oxygen that countervailing ethics have been unable to thrive.

We arrive then at one of the main conclusions of this series of blogs on Rebooting Democracy. I have concluded that the public’s suspicions that our nation is careening down “the wrong track” are sound. The resulting problem fits the definition of a “wicked problem.” Conventional strategies are too superficial to solve deep cultural problems. New laws, new technical fixes, throwing money at the problem -- none of these will suffice. A deeper, more fundamental strategy is required.

Our culture currently lacks a countervailing ethic to restrain the dynamism of untrammeled individualism. Without such an ethic, rampant individualism creates all manner of distorting irrationalities in our institutions.

In future blogs, I will specify what such a countervailing ethic might look like and how it can be solidly grounded in America’s long ethical tradition.