The Weakness That Starts at Home

By LANCE MORROW

The willpower of the Americans astonished me ... the determination that has transformed a handful of emigrants into a powerful nation; the industry which has made it great and wealthy; and the wisdom which is leading it onward to a glorious and assured future.

--Count Vay de Vaya, a Hungarian traveler in America, 1908

No power on earth can prevent the increasing equality of conditions ... from leading every member of the community to be wrapped up in himself... And no one can foretell into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves lest they should have to sacrifice something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their fellow creatures.

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

Toward dusk, their small boats go whumping across lakes and bays, rooster-tailing on fierce twin-100 outboards. Caravans of eight-miles-to-the-gallon RVs start homing off the interstates, their occupants damply chilled in the air conditioning, bathed in Dolly Parton from the tape deck. In shopping malls, supermarkets the size of National Guard armories feel as cold as meat lockers; housewives in pedal pushers go Brrrr as they load their carts with food encased in a wealth of nonreturnable glass, metal and paper. They shake their heads as they pay what the check-out computer demands of them, and pile the groceries into broad-beamed station wagons. At home, the automatic icemaker sighs and clatters in the kitchen; the automatic washer discos through the spin cycle. The microwave starts dinner.

Meantime, in winding ropes of bright capillaries, the slow and overpowered commuting cars poof home. From above, at night, American cities look like garishly jumbled jewelry strewn up and down the landscape; in the centers, empty high-rises of piled diamonds glow, great sparklers kept alight for the cleaning women, for the admiration of passing planes.

For years foreigners have regarded America (enviously, contemptuously) as a shocking wastrel, besotted with its own resources, lighting its cigars with $1,000 bills. In winter, visitors remark, the U.S. is always too warm indoors, and in summer always too cold; in a flawless little American parable, Richard Nixon used to turn up the White House air conditioning full blast and then start a cozy blaze in the fireplace.

Since the early '70s, Americans have been flirting reluctantly with a complicated and grudging awareness about themselves and their orgies of fossil burning. But they are still in the quibbling stage, in what psychologists call a period of "defensive avoidance." The gas lines that started in California and have begun to spread across the country like a rumor are still open to confusing interpretations: Are they a temporary inconvenience or ominous intimations of the future? The last gas crisis, in 1973-74, subsided soon enough. Perhaps this one will as well? According to the Gallup poll, more than three-quarters of Americans still believe that current gasoline shortages are a Big Oil contrivance. If decontrol begins, the assumption goes, prices will rise well above $1 a gallon and

Americans will all be presently awash in gas again.

It is still difficult to persuade Americans that such cynical calculations are pretty much beside the point, that even if the big oil companies were withholding gas supplies in order to await higher prices, the overall scarcity of oil is real, absolute and ultimately irreversible. The U.S., with 28.6% of the industrial West's population, accounts for 70% of its daily consumption of crude oil. Even with U.S. gas prices going up toward $1 a gallon, Americans are still paying unusually low prices; Europeans for years have been paying two or three times as much for gas as Americans. The price in France was $2.44 a gallon last week. But Americans go on printing more money and descending deeper into trade deficits to pay for their energy habit.

The ominous inconvenience of the gasoline lines has aroused combinations of scapegoating and soul searching. While many Americans blame the oil companies, others regard American energy habits as a symptom of fundamental national weakness. There is an unhappy plausibility in the underlying premise that Americans have drifted into a condition of spoiled purposelessness.

All through last winter, the nation heard rumblings about American "weakness."

Usually, it was expressed as concern about "losing Iran," or about the nation doing nothing when an American ambassador was shot down overseas, or about how the U.S. might--or might not--react if the Middle East oilfields were seized. The concern has found its sharpest focus in the argument over the SALT II treaty: whether it will leave the U.S. weaker, more vulnerable.

Those are serious worries. But the real calculus of American strength is not expressed primarily in terms of a willingness to fight or in numbers of missiles and warheads. It is not expressed in how tough Americans can be with the Soviets, or anybody else abroad. It is expressed precisely in how tough Americans are willing to be with themselves. A damaging slackness, a widespread fecklessness have grown evident not only in American leadership and corporations but in U.S. society at large.

Energy is only part of the problem. Another disturbing symptom is the state of American productivity, which after several years of declining growth has in recent months actually dipped below zero progress. America began to play its great role in the world not so much through military power as through its immense productive capacity. Productivity is not simply a matter of people willing to work hard, although that remains a major factor. It is also a matter of maintaining healthy machines and plants, capital investment and innovation. In most of these areas, America now lags behind many other nations.

Meantime, the public sector in the past three decades has consumed more and more of the nation's gross national product (32.5% in 1978). An exorbitantly overgrown system of regulation has turned prudent Government watchfulness over private industry into virtually perpetual interference, and thereby chilled enthusiasm for investment. Moreover, the business of business, unglamorous and vaguely unpopular in the U.S. for at least several generations, is portrayed as all-purpose villain at the very moment when it should be stimulated to its greatest exertions. Communications across the barriers of attitude become difficult. Too many Americans cherish a doctrinaire repugnance for the free market. On the other side, too many business leaders and conservative ideologues, often oblivious to criticism, tend to talk and listen only to members of their own club. Meantime, the separate tribes of special interests fiercely pursue their own advantage, increasingly unwilling to compromise with one another.

In fact, the entire argument over the American character in the energy crisis is often framed along ideological lines.

There are at least two angles of reasoning. One holds that it is the American people themselves who are to blame for the energy crisis. "Several generations of us have been spoiled crazy," says Brandeis University Sociologist Marshall Sklare. "Having the highest standard of living in the world has made us vulnerable. In times of crisis, reactions are almost childlike. People want their candy. The need to modify lives evokes anger."

Others locate the blame in the nation's political and social leadership. According to Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist at M.I.T.: "Most of us pretty much take life as it is given to us by others. For example, destroy local mass transit systems, promote suburban sprawl ... permit central cities to deteriorate into jungles and stimulate the automotive industry by every advertising trick known to man, and what do you get? A spread-out network of settlement, work, distribution and consumption which has become absolutely dependent on the automobile for its existence." Burnham will have none of the "pundits who blame the American people for doing what their leaders and their corporate giants had told them to do, decade after decade."

But the distinctions between the people and their leaders are ultimately somewhat artificial. They are also recriminatory and divisive in any crisis that calls for the unity of shared sacrifice. Blame for heedless profligacy and bad planning should be addressed to corporate and Government leaders. But the responsibility is also shared by the larger population. Pogo's winsome cliche"We have met the enemy and he is us") is in full operation. Americans are not, after all, mere spectators in the drama of their own lives. They are, in historical terms, the most appallingly wasteful people who have ever lived; whole nations could live comfortably on their leftovers.

Besides, in democratic process, there is a constant interaction between leaders and led, between the people's mood and the politician's watchful calculation of it. The two intersect in Congress, which seems to be dissolving into dreary incoherence. Congress, with its delicate Geiger counters of mood all activated and ticking gently, refused even to grant the Administration stand-by authority to ration gas--although it is true that Carter's approach on that subject was notably clumsy.

The transition to a future of scarcer energy is being made all the more painful by the manic, contradictory signals emanating from the Administration about fuel prospects. If the nation is in a state of indiscipline and division, it is probably not because of defective character so much as an immense bewilderment about the real dangers of the energy shortage.

True, Jimmy Carter has delivered a number of soliloquies on the "moral equivalent of war," but the attributes of war remain absent. The problem seems abstract to Americans, except when gas prices rise and stations close.

Americans displayed many similar signs of indifference and disunity on the eve of World War II. Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation at last into comparative unity and necessary action. In fact, World War II may have been the last epoch when Americans acted in moral harmony with one an other. An overriding common necessity imposed sacrifices -- rationing at home, service and possible death abroad -- upon a people more or less unified in their perception of the evil to be conquered.

Americans are a people capable of extraordinary ingenuity and unexpected self-discipline when they come up hard against something they see as a real emergency. When California's Marin County was confronted with a drought two years ago, for example, residents shared the burden of sacrifice with remarkable success, revising their life-styles to accommodate the need. But Americans are also a breathtakingly forgetful people who are simply not moved to change their lives very much in consideration of the long range.

American skepticism about the energy shortage has two elements. First, a somewhat truculent sense of equity leads people to insist, "I will sacrifice, if necessary, but I'll be damned if I'll be the first." That leads to a paralysis of selfishness in which each citizen assumes the bad faith of all the rest.

So people alter their behavior by small degrees, but do not change anything drastically. Second, they persist in one of the oldest articles of the American faith -- a belief in the technological fix, in new developments that will bail them out of their dilemmas. Gasohol, for example, has just the look of that American deliverance. Thus, in a sense, American tradition itself militates against concerted action against the energy shortage.

That tradition of material salvation is the profoundest question confronting Americans. The logic of the energy shortage dictates: cut down, because supplies are finite.

The questions raised about the nuclear power industry by the Three Mile Island accident only reinforce that logic. Yet Americans have not sifted through the questions of their priorities. They want energy without risk. They may be a long time in settling the question of what price they are willing to pay for their power. Americans historically have believed that they can have it both ways -- indeed, every way. Their success was erected upon a profligate exuberance.

There have been counterstrains. The transition now to a far more prudent and intelligent energy policy demands reactivation of what M. Carl Holman, president of the National Urban Coalition, calls "a sense of The Green." The earliest towns and villages in the U.S., Holman notes, "usually set aside some land at the center that was held in common, called The Green. But to day, people have difficulty feeling that they have things in common: that there are group interests that override individual needs."

Americans also need to reclaim some of the provinces of their lives that they have ceded over the years to experts in a variety of fields -- in education, health care and child care, for example.

One of the country's deepest moral problems is that Americans now possess -- and take the responsibility for -- so little of them selves. Government and other specialists have appropriated too much of their lives. Such an individual sense might help to fill the vacuum of national purpose in which Americans have operated for some time. The exclusive pursuit of the good life does not ultimately add up to much of a raison d'etre.

The problem is that too many Americans are accustomed to acting only in emergencies, and too few of them are persuaded that they actually face one at the moment. Presumably they will wake up to the certain knowledge of it before too long. As Samuel Johnson said: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

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