When your career involves a lot of writing, as mine has, anybody with a shred of humility realizes how rarely you come up with a truly original thought. So a few months back I was proud of a column I wrote that put forward this idea: We are witnessing, broadly, an Age of Diminished Expectations – when we’re just settling for so much in lives that we once thought could be so much better.
And then my little moment of pride took a beating because I discovered that there was a book published in 1990 with just that title – The Age of Diminished Expectations – by the eminent economist and writer Paul Krugman. So much for my fresh idea. But what was unsettling, beyond the ego deflation, was that what Krugman observed more than three decades ago is tragically more widespread now, encompassing so many more elements of our lives.
What Krugman wrote about was this: Young adults can no longer expect to be more financially secure than their parents, because of political choices that have rewarded the wealthy at the expense of America’s shrinking middle class. That was true when Krugman wrote it, but nowadays there are far more areas where expectations have diminished.
Like this: Most Americans can no longer expect that we won’t be inundated by floods or scorched by drought, because as a nation we haven’t adequately fought human-induced climate change.
And this: Thanks to the Trump-packed Supreme Court, we’re unable to expect the protection of equal rights for all our fellow citizens.
And this: We can’t expect anymore, as we once did, that our political leaders will behave with fairness and decency, because so many of them have shown little inclination to do so.
So, broadly, our expectations have dropped.
You could argue that it’s simply sensible to recognize the reality of our diminished circumstance as a nation at a time when the world has grown so complex. That notion is common in the business world, where a generation of leaders has embraced the value of celebrating even limited success – or, as Voltaire is supposed to have suggested, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. That’s probably a useful strategy in an era of technology that allows new iterations of products to quickly replace whatever isn’t quite up to snuff. A wise old friend displayed a sign next to his desk: “When all else fails, lower your standards.” So what’s so bad about that?
That’s sort of the current best thinking among many psychologists, who say that we all might be more able to find peace of mind by sort of grading our expectations on a curve. A social theorist named Barry Schwartz argued in 2004, in a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, that people who are “maximizers,” trying to get the most out of life, are often less happy than those he called “satisficers,” who are content with good-enough results. Think of it this way: Strivers can be floppers.
Learning to accept “good enough” actually makes people happier, it seems. Schwartz wrote, “No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.” Okay; I, for one, am fine with “good enough” wine.
But what is healthy for our unsettled psyches isn’t necessarily good for our troubled nation. Here’s why: If too many citizens lose their ambition to reach for the sky, they will choose mediocre leaders, who will drag down the nation’s ambitions. I might argue that we have witnessed that, in fact.
And a nation that gives up on solving big problems can’t hope to lead us to a more secure world. When Al Franken was still a Saturday Night Live cast member, he captured the notion through his hapless character Stuart Smalley. Stuart explained, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.” But who wants to cheer for mediocrity? As any coach who has tallied a winning season will explain, a team cannot rise above mediocrity unless it believes that it can.
Right now, a lot of Americans are convinced that we can’t move much beyond mediocrity in any effort to solve key social problems. And what’s at risk in that mindset is nothing less than what’s often called the American Dream.
It was in the depths of the Great Depression that the concept of the American Dream emerged. It was popularized by an historian, James Truslow Adams. He wrote of, as he put it, “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” Adams stressed that he wasn’t referring mainly to financial gain, but to what he called “a genuine individual search and striving for the abiding values of life… and for the common man to rise to full stature.” Adams believed deeply in the value of liberal education, and he was ahead of the broader society in his insistence that the American dream must be understood to apply to women as well as to men, to people of color as well as to the dominant white culture and to people whose financial status might seem at first hopeless. That is, the American Dream was for everybody.
And it still must be. Really, there’s too much at stake for all of us to allow any of us to settle into the belief that we can do no better in the future than we’re doing right now. In the face of a reactionary Supreme Court majority, a Congress hobbled by a minority’s ability to block any progress and a bitterly divided electorate, it’s tempting to sit back, and hope that maybe somebody else can make things better.
But this is no time to embrace low expectations and to tolerate the carnage in our political system and to American society more generally. So we need to fight the Era of Diminished Expectations. OK, save the good wine, maybe – but don’t settle for mediocrity in the fight to restore the real American Dream. Pour your all into it.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.