Hoards of pundits and experts argue over what to call our current recession, which began as a crisis in finance. Arguments will continue because whether the recession is really a depression, cannot be determined until more time has passed.

            When I first heard our current recession referred to as “Great Depression II” and “GP II,” I thought “How apt but unacceptable.”  But today when I Goggled the phrase (in quotes), 56,000 hits appeared. Not surprisingly, the term “recession” appears 100 times more often. I will use the term recession and “deep recession“ even though history may eventually call it “Great Depression II.”

The typical comments on the web about the effects of the recession can best be described as stories of stress, pain, fear and suffering. Their missives are social tragedies because they are stories of parents struggling to find food for hungry children and of breadwinners getting laid off. They are stories of the inability to pay for medical treatment, which lays the pathway to early death, just like the third world.

            Early Americans believed that pain, hunger, and suffering lead to strong character and close communities. But now contemporary Americans seem to view “suffering” as eating at home rather than going out; or as taking a vacation by car instead of jetting to the Caribbean.  

            Time Magazine splashed “The New Frugality” as its cover story this week. The story claimed that the “Great Recession” is transforming how we spend, whom we trust, where we save and what we really value.” Time had just conducted a scientific, nationwide survey that found half of the public admitting to feeling hardship in general. Nearly a quarter had been unemployed not by choice. And, of course, we are spending less, at least on the nonessentials.

         The most remarkable finding by the Time survey was that nearly two thirds “predict they’ll continue to spend less than they did before.” Even people earning more than $100,000 a year were talking about how they spent less, especially on luxury items.

            On the basis of all of these types of findings, journalists tend to claim that the recession is affecting everyone. The truth is that the lifestyles of the super-wealthy remain basically unchanged, while the middle and poverty classes are struggling with day to day subsistence.

New national survey findings by the Pew Research Center Trends project were released as Luxury or Necessity? The Public Makes a U-Turn.  Here is a synopsis of their discovery about how American adults are adapting to the economic depression:

·         Over the past few decades, Americans have been increasingly viewing all home appliances as necessities rather than luxuries. All of a sudden in the past 4 months that trend has reversed. Now we are less likely to view microwaves, home air conditioning, dishwashers, and clothes dryers as necessities. Already in 4 months these appliances have lost 10 years worth of growth in their perception as necessities.

·         Eight-in-ten adults have taken specific steps of one kind or another to economize during these bad times. Almost six-in-ten say they are shopping more in discount stores or are passing up name brands in favor of less expensive varieties

·         One-in-five adults say they are following the example of first lady Michelle Obama and are making plans to plant a vegetable garden to save money on food

·         Consumer reaction to the recession is being driven by specific personal economic hardships as well as by a more pervasive new creed of thrift that has taken hold both among those who’ve been personally affected and those who haven’t.

·         Nearly half say they or another household member has lost more than 20% in a retirement account or other investments.

·         About two-in-three American families have faced major economic problems such as loss of a job, major loss of investments, or trouble with mortgage payments in the past year.

·         Children, young adults, women and the less affluent are the most likely to have been troubled or to face tragedy.  

Taken as a whole these findings allow us to confirm that small shifts values have occurred within the American public, and perhaps around the world. That change consists of dropping or chipping away at materialistic, consumption values.

For those like Tim Kasser, author of The High Price of Materialism, this must be good news. Although the Pew survey’s discovered a drop in the perceived meaning and value of major consumer items, the small drop may be finicky rather than long lasting, and superficial rather than deep.

            Last month the Archbishop of Canterbury proclaimed that the recession had challenged the common belief that material possessions lead to contentment.  On Easter Sunday, he preached for voluntary limits on “human acquisitiveness and sexual appetite.” I don’t know how sex slipped into hissermon, but let’s not get into psychoanalysis.

            The important point he made is that contemporary society promotes harmful social values of excessive acquisition of a many nonessentials. These values have blinded us from observing the harm we do to the environment and our great insensitivity to the subsistence suffering of millions of people in American and around the world. This is a failing not just of Catholics, but also of people of every form of religion and non-religion.

I spent my elementary school years in Africa, and when my family returned to the United States, I found it strange that my classmates and teachers talked as if the United States was the only country in the world mattered. Still to this day I wonder why most Americans believe there is no need to listen to what’s happening in other countries or to learn from them. What I didn’t realize was that I was taking exception to “American exceptionalism.” 

The traditional explanation for America’s failure to listen is American exceptionalism,  which simply put is the belief that other countries cannot compare to the United States because it is so special.

  Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville  in 1831 created the concept as he traveled through the United States.

 (Doesn’t he look young for being a notorious sociological commentator and world traveler?)

Later sociologist Martin Lipset cast it as the historical explanation for American’s rejection of socialism and the welfare state.

 (Now he looks more like the stereotypical famous sociologist.)

Exceptionalist beliefs differ from, but go hand in hand with, convictions of moral superiority, ethnocentrism, and nationalism.

Is America so special it does not have to listen to the rest of the world? Of course not, but the world thinks Americans hold that opinion of themselves.

  A 2007 BBC international opinion poll in 18 countries concluded “Listen more is the world’s message to the US”  The poll found that most of our allies did not agree with the United States handling of:·        

• The Iraq crisis·        
•  Guantanamo detainees·        
• The Israel-Hezbollah war·        
• Iran’s nuclear program
• Global warming

 You might argue: “The US just has an image problem; we need to communicate better.” But Joseph S Nye, Dean of the JFK School of Government at Harvard said “To communicate effectively, Americans must first learn to listen.”

 Incidentally, Professor Nye has written an important book

The title doesn’t sound interesting but he interprets power in terms of soft and hard power and how we need to blend them, which he labels “smart power.” He makes a strong case that the US foreign policy of the past 8 years has been the opposite of smart power. 

Returning to the challenge of listening and American “humility”, here are some soul-searching questions for us as Americans:·        

• Did we listen right after 9/11 when we thought we needed revenge, any revenge?·        
•  Do our embassies around the world listen, when most of the staff don’t know the local language?Do our intelligence agencies listen, when only a tiny percentage speak languages other than English?·        
• Do our armed forces listen when they know next to nothing about the culture of countries that threaten us?
• Do we really listen when we never listen or read any world news except that which comes from American corporate media? (Personally I have found that Link TV (a cable channel) is by far the least biased on world news, especially the Middle East, of any non-print news source. NPR and PBS are pretty objective but even they have to worry too much about pleasing their sponsors.This topic deserves a future post.)

 So that we do not hang ourselves by our own hubris, we should be reflective and soul searching about our beliefs of America’s place in the world. The best place to start is by listening to what people in other countries are saying. There are many different ways of listening and some can be fun. 

In the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of FP (Foreign Policy)  magazine several political celebrities wrote brief answers to one question: “What single policy or gesture can the next president of the USA make to improve America’s standing in the world?”

One person simply wrote “listen.” He said the highest priority should be to persuade people around the world that we “hear them.” That answer was given by none other than Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House.

  While I usuallyI don’t agree with his political beliefs, in this instance we have a total meeting of the minds. I love it that he went on to say that the new president, immediately upon being elected, should tour the world just asking questions. He even said: “Not one moment need be spent trying to demonstrate American power and dominance.” What a wonderful, revolutionary idea for 2008.

      Not only should America listen, but it should talk and negotiate also. This is one of the key themes of Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Slaughter, author of The Idea That is America, is Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and who is a talked-about-candidate for the next administration’s Secretary of State, argues that we must return to America’s key principles, one of which is humility.

 As this picture illustrates, the American iPod (& cell phone) generation can’t hear what the world is saying at extremely loud volume.  

In recent years world opinion of America has soured. That gives us even more reason to learn from other countries by holding them, as well as America, “up to the light” to see inside them at the same time. We start by seeing differences, then extract ways in which we can improve, and appropriate these ideas into our own culture.