In Black-White Relations: The American Dilemma, economist Junfu Zhang offers this summary of Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work, An American Dilemma (1944):
"According to Myrdal, the American dilemma of his time referred to the co-existence of the American liberal ideals and the miserable situation of blacks. On the one hand, enshrined in the American creed is the belief that people are created equal and have human rights; on the other hand, blacks, as one tenth of the population, were treated as an inferior race and were denied numerous civil and political rights. Myrdal's encyclopedic study covers every aspect of black-white relations in the United States up to his time. He frankly concluded that the 'Negro problem' is a 'white man's problem.' That is, whites as a collective were responsible for the disadvantageous situation in which blacks were trapped." (Wikipedia)
Mrydal's analysis of race relations in the U.S. remains relevant today. I would like to offer a slight emendation of his thesis, however. I believe there is a fundamental conflict at the very root of American life. The conflict is between the value of living a moral way of life, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the value of pursuing the material goals around which our way of life is organized.
Let's begin with the value of a moral life. Probably most of us would agree that, if there is any widely accepted basic principle of morality, it is embodied in the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule directs us to imagine ourselves as the people who will be affected by any action we take, and to ask ourselves whether, if we were they, we would be willing to endure the consequences of that action. In other words, in every choice we make between actions having a potential impact on others, we should take fully into account the possible harms and disadvantages (as well as benefits) that our choice of how to act might have for others. We should weigh those consequences against the gains (and costs) that will accrue to us. Then, we should strike a balance between them, taking care to ensure that we don't give greater weight to our own good than to the good of others (because they, as individual human beings, deserve to be treated as having a moral worth equal to our own).
Now, contrast the Golden Rule with the principle of “rational egoism.” According to this rule, everyone should always do what’s best for himself or herself. Where the Golden Rule directs us to take into account the consequences of our actions for others; to weigh those consequences against the consequences for ourselves; and to strike a balance between them, rational egoism tells us to consider only the consequences for ourselves and to choose the action that will lead to the best consequences for ourselves. The Golden Rule tells us to do what’s best for all of us. Rational egoism tells us to do what’s best for me.
Rational egoism is closely related to the principle of optimal decision-making. Optimal decision-making says, basically, that we should try to maximize our gains (or the benefits we expect our action to generate) and to minimize our losses (or the costs we expect to pay in order to obtain those benefits). In other words, we should (and, if we are rational, we will) choose that option among those that are open to us that leads to an outcome that produces more good than (or at least as much good as) any other option. (In practice, few people try to ensure that their decisions are optimal. Instead, they use practical strategies they’ve developed to make decisions that are “good enough”—that is, they engage in “satisficing.”)
The principle of optimal decision-making, in turn, is the principle that underlies microeconomic decision-making (i.e., decision-making by individuals (or firms) in an economy). Like optimal decision-making, microeconomic decision-making is essentially rational egoism. Both optimal decision-making and microeconomic decision-making thus run contrary to the principle of moral reasoning.
American society's basic operating principle is rational egoism. Although originally (in the 17th century) it was confined to the economic arena, as the influence of religion waned (throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), it became the default principle for all decision-making, replacing the moral principles — chief among them the Golden Rule — embodied in religious teachings. Put another way, rational egoism escaped the economic arena and invaded, or “colonized,” all other areas of our lives. In none of those areas is it counterbalanced adequately by the basic principle of morality.
As the late John Gardner once remarked, “America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment,” he observed, “is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” This view — that freedom must be balanced with order rooted in moral principle — is a view that has been asserted by great minds throughout the ages. Montesquieu — the 18th century French philosopher of politics and law, and one of the chief influences on the thinking of America’s Founders — argued that all free societies must rest on the principle of “virtue,” which he defined as “a renouncement of self…the constant preference of the public interest to one’s own.”[1] Similarly, Tocqueville defined “virtue” as the “moral power which an individual exercises over himself.”
But virtue, or moral self-restraint, was exactly what John Adams said most people lack. In his view, to expect them to restrain themselves when it comes to the free pursuit of their self-interest was to ignore the lessons of history. Similarly, Tocqueville thought Americans would quickly forget the need for virtue in civic life: Individualism, he wrote, “at first only saps the virtue of public life; but in the long-run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness.” Tocqueville understood, as did the Founders, that people had little of the moral self-restraint needed to discipline their desires.
Like Adams, Hamilton, and Madison before him, Tocqueville knew that the real issue in American democracy — and the real test of its viability — was whether enlightened self-interest would prove morally strong enough to prevent the corruption of politics by the grasping and clawing after money. If enlightened self-interest were to prove too weak to counter the baser desires people might seek to satisfy through politics, what could? What source of moral authority would pragmatic Americans understand, respect, and respond to?
Tocqueville thought that religion would provide that authority. He believed Americans considered religion essential for the success of democracy. In the early 19th century, the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, and other moral rules were widely accepted as constituting a moral ideal, and they had behind them the force of traditional religious belief and practice. Religion was the chief source of social order — the only authoritative basis for values and principles that might constrain and temper the behavior of people in their scramble for material gain, providing common bonds of religious sentiment that constitute “the greatest real power over men’s souls.”
Although American government had been organized according to secular political principles, American society was governed by religious sentiments. Tocqueville went so far as to say that Americans should think of religion as “the first of their political institutions” because it tempered freedom, made it less absolute. Religious belief gave morality a “divine source”:
"…Christianity…teaches that we must do good to our fellows for love of God. [When]…man’s mind [is] filled with understanding of God’s thought, he sees that order is God’s plan, [and] in freedom labors for this great design, ever sacrificing his private interests for this wondrous ordering of all that is, and expecting no other reward than the joy of contemplating it."
Tocqueville thus hoped that religion would provide an answer to worldly materialism. But he recognized that, in Europe, Enlightenment secularism — with its skepticism about life after death, and hence the need to find an alternative source of moral motivation — was fast eroding religious conviction, and it was already showing signs of doing the same in America. As capitalism develops, Tocqueville wrote, “the light of faith grows dim… “What can be done, he wondered, “with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?” They no longer care what will happen in the afterlife, and so they succumb to the “natural instability” of changing desires in a joyless quest for momentary happiness. When the habit of institutionalized religious practice is interrupted or undermined, the rush to secularism quickens. The “mad impetuosity of materialism has arrived.”
And with its arrival, the idea of virtue lost the authority and influence of both classical political thought and Christianity-based moral duty. This is the circumstance into which all of us who’ve lived within the past 300 years were born.
Growing up in America, we are taught that, if we ensure everyone is free to make his own decisions and pursue his own interests, everything will work out best for everyone. In short, if everyone acts according to the rule of rational egoism, everyone will benefit. This is the basic utilitarian calculus that underpins the ideal of the free market. It assumes, however, that (1) everybody is in fact free; (2) everyone is in fact rational (and well-informed); (3) the market is perfectly competitive (no one has the power of a monopolist or oligopolist to affect others' situations or influence their decisions in a way or to a degree that those others would consider to be not in their interests); and (4) the problem in game theory known as the Tragedy of the Commons does not exist. None of these assumptions is true.
Let's turn now to the matter of racism. Racism has existed in America since white Europeans arrived in the 17th century. For more than three-quarters of the intervening time, it coexisted with rational egoism and with morality rooted in the Christian religion. But the influence of religion has now almost disappeared. So we are left with rational egoism as our chief guide to action. Rational egoism has been reinforced by the success of the free market in generating prosperity and producing technological innovations.
But because American society was constructed from the outset with a view to allowing people to be guided by self-interest in conditions of individual freedom, rational egoism is woven into its very fabric. Self-interest can't be simply pulled out without unraveling that fabric. Racism, too, is part of the fabric (though it is obscured by the passage of time, by genuine progress in reducing it, and by our ignorance of history, psychology, and sociology).
The antidote for racism cannot be found within the pervasive practice of free and self-interested pursuit of individual goals, with its foundation of rational egoism. This cultural ethos simply perpetuates and even exacerbates the inability of African-Americans to overcome four centuries of racial advantages that accrued to white Americans because that ethos was made by and for us — for people who were roughly equal in terms of personal resources we could draw on to fend for ourselves and to compete effectively with each other. But the ethos of free and self-interested pursuit of individual goals never worked for black Americans, because they were consistently denied the personal resources they needed to succeed. These included not only education but opportunity, which was denied them first by slavery and then by Jim Crow laws in the South and by more-subtle discrimination elsewhere in the country. (See, e.g., the discussion of how Reconstruction failed after the Civil War in Morison, S.E., The Oxford History of the American People, vol. 2). The ethos of free and self-interested pursuit of individual goals cannot bring people to a condition of equal competitiveness if those people have never been afforded the tools, skills, knowledge, incentives, and opportunities — including the opportunity to compete without being discriminated against — that the rest of us take for granted.
Eliminating racism will require replacing the ethos of free and self-interested pursuit of individual goals — or at least modifying and tempering it — with ethical decision-making. Which is to say we cannot eliminate racism without changing “the system” — without putting it on an ethical foundation instead of an egoistic one. Therein lies the dilemma. Our identities as Americans are bound up with the essential American values and principles of self-responsibility, independence, freedom, individuality, pluralism, self-interest, material gain, etc. These values will have to be supplement by and perhaps subordinated to values like caring, responsibility for others, cooperation, self-examination, moral and political equality, making amends, and asking forgiveness. We are thus between an immense rock and a very hard place, because people do not easily alter their value priorities, even less readily their identities. It will be difficult in the extreme for us to change after three centuries of living the way of life that gave us both the ethos of free and self-interested pursuit of individual goals and racism.
[1] Diggins, John Patrick. 1984. The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.