Bubbles, Tiny Bubbles

Travelling between worlds is frequently a wrenching experience, even when done at the dinner table.  I recently found myself making the jump, first while dining with friends who definitely qualify as members in good standing of the east coast establishment, then later with friends who are active in the international scientific community.  My establishment friends are not only very good people, but totally “with it”, able to converse knowledgeably and facilely on just about any topic.  To some extent, they make their living with words.  At a lull in the conversation, I had brought up the subject of the ideas in David Rothkopf’s new book, Power, Inc., regarding the struggle for dominance between multi-national corporations and nation-states.   I thought that since my friends worked daily with both corporations and government, they might find Rothkopf’s conclusions at least interesting. It was like dropping a rock into the abyss. It was not just that they had not read the book; that by itself would never have stopped them from conversing about it.  My friends were obviously flummoxed by the very existence of such ideas and at a rare loss for words, so we quickly passed on to other subjects.  Then, a day later, I brought up the same ideas (you can tell I liked the book) to my scientist friends, who immediately picked up on them, affirming them from their own experience and offering several instances of their significance.  I myself was a little aghast at the chasm it revealed between two superficially overlapping communities.

It brought to mind another book I’m currently reading, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010, by Charles Murray.   It’s one of those books that is less controversial than its author.  Murray is a conservative sociologist best known as author of The Bell Curve, a book some years ago reporting educational differences between Whites and Blacks that received a lot of criticism for its negative conclusions about the educational attainment of Blacks.  In his new book, Murray reports a study of emerging differences between upper middle class and the working middle class in America, confining himself to a study of white groups only to avoid further racial controversy.  In it, he analyses commonalities and differences between two communities living side by side in a Philadelphia suburb, and their changes over time.  He finds that groups that once, while differing in income and education, essentially shared the same life style, eating the same foods prepared only slightly differently, shopping at the same stores, with children attending the same schools, etc., now are living lives differing in such broad ways that they are increasingly unable to understand and relate to each other’s problems.  Murray describes each group as living in a bubble, out of contact with the other and not even aware of that fact. His conclusions reinforce the observation made in The American Scholar a year or two ago, that the average graduate of an elite college is unable to hold a meaningful conversation with his plumber.

I suppose my problem with the book is that, because he’s doing a longitudinal study of two side-by-side communities, and not for example, including differences between a southern university town, a Midwestern small town and a west coast hi-tech community, Murray’s bubbles are too large and few.  In my view, we are increasingly a nation of smaller and smaller bubbles, and a San Francisco poet or Chicago commodities broker or Duke University teacher might as well, to an affluent farmer in east Texas or to each other, be in Asia. I have cited before the empathy gap in America, and the problems it leads us into.  It will be especially troubling this year, as we go into a general election and begin tearing each other’s values apart.  We always will need to be sensitive to the different bubbles we live in and the different way the world appears from them.  And we must remember that sometimes there’s a whole different world just across the dinner table.