Ken's Blog

For roughly six months, one of our nation’s most revered institutions, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has been defaced by crude and obscene graffiti. Today, at last, the offensive scrawl has been removed.

I won’t discuss the contents of that graffiti, because children might be reading this post. Suffice it to say, all patriotic Americans can breathe a sigh of relief that it is now gone.

The wheels of justice may grind slowly, but they usually get to where they need to go. The courts have now decided, correctly, that those who would deface our nation’s most hallowed and respected monuments should not be permitted to do so. Nobody should be allowed to turn our shared cultural heritage into the punchline of a crude joke.

Nations are sometimes destroyed by military force. But more often, nations are brought down by the destruction of their core sense of identity and shared community.

Once you know what makes a country great, it becomes much easier to destroy it. So that’s the way to go if you want to destroy a once great nation, and leave it a mere shell of its former self.

If somebody really hated the United States, or else worked for its geopolitical enemies, the most efficient way they could bring it down would be to destroy it from within. If you can take away from America the things that make it truly great, what is left will no longer matter.

So the first thing you should do is convince the American people that its greatest virtues are actually vices. Diversity, equality, inclusiveness — the very defining American traits that Lincoln pointed proudly to at Gettysburg — need to be perceived as weaknesses, rather than the strengths they truly are.

Once you manage to plant that sickness into the soul of the American people, it will grow like a cancer. Millions of Americans will forget who they are, and will change from being a free and generous people to becoming suspicious, selfish and filled with hate.

But who could have so much hatred for America that they would try to destroy it in such a monstrous way?

In recent posts I have been addressing the question “What makes America great?” The collective results of my analysis can be summed up roughly as follows.

All empty bragging aside, the truly great things about America are three related aspirational principles: The principle of embodying and celebrating diversity, the principle of wishing to support a spirit and practice of equality between people, and the principle of wishing not to exclude people from these benefits merely because they have the “wrong” ethnic or cultural identity.

In short, there are three things that make America great: Diversity, Equality, and Inclusiveness. This can be expressed by an acronym: DEIMAG: Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness Make America Great.

Perhaps to show that we are patriotic Americans, and to show support for our nation, we can have T-shirts or hats made up that say “DEIMAG”. Maybe printed together with little American flags.

I wonder what color they should be. I’m thinking blue might be nice.

It can also be argued that one of the great things about America’s ideals (alas, not always its reality) is a belief that achieving the American dream is not based on who you are. In contract, some very fine cultures definitely do not work that way.

For example, the French have historically made a clear distinction between those who are French and those who are not. Japan is similar in that regard. I think that these are simply the natural consequences of having a long history as a monoculture.

But America has never been a monoculture. And therefore the idea of who can be an American is far more amorphous — a natural consequence of its particular history.

Other than Native Americans, whose ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years, America is very much a nation of recent immigrants. Nearly every American you know can easily trace their roots to somewhere else in the world by going back just a few generations.

America is therefore necessarily an amalgam of many cultures and many ways of life. So the entire franchise can only operate, pretty much by definition, by being inclusive.

When you look at it this way, it becomes clear that America’s principle of inclusivity is one of its greatest strengths. More tomorrow.

There are many things wrong with American culture, to be sure. But one thing America has generally been good at is learning from its mistakes.

The country began with the at the time radical assertion that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Somewhat later, President Lincoln made the point that this proposition was, in fact, the very definition of the American nation.

The actual realization of that ideal has been far less than perfect. But the direction has generally been from darkness toward light. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the Voting Rights Act.

America’s history has been one of a nation gradually finding its way toward a state of ever truer equality. So you could say that the ideal of equality — that every human being has fundamental and inalienable rights — is a key part of what makes America great.

More tomorrow.

One of the things that has always impressed me about the United States of America is that, unlike most nations, it is not a mono-culture. There are many wonderful nations out there, like France, or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan, but most of them tend to be dominated by a single relatively homogeneous cultural norm.

In contrast, the United States benefits from its history as a nation of immigrants. In everything from our humor, our cuisine, our interior design, our shops, our street fairs, and many more things besides, our culture is enriched by influences from many nations.

Simply walking down the street in New York City feels like visiting a cross between the United Nations and Disney’s EPCOT. The diversity on display is mind-bogglingly rich.

So it would be fair to say that one of the key things that makes America great is its profoundly rich diversity. More tomorrow.

What makes the United States of America great? Of course that question implies, by its very wording, that America is great.

Some people assume you can simply assert the greatness of America, as though it is self-evident. But suppose we would like to go about systematically pointing to the key things that actually are great about America?

How should we go about doing that? I will be devoting the next few posts to addressing that very question.

At my annual physical, I told my doctor that my current plan is to live forever. He pointed out that based on actuarial statistics, the odds are against me, but other than that it is a very good plan.

He called me back the next day with the results of my blood tests. He said he was happy to report that all indications were great, and he added that it seems that so far my plan is working.

I told him that if I do succeed, then in one hundred years I will buy him a drink. He happily took me up on that offer.

Continuing from yesterday…

What I find remarkable is that people respond to incentives in a completely non-rational way. There doesn’t seem to be any real evaluation of cost-benefit.

For example, if you invite students to a meeting and you say there will be pizza, they will always show up. The fact that their parents paid many tens of thousands of dollars for their education doesn’t seem to faze them — but missing out on a slice of pizza would feel devastating.

I wonder why this principle is not applied in a more systematic way for the benefit of society. For example, insurance companies pay out billions of dollars every year because people make really unhealthy lifestyle choices.

Suppose the insurance companies were to bribe those people to engage in healthy behaviors? Things like exercising, stretching, eating sensibly, maintaining muscle mass, or using an app to monitor your progress.

For a relatively modest payout, those insurance companies would be rewarded by many millions of dollars each year in savings. The result would be fewer falls, less heart disease, lower rates of cancer, to name just a few benefits. And as an extra special bonus, people would live longer, happier, healthier lives.

Too bad the world doesn’t work that way.

A little over 30 years ago the NY Subway system first introduced the MetroCard. Thus began the decade long process of phasing out subway tokens.

I remember that my aunt was adamant that she would not switch. She loved the subway tokens, and the fact that they were actual physical tokens. She could just look at them to know exactly how many rides she had bought.

But then somebody told her that if you buy 10 rides with your MetroCard, you get an 11th ride for free. Upon hearing that, she immediately switched to MetroCards, and never said another word about it.

I think there is an important lesson here about incentives and human motivation, which is worth a deeper look. More tomorrow.