Is bullying a symptom or the disease?

I promise the next thing I write will be lighter.

When I was writing about bad language the other day, I didn't know what exactly what was going on in the assembly in school, but I did have an inkling. I'm glad we did that exercise. I think when anthropologists are studying the history of American culture, they will look at the turn of the millenium as the point where meanness became one of the most prominent aspects of American life. They'll look at media content and trends and whatever else it is that anthropologists do. And they'll see a thread of nastiness that is unmistakable.

It's kind of depressing to see, really. I've lived through a decent variety of national moods, but this is possibly the worst I've seen it. Teenage bullying is just a symptom, because you can see adult bullying all the time in political discourse and other places. But really the larger question is why and what, if anything, can we do about it?

In my usual rigorous manner, I will now make a definitive statement without anything to back it up. This is a skill one learns in advertising. Not in the ads themselves- there you have to back up any claims you make- but in the selling of your ideas and your importance to the success of whatever you're advertising.

My sense it that there are several concurrent trends that are leading us down this path. We'll start with the automobile and the rise of suburbia. I don't want to mythologize city life, but when you're thrown together with people all the time, every day, you learn to live with them- even the ones you don't like. There's a commonness of place that connects people and being squashed together requires cooperation (try to imagine walking down 5th Avenue at rush hour if nobody made any effort to get out of anyone's way). In the burbs, everyone's in their own little space. And the rise of the car as the primary mode of transportation has been a horrible mistake on so many levels that I can't even start to enumerate the reasons why, (just a few examples- air pollution, traffic fatalities, and the overall crappy way divers treat other drivers). But as a social influence, the way driving isolates drivers from everything and everyone around them is pernicious.

Let's add in more and more home video entertainment- cable TV and video games- and the Internet, and I think you can see a culture in a place where everyone is isolated in their own little bubble, mistrustful of anyone from the "outside" and intolerant of any kind of shared responsibility for making sure things go well. It's like in the 2000 Year Old Man, when Carl Reiner aska about caveman life, and the Mel Brooks says that every cave had its own national anthem. "What was yours?" says Reiner. "Mine was, 'May they all go to hell except Cave 57.'"

Good thing we've come so far since then. The next question, of course, is how do we fight societal trends like this?