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The profound psychological density brought to America by its communications works in sometimes contradictory ways. The images of blacks on network TV, for example, can encourage tolerance by overriding local or regional bigotries; for all the talk of a resurrected Ku Klux Klan, it is only a vestige and parody of the huge, white-sheeted army that once lynched with impunity over much of the South. The more profound bigotries, of course, easily manage to survive the weak civilizing influences of an interracial sitcom. At the same tune, the new, closely worked symbolism of American nationality raises expectations, sharpening all social contrasts to the point that any inequality seems an injustice. The new nationality gives all Americans a much higher and detailed description of what they are supposedly entitled to; the basis for comparison is so much more immediate.
AMERICANS NEED TO focus now on a different form of expectation: not what they expect for themselves in the way of entitlements, but what they are entitled to expect from one another in the way of social behavior. Those expectations include civility, literacy, manners, tolerance, even cleanliness. People from around the world are horrified by the heedless way that Americans scatter trash and garbage, as if making a mess were a reassurance of one's freedom.
The past 15 years were centrifugal; no moral center of gravity exerted a restraining force, so that almost any social behavior short of a display of necrophilia in the public parks could lay claim to legitimacy. In the '80s, the trend should be more centripetal: away from the purely individual, toward the community.
The U.S. and Japan, historically and culturally, are almost universes apart, and the U.S. became great through precisely the kind of turbulent freedom that is unthinkable in that other universe.
Nevertheless, Americans might profitably reflect on the social organization —not to mention the business methods—of the extraordinarily cohesive Japanese. A Japanese writer, Michihiro Matsumoto, explains one difference this way: "In the U.S., you say, 'I'm O.K., you're O.K.' In Japan, we say, 'We're O.K., therefore I'm O.K.' " The Japanese tend to identify their own welfare with that of their countrymen.
Almost nothing since the end of World War II has so affected the American spirit as the old story of the traumatic transition from small-town community to big-city anonymity: the spread of an isolation and estrangement that make it impossible for a person to know if the man in the next seat or next apartment is worth getting to know or is a homicidal maniac. In the towns, by God, the fund of common knowledge about nearly everyone was richly and sometimes intrusively detailed. The urban milieu has its advantages—individual privacy and freedom—but it can exact a heavy psychic price. Citizens who become secrets to each other dead-end in narcissism, cut off from the nation's public life.