A common myth you will hear repeated again and again in media debates over American politics is that we as a society are overly "litigious" -- that is, we are too quick to sue people for trivial matters that used to be handled by friendly neighbors who didn't need to sign contracts with each other because they had trust to fall back on. There is no evidence of this trend historically (in fact, the evidence suggests people are too HESITANT to sue, rather than too quick).

But more importantly, this argument relies on a nostalgia for an American community that never really existed, and that there are reasons to be grateful that we abandoned the vision. Here, sociologist Sally Merry offers what I think is the most brilliant rebuke to this nostalgia that I have ever read, and so I wanted to share it with you today:

In trying to understand what it means when people bring personal problems to court some commentators have blamed it on an American tendency toward litigiousness. They hypothesize, as I discussed in Chapter 1, that Americans are ready to sue at the slightest provocation, their desires unleashed by the breakdown of community and the erosion of authority. By the end of the 1980s, the theory of the litigious American was widely accepted, occupying the status of common sense (see Hayden 1989). Implicit in this theory is the assumption that community has broken down, that the traditional authorities of family, church, and community have weakened so that people go to court rather than rely on these authorities, and that Americans generally regret this change and bemoan the loss of community (e.g., see Lieberman 1981: 186). With the decline in commitment to family and neighborhood life, people pull the government - the police and the courts - into their squabbles. They do so because they no longer feel either the same loyalty to these institutions or the same willingness to defer to the wishes of others. Now it is every man and woman for him- or herself as the modern citizen focuses on his own self-interest rather than on a greater communal good. Since the willingness to compromise and settle differences depends on the existence of social relationships which people wish to preserve, those who fail to settle must be people who put their personal interests above their social relationships.

[...]

I argue, however, that the expansion of formal social control is not caused by the collapse of community but by American individualism and egalitarian values and by the expansive efforts of the state. It is a result of ordinary citizens' desire to escape from community and, at the same time, of the legal system's invitation to them to bring their neighborhood and family problems to the courts. Individuals turn to the law to escape from the bonds of community and to construct a preferred mode of social ordering within families and neighborhoods. They often use the law to challenge the social hierarchies in families and communities which control their lives. Yet, in doing so they also respond to the entitlements and services offered by the state. Thus, the behavior I am describing is not so different from that claimed by proponents of the litigiousness and community-breakdown theory, but my interpretation of this behavior is different.

The theory of litigiousness and of the breakdown of community misunderstands the contemporary American attitude toward community. As long as community is conceived according the romantic American folk vision of a warm, intimate, and supportive social group, it is hard to understand why anyone would give it up. But the very intimacy and totality of such a social world make it miserable for the person who cannot or will not go along. It is not clear that urban Americans truly regret the loss of an intimate, consensual community. Proponents of community portray the alienated urbanite forced to sacrifice the close social world of his ancestral village, but it often seems that he or she wanted to leave. For example, those who lived in the small towns of America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries left the country for the city, in droves. Obviously, the pull of jobs and the push of rural poverty are critical to rural-to-urban migration, but the attraction of a social life more free of gossip and of the informal surveillance of neighbors, family, and friends also has an appeal. Even eighteenth-century New England communities were constantly changing as discontented people and segments of the community moved away in order to deaJ with their differences (Bender 1978: 73). The United States, unlike Europe and many other parts of the world, lacks a tradition of settled peasant villages in which restrictions on mobility create enormous pressures to compromise interests and to settle. Even American immigrant communities, in which such village-like social structures are recreated, rarely last more than two or three generations, unless they are replenished by new immigrants. For much of American history, the frontier provided, for people enmeshed in conflicts, opportuntiies to move away. Perhaps the original decision to come to the United states was ssimilar strike toward freedom. Indeed, historian Robert Wiebe argues that it is a fundamental cultural logic in America to deal with difference by living apart (1975). "What held American dreams together," he says, " was their ability ot live apart. Society depended on segmentation (1975:46)."

In the postwar period, the suburbs have offered the possibility of a more private.
autonomous life, regulated less by convention, by gossip, and by local leaders. As the working-class adolescent from an inner-city, close-knit neighborhood put it: "I want to get out of here, away frorn the people here. I want to get to a place where you can decide for yourself how you want to live. In Cityville, you have to be what others want (Steinitz and Solomon 19~6: 50)." Other adolescents from this neighborhood want the peace and quiet of the suburbs, their spaciousness, the opportunities that they think the suburbs provide to be oneself and to be free of conventions, although they also fear that life there will be lonely and isolated (Steinitz and Solomon 1986: 17-62). Such suburban neighborhoods provide more freedom of individual expression, self-fulfillment, and individuality in private life-as long as one does not park an unregistered car in the driveway, make noise after 11 P.M., allow a dog to run free, build a structure too close to the property line, or in other ways violate the elaborate set of local regulations and zoning restrictions which are typical of suburbs.

Insofar as contemporary Americans are voting with their feet rather than with their rhetoric, they are continuing to move to suburbs, to choose privacy, separation, and, for social ordering, dependence on the lmv rather than the intimacy of community. In the postwar period, Americans in large numbers left the urban ethnic villages of the inner city to move to the suburbs. Three-quarters of all American housing has been built since 1940, a period in which the single-family detached horne, produced in vast numbers, became the nom1 (Hayden 1984:12). By 1980, two-thirds of the American housing stock consisted of singlefamily, detached homes (Hayden 1984: 12). Increased affluence has been translated into more widely spaced homes, reduced dependence on neighbors, smaller networks of kinsmen in which reciprocity prevails, and fewer people living in the same household, whether through elimination of older relatives, through divorce, or through restriction of the household to the nuclear family. As Americans have moved up, they have moved apart.

References:

Merry, S. (1990). Getting justice and getting even: Legal consciousness among working class Americans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 173-175.

Oh, Trevi! Your post on how annoying it is to have to decipher the sense of the word "problematic" when it is actually used as one of these hypocritical detours to express a disagreement in a gentle, almost clandestine way, reminded me of a cultural gap between French and American people in terms of holding a conversation and expressing oneself publicly.

Of course these are only my subjective thoughts, based on just four years spent in the golden cage of Ann Arbor, Michigan, so who I am to speak in the name of French people and to make some highly disputable generalizations about American folks? Well, this previous statement is actually symptomatic of what I want to share with you: the need to put some rhetorical lube before expressing a personal opinion so that, in case of a debate, or a disagreement, I already anticipate a space for modifying my opinion and reaching an agreement - and saving my ass.

I noticed this tendency, in America, to be careful when you are about to speak up your mind. You are encouraged to be sincere, of course, but people tend to formulate their opinions with a rhetoric that reflects flexibility and humble skepticism. In my experience, the American conversation relies on the use of conditional -- like "I would say" or "I would think" -- or the seemingly ever-recurring "maybes" and euphemistic expressions (the word "problematic" is one of these euphemisms). That's what I call "rhetorical lube." You don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by expressing yourself. Rather, you want to make sure you're still being seen as a sociable, smiling, constructive person. A "team player."

Thinking about this rhetoric, and contrasting it with the way French people tend to express themselves, I was struck by a cultural gap. In France, we tend to be much more explicit than American people, straight to the point, without fear of inciting an intense conversation or an argument. When you look for a job in France, you do not have to prove how sociable and friendly you can be, how compatible you are with many different kinds of people, and how careful you are to respect everyone's sensibility. In other words, you are expected to be polite, but you are also expected to have a personality and not to fear conflict when defending your beliefs. In America, people tend to be careful to avoid personal conflicts. They do their best to avoid being labeled "defensive" because others might perceive them as deviating from the politically correct, mainstream, and utterly safe opinions that circulate in everyday life.

That's when it becomes more than just an issue of rhetoric. Let me articulate here a political interpretation on why would French people be less concerned about conflicts, about being loud on their beliefs, whereas Americans would tend to value courteous dialogue and constructive behavior. I propose that, more than just a matter of different rhetorical styles, these differences have political roots. In France, even if you're a poor worker, you can still rely on the nanny state in terms of having access to a free, high quality health system. And if you think you were fired for unfair reasons, you can rely on the free Prud'hommes system in order to sue your boss and reclaim a compensation for any abuse of power. The same for education: you don't have to plan a huge budget for your kids because in France most of the schools, including the most prestigious and elitist ones, are not expensive and do not select their students by the financial profile of their parents.

Of course I am not convinced myself by what I wrote (Bourdieu would spit on my face), France is far from being a paradise, deficits are huge and nobody seems to be willing to quote us as a model. On top of that I came to the University of Michigan to start a PhD precisely because the conditions for studying and the resources here are just outstanding, so let me rephrase my opinion in a less stereotypical way: in spite of all the drawbacks of the French nanny state, of all the big lies on the French egalitarian system in terms of education and public health insurance, it still remains obvious than French people, in comparison to American people, are not afraid of being often on strike, of suing their bosses, and of having a big argument in public when they feel they are right!

I want to interpret this as the political consequence of knowing that, in case of cancer, or of unemployment, you know you can rely on the nanny state for support. On the contrary, I think that if Americans are so concerned about being seen as sociable and not defensive, it is because in their contemporary society, they can only rely on themselves and think twice before taking a risk. You live constantly on loans. We don't. You have to deal with an army of lawyers to protect yourself or attack the others, we don't. That is a big, huge, significant difference. You have much more to lose when you rely on yourself, so you think twice before speaking up your mind. And the Fox News constant brainwashing on "don't forget to live with fear" does not help at all. It only confirms the dynamics of a safe, selfish individualism!

But let me end on this note, and this is my outing as a socialist here: self made men do exist, and yes they are wonderful role models. But they belong to the happy few, and their success story should never be a pretext to legitimize the absence of a basic, financial support from the Nation in the name of social justice and, as we say in France, fraternité. So God Bless America, and those who want to change it radically!