The milkman theory of civilisation

Nothing is more calculated to make you feel world-weary than seeing things you always considered common sense turned into lucrative theory. I felt this when I read Francis Fukuyama's new book: Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

He reminds us that trust is not just a vital part of personal relationships: it oils the wheels of a country's prosperity and its absence imposes a tax, measurable in lawsuits, bureaucracy, crime and unrest.

The US suffers a serious lack of trust. But Fukuyama insists that despite its Lone Ranger image, the country once prospered on its communitarian tradition. Unfortunately, he adds, reality is catching up with legend and the US is running down its store of social capital-the ability to work together for a common purpose-to a point which could endanger its superpower status.



As Fukuyama's book progresses through detailed examples, the merits of theorising become more evident. But for me it is an old argument. It is the story of my life.

Cut to Heathrow immigration seven years ago. Even though I have lived in London since early childhood and my application for British citizenship is in another queue at the appropriately named Lunar House, I am waiting in the "alien" line. Finally I reach an official, thrust the residency stamp in my blue US passport under his nose and mutter "I live here." "Why?" he asks, only half-joking. "Why live in England? If I had a US passport, I'd be out of here like a shot."

Unless you are Rupert Murdoch or Zola Budd and your passport is a business decision, naturalisation has a strange impact on your emotions. It is like marriage: a piece of paper which changes everything. I always joke that, after years of happy cohabiting, I married just to avoid the Heathrow queues. Another reason was European "harmonisation" which made EU nationality a way of avoiding the Paris, Frankfurt and Rome queues as well. It became irresistible when Washington brought in rule changes making it possible at last to hold dual nationality. But the main reason was that I wanted my formal identity to mirror my actual one.

When I arrived in England in 1965, Winston Churchill had just died and Harold Wilson was in power. A teacher at primary school made jokes about how American central heating made you "soft," while classmates taunted me for being a "Yank and a Yid." I learned English embarrassment at my mother's un-English propensity to complain, for example when she discovered we played outdoor winter games dressed only in culottes and a flimsy pullover. But when the family returned to the US I was in the middle of a good-and free-university education, and remained.

When that immigration official asked me why I lived here, it forced me to develop my milkman theory of civilisation: things had to be OK in a country where the milkman visited every day-without fear of being mugged or having his pints nicked-spreading chat like a bee pollinating the neighbourhood.

With my knowledge of American life, I rebelled against the glamorisation of its problems. The thing that really bothered me about my birthplace was its alienation and self-absorption: not violence itself, but the anticipation of violence, the sense of a civil war fought on social rather than geographical lines.

Since my reflections at Heathrow, of course, the milkman test has become redundant, not because he is afraid to make his rounds but for that most modern of reasons: his work does not pay. All those single-person households don't need daily deliveries, and families are under pressure to economise.

When people say that Britain is becoming more like the US, the examples are mostly about breakdown of trust. The left points to Thatcherism's disbelief in "society," the right fingers the entitlement mentality. Others complain that modern technology has privatised leisure. Whatever the cause, Britain could soon suffer the US's disadvantages with few of its advantages.

None of this makes me happy. But because of long stints abroad I watch it all through the looking-glass; I see just another people moaning about their own country. Life here is not perfect, because life everywhere is a bitch. Yet, while it should not be taken for granted, there is still a deep reservoir of trust and common sense in Britain.

After periods spent in parts of Europe where malice or obliquity is an art form, I nearly fall on the necks of the polite people at Dover. Take the debate about identity cards, long resisted in Britain but nearly universal on the Continent. It is assumed that you are who you say you are. In most parts of Continental Europe, it is assumed that everything you say is a lie unless you document it otherwise. When I started a job in Paris I had to get letters from every former employer since the dinosaurs to qualify for an anciennet? bonus.

Fukuyama's fear that narrow individualism is making the west less fun and less competitive follows a long academic debate. Robert Putnam, whose work is used by Fukuyama, has argued that a healthy society requires "trusting one another to act fairly and obey the law."

In modern America, however, trust of all kinds has been eroded. According to surveys Putnam quotes in his essay Bowling Alone, Revisited the proportion of Americans who say they trust government "only sometimes" or "almost never" rose from 30 per cent in 1966 to 75 per cent in 1992; the number who agree that "most people can be trusted" fell from 58 per cent in 1960 to 35 per cent in 1994. Participation in voluntary organisations has also plummeted: although more people go bowling than vote in congressional elections, the numbers taking part in league bowling are falling; people are bowling alone. This is serious stuff. People who trust others are more likely to work for the community, vote, and believe in the future.

Fukuyama enters the debate as a liberal anticipating doubts about his preferred model. In The End of History he argues that history, as defined by Karl Marx, had "ended" with the cold war. And it ended not with proletarian revolution, but the triumph of liberal democracy and the market economy. In Trust, he is less triumphal but insists the liberal model is still the best game in town. Indeed, he says that the classical market model of rational, self-interested human behaviour accounts for about 80 per cent of economic advancement and social capital for just 20 per cent.

The main fight, not stated overtly, is to maintain the edge against those anti-liberal rivals who now crow at the west's problems. For example, Eisuke Sakakibara, the Japanese finance ministry official, declares in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs that a waning western "progressivism" should have greater tolerance towards an Asian civilisation which has shown its economic mettle. The problem is that this kind of reference to "Asian values" has become shorthand for a mix of economic openness and political authoritarianism in which tolerance gets short shrift.

Fukuyama tries to cut the argument another way, pinpointing successful qualities across the east-west divide. In his model, the three levels of family, civil society and the state each has a corresponding economic organisation: the family business, the managed corporation and the state-backed concern. Grouping together low-trust societies from both east and west such as China and France, he argues that they tend to have a large gap in the middle, between family and state. In Chinese societies business falls back on trusted family ties, but companies often die with their founder. In France, the tendency to refer everything to the highest level of state prevents people from arriving at practical, face-to face solutions. On the other hand, in different ways, "spontaneously sociable" nations such as the US, Japan and Germany were able to develop large and prosperous enterprises.

By this reckoning, Britain ranks somewhere in the middle: it scores high on spontaneous sociability but low on class stratification: "Its very gradualism and tolerance had the perverse effect of leaving intact an upper-class culture that was openly hostile to the values of a modern industrial society," Fukuyama says.

Modern society needs transparent rules, he argues, but must build on old-fashioned networks (such as the family) which act as a moderating force and prevent the individualist impulse from reaching its logical conclusion: "Past a certain point, the proliferation of rules to regulate wider and wider sets of social relationships becomes not the hallmark of rational efficiency but a sign of social dysfunction."

Fukuyama rejects the liberal idea that dominant cultural values smother diversity: for him, inculcating those values in newcomers is the only way society can avoid over-regulation without imposing homogeneity.

But despite his effort to sound even-handed, he makes a much stronger critique of the progressive entitlement mentality than of the radical right politics burned into our consciousness by the bombing in Oklahoma City. In Europe, the debate about "large" or "small" government remains within the boundaries of normal discourse: in the US, mainstream conservatives looking for votes are not rushing to separate themselves from those who interpret the exercise of any state power over the individual as a conspiracy for "world government." Not much room there for contributing to a collective good. My milkman wouldn't last five minutes.