“Good enough” isn’t actually good enough for America. Too much is at stake. (Photo by Max Kleinen on Unsplash)

Thank goodness there was a good guy with a gun handy, we’re being told, or else the latest mass shooting, at a mall just outside Indianapolis, would have left more than three people dead, not including the perpetrator. Actually, it’s not really the latest mass shooting, only the one that was widely reported: In the first five days afterwards, there were six more shootings with multiple victims across the country, leaving 25 more victims. That’s the way it is in America nowadays.

The Greenwood Park Mall is near the leafy college campus where my parents met, and just 20 minutes by car from the cottage on a winding drive where they spent their last years together. It’s a suburban area surrounded by rich farmland, the mall designed to be familiar enough that practically anybody might feel comfortable going about the business of their daily lives there.

But people felt comfortable at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, too, before 10 people were killed by a gunman there in May, and people weren’t on their guard at the 4th of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., where seven people were shot dead and dozens more wounded, and, of course, we presume the children in Uvalde, Tex., weren’t afraid for their lives when they showed up for school on that day in the spring when 19 fourth graders and two teachers were slaughtered.

It should go without saying that we shouldn’t have to depend upon a passerby packing a pistol to assure our safety in a suburban shopping mall, or anywhere else. Nor should we settle into tolerating a mass shooting every week, which is the reality of 2022 in America.

It isn’t only in our sense of physical security that the expectations of Americans have dropped so drastically, though. We are witnessing, broadly, an Age of Diminished Expectations — a description I was pretty proud of concocting, until I learned that it was the title of a 1990 book about the nation’s rising wealth gap by the eminent economist Paul Krugman.

Young adults can no longer expect to be more financially secure than their parents, Krugman noted, because of political choices that have rewarded the wealthy at the expense of America’s shrinking middle class. That was true when Krugman wrote it, but this is also true now: Most of us likewise can’t expect, as we once did, that we won’t be inundated by floods or scorched by drought, because as a nation we haven’t adequately fought human-induced climate change. And this: We’re unable to expect the protection of equal rights for all our fellow citizens, because the Trump-packed Supreme Court seems headed toward reimposing the legalized dominance of white heterosexual men in our society, at intolerable cost to people of color, women and people who aren’t straight. And this: We surely can’t expect anymore, as we once did, that our political leaders will behave with fairness and decency, because so many of them have shown little inclination to do so — and, anyway, so many of our fellow citizens are seduced by shameless demagogues willing to sacrifice democracy for power that there’s little to gain by displays of good character in politics.

You could argue that it’s simply sensible to recognize the reality of our diminished circumstance as a nation at a time when the world has grown so complex. In business, that notion is common: A generation of leaders has embraced the value of celebrating even limited success, or, as Voltaire is supposed to have suggested, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. That’s probably a useful strategy in an era of technology that allows new iterations of products to quickly replace whatever isn’t quite up to snuff. A wise old friend displayed a sign next to his desk: “When all else fails, lower your standards.” So what’s so bad about that?

Besides, there is a current among psychologists suggesting that we all might be more able to find peace of mind by sort of grading our expectations on a curve. As the social theorist Barry Schwartz argued in 2004 in The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, people who are “maximizers,” trying to get the most out of life, are often less happy than “satisficers,” who are content with good-enough results.

Schwartz wrote that learning to accept “good enough” makes people happier, rather famously urging, “No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.”

What is healthy for our unsettled psyches, though, isn’t necessarily good for our troubled nation. If too many citizens lose their ambition to reach for the sky, they will choose mediocre leaders, who will drag down the nation’s ambitions. I might argue that we have witnessed that, in fact.

And a nation that gives up on solving big problems can’t hope to lead us to a more secure world. When Al Franken was still a Saturday Night Live cast member, he captured the notion through his hapless character Stuart Smalley, who explained, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

Right now, Americans are about to settle on the notion that we can’t move much beyond mediocrity in any effort to solve key social problems. What’s at risk in that mindset is nothing less than what’s often called the American Dream, a concept that was popularized by the Pulitzer-winning historian James Truslow Adams in the depths of the Great Depression.

Adams wrote of “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone,” importantly stressing that he wasn’t referring mainly to financial gain, but to “a genuine individual search and striving for the abiding values of life… and for the common man to rise to full stature” in the free realms of “communal spiritual and intellectual life.” Adams believed deeply in the value of liberal education, and he was ahead of the broader society in his insistence that the American dream must be understood to apply to women as well as to men, to people of color as well as to the dominant white culture and to people whose financial status might seem at first hopeless.

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely,” he wrote in 1931, “but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” That is, the American Dream was for all.

If you agree with that, consider this: There’s too much at stake for all of us to allow any of us to accept the luxury of settling into the belief that we can do no better in the future than we’re doing right now. In the face of a reactionary Supreme Court majority, a Congress hobbled by a minority’s ability to block any progress and a bitterly divided electorate, it’s tempting to sit back in shock and chagrin, and hope that maybe somebody else can make things better. But that’s like figuring that a stranger with a gun is the only solution to the gun epidemic: It’s not really a solution, because it’s unlikely to occur, and fraught with danger if it does.

This is no time to embrace low expectations and to tolerate the carnage in our political system and to American society more generally. Save the good wine, maybe, but don’t settle for mediocrity in the fight to restore the real American Dream. Pour your all into it.

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