by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

January 29, 2009

To Dick Meyer, many of the technological developments and personal freedoms Americans have achieved in the past half-century have “made us quite unhappy.”

But when he speaks in Livingston on Friday evening, Feb. 6, the editorial director for digital media at National Public Radio said he will be pleased to count the ways that people have come to consider “progress” a setback to the national spirit.

Meyer, the author of a new book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium, will discuss the work at a symposium following Shabbat dinner at Temple B’nai Abraham. “We hate us because we are constantly irritated,” he told NJ Jewish News, explaining the curious title of his book. And why are we constantly irritated? “It is partly because we have abandoned so many forms of traditional community and traditional belief that over time have made living with other homo sapiens productive.”

Two weeks before his talk at the temple, Meyer told NJJN he was tailoring his thesis to suit his audience.

“I will talk about traditional religion, notably Judaism,” he said. “In America, starting with the ’60s, almost any form of traditional inherited wisdom became suspect,” he said with a touch of whimsy. “There was a rebellious feeling in the country that what you were supposed to do as an individual was stitch your own life together. You picked your own beliefs and your own lifestyle. You picked whether you want to have big boobs or small boobs, a large nose or a small nose. You picked whether you want to be a JewBu or a Scientologist.

“Everything in our life has become a choosable consumer option,” said Meyer. “As a recipe for human happiness, I don’t think it has been proven to work.”

Financial security, too, seems not to offer the contentment so many seek. According to Meyer, “one of the great paradoxes of our time is that we are less happy in this country the more materially well off we have become.”

Contributing to this general malaise, he said, was a contemporary diaspora.

“In most of human history, when people left their village and their nuclear family and most intergenerational relationships, it’s because they were forced to — the Cossacks were coming for them or there was a pogrom or a blight or a potato famine. It was very rare that people would leave their organic community by choice. But since the Second World War, it was what Americans did anyway,” said Meyer. “To get a better job or an education, you move frequently as an adult.

“To put it simply, when you live among strangers, it is harder to procure happiness.”

‘Derailed by journalism’

Casting a critical eye at the Internet, the iPod, the cell phone, and the BlackBerry, Meyer said, “One of the biggest factors is the amount of time we spend with electronic devices and media. They are a major part of our day, and they give almost nothing back spiritually.”

Curiously, much of Meyer’s own professional life has been devoted to electronic media.

A former producer at CBS News, he moved from television to on-line journalism, serving as editorial director of CBSNews.com prior to joining NPR.

Meyer is on the board of the Online News Association, the leading organization for Internet journalists, and writes regularly on politics, culture, and the media for various web and print outlets, including The Washington Post.

He grew up in what he called “a very, very, very Reform German-Jewish household in Glencoe, Ill., outside Chicago.” He majored in religion at Columbia University and philosophy as a graduate student at Oxford. “I was on my way to being an academic when I got derailed by journalism and never went back,” he said.

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