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.