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The Individual In Contemporary Society

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I’m on the road, it’s been raining in Paris, time for something new. I’ve been posting here for a long time, this is number 334, and almost all of them have been about some aspect of our national life. Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an individual person in contemporary US society.

Vignettes

Should we define ourselves in terms of our work lives?

1. Neoliberals talk about homo economicus.  Humans are rational agents competing against each other for necessary resources and desired objects.

2. This is from a 2019 article in Scientific American, How the Brain Reads Faces by Doris Y. Tsao, a professor at Berkeley.

I believe at each stage in life one has a duty. And the duty of a college student is to dream, to find the thing that captures one’s heart and seems worth devoting a whole life to. Indeed, this is the single most important step in science: to find the right problem.

3. Dr. Tsao’s view isn’t reserved for college professors. I recently sat in the Cloisters of San Marco in Florence, an open courtyard surrounded on four sides by a slope-roofed portico,  supported by arches on pillars of pietra serena topped with Ionic capitals. It is a quiet space. Tourists seem muted as they pass through. It was designed by Michelozzo in the mid-15th C., but I was thinking about the builders, the working men who carved out the pillars and the capitals, built the arches, coated them with plaster, and whitewashed them.

Maybe they felt like the Kentucky coal miners described in the book Stolen Pride by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. Here’s an excerpt from a book review; the quotes seem to be from the author.

For more than a century, eastern Kentucky was one of the centers of the American coal industry. Though back-breaking and sometimes deadly for its workers, the sector employed thousands of people, lifted many out of poverty, and brought railways and other infrastructure into the region. Men took pride in their work, which required courage and knowhow, and the people of the region were proud that their coal fueled America.

“[People could] proudly say, ‘We kept the lights on in this country; we won world war one, world war two by digging coal,’ and the coalminer was kind of like a decorated soldier – he faced danger. Many died young, of black lung. But it was like a trade passed down from generation to generation for men, and then suddenly it was cut off.”

Should we look for something sciencey?

The is from Possession by A.S. Byatt; this part of the story is set in the mid 1980s.

Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his “self” as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. P. 459.

Should we be looking for meaning?

1. From the Baltimore Catechism. It’s slightly different from my memory from St. Joseph’s Grade School.

2. Q. Who is God?

A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.

3. Q. What is man?

A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.

6. Q. Why did God make you?

A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.

2. This is from The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. It was, as I recall, the first serious philosophy book I ever read. My mother gave it to me when I was 16, and I have thought about it ever since. We all know the myth, at least the part about the punishment meted out to Sisyphus, which is the subject of this essay.  This is the concluding paragraph of Camus’ essay:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. P. 78.

So what?

None of my vignettes involve any of the conditions under which we humans evolved. None of them deals directly with food, clothing, and shelter, the requirements of survival. None of them takes up the question of the relations between and among people. Admittedly I was only looking for pieces about individuals, but that was easy, because there is little in our literature related to human solidarity.

There’s something else missing. Here’s a bit more about Roland from Possession. He is a barely employed researcher into the life of a fictional Victorian poet, Henry Randolph Ash. He’s uncovered a previously unknown connection with the poet Cristabel LaMotte. He shared this discovery with Maud, an expert in LaMotte and in feminist theory. Byatt writes:

He thought … of Maud’s faintly contemptuous look at their first meeting. … [T]here was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. Moreover, in some dark and outdated English social system of class, which he did not believe in, but felt obscurely working and gripping him, Maud was County, and he was urban lower-middle-class, in some places more, in some places less acceptable than Maud, but in almost all incompatible. All that was the plot of a Romance. He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously; a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another. P. 459-60.

Are we all caught up in systems that control us? Is that what it means to be an individual? I am nothing more that a crossing-place of a number of externally generatedJ systems that control me? It doesn’t feel like that, but ….

 

 

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The front page pic is a detail from The Expulsion From The Garden Of Eden by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria Del Carmine in Florence, Italy. It was painted about 1425. Source.

 

The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay: Human Nature is more than Producing Stuff

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One crucial difference between the Frankfurt School and the vulgar Marxists of the 1920s was the rejection of what Martin Jay describes as the fetish of labor. The scholars of the Institute for Social Research recognized that human nature was not defined by or limited to mere production. According to Jay, Marx himself took a broader perspective, arguing that the only constant in human nature was its ability to invent itself over and over again.

Critical Theory deals with this difference in several ways. First, it emphasizes the role of politics as an arena for moral action. Religion and secular philosophers historically emphasized the importance of individual morality, but for the most part accepted society as they found it. Jay points to Kant as an example. By the 20th Century, politics offered a much broader opportunity for moral action, and one that included a growing part of the working class. Far from accepting a limited social role as the productive force, people in the working class insisted on acting on their own as agents, and rejected the view that they were mere subjects acted upon by powers, state or corporate, beyond their control.

When Marx wrote, the central problem facing the working class was that its role in society was dictated soley by whatever it could provide in the way of productive value. Workers had no ownership in the products of their labor, only in their wages. The problems of capitalist oppression and alienation are central to Marx. Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School rejected this emphasis, saying it did the work of the capitalist class. Instead, he wrote about the importance of human sensual happiness. Jay describes one essay in which Horkheimer “discussed the the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture“. P. 57. Kant, considered a bourgeois philosopher, saw an absolute distinction between duty and personal happiness.

Although [Horkheimer] gave a certain weight to both, by the time capitalism had become sufficiently advanced, the precedence of duty to the totality over personal gratification had grown to such an extent that the latter was almost completely neglected. To compensate for the repression of genuine individual happiness, mass diversions had been devised to defuse discontent. P.57.

Ranking duty to the totality above personal gratification has roots in Marx. Theodore Adorno told Martin Jay in a 1969 interview that “[if] Marx had his way the entire world would be turned into a ‘giant workhouse.’” P. 57, fn. 20. This repression of individual happiness in favor of duty to society, to the totality, reaches its peak in fascism and Soviet communism. Even in its less drastic forms, this precedence of duty over personal happiness leads people to surrender their ability to pursue their own forms of happiness without even noticing the loss. It’s hard to exercise freedom when every part of society conspires to put certain ideas into your head, ideas that are useful to the capitalist class because they reinforce the importance of labor as the price of every personal pleasure or necessity.

This view of work is essentially bourgeois, and reinforces the status quo, two things the Frankfurt School rejected.

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The idea that labor is crucial to participation in society is central to capitalism, but problems are becoming obvious. Production of material goods has become so efficient that fewer laborers are needed, and the kinds work they do is dramatically different. This article discusses the new proletariat and the rise in their recognition of their status as an actual class, with interests opposed to other classes. Outsourcing and factory relocation to countries with cheap labor have reduced the number of jobs in production in this country. Automation threatens many more jobs, and not just those of the working class but of the middle class and the professional class.

In one part of the political world, ideas are circulating about job guarantees, universal basic incomes and other possible responses for a society that has too too little socially useful work for the number of workers. In other parts of the political world, ideas are circulating for torturing those who don’t have jobs so that they will accept whatever work is available just to stay alive, a modern-day version of the 19th Century argument that the workers and slaves are lazy and need the lash of hunger to get them to work. Maybe all those lazy takers will be forced back to the farms to replace the immigrants we are so busy deporting.

Or maybe we will change our minds about the glories of work. Try googling “fuck work” for a sampling. Here’s a long and detailed article in the Baffler asking why left and right agree that the answer to social problems is “get a job”. The writer, James Livingston, a professor at Rutgers, traces leftist support for the centrality of work in forming character back to the Left-Hegelians and Marx, just as Martin Jay does.

We’re not all card-carrying Marxists now, but we’re properly fellow travelers because “full employment” appears to many, left and right, a self-justifying project. Certainly the left remains the captive of the Marxist tradition, which still peddles two ideas that now threaten to distract us from the realities of our time. These are that human nature resides in its capacity to create value through work and, consequently, that the proletariat (the “universal class”) is the appointed engine of social change and progress through class struggle.

This sounds like the vulgar Marxists Jay describes. Livingston shows that it is specifically Protestant. “Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the Reformation, almost everyone did.” I don’t think work is ennobling, whatever else it is or does, but I’m pretty sure this is the majority view. Everyone, left and right, seems to think work creates character, through discipline or something. I’m sure it does create a mindset, but again, how do we know what we are, how do we know how to be free, when those ideas constrain us invisibly, so that we barely know ourselves without them.

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That’s enough of Chapter 2 of The Dialectical Imagination; on to the chapter on the integration of psychoanalysis into Critical Theory. Curiously, I’m re-reading one of my favorite novels, Possession, by A.S. Byatt, and I am struck by synchronicity in this odd passage:

Maud considered. She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight — whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose — to imagine — he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely — but not in the large plan —”

Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? P. 276.