More thoughts on Ehrenreich's _Bright-Sided_

I've been skimming through Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided and it strikes me that positive psychology is just a tool with no factional preference.  She describes how conservatives of both the capitalist and Christian bents (groups that overlap frequently but far from always) embrace it, as do liberals of every bent.  Capitalists can believe that those who fail in our economy are simply not maintaining the right attitude--it's their fault!  Christians and other religious conservatives can believe that sin and misfortune are the inevitable consequences of not holding the proper mindset, i.e. the proper beliefs.  They tried, they preached the good news, and all who embraced it and felt good were lifted up, and those who didn't have the right attitude obviously hadn't embraced the right teachings and that's why they failed.

Liberals can believe that all of the social problems that they seek to remedy have easy solutions.  Reformers will have to work but not, you know, too hard.  They just need to impart the right attitude to kids, and if the attitudes don't solve problems then it's either because the kids didn't embrace it (if you're willing to go there) or, if you prefer not to go there, their parents and teachers didn't reinforce it, or the rest of society didn't see them through the same happy lens, or whatever.  Bottom line, if there's a problem, it's that somebody out there in this cold, cruel world just wasn't happy-shiny world wasn't nice enough and open enough and we just need to fix that and then it will be great.

As for me, I believe that there are no secret tricks, no correct politics.  Just liars and lunatics.

Bright-Sided, First few chapters

This book is largely a history of "positive thinking" and various movements to get people to be irrationally optimistic on the premise that it will yield dividends.  I don't have it in me to blog every detail, but there's one bit that stands out:

Apparently a lot of the enthusiasts for various "positive thinking" remedies, whether pushed by religion, psychologists, or business consultants, are sales people.  On one level this seems like an utterly obvious and unremarkable observation.  Salesmen and saleswomen are cheerful and personable.  Of course they're upbeat!  However, Ehrenreich points to interviews in which salespeople (and the "positive thinking" enthusiasts who shill to them) often find it difficult to project that persona.  They buy these books because they need constant infusions of kool-aid to keep up the appearance.  In private, many of them are unhappy with their lonely lives on the road, surrounded only by people whom they want things from, and who in turn want only free samples and low prices.  That frankly sounds like a hellish life.

When I think more about the people in my profession who are most publicly adamant about various "positive thinking" approaches (even if not in so many words), I realize that some of them wish they weren't professors, or at least that they weren't in STEM fields.  I won't use a public blog to identify them or say why I think they regret their choice of field, but I've seen enough to make me quite certain that they wish for something else and don't know how to escape.  For myself, I hate many things about the current direction of my profession and institution, but I am quite certain that I want to teach physics and do research in physics.  So I pity them, and I start to understand why they are desperate for the quick fixes peddled in pop psychology.  And I see the overlap between their restlessness and that of the people who buy self-help books and attend motivational seminars.

Next book: Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich

My next reading/blogging project is Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America.  It's also by Barbara Ehrenreich, and apparently discusses the problems with pop psychology.  Maybe it will give me some insight into the kool-aid.

Ehrenreich, conclusions

I don't have much to say about Chapter 5.  It was mostly about the 80's, yuppies, and materialism.

Chapter 6 is her concluding analysis.  There are several points that I like:
1) The "New Class" was not actually the cause of hedonism, but the place where people argued over it.  One argument that people often make is that the comfortable people in word-driven occupations have the intellect, savings, and support network to afford a bit of foolishness, so they can dismiss traditional values in ways that others dare not.  This argument is often abused, and she has no sympathy for its abusers (nor do I), but I think it's one of those things that we should not just dismiss either.  Of course, I'd be more sympathetic to its proponents if they weren't standing behind a twice-divorced sexual assaulter.

2) She notes that economic inequality was growing in 1989, and 30 years of experience have seen no reversal of that trend.  She also notes the ways in which that trend has increased inequality within the "New Class" or the people in word-driven jobs.  It only got worse since then.  Information is cheap now, which has destroyed business models that supported writers and creators of various sorts.  In that sense, competition really is more fierce, and so cheap information and abundant competition can sometimes lead to a bifurcation rather than equalization of outcomes.

But bifurcated outcomes, while certainly possible in the real world, are not always the outcome of competition.  Econ 101 isn't everything, but it isn't nothing either.  There's rent-seeking to be found out there, if any journalists can be paid to seek for it.  De Tocqueville noted that competitive societies tend to become equal, and so I'm far from convinced that we're seeing fair competition.

I think we're definitely seeing a lot of competition in the more precarious segments of the upper-middle class, the segments that really do have to compete and spend considerable time "paying dues."  I've noted before that competition is a tough subject because too much of it makes people indistinguishable rather than bringing out variety, but too little leads to corruption and a choking of opportunity. I think we're seeing a split-level game, with those who have many advantages making everything of them (because, hey, who wouldn't?) while those with fewer (not the same as no) advantages really do compete viciously.

One irony is that the "New Class" now has to proclaim its commitment to bringing in more competition, i.e. expanding equity and opportunity, in order to show that they are virtuous enough to win the competition.  It's a strange thing.  A laudable thing in many ways, but a strange thing.

3) Ehrenreich ends by calling for a moral reform, a move away from consumerism.  In principle I agree, and I hope everyone uses their smart phone to like and share this blog post.  Of course, I think we've gotten one, but it isn't the one she called for.  She called for a revival of class consciousness in a country where most people want to think of themselves (accurately or otherwise) as middle-class.  Instead we've gotten identity-consciousness.  Let me tell you, there's nothing that a middle-class scholarship kid loves more than hearing an Ivy League legacy admit explain that our shared lack of melanin and estrogen makes us equally privileged.  (True story.)

4) She also calls for a revival of "professionalism" in an era where the knowledge-driven professionals of the "New Class" are now getting squeezed.  She makes the fascinating and compelling point that knowledge workers (many but not all of whom are in some segment of the broad "middle class", albeit usually the upper segment) actually like their work.  They do things that they find fascinating.  The rich might like their work but they tend to like their leisure more.  The poor might like some of what they do at work, but often they get treated badly and their jobs take a toll.  That is another sense in which the rich and poor resemble each other more than the middle class.  I need to think about that.

She sees professionalism as a cure for consumerism, treating the right kind of work as a satisfying thing in its own right rather than a means for more consumption.  I think this would be a nice thing, but I don't know how to change a society.

5) Of course, in the end she calls for an abolition of even the privileges of the "professional middle class" knowledge workers and professionals.  I think we're seeing more of that, but without the societal flattening that she hoped would accompany it.

That's all for this book.  I will eventually blog another book, but not sure when.

Fear of Falling, Chapter 4

This chapter focuses on the "New Class", a term originally coined by Marxists to refer to the technocratic class running Communist societies.  They weren't capitalists (by definition), but they also weren't workers.  It got appropriated to deride liberal technocrats in the West, and apparently in the 70's was applied to upper-middle-class people with degrees and desk jobs.  She highlights a few ironies that many others have noted as well, but in 1989 I think these were somewhat fresher insights:

1) Many of the conservative intellectuals critiquing this class were comfortable urban dwellers who wrote for a living and (politics aside) were remarkably similar to those they critiqued.  They were class traitors, in a way.

This is often noted when conservative pundits critique "liberal elite" culture.

2) Of course, the liberal technocrats were class traitors themselves, in that they support policies that required progressive taxation of people with upper incomes. This is inevitable if the project of modern policy is the improvement of society and remediation of social inequality.  It's a big, expensive project, and you can only fund big, expensive projects by taxing the people who actually have the money.

3) At the same time, these upper-class advocates for redistribution are disliked by the "working class".  Some of this is because of cultural differences (which also makes the situation of conservative pundits ironic), but not solely.  If you want to "fix" society and "fix" inequality then you will have to, at a minimum, do something about the poor.  Fears of moral hazard (sometimes justified, but not always) mean that you can't just hand out money.  And the systems in which people exist also matter, so beyond handing money to the poor you'd need to look at infrastructure, regulations, etc.  All of this means that you'll be addressing a certain stratum of society, and trying to engineer them.

If you hand enough largess to a certain stratum of society then maybe they'll accept your efforts to engineer them.  Maybe.  But this stratum is not perfectly demarcated from the "working class" that is not necessarily super-comfortable but at least doesn't feel an acute need for redistribution.  Because they are not perfectly demarcated, efforts to engineer the social conditions affecting the poor will also affect the "working class" or "lower-middle class."  They won't like that.

They'll like it even less if they're facing social engineering (with its downsides) while their taxes go into redistribution to others.  Some of those others might be objectively undeserving layabouts.  Many more will be perceived as such.  Some might be objectively deserving hard luck cases, but not all will see them as such.

An over-simplified view of the left and right in 21st century America is that the left is a coalition of the upper-middle class and the poor, while the right is a coalition of the lower-middle class and the rich.  This is very over-simplified, but it captures something:  The left has technocrats and the people they focus their efforts on, the right has plutocrats and the people that the technocrats look down on but don't give largess to.

4) She also talks about how the right critiqued liberal social policy as "permissiveness" while business needs a consumer culture that is all about avoiding self-restraint.  She references Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism here.

She also notes that the right blamed the government for "permissiveness" because they couldn't bring themselves to blame consumer culture and its enablers in the advertising industry.

Ehrenreich, start of Chp. 3

I've started chapter 3.  She's chronicling the way that the media "discovered" the "white working class" and "middle America" after Nixon's win in 1968.  It sounds a lot like the media's discovery of conservative whites after 2016.  Of course, the backlash against 60's liberals and hippies and civil rights and whatnot was broader than lower-income whites, there were plenty of affluent whites who were plenty reactionary, there were plenty of liberal and moderate white people with modest incomes, and there were plenty of non-white people who worked similar jobs and had similar lifestyles.  But the media became obsessed with a certain stereotype of working-class white men, and vacillated between treating them as distasteful and Authentic.  Sometimes the focus was on how to appease them, sometimes on why the Better Classes should never appease them, but they were definitely the focus.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Ehrenreich, Chp. 2

I don't have it in me to type out a complete summary of this chapter, but I will highlight some interesting points.

First, the academic and cultural establishments reacted so strongly to the student revolts of the 1960's because the university is in some sense the incubator of the professional middle class.  I suppose I am similarly reactionary in how I view the kids promoting political correctness, seeking safe spaces, etc.  One thing that I find interesting about my peers is how many of them are more defensive than reactionary, seeking to prove to the student radicals that they too seek Disruption, Transformation, etc.  It's like everyone believes that to be a good academic is to pursue the destruction and recreation of the academy.  Yes, there's a very important sense in which we have to pursue that in our research, seeking to uncover error and replace it with insight.  Still, in STEM you prolific researchers who speak of the need to Transform And Disrupt the very systems in which they thrive.  Of course, they never actually do that, but it's striking how they feel the need to say they're doing it.

Ehrenreich identifies an interesting tension in the middle class, and how it differs from both the rich and poor:  The middle class is kept in a state of unease and insecurity, with no guarantee of remaining as comfortable as your parents.

If you're born rich you'll usually remain rich.  You might not get on well with your family, you might not get or retain a good job in the family business empire, but you'll get your trust fund and if you aren't completely stupid with it you'll remain comfortable.  And if you are just moderately smart about what you do with your opportunities you'll do quite well.  Even if your career collapses in scandal, well, who ever heard of a disgraced financier living in a shitty apartment and eating from the local food pantry?  There's a safety net.

Likewise, if you're born poor to lower-middle class, you'll probably remain that way.  Yes, there are a few who rise, but most don't.  It isn't much comfort, but it's stable.  At the risk of romanticizing it, if you know that you'll remain in the same place, with the same people, struggling to survive in the same hustle, there may be a level of security.  You're used to shit, and you know who will be there beside you.  If the picture I pain seems romantic, it's because of the human capacity for adjustment to predictable conditions.

In the professional middle class, you could rise high (probably not to the top, but high) or fall low (probably not to the bottom, but certainly below your comfort zone).  You need to study hard, train hard, and "pay your dues" in jobs with long hours before you achieve some security in your profession.  There are far worse fates, but it's certainly a system that can induce anxiety.  If the question is whether the rest of the world should pity them, the answer is no, but if the question is "Why are they so neurotic?" well, there's your answer.

I feel like I've blogged before about the ways in which the rich and poor resemble each other more than the middle class, but I can't find them now.

She also discusses a tension in the characterizations of the counter-culture, and the ways in which it was and wasn't the apotheosis of consumer culture.  The desire to "do your own thing, man" was in some ways the ultimate consumer ethos:  You do what you want for your own fulfillment.  However, if "doing your own thing" should threaten corporate profits, if it should involve consuming less, that would hurt the consumer culture.  Today we have excellent systems for co-opting rebellion.  We have Woke Capitalists who will make sure that your consumer goods come packaged with whatever logos and symbols are favored by your socially just cause, and make certain that the stores in which they are sold use all the preferred pronouns of both the staff and customers...because that's easier than paying living wages or polluting less.  (Don't get me wrong, I'll use your preferred pronouns without objection, but I think it's a pretty small thing.  I'd like to also buy something less polluting.  Or, better yet, not buy as much cheap plastic crap.)

In the middle of the chapter, she talks a lot about the history of child-rearing, and manages to show that simplistic narratives are too simplistic.  What the middle class tells themselves about their parenting has fluctuated over the years.  Sometimes they boast about the structure and order that they give their kids.  Sometimes they boast about the freedom and exploration that they allow their kids to enjoy.  Sometimes they lament how the poor are harsher disciplinarians (so unsophisticated!).  Other times they lament how the poor let their kids run wild.  The truth, of course, is that parents of every social class are varied.  I'll let social scientists determine if some styles of parenting really are unevenly distributed among classes in ways that conform to narratives, but certainly it's messier than an era's favorite narrative would have us believe.

Finally, she talks about how prosperity gave teenagers identities as consumers, and also gave an extended adolescence that the rich and middle class enjoy (the rich with a bit more leisure, the middle class with more training and apprenticing).  The poor mostly work the same types of jobs as their parents once they reach a certain age, but the professional middle class goes to college, then "pays their dues" in jobs that are much lower on the ladder than their parents' jobs.

So far, so good.  But then she goes on about rock and roll and the values it allegedly reflected.  Eh, whatever.  Rock lyrics are varied.  She's trying to shoehorn them into a narrative.

On to chapter 3.

Fear of Falling, Chapter 1

This book is apparently about the attitudes of the "professional middle class" (comfortable middle class people who have nice office jobs, but not so much wealth as to truly have substantial individual influence in their communities).  She starts by recounting the ways that Good Respectable People talk about the aesthetics and lifestyles of the lower classes.  She's writing in 1989 but she could be talking about post-2016 hand-wringing over lower-income whites who voted for Trump.  From there she skips back a few decades, to the 50's, in order to chronicle the post-WWII journey to 1989.  She visits the sociology textbooks of the 50's, and I'm surprised by the condescension towards the poor.  Not because I'm surprised that people hold such attitudes (duh), but because I can't believe they'd write them so explicitly in textbooks.  I thought they were supposed to say those things indirectly.  Well, I guess some things really do change.

She describes 1950's pundits simultaneously celebrating the wealth of post-war America and also bemoaning materialism and consumerism as tacky symptoms of "affluence."  Things I like about her critique:

1. She notes the interesting shift from "wealth" to "affluence."  Critiquing wealth means you might go after the wealthy.  But affluence is a society-wide condition.  It's not so different from how the post-2016 critiques have focused on "working-class whites" while ignoring high-income Republicans who voted on the basis of tax policy.
2. She recognizes that post-WWII prosperity depended so much on the rest of the world being messed up and unable to compete.  Yes, the post-1950's economy in America is in part a product of choices by elites, but it's also in part an inevitable consequence of global competition.
3. She is ruthlessly economic in her critique of keeping middle-class women as housewives: It was a waste of educated minds.
4. She is also ruthlessly historical in noting that lower-class women never had the option of being housewives.  It was either something they did out of necessity (somebody had to care for the kids and do the in-home production of goods via sewing, scratch cooking, etc.) or didn't do out of necessity (they needed to work for money).  Choice had precious little to do with it.

I found it fascinating how elite commentary didn't "discover" poverty in America until the 1960's.  I need to read more about that.

Finally, she talks about patronizing attitudes towards the poor in 1960's commentary.  She notes that pundits regarded them as unworthy of trust with money.  Thing is, poverty is multi-faceted, and while I largely agree that most people can handle money, some people do make bad choices.  In fact, some choices are the products of poverty rather than the cause of poverty:  If you can't afford to buy reliable goods you buy unreliable goods and incur greater costs down the line.  If you keep facing emergencies that drain you, long-term plans are something you rationally avoid, because what's the point?

If poverty were all about unforced bad choices, the paternalists would be entirely right.  If poverty were all about forced bad choices, the libertarians would be entirely right.  And if poverty were about circumstances beyond the realm of choice, the leftists would be entirely right (or, um, left, I guess?).  But the real world is multi-faceted.  Still, the facets that she highlights here are important.

On to chapter 2, which addresses the 60's and counter-culture.

Next book: "Fear of Falling" by Barbara Ehrenreich

My next reading/blogging project will be Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich.  It supposedly explores the anxieties of middle-class professionals.  It seems relevant to academia...