I am NOT a company man! I am an empowered creative with a non-conformist outlook that is valued in our diverse workspace!

This essay in American Affairs Journal is full of insights into how educated professionals conduct themselves as corporate bureaucrats while portraying themselves as non-conformists. For instance:

A key benefit of any prestige university is the social network. In order to take full advantage of this, students must participate in party culture without losing control of their appetites. Fiction often con­fronts open secrets, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt follows a group of eccentric college students who destroy their lives after taking their professors’ Dionysian stories too seriously. This might point to obvious truths about moderation: self-control accompanies success. Yet vices and virtues are not doled out equally, and when leadership training is done in a hyper-permissive atmosphere, we narrow the type of character who emerges.

When I think back to the rituals of certain honor societies in my senior year of college, I think about various rituals that involved long, sleepless nights, hard work and hard celebration, and the bonds that were forged.  And I get it. It's a balancing act of work and play reminiscent of Daniel Bell's observations in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Not everyone can pull it off, but it's a badge of honor for those who do.

Also, regarding why so many in the professional classes eat up the dumbest pop psychology like it's pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's:

Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that “modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their intelligence,” and today employers rub this insult in workers’ faces with a hideously infantilizing work culture that turns the office into a permanent kindergarten classroom. Blue-chip companies reward their employees with balloons, stuffed animals, and gold stars, and an exposé detailing the stringent communication rules of the luxury brand Away Luggage revealed how many start-ups are just “live, laugh, love” sweatshops. This humiliating culture dominates America’s companies because few engage in truly productive or necessary work. Professional genre fiction, such as corporate feminism, is thus often told as a way to cope with the underwhelming reality of working a job that doesn’t con­tribute anything to the world.

There is another way to tell the story of the young career woman, however. Her commute includes inspiring podcasts about Ugandan entrepreneurs, but also a subway stranger breathing an egg sandwich into her face. Her job title is “Senior Analyst—Global Trends,” but her job is just copying and pasting between spreadsheets for ten hours. Despite all the “doing well by doing good” seminars, the closest thing she knows to a community is spin class, where a hundred similar women, and one intense man in sports goggles, listen to a spaz scream Hallmark card affirmations.

Regarding genuine non-conformity:

Trump’s antics are indicative of his different route to power. Forget everything else about him: how would you act if you never had a job outside a company with your name on the building? The world of the professional managerial class doesn’t contain many characters, and so they associate eccentricity with bohemianism or ineptitude. But it’s also reliably found somewhere else.

Indeed, the more ostensibly bohemian a professional pretends to be, the more adamant they are about the Code of Conduct. I can recall sitting in a seminar where a speaker with a distinctly "alternative" appearance was introduced, and the host made sure to mention that this speaker had been quite active in developing codes of conduct for professional organizations. I'm old enough to remember when this person would have been denouncing the Code of Conduct, not writing it. I have never been a hippie, punk, or bohemian, and the only time my skin gets pieced by metal is during medical procedures. Still, I miss the days when deviating substantially from some "normie" expectation meant a person was probably harder to offend, not easier to offend.

Now, to be sure, I think conservatives have lately drifted too far away from codes of conduct, as evidenced both by the Tweeter-in-Chief and also some chance encounters with conservatives. At the same time, I think there has to be a middle ground where we keep our hands to ourselves and avoid the dirty talk while at work, but also don't elevate the perpetually-offended to the highest moral pedestals.

I miss the days when it was the right-wingers who wanted the kids to turn down their music and stop watching those blasphemous movies. The other day I was watching Monty Python's Life of Brian, and partway through I realized that this movie would be roundly condemned for blasphemy today, but the condemnations would come from the left.  The right has (mostly) learned how to deal with jokes about religion.  Or, at least, they know they can't bankrupt a theater chain. But the left would go ballistic over the punching down, never mind that Monty Python also punched up, sideways, diagonally, and into the fifth dimension. And never mind that Eric Idle's Loretta character actually had her name and pronoun preferences respected, snide remarks from Reg not withstanding.

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.

More from Bell's "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism"

(Not exact quotes, just synopses of points I want to remember.)

pg. 168:  He says that cults appear when dominant religions fail.  He identifies cults as groups that offer allegedly suppressed truths, rally around heterodox leaders, and offer the opportunity to be transgressive.

I really, really, REALLY want to join a cult.  The modern religions of the educated professional classes are failing, and I want a person smarter than me to give me the freedom to transgress.

Strangely, one of my favorite pieces of music lately is Lana Del Rey's Off to the Races.



pg. 179: Societies will find no easy resolution if they admit the existence of legitimate grievances and promise just remedies.  I don't know that academia can actually deliver remedies, but a bunch of people promised that we would, so here we are.

pg. 185: "A conservative measures social change by the distance from the past; a revolutionary from some mark in the future."  Then I wonder what to say of the kool-aid peddlers who proclaim that the revolution is ALREADY HERE AND YOU NEED TO GET ON BOARD NOW!!! They are definitely not conservative, but they are far too interested in their immediate comfort to be revolutionaries.

pg. 198: The burdens placed on universities are inevitable consequences of a post-industrial economy.

Bell on religion

On page 155, Bell cites Emile Durkheim, who apparently viewed religion as dividing the world not into men and gods but sacred and profane.  Seen in that light, the religiosity of a society is measured not by supernatural belief but by extremes of moral convictions.  I think our modern politically correct era is a very religious one.  However, it's a religion that cannot identify itself as one, so we lack the language and customs to respect it, critique it, constrain it, and channel it.

Latest book: Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell

I'm reading The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell.  Seventy pages in (out of 339) the book very much has the feel of a polemic, but I'm getting interesting bit of cultural history mixed in.  The question he's tackling is how a very capitalist society that was shaped by Puritan frugality and discipline has spawned such licentiousness while still remaining so capitalist.  What corporations pander to in their customers is so different from what they need from their employees, but the two have to co-exist.

The book really got interesting for me on page 61.  After describing the disciplined cultural legacy of the Puritans, he starts chronicling the backlash.  Apparently writers as early as 1915 were demanding a re-examination of our cultural roots, a re-envisioning of America as a place for not just the descendants of Puritans but also immigrants, African Americans, and urban life.  What's ironic is that the cultural and political descendants of the Puritans were foremost among the crusaders against slavery.  A less racist America is very much an America that embraces the multi-faceted legacy of the Puritans, examining their shortcomings and working to do better, but also holding on to their most positive contributions.

Bell quotes writers who saw the Puritans only as sexually repressed people.  First, sexual repression was hardly a trait unique to Puritans.  In that regard they were unremarkable among the many strains in the Western European culture that they came from.  Their values of learning, work, discipline, frugality, and egalitarianism are what made them remarkable.  Nonetheless, too many people to this day only remember them for that.

I will grant that some American ancestral strains were more open about sexuality, particularly the Scots-Irish (for whom "out-of-wedlock birth" was arguably redundant) and the Cavaliers who founded the Virginia aristocracy (and probably believed in Droit du seigneur).  However, they weren't so much liberated as bad at hiding hypocrisy.  The Scots-Irish might not have been terribly disciplined about sex but they were fervent about religion, and proclaimed themselves quite devout adherents of the most conservative strains of Christianity. And while powerful men in every society have always seen themselves as entitled to women, the Southern elites took it to particularly nasty places.  That doesn't mean that everyone else was forgiven similar indiscretions.  They were open about sex but not necessarily free about sex.

But, anyway, Bell makes the case that a century ago people sought a new Bohemia and they did so not by looking South (for then they'd have to see what comes of lack of restraint) but rather by pissing on the legacy of the Puritans.  Rejecting an idea is so much easier than arguing for its opposite, because if you start to examine its opposite you might find all sorts of unfortunate examples and precedents.  But the idea itself probably has tons of easily-identified downsides.  So, much better to argue against Puritan morals than to argue for the actually-existing cultures that rejected them.  It's the licentious version of "Oh, we just haven't seen Real Communism yet!"

Interestingly, these Bohemians of the early 20th century liked to call everything that they did "New."  "New Poetry", "New Democracy", etc.  This feels very much like the restlessness of the present. They'd probably love pedagogy workshops.  "Oh, we don't assign homework.  That's so old-fashioned!  No, we assign Take-Home Assessments!  They're totally different!"

I'm now at the part where he blames transportation and mass media for freeing us from constraints.  If you live in a world where a trip of even five miles is a big deal, you will spend most of your time in a tight network of people.  If a trip of twenty miles is no big deal, you can have more ties but also looser ties, and more activity can take place out of sight of your closest ties (such as they are).  And the movies, TV, and radio can all advertise and create material lust in your heart.

Let's see where this goes.