The Lonely Quest: Constructing the Self in the Twenty-First Century United States 9781138049598, 9781138049611, 9781315169507

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The Lonely Quest

Today the United States is a country divided along lines of gender, economic inequality, educational level, and political affiliation. Democrats typically select a different range of matters of serious public concern compared to Republicans. Many Americans describe difficulty in coming to terms with the demands placed on them in their work, communities, and personal lives and achieving satisfaction. The institutional crises that pervade our politics, economy, educational systems, and communities have inspired a contemporary crisis: a widespread inability for many to live as integrated, effective selves in the twenty-first century United States. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary research, The Lonely Quest explores the dilemma of constructing the self  in the U.S. today. Robert C. Hauhart is a professor in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin’s University, Lacey, WA. He is the author, most recently, of Seeking the American Dream: A Sociological Inquiry (2016) and the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia for Spring, 2019.

The Lonely Quest Constructing the Self in the Twenty-First Century United States

ROBERT C. HAUHART

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Robert C. Hauhart to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-04959-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-04961-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16950-7 (ebk) Typeset in Avenir and Dante by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Prefacevii Acknowledgmentsxiii 1

2

3

4

5

6

Exploring Mankind’s Past: Social Character Under Tribalism, Feudalism, and Early Industrialism

1

Documenting the Divide: Social Division in the Twenty-First Century United States

30

The Social Self: Early and Mid-Twentieth Century American Sociological Theories

59

The Formation of the Self Under the Conditions of Globalized Capitalism

95

Self Identity in Field Studies in Twenty-First Century American Class Settings: Implications for Modernist Theories

129

Life Projects in the Twenty-First Century United States: Rising Inequality, Global Capitalism, Neo-Liberal Government, and the Great Recession

173

vi  Contents

7

Conclusion: Individualism and Meritocracy: Prospects for Constructing Self Identity under the Conditions of Twenty-First Century Modernity

195

Index222

Preface

Is it Hard to Make Arrangements With Yourself? The question posed as a subtitle to these opening remarks is from “Tell Me Why” by Neil Young, which appears on his 1970 album, After the Gold Rush (Reprise Records). It encapsulates, in one sense, the quandary that many contemporary Americans seem to feel about themselves and serves as modest shorthand for what might otherwise be a lengthy explanation of the origin, and nature, of the book that follows. I began thinking about the ideas that animate this book in the wake of publishing Seeking the American Dream: A Sociological Inquiry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016). In that book I traced the ideas that ultimately congealed into the iconic national notion of “the American Dream.” Coined and elucidated in print for the first time in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America, the phrase has had a checkered journey from idealized American aspiration to unattainable mirage to culturally denigrated pursuit of bland mediocrity. Regardless of which vision of the American Dream one prefers, however, one of the things that struck me was the difficulty that many Americans seem to experience today in choosing the way to exercise their freedom of choice, pursue happiness, and—ultimately—decide who they are as a person. I felt that I needed to investigate these issues and write about them. In looking around, I found that many American researchers and writers have struggled with this question before. Joan Didion, in her essay “Pacific Distances” in After Henry (1992:112–113), reflected: Our children remind us of how random our lives have been. I had occasion in 1979 to speak to my daughter’s school in Los Angeles, and

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I stood there, apparently a grown woman, certainly a woman who had stood up any number of times and spoken to students around the country, and tried to confront a question that suddenly seemed almost impenetrable. How had I become a writer, how and why had I made the particular choices I had made in my life? Didion’s reflection about her own journey is but a single exemplar of innumerable examinations of what it means to be a ‘self ’ within society that stretch back to time immemorial. These meditations are not limited to Americans who, after all, are a relatively recent addition to the historical record unless one counts indigenous (i.e., native) Americans, which—due to our ethnocentrism—we normally do not. Arguably, however, the task of being, and becoming, a self has been made more difficult by the many changes documented over the last two centuries which have irrevocably altered life experience for Americans although—increasingly—globalization has extended the impact of those changes internationally. Historically, the language used to consider the nature of the self has shifted from one era or culture to the next. Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics (Book V), examined the character of mankind in light of a person’s disposition to engage in just acts and to aspire to achieve just relations as compared to the person who acts unjustly, either by breaking the law or knowingly taking more than his or her due at the expense of others (Morris 1959:16). Although it is inaccurate to say that justice and injustice are no longer meaningful concepts with respect to the formation of contemporary character in the United States, Aristotle’s approach conveys a notion that bears a somewhat antique intellectual flavor today. For one thing, Aristotle’s focus on individual character is at odds with more contextual modern analyses that locate the person within a matrix of institutions and settings so that the cultural environment is accorded more influence than Aristotle’s thinking reflected. Second, Aristotle wrote before both modernism and post-modernism developed and, as such, had substantially more confidence that a discernible social reality existed—and could be perceived accurately and acted upon reliably—than perhaps many thinkers would assert, or even acknowledge, today. Turning to one modern writer whose essential orientation is perhaps at one extreme from Aristotle’s approach, Erving Goffman begins his seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959:19) in Chapter 1 by observing: When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them.

Preface  ix

Thus, in contradistinction to Aristotle’s belief that a man is known, and comes to know himself or herself, by the quality of the acts he or she engages in and the nature of the expressed motivations for acting, Goffman’s figure is merely engaged in a temporary performance before a certain audience—a performance that will have a beginning and an end and which may, or may not, ever be taken up again. Moreover, even if the figure’s performance is continued or resumed, it will be reconstituted—since it can never quite be the same performance as before—and the audience will be a new one as old members will be replaced by new in a different setting and so forth. For Goffman, then, the self is nothing more, perhaps, than a series of these performances—carried out for different reasons before different audiences and intended to elicit a momentary belief in the enactment by those for whom the self-presentation is displayed. If the audience to such a display suspends disbelief and in today’s parlance ‘buys in’ to the self-narrative offered, then the performer has created a successful self—albeit a self that can be jettisoned at any opportune moment once the figure exits the immediate stage. In a new setting some other self will be called for and the effort will be put forth to present another suitable performance. Such a mobile and malleable self brings into question the entire notion of ‘character’ and, indeed, of the type of ‘self ’ that heretofore has been the subject of study. Still, the modern and post-modern self that Goffman and other writers have projected can’t be dismissed out of hand as there is substantial evidence that the pliant self, attuned to the fluidity of social intercourse in our age, is an adaptive mechanism developed and sustained by many of the forces I will examine throughout this book. Indeed, the group of theorists who have taken up the study of modernity and globalization have coined an array of concepts to address this newly adaptable self— the plastic self, the liquid self, the reflexive self, reflexive individualization, and so forth. (In this regard they follow the time-honored tradition of believing that one can contribute to a better understanding of a phenomenon simply by renaming it or developing a new euphemism.) Goffman and those whose work echoes some of his themes, whether wittingly or not, cannot accurately be read, however, to completely disavow the influence of social structure. Indeed, Goffman’s work is seminal because his analyses of identity and interactional cues are so intimately tied to a person’s location in society. It is this juxtaposition between the individual and social circumstance, including the influence of other individuals, that leads to the conundrum posed by self-definition. This raises the important question: why does anyone need to construct a self ? Aren’t we all simply born as ourselves and live that way until we die? The long and short of it is “No, it isn’t that simple.” Certainly it is not remotely that simple in the twenty-first century United States.

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Todd Gitlin, in his introduction to the “twentieth anniversary edition” of Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness (1990:xiv), remarks upon Slater’s argument that American individualism is an attempt to deny the existence of human interdependence by noting that F. Scott Fitzgerald was quite wrong when he said that Americans possess no second acts. To the contrary, Gitlin contends that Americans have little else but second acts since someone living in the United States must constantly reinvent himself or herself. Moreover, as Gitlin observes, Americans exercise their freedom to be individuals and reshape themselves almost exclusively within institutions that cull out niches for personal achievement. While American individualism may be rampant and dysfunctional as Slater contended, I will argue that it is especially so when so many Americans believe that their institutions have failed. Can it really make any sense for individuals to place their confidence in the roles that our predominantly hierarchical institutions provide when we doubt the efficacy of those same institutions to achieve what we say they are created to achieve? The chapters that follow attempt to trace the changing relations of self and society from the earliest, primitive societies to the contemporary twenty-first century United States. While the first chapter sets the stage with a generally chronological summary that moves rather quickly through the centuries to modern times, the balance of the chapters examine the self-society relation through a variety of twentieth-century theories of self-identity propounded by American sociologists and a group of highly contextualized field and interview studies from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The latter predominate for three reasons. First, since this book is intended to illuminate the present dilemma of constructing self-identity in the contemporary United States, those investigations and theories generated in the last 30 years within the United States yield the most interest and the greatest potential for offering insight on the questions posed. Second, as many of the theorists and researchers writing on American society in recent decades have emphasized, there has arguably been a ‘speeding up’ of social and economic change so that major transitions (in institutional mission, in structural formations, in family life) have come about more quickly than in the mid-to-early twentieth century and every century theretofore. Thus, the speed of social change makes it necessary to focus on recent contexts, and take a broader range of contexts into account in order to portray the American social landscape in a way that more accurately reflects the social forces impinging on the individual at this time in our history. The shifting sands of institutional arrangements that once buffered and protected the individual now, seemingly, beset him or her and only a detailed examination of these contemporary contexts can suffice. Finally, this is a sociological analysis that is informed principally by sociological works

Preface  xi

although I have not limited myself to them whenever anything from another discipline appeared credible and useful. Among the earliest principles that offer sound guidance with respect to social investigations and our understanding of human societies is Karl Marx’s famous remark in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852) where he stated: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (Tucker 1972:437). Thus, any responsible analysis must be firmly grounded in the past—“the tradition of all the dead generations” as Marx phrases it (Tucker 1972:437) but perhaps most particularly the most recent past as it has a closer connection to both the present and the anticipated future. While the introductory chapter is decidedly historical, the balance of the manuscript addresses directly our contemporary dilemma. There is wide agreement among the many persons whose work I discuss that inequality is growing; that the class gap may have already overtaken the racial and ethnic divide in the United States; and that cultural and social capital are unequally distributed (Rank, Hirschl, and Foster 2014; Putnam 2015; Dasgupta 2015; Hochschild 2016; Hauhart 2016). The thesis I propound grows out of the socially and politically divided nation these numerous sociologists, political scientists, and socio-economic commentators have consistently identified in United States society over the last decade. Will some—or all—of these divides be bridged? Can those who are struggling to define themselves in the twenty-first century manage to leverage social and personal resources to do so? Will more access to education, better parenting, income redistribution, better schools, more government assistance to the poor, and more affordable housing release Americans to remake their lives—to become the self they wish to become? The answer can only be tentatively pronounced once we have comprehensively surveyed the many recent thoughtful studies that have examined these issues. It is possible to say without qualification even at the start of the journey that it is a daunting task. The upshot of all this for constructing and projecting the self can be summed up, as the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton did when speaking about the identity diffusion Patricia Hearst experienced under the psychological duress of her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974: “She experienced what I call the death anxiety and the breaking point. . . . Her external points of reference for maintenance of her personality had disappeared” (Didion 1992:103). Lifton was, it is fair to say, only pointing out the obvious: when the institutional frameworks that support the individual are de-legitimized or otherwise dysfunctional, when the individual rejects the sources of support a

xii  Preface

society has to offer, the self—unanchored and adrift—washes here and there in search of any handhold that presents itself. Identity, once firmly cemented in family, community, and work has—to an amazing extent according to some writers—become freely floating, episodic, and shape-shifting, often both in form and content. Although perhaps trite and unduly pessimistic in the extreme, it nevertheless remains openly questionable whether the highly individualized self of contemporary American society can long endure such circumstances. Has the twenty-first century United States approached this point of institutional dysfunction? Has identity become so problematic, fragmented, and fragile that the supports necessary to sustain it are simply insufficient? Have our established institutions exhausted their relevance and now fail to provide us current purpose? The answer lies in a detailed examination of what the contemporary United States is like today and the ways in which the self is formed, and deformed, by the social contexts individuals must navigate to survive.

References Aristotle. 1959. “Nichomachean Ethics (Book V).” In Clarence Morris, Ed., The Great Legal Philosophers: Selected Writings in Jurisprudence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Adams, James Truslow. 1931. The Epic of America. Garden City: Garden City Books. Dasgupta, Katsuri. 2015. Introducing Social Stratification. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Didion, Joan. 1992. “Pacific Distances.” In After Henry. New York: Vintage Books. Gitlin, Todd. 1990. Introduction to The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater. Boston: Beacon Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday, Anchor Books. Hauhart, Robert C. 2016. Seeking the American Dream: A Sociological Inquiry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: The New Press. Marx, Karl. 1852. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” originally published in Die Revolution (New York). In Robert C. Tucker, Ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rank, Mark, Thomas A. Hirschl and Kirk A. Foster. 2014. Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes. New York: Oxford University Press. Tucker, Robert C., Ed. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Young, Neil. 1970. “Tell Me Why,” from After the Gold Rush (Reprise Records).

Acknowledgments

The development and writing of this book has benefitted from the support of many individuals. Initially I would like to express my gratitude to Saint Martin’s University and two of the institutional leaders who have supported scholarship there among the faculty: former Vice-President of Academic Affairs and Provost, Molly Smith, Ph.D. (now Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Wisconsin—Superior) and Jeff Crane, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Saint Martin’s University. I would also like to thank my faculty colleagues at Saint Martin’s, specifically including Jeff Birkenstein, Jamie Olson, Julia Chavez, Katya Shkurkin, Irina Gendelman, Joe Mailhot, and Teresa Winstead. While none of my students or former students played active roles in the preparation of this book, I have benefitted greatly from working closely with some excellent students on other published scholarship including: Courtney Carter Choi, Kimberly Menius, Jessica Flores, Emmalee Baker, Alyssa Slate, and Roslyn Buff. I hope to be able to add the names of many more students in the future. At other universities and research centers I have enjoyed the friendship and collegiality extended by Jon Grahe, Pacific Lutheran University; Jeff Torlina, Siena College; Dennis Downey, California State University, Channel Islands; Sheila Katz, University of Houston; Clayton Peoples, University of Nevada— Reno; Mitja Sardoč, Ph.D., Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana (Slovenia); and Oto Luthar, Ph.D., Research Centre for the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Ljubljana (Slovenia). At Routledge/Taylor and Francis I am appreciative of the interest in my work shown by Dean Birkenkamp, Senior Acquisitions Editor for Sociology, and for his astute

xiv  Acknowledgments

guidance through the publishing process. Finally, I am indebted to Diane Wiegand for her unwavering support over many years. Robert C. Hauhart Petit Manan Point, Maine Placitas, New Mexico Lacey, Washington

Exploring Mankind’s Past

1

Social Character Under Tribalism, Feudalism, and Early Industrialism

the voyage to the other side of town is harder to make than a trip around the world, and a voyage of discovery in one’s own home is the hardest of all. —Randall Collins and Michael Makowsky, The Discovery of Society (1984:11–12)

Introduction Our inquiry into the nature of the self in contemporary U.S. society must begin elsewhere, in another place and another time. The reason may be found in a very brief excursus into the topic as philosophers from the period of Ancient Greece treated it. Classical philosophy rested upon a theological metaphysics in which members of society were thought of as beings with a more or less fixed nature as their center, thus sharing an essential common core (Bell 1996:18–19). As Cicero phrased it, [F]or no single thing is like another, so exactly its counterpart, as all of us are to one another. Nay, if bad habits and false beliefs did not twist the weaker minds and turn them in whatever direction they are inclined, no one would be so like his own self as all men would be like all others. (Morris 1959:45, left column)

2  Exploring Mankind’s Past

As Cicero’s comment suggests, and as wider readings among the classical philosophers confirms, the ancients identified a hierarchy of virtues which men, in reality, only approximated. As Aristotle evaluated the matter, “And justice is the perfect virtue because it is the practice of perfect virtue; and perfect in a special degree, because its possessor can practice his virtue towards others and not merely by himself ” (1959:17, left column). Other positive qualities, such as courage and probity, while valorous in the estimation of ancient philosophers, were neither as exalted, nor their absence as debilitating, to a person’s character as a sense of justice. Still, as Aristotle noted, a man could commit an unjust act and still be a just man (1959:20, left column, 21 right column) for it was the nature of man, a given part of his being, that while mankind strove for transcendence either his motives or his acts might fail to achieve his ideals. Thus, for classical Greek philosophy, the self was an object whose innate nature was unvarying although a person’s conduct could be better or worse in approximating ancient virtues. Consequently, the nature of the self was of little interest per se but rather was only principally of interest in relation to others (i.e., in relation to the family, community, or state). The foregoing explains in succinct outline why we must begin our exploration of the nature of self-identity in the twenty-first century United States with a brief detour through older societies. Thus, it is clear that the nature of being found in Greek classicism, while instructive, is far distant from what we perceive as, and experience as, self-identity in the modern era. In short, our investigation into the nature of self-identity must address both temporality, that is the historical era relevant to our inquiry, and do so with cultural specificity since the example of classical Greek thought illustrates that the self is inextricably bound up with a particular society at a particular time in history. Moreover, although it is not immediately apparent from our short discussion of the nature of being in ancient Greece, our understanding of contemporary society rests on our grasp of the evolution of human cultures over time as well. It would be incorrect to assume, for example, that the historical progression of material and technological advances that have taken place have no bearing on the current nature of the self in the United States. Rather, it is much more likely that our knowledge of prior efforts to outline distinctiveness among societies in their progress toward modernity and the relationship between self and society in previous epochs has substantial potential for expanding our understanding of self-identity formation today. It is an obvious truism that human societies exist in specific places and each culture must adapt itself to the environment which it inhabits. Likewise, societies also exist in a particular historical moment that is characterized by, among other things, a specific level of technological development.

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Finally, societies exist within a web of cultural legacies handed down from their past and those cultural adaptations acquired through contact with other cultures. As Milner (1994:22) persuasively argues, “in large measures [particular social formations] are shaped by the nature of the resources that are available and dominant in a given historical situation.” Cultural traditions that arise out of one historical set of conditions offer a foundation for each successive generation within a society and supply a palette of behavioral norms, social attitudes, and group rituals as a basis for the continuation of a shared culture. Yet, no society is an island and each culture acts as both a source and a recipient of cultural influences. Only by examining the web of historical and cultural evolutions that together have spawned our own era and developed our contemporary cultural conditions can we begin to understand the social forces that externally impinge upon, and internally impel, the social construction of the self in the twenty-first century United States. For this reason, I will now turn to a brief discussion of the major shifts in historical social formations as we presently understand them. Anthropologists and other social scientists generally describe the earliest human societies as variations of hunting and gathering groups (Harris 1978a; Lindsey and Beach 2002). In these subsistence societies, the food sources were wild animals killed through hunting and wild plants secured through foraging. These groups, often consisting of small bands of perhaps 25–50 members, typically kept their populations low in order to enjoy a favorable standard of living. This made it easier to avoid depleting the game and plant resources nearby as quickly. Many primitive groups survived by “eating the forest” and therefore needed to devise measures not to eat the forest too quickly (Harris 1978b:63). Many small bands were nomadic for this reason as well as to take advantage of annual animal migrations and seasonal plants. Researchers have also documented intentional efforts to maintain population at low levels, including evidence of (female) infanticide, abortion, and geronticide (Harris 1978a:21–22, 1978b:65–66). Many anthropologists now note that primitive groups selected fertile environments when possible thereby sustaining subsistence with less time and energy devoted to food production than was initially believed (Sahlins 1960; Harris 1978a:13–14). Human societies are all characterized by divisions of labor but in hunting and gathering subsistence societies the division is very simple. In primitive societies labor is divided on the basis of gender, race, and other ascribed characteristics (Farley 2003). In hunting and gathering societies men were normally responsible for hunting (and warfare) and women often responsible for foraging for wild plants and fruits. Subsistence economies offer little need, and provide almost no support, for more specialized production roles. The

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same low level of subsistence means there is little surplus to produce inequality or status stratification; food, work, living conditions, and most everything of value must be shared within the band, normally producing high levels of consensus and shared ritual (Lee 1984). The small size of the tribe, the low level of subsistence, and the simple division of labor create a society akin to what sociologists define as a primary group—one based on frequent face-to-face interaction among the same group members producing a high level of interpersonal cooperation (Cooley 1962). All of the group’s needs must be provided for within this context. Consequently, primitive societies rely on family and clan from cradle to grave rather than on the array of specialized institutions that arise in more complex, modern societies. Thus, both socialization and skill acquisition are passed on from generation to generation in the informal everyday life of the group; there are no schools and, hence, no formal role such as a teacher. Likewise, while there may be a nominal leader, and even a group of elders, these are informally selected and possess limited power due to the low level of resources and narrow range of options. Neither are there full-time religious specialists nor entities such as the church or health care institutions or professional caregivers, although there may be shaman whose assumed relation to the spirit world may combine elements of both religious leader and healer. Finally, there exists no purpose in making more than the group needs and useful things are made only at the time and in the quantity required (Henry 1965). Trade with other groups is nonexistent at this primitive level. This complementarity between the need for certain goods and the ability to produce them within the group, along with the isolated nature of primitive life, means there is no impetus to develop goods for either barter or sale; hence, there are no concepts such as business, commerce, and profit. These features of primitive groups enable us to retrospectively envision the nature of group members who inhabit those societies. First, the limitations these societies face create a social order with very limited opportunities for developing a self beyond the narrow confines of the group. As in later village life, there are few (if any) choices for the individual to make: one’s life is entirely circumscribed by the small group in which one finds oneself and there are no viable alternatives. A member of a primitive hunting and gathering tribe would never conceive of leaving the tribe as it was an unrealistic fantasy: all one knew of life was one’s own group and to the extent one knew of the existence of other groups there was no basis for believing that one could leave one clan and join another; it just wasn’t done. Like the practice of producing only what was needed in the way of food for subsistence and objects for daily use, the member of a primitive tribe need not consider

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going beyond the established pathways. As Henry (1965:9) observes, the close congruity between what is needed to live and the ability to produce it for use produces a base level of psychological satisfaction that does not fuel a yearning for more or different. The consequence is a social order that is highly stable, where change is slow to the point of being nearly nonexistent, and tribal members possess attitudes and proclivities which are well-matched to the limited options available to them. Here, the self is the role allotted in the group and little more. Indeed, the individual self means nothing to primitive people as the individual is subsumed entirely within the group. As Robert Blauner (1964:30) observes, In a traditional society with little individuation, identity, the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’, was not a problem for the masses of people. Identity, to the extent such a concept was meaningful in such a society, was largely provided through kinship systems, which means that it was not a matter of choice. By way of contrast, in modern industrial and post-industrial societies, where occupational, social, and geographical mobility are near constant, considerable freedom of choice exists. Indeed, one can almost safely assert that freedom of choice along one or more of these dimensions will confront the individual as inevitable. The consequence is that the question of identity, and the formation of identity itself, becomes nearly a continuous, creative process. The dominance of the group among primitive peoples may arise from the limited resources, low level of technology, and simple division of labor but its effects on the self are manifold. While it is easy to identify negative effects, hidden within the limitations imposed on the self by the group are positive qualities that may go unrecognized. Thus, the simple role requirements of group membership in a primitive society can act as insulators from the forces that are often remarked upon in more modern, complex societies. Primitive men and women seldom comment on experiencing a ‘time bind’ (Hochschild 1997) when work becomes home and home takes on all the qualities of work even though members of primitive groups do not have compartmentalized spaces carved out for each for these separate realms. Rather, members of primitive tribes inhabit both home and work perhaps in closer proximity and intimacy than any other peoples. Similarly, the simple role requirements of primitive group life lessen, to the point of eliminating, role strain—the difficulty in performing all of the constituent elements of a role set that are expected of the position holder of a particular status (Goode 1960). The limited resource base of primitive groups that leads to few differences in status

6  Exploring Mankind’s Past

also reduces the potential for what sociologists term role conflict where the expectations for the role performance connected to one status are incompatible with the roles associated with other statuses held by a single individual (Macionis 2005). Finally, the experience of alienation or estrangement, where a painful separation between what one experiences as ‘me’ and the face shown to the world or between what one presents as ‘me’ and the actual feelings experienced but not displayed (Hochschild 2012), is not a condition often reported with respect to the members of primitive tribes. The environmental conditions and cultural adaptations that such groups contrive to survive their circumstances lend themselves to a unity of the self and cooperative harmony with other group members that forces within more modern societies disrupt. In sum, the undifferentiated self that is enveloped within the confines of the primitive group is often the source of yearning for a return to an idealized past in modern cultures. Friction between the self and the group is minimized due to the congruence of circumstances among members, the closely shared set of limited traditions and rituals, and the lack of other realistic options for members to pursue. In such societies, the potential for a breakdown in face-toface interaction sequence as a consequence of failed impression management is lessened. Indeed, the elaborate strategic performances and reciprocally cooperative interactions that Erving Goffman (1959) analyzes for sustaining the definition of any situation are seemingly unnecessary in the taken-forgranted cultures of primitive groups. In this regard, then, the primitive self narrows the distance between what one seems to be, what one is, and what one will become—each aspect of which becomes increasingly problematic in the context of many modern societies. Subsequent forms of society up through and including the Middle Ages reproduced many of these features of primitive society as the process of social differentiation that led to the modern industrial revolution, and thence to modern society, incrementally emerged. Between 10–12,000 years ago, some primitive groups began the transition to either one or the other of horticultural societies or pastoral societies, largely depending on environmental factors such as land fertility and annual rainfall. Horticultural societies are characterized by hunting and gathering tribes that add some field agriculture using simple tools to supplement their food production. The groups become semi-sedentary but often still move periodically due to exhausting the land’s ability to productively raise crops. Pastoral societies developed at the same time where environmental conditions were not as favorable for agriculture but could support the domestication of herd animals. Pastoralists, however, remained primarily nomadic rather than semi-sedentary, moving their herds to different pastures regularly to avoid over-grazing. The pastoralists’ travels

Exploring Mankind’s Past  7

exposed them to other peoples, including those in horticultural encampments, and encouraged the development of trade among groups. Horticultural and pastoral societies both supported an increase in food production and improved its quality, thereby permitting gradually larger settlements and/or tribes. This, in turn, permitted a few group members to refrain from subsistence work. Each form of society could permit a handful of members to focus on making more sophisticated tools or ornamentation or to become more or less full-time religious specialists (Parsons 1966; EvansPritchard 1940). Importantly, however, the overwhelming majority of peoples in both types of community remained tied to basic subsistence and face-toface interaction with only a small number of intimates within the primary family group. Thus, while very modest increases in inequality between some families and others occur in these societies, most individuals are still subject to the pressures of conformity that characterize small group life. Agrarian societies, which arose about 6,000 years ago, united the domestication of animals with horticulture by using animals to increase cultivation yields. These societies continued the expansion in size of communities along with providing further support for an increasingly complex division of labor. Here, for the first time, began the formation of identifiable religious and political institutions beyond the realm of a single influential religious leader with a small coterie of followers or a legitimated, formally enshrined chief or king with a bounded domain. Correspondingly, the expanded division of labor produced implications for the individual and what it meant to be a self within society. As we shall shortly see, however, the further division of labor, which continues to this day, would not be an unalloyed benefit for individuals.

The Transition to Modernity: Feudalism The modern era arose from the ashes of feudalism in the Middle Ages. Feudalism itself evolved from the vestiges of village life that developed around farming communities in the prior sequential phases. Briefly, with the production of surplus leading to increases in private and public property, warfare between groups and societies ensued with greater frequency (Harris 1978a). The European solution to defending against attack from one’s enemies was the establishment of feudal manors, most fully developed in England, with a local noble as baronial chieftain. The lord of the manor would provide protection in return for fealty from his subjects who lived in the feudal village surrounding the manor and worked land on the manor. Peasants would make a payment, often in kind, for their use of manor lands and the protection from attack they

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received. The lords, in turn, loosely affiliated with a national monarch for purposes of their own sovereignty over their feudal estate (Tucker 1972:117–118). Feudalism’s implications for the individual self can be succinctly summarized. The division between land-owning nobles and peasants tethered to small plots of land allotted them for use was pervasive and complete throughout the Middle Ages. As Marx (Tucker 1972:117) observed, “landed property with serf labour chained to it” was the norm and “(T)here was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism.” Only very gradually did there emerge individual craftsmen with small accumulations of capital in the form of tools of their respective trades. The fact that agrarian labor was the universal lot of nearly everyone outside of the landed gentry meant that the status of women, who were conceived of as less productive in the field than men and subordinated to them, was low. The disintegration of the basis for feudal society and the incremental emergence of the industrial era lay in an increasing rural population driven in substantial part by decreased early mortality resulting from cessation of the repeated plagues that dominated the early and middle medieval eras (Bagley 1960; Platt 1976). The surplus population in the countryside meant that there were more people on the feudal estates than the land could successfully support. Men were driven from the peasantry but had nowhere to go. Responding to this imbalance, nobles successfully persuaded the crown to permit them to reassert authority over prime plots allocated to their lieges and lease them to this new class of free wage worker (Brooks 2013). Others who could not afford a lease-hold chose to take their chances; they could apprentice in a craft or join in trade and flocked to the burgeoning towns (Tucker 1972). In this way, the stable arrangements of feudalism that had lasted for centuries were upset and the individual was severed from established relations. The familial and other communal arrangements that characterized the feudal order for the peasantry were cast asunder and the self was thrown into the ensuing dislocation that characterized the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. For many, the known world of the feudal village was replaced by the anonymity and drift of towns, and later, cities. Buffeted by social and economic forces that were in severe flux, an individual self was adrift in swirling seas over which he or she had no control.

The Emergence of the Individual in the Modern Era The disintegration and demise of the social order that characterized feudalism and the emergence of industrial society laid the groundwork for what

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has become the modern individual. In the brief summary of the essential features of earlier societies we have seen that the individual is entirely subsumed within the elemental requirements of the group. Individuals were undifferentiated for the most part with only a few roles that set a person apart from other members of the group in any way. The family with its emphasis on face-to-face interaction was the model for all group relations, offering little support for developing individuation. Even where a unique status was conferred on a person—as when a chief or spiritual healer was identifiable—the individual had little authority over other group members and was not vested within a matrix of other roles that constituted an institution. Thus, these early societies did not have political institutions or religious institutions; rather, the groups had a political leader and/or a soothsayer. Ancient societies like the Greek city states and the Roman Empire established roles such as political leader at the head of distinct institutional realms for the first time. Roman law, for example, recognized and legitimated the separateness and power of the political realm, thereby cementing its authority within society. Feudalism confirmed the separation of the political and religious spheres in society but other modern institutions—education and the economy, for example—only emerged with the nascent stages of pre-industrial society in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Only with the advent of industrialization as a widespread force in the early nineteenth century do we find societies with multiple institutional spheres that will, over time, become increasingly complex, numerous, and intertwined. What we now treat as the beginnings of modern society only arise from this process of elaboration toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The modern individual then becomes a distinct object of interest to social thinkers as he or she continues a process of differentiation leading to the present day. It is to these seminal nineteenth-century social thinkers and their observations regarding self and society that we now turn.

Marx and Engels: Nineteenth-Century Industrial Capitalism and the Individual The Marxian analysis of history, emphasizing the dominance and primacy of class struggle, is well known. As Marx and Engels (Tucker 1972:335–336) phrased it in the Communist Manifesto: Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now

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open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Irrespective of whether or not one subscribes, even partially, to the Marxian analysis, it is indisputable that the various forces that dissolved feudalism over two centuries had the effect of liberating men from this long-established form of social organization while not replacing it with a new, coherent form of society. It is undeniable, for example, that a general instability within English society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prevailed. At the macro level, the forces of increasing rural population leading to rural poverty and the release of vassals from their feudal fealty as free wage workers, already briefly mentioned, produced the restless competition that characterized the burgeoning towns and cities. As Marx (Tucker 1972:140) observed, “[the towns] were formed anew by the serfs who had become free, each man’s own particular labour was his only property.” The absence of a coherent social order within the towns arose from this “flight of the serfs” (Tucker 1972:141) which pitted each individual against the other in a Hobbesian war of all against all within the marketplace for labor. This isolated individualism was exacerbated by the low wages arising from intense urban competition which also produced protective association through the formation of craft guilds. The result, in Marx’s (Tucker 1972:141) phrasing was that “[Each individual] had to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the demand for their labour and the interest of their organized urban competition.” This restiveness both served to produce, and then exacerbate, the divisiveness that characterized English religious life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the political strife that ultimately coalesced into the English Civil War (1642–1651). In its aftermath, the monarchy was replaced by the Commonwealth and the Cromwells, until civil war re-surfaced in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 leading to the restoration. Instability and strife in each of these periods, along with the powerlessness and constantly increasing numbers of the urban masses, paved the way for the ascendant class of merchants and industrialists to usher in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century era of industrial capitalism. Thus, while Marx’s analysis may be rhetorically over-simplified in some respects, portions of his overall thesis describe very well the new relations between members of society that industrial capitalism invoked. Moreover, Marx was among the first of the modern thinkers to develop a coherent theory of what these new relations entailed for the individual. More than he has been given credit for by later writers, Marx laid out a detailed description of what capitalist economics did to the self.

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The Primacy of Individual Self Interest At the heart of Marx’s theory, and of the analyses of modern societies generally, is the tension between self-interest and communal interest. In primitive societies, as we have seen, there is a close alignment between individual needs and roles and the societal resources available for group use or distribution. The general lack of surplus meant that egoistic accumulation was severely restrained; consequently, the individual had little incentive to try and exalt him or herself above the everyday life of the group. There existed few statuses other than commoner and those that did exist did not offer any appreciable material advantages. The dissolution of the stable, if unequal, relations of feudal society unleashed the individual for the equivalent of forced servitude but only to catapult the untethered individual into a frenzied competition for advantages against his or her fellows. Although Marx developed a theory of class warfare, his writings clearly identify its origin as the polyglot composition of the early towns as cauldrons of individualistic self-seeking for advantage: “The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors” (Tucker 1972:143). It is only when individuals realize that they are faced with circumstances common to them all, and identify a common class enemy, that individuals coalesce to form a united front in opposition to other groups. As Marx (1972:143) observed with respect to the emerging precursors to the bourgeoisie: The conditions of the life of the individual burghers became, on account of their contradiction to the existing relationships and of the mode of labour determined by these, conditions which were common to them all and independent of each individual. Yet, this association of the similarly situated is fragile and “splits according to the division of labour into various factions” (Tucker 1972:143) eventually achieving sufficient independent force so that individuals find their “existence predetermined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class” (Tucker 1972:143). While this language over-states the forces that combined against class members under early capitalism, and thus has been one source of criticism of Marx’s theory, his thesis correctly recognizes that when stable relationships, as in feudal society, are fractured and dissolved the individual is thrown back on his own resources. He or she then becomes subject to macro forces such as the economy and class position, which exert such strong effects that the individual’s fate is influenced

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to a degree that the individual cannot resist. As Marx concludes, this is merely an extension of the broader phenomenon that compels the subjection of separate individuals to the historical development of the division of labor leading to class formation. Yet, his observation that these forces essentially dictate a person’s life chances and thereby constrain each individual’s personal development, speaks to the issue of the nature and extent of self-formation available within early industrial capitalism. In this regard, Marx is prescient. Arguably, his theory has more to offer about the nature of the self in society than any of his detractors have ever given him credit for recognizing. The crux of the implications that arise from Marx’s theory may be found in a relatively famous quote from The German Ideology: For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood. (Tucker 1972:124) Against this limiting conception of the division of labor, Marx counter-posed the ideal circumstance he envisioned for each individual in a communist society: [where no one will have] one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, . . . and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Tucker 1972:124) For Marx, the division of labor—particularly the specialized functions imposed by industrial society—constituted an artificial, but powerful, consolidation of mankind’s technical progress over and above the individual. Seemingly an objective power beyond personal influence, the division of labor inspired by machine efficiency that characterized early industrialism could only thwart mankind’s hopes and expectations by submerging true self-interest to the vicissitudes of capital’s pursuit of profit from the form of industrial production. Mankind, in short, “became more and more enslaved under a power alien to them,” (Tucker 1972:127) and only by overcoming

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the existing order’s division of labor could mankind liberate itself from class oppression. Thus, the free individual, able to develop his or her self along lines only he or she determined, was dependent upon the class to which one belonged freeing itself from the shackles of organized labor common to its class. Although Marx’s focus on proletarian revolution absorbed most of his interest, he saw the bourgeoisie as equally constrained by their class location as were the proletariat, albeit the bourgeoisie were constrained in more comfortable economic circumstances. The struggle for self-definition and self-assertion in the stage of early industrial capitalism arose from a tangible source of economic resistance dictated by capitalism’s search for profit. Thus, the nature of the self was reduced to the requirements of economic man. As Marx contended, “we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities” (Tucker 1972:56). This was true because the product of a worker’s labor was not his or hers so that “the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production” (1972:56). Thus, when the worker produces more he becomes more valuable to the capitalist but because there were more workers than industrial jobs, the towns and cities teeming with the unemployed, the capitalist need not pay higher wages. Rather, “the worker [became] an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (1972:57). The consequences during the early stage of industrial capitalism were obvious to Marx: “labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity” (1972:59). Thus, the development of the self, limited by industrial capitalism’s nature, was obviously tied to efforts to address very tangible conditions external to the individual. Few have contested the conditions that faced the common lot of mankind in nineteenth-century England and other European countries gripped by the transition into industrialism. As Engels reported with respect to Manchester’s workers’ districts, “the streets, even the better ones, are narrow and winding, . . . the houses dirty, old, and tumble down, and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible” (Tucker 1972:429). He went on to note: covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found—. . . . In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. . . .

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Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighborhood with the stench of animal putrefaction . . . entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs over heaps of refuse and filth. . . . At the bottom [of a high parapet by a bridge] flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk [River], a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank . . . from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty of fifty feet above the surface of the stream. (1972:430–431) These living conditions were no more horrible than the working conditions that the agglomeration of urban poor faced. Marx reported the observations of a country magistrate speaking at a public meeting in 1860 that in the local [Nottingham] lace trade: Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate. (1972:255) Marx’s language here may achieve a certain level of rhetorical exaggeration but with respect to the general consensus among historians it is widely recognized that of those who worked in spinning and weaving factories in nineteenth-century England, almost half were women and nearly 15% were children under the age of 14 (Marcus 1975:10). Engels, the son of a prosperous German textile mill owner himself, was personally familiar with the work in industrial mills as he was delegated by his father to spend 20 months overseeing cotton mill production in Manchester in the 1840s. As Engels commented, mill workers were forced by their need for subsistence within the new money economy to labor “every day from morning to night against his will at a job he abhors . . . He works for money . . . [enduring] hours of labor [that] are so long and so dismally monotonous, . . . [his activity] limited to insignificant and purely repetitive tasks which continue minute after minute for every day of the year.” (Engels 1968:133–134). For Marx and Engels then, the structure of early industrial capitalism is the defining basis for the nature of the self. Man becomes a mere commodity whose labor power is bought and sold by the owners of the means of

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production who pay mere subsistence wages in a constant search for a return on capital investment in the nature of profit. Man, the worker, is therefore alienated from his own being since he/she must sell oneself for wages that estrange the individual from his/her own labor. Being forced to estrange oneself, one becomes estranged from one’s relation to others and all mankind becomes reduced to their lowest common denominator as economic beings. The only persons exempt from this economic calculus are the bourgeoisie themselves but they, too, are estranged from others because of their own enmeshment in private property relations and their position within the division of labor. All human relations are thereby tainted by the positions allotted by one’s location in class society in early industrial capitalism and each societal institution is influenced negatively by these economic relations. In the family under such a system, Marx observed that “wife and children are the slaves of the husband” (Tucker 1972:123). Likewise, the state becomes nothing more than “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests” (Tucker 1972:151). It is nothing more than a committee for managing and supervising an “illusory communal life” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie (Tucker 1972:124). Religion, education, and other non-economic institutions are themselves dominated by the nature of the underlying economic relations that predominate and thus the state, devised to manage the affairs of contending factions in the interests of the ruling class, simply incorporates these other forms of human organization into mere instrumentalities incapable of opposing the dictates of capitalism. It is for this reason that Marx dismisses religion as the “opium of the people” (Tucker 1972:12) and a generator of false consciousness, a purveyor of illusions about mankind’s true condition that is obscured by the system of hegemonic control exercised by a system of government that exerts the will of the bourgeoisie rather than expresses the will of the people (Tucker 1972:14). In this regard, Marx saw religion and other human institutions as merely exemplary of “the stifling pressure which the different social spheres exert upon other [spheres].” (1972:14) In such a reinforcing system, Marx foresaw little chance mankind could emancipate themselves, enabling individuals to become their true human essence, unless the yoke of industrial capitalism and its entire network of supporting institutional relations could be overthrown. For Marx, only a complete and utter revolution would foster “the transcendence of human self-estrangement” that would permit the “re-integration . . . of man to himself ” (1972:70). Human consciousness, limited by the alienation produced by man’s subjection to his station in society, therefore is used “over and against himself,” making one’s inner world poorer, his consciousness “less belongs to him as his own” (1972:58). In sum, Marx argued that for the individual to

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become self-determining the actual conditions and false relations of industrial capitalism needed to be overcome.

Critique of Marx and Engels Modern criticism of the Marxian theory of society is premised on the increase in the relative strength of other institutional sectors in comparison to the economy. Thus, the era of unrestrained bare-knuckled capitalism that characterized late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century industrialism is said to no longer exist. Consequently, implications for constructing the self in the contemporary United States are assumed to be substantially different than the constraints Marx and Engels discussed. For example, a common argument during the late twentieth century suggested that the age of scarcity had been replaced by an age of affluence (Galbraith 1976). The problem of modern society had become the expenditure of surplus, not its shortage. Hence, societal theories that relied on models of economic man enmeshed in an unforgiving system of pure capitalism were deemed antiquated. There are, however, persuasive arguments that social conditions in the era of twenty-first century neo-liberal capitalism, while differently organized, are in many respects quite similar to the economic and social relations Marx and Engels described. In a recent, carefully researched study of housing for the poor in Milwaukee, as one example, Desmond (2016) found that poor Americans living on the North Side of Milwaukee paid 70%–80% of their limited incomes to live in housing that was only marginally habitable in many cases. Some of the conditions he reports approached, but fell somewhat short of, those Engels described in Manchester, England in the 1840s. These poor Americans, much like those in early industrial England, are often forced to choose between eating and paying the rent; between money for medical treatment and prescription drugs and paying the rent. Landlords, ever vigilant for late payment and non-payment, are the unforgiving equivalent of the rentiers Marx described, who as soon as “[the poor worker] receive his wages . . . is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.” (Tucker 1972:341). Contrary to the poor who are evicted, owning and renting substandard dwellings to the poor can be a lucrative business. Desmond (2016) describes landlords who regularly vacation in the Caribbean in winter as their renters, who often cannot afford both rent payments and heat or electricity, suffer in Milwaukee’s freezing temperatures. In short, just as in the era of early industrial capitalism that Marx and Engels described, the accumulation of capital permits the

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bourgeoisie to use that capital to seek profit and to prey upon the poor in doing so. What then is the difference for the poor individual under the twenty-first century version of neo-liberal capitalism in the United States? The poor remain subject to the prevailing system of class-based, profit-seeking oppression much the same as the poor did in early nineteenth-century England. The landlord-tenant experience Desmond describes “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than ‘callous cash payment’ ” just as Marx contended (Tucker 1972:337). Indeed, Desmond’s work on evictions is not the only recent study that concludes that the American poor are subject to such oppressive economic circumstances that the exploitative economic relations Marx described continue to have relevance. As another example, contemporary studies of various forms of sex work and the lives of the individuals that perform them display unnerving similarities to the impact that the early nineteenth-century division of labor imposed on the poor. Dewey (2011:xii–xiii), analyzing the lives of topless dancers, notes that these poor [generally young] women of limited educational attainment, and few other specialized job skills, saw erotic dancing as offering daily cash as well as a “powerfully seductive promise of socioeconomic mobility.” The combination of money for 8-hour shifts of dancing before strangers nearly naked—however unattractive to the better off—thereby constituted their most desirable alternative from the “limited menu of life choices” (2011:ix) facing these young, poor women. Like nineteenth-century mill workers who must toil at shift work conceived for them and largely benefitting others, the strippers Dewey studied must suppress their ‘real selves’ and become commodified objects of others’ desires (2011:123). Just as factory owners would use industrial laborers’ physical strength up through endless hours of forced, ‘embodied’ toil, strippers must subordinate their bodies to the sexualized, physical requirements of the stage, the pole, and the male gaze. And, like nineteenth-century factory workers, the poor women did so to support themselves and their children. Hence, the aspirations of the contemporary poor in the United States are hardly different than the elemental human desires Marx and Engels recounted—better housing and living conditions, a living wage with less toil—and their consciousness, like nineteenth-century textile workers, remains consumed by their economic plight. In short, the contemporary American poor seem no more capable of achieving “the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement” (1972:70) than the urban proletariat of Marx’s day, nor does it appear they can achieve the true ‘human essence’ that would constitute the “complete return of man to himself ” that Marx posited as mankind’s existential goal. Rather, the poor

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in the United States remain chained to an unforgiving division of labor that exploits them.

Emile Durkheim and the Division of Labor For both Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, the primacy of the division of labor in the organization of society was a principle that united their otherwise disparate analyses of nineteenth-century Europe. Both Durkheim and Marx were evolutionists in the sense that they both believed that changes in the division of labor in society led to new forms of organization. They differed, however, as to whether changes in the division of labor from one era to another constituted an ‘advance’ or ‘progress’ for either society or the individual. Marx’s analysis led him to conceive of each successive stage of society beginning with feudalism as only a new form of organization that consolidated control in a slightly different manner in the hands of a small elite. The poor were thus always oppressed in each phase; only the manner and form of their oppression changed with each successive reformulation of the division of labor. This led Marx to observe that the poor and well off, the commoner and the elite, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are inherently at odds with one another. In Marx’s view this dynamic, yet recursive, struggle would only be resolved when the poor threw off the yoke of history and replaced bourgeois/­capitalist society by revolutionary action. Durkheim, focused on solidarity rather than conflict, relied on the social fact that somehow, regardless of the tumultuousness within societies, human groups cohered over time as the cornerstone of his thinking. Primitive societies were held together in his view by what he termed mechanical solidarity, similar to what others have described: small isolated groups can engender solidarity on the basis of ideas and sentiments common to all members of the group and shared circumstances. Individuality, as we have seen, is extremely limited in these primitive small, face-to-face groups and according to Durkheim “only arises if the [influence and domination of the] community recedes” (Simpson 1963:43). According to Durkheim’s view, the influence of the community over the individual recedes as the division of labor becomes more complex. At this juncture, the individual’s connection to society depends not on shared ideas and sentiments but rather on “definite relations bound together in a system of different specialized functions” (1963:43). While Marx saw the division of labor as simply one more means to oppress individuals and exploit their contribution to society by an elite, Durkheim contended that “the yoke we submit to is much less heavy than when society completely controls us, and

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leaves much more place open for the free play of our initiative” (1963:44). Although generally favorable to the advances supported by the increasingly specialized division of labor, Durkheim was not oblivious to the fact that “[a]t the same time that specialization becomes greater, revolts become more frequent” (1963:81). Durkheim recognized, as Marx and Engels asserted, that the working classes were not satisfied with the conditions under which they lived. Rather, he knew that “all too often [they] accept them only under constraint and force, since they have no means to change them” (1963:82). Still, relying on the metaphor of bodily organs which work together for the benefit of the whole, Durkheim believed the division of labor was, on the whole, beneficial and the source of social strength and advancement. He termed this form organic solidarity. The core conception of Marx’s and Durkheim’s theories naturally influence, and then reflect, their views on religion. For Durkheim, the basis for all modern religions may be found in the simple fact that the ideas, sentiments, and sacred rituals are held in common by a group having a common life (1963:47). Thus, it is when a group shares beliefs and practices with some degree of intensity that these shared views take on a religious character. As society moves from mechanical to organic solidarity, Durkheim observes that religion “comes to embrace an ever smaller part of social life” (1963:47). There are fewer collective representations which are less widely shared (1963:49), the common conscience is reduced although not extinguished, and it is “the division of labor which more and more occupies the place formerly filled by the common conscience” and binds society together (1963:50). For Durkheim, though, the overall impact on the individual is salubrious. As he phrases the effect: As long as societies are restricted in size and density the only psychic life capable of being developed is one common to all members of the group and identical to each member. But as societies become larger and especially as they become dense a psychic life of a new sort makes its appearance. Individual differences, originally lacking or indistinguishable amidst the bulk of social likenesses, appear in bold relief and increase. A host of things that had persisted beyond the reach of individual minds . . . become objects of representation . . . each [individual] becomes an agent of spontaneous activity. Special types of personality come forth. . . . The collective psychic life becomes freer and wider . . . individual minds, . . . [benefit from] their widening, their sophistication and their flexibility. (1963:57–58)

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As with the division of labor generally, however, Durkheim is aware of some negative tendencies. In such circumstances Durkheim observes that mankind becomes “discontent with tradition,” increasingly directed toward controlling the future, and the subject of increased yearning and striving for new wants (1963:58). Durkheim’s generally optimistic view of human progress as the division of labor becomes the inherent glue that holds society together is dimmed by his discussion of the effects that individualism has on the frequency of suicide. As Durkheim concedes, while individualism is not synonymous with egoism, the two are closely connected. Moreover, where progress and change are rapid, and the rules restraining individual conduct sufficiently malleable to permit innovation, the weaker restraints permit “desires and ambitions [to] overflow impetuously at certain points” (1963:65). Unwilling to accept resignation, Durkheim notes that the number of individuals who are “malcontent and disquieted is bound to increase” (1963:66). Mankind, suffering from the “haunting search for the unattainable,” (1963:69) becomes restless and unappeased. In such a context, poverty can act as an insulator, protecting the individual from suicide because “it acts as a restraint on itself ” (1963:77). Overweening ambition and greed, to the contrary, cannot be calmed “since [their] goal is far beyond all [they] can obtain” (1963:78). The individual, whose unregulated emotions are adjusted neither to others nor to the conditions under which he or she must live, faces painful disillusionment and disappointment when achievement is curtailed or one’s accustomed status diminished (1963:119). The ambitious self, driven by the futility of an endless pursuit for that which cannot be attained, may then turn against itself in a state of “irritated disgust with life” (1963:120). Having abandoned the past for a race with eyes constantly fixed on the future, the individual finds nothing to comfort his or her present afflictions nor strength to endure the least reverse. The sterile division of labor cannot act as a salve for such a state. Durkheim’s observations regarding personal and social equilibrium have profound implications for our investigation of the nature of the self, as well as the manner individuals feel compelled to follow in constructing a self, in the twenty-first century United States. As Durkheim notes, “No living being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means” (1963:73). The act of maintaining equilibrium is a simple one for animals according to Durkheim: a matter of “automatic spontaneity because the animal depends on purely material conditions” (1963:73). Although Durkheim obviously misstates, by neglecting or underestimating, the role of emotions and mental states in animals, he is correct that for men and women the balancing act may be more complex. The problem for modern man, confirmed

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by many writers since, is the multitude of “seemingly desirable ends craving fulfillment” (1963:73) that contemporary society can generate compounded by the fact that nothing inherent in mankind’s constitution sets a limit on desire. For Durkheim the answer is in “knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others” (1963:78), thereby finding an attachment to life and society. Released from all restraint, men and women flounder, “tempted to extend the range of [their] needs indefinitely” (1963:77). Facing restraint and accepting limits, which compel moderation, accustoms individuals to develop self-discipline and accept the discipline of society with equanimity. In Durkheim’s view, the self, left to its own devices, cannot sustain itself absent the structure society provides.

The Weberian Self and the Routines of Everyday Life Max Weber’s sociology may be understood in part as an effort to respond to Marx’s purely economic analysis of history by broadening it to include a materialist assessment of the political and military domains (Gerth and Mills 1946:47). For Marx, the great transitions of history from one period to another were dictated by shifts in economic control. Weber adds to this understanding an appreciation for the struggle over the disposition of military violence and the administration of large tracts of land and large populations. Thus, while Marx saw the accumulation of capital as an attempt to secure economic status by exalting oneself over the lot of common men, and the continued use of capital to maintain that status, Weber noted that nineteenth-century rulers were simply the latest in a long line, each attempting to secure their status as legitimized political leaders through the financial and military means they could command at their disposal. Weber does not deny the existence of the economic class struggles that dominate Marx’s theory; rather, Weber merely sees other groups and other contending forces within society contributing to the successive phases and forms of human organization that have arisen. As political leaders struggle to assert control over their domains, they employ whatever strategies and resources come to hand. For Weber, one of the principal means of imposing control, whether over men or things, is applying the principle and process of rationalization. In Weber’s view, this is principally what industrial manufacturers did by adopting and readapting technological advances and deploying those advances to make production more efficient and precise. In the course of doing so they also rationalized the workforce by, for example, turning labor into ‘shift work.’ Weber does not dispute the harsh conditions that this process sometimes inspired but in his view rationalization

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was somewhat inevitable. Weber’s hope was that rationalization could be restrained from dominating every realm of society so that an over-arching scheme of administrative control did not capture mankind in an “iron cage of rationality” (1946:48–50; Lindsey and Beach 2002:569). Weber’s examination of the increased importance of rationalized processes in modern society reaches its zenith in his analysis of bureaucracy. There is some dispute as to the precise set of societal conditions that lead to the adoption of bureaucratic forms of organization. For his part, Weber identified (1) the existence of a money economy and (2) the transformation of villeinage (that is, the status of serf where the commoner holds his status and relation to the land through fealty to the lord of the manner) to tenancy, where the landholder pays taxes in the form of money-income (1946:204–205). These preconditions permit the noble (and subsequently the monarch) to order their heretofore fluctuating income into a systematic budget. To manage the money income, and safeguard against the loss of control, the ruler develops a cadre of subalterns who apply fixed rules for receiving, accounting, and disbursing the funds. In short, a bureaucracy is created (1946:205–206). Weber’s well-known analysis of the form of human organization that constitutes bureaucracy relies on his method of identifying the elements of an “ideal type” (1946:59–61) which consists of articulating a logically precise conception that defines the essential, core nature of bureaucratic administration. For Weber, the core elements included: (1) the establishment of fixed and official jurisdictional areas; (2) characterized by a hierarchy of offices; (3) that are governed by rules; (4) which are administered by officeholders whose duty it is to follow the rules; (5) who are appointed based on their attainment of regulated qualifications; and (6) whose actions are recorded in written records which are maintained for later inspection and accountability (1946:196–198). Weber believed that the principal reason bureaucratic organization spread so successfully from the end of the feudal era through the nineteenth century was due to its technical superiority over other forms of human organization for the conduct of many missions and the completion of many tasks. Weber identified bureaucracy’s chief virtues as “[P]recision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—” (1946:214). For each of these reasons and all of them collectively, bureaucracy served the capitalist market economy well in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when Weber lived and wrote. In particular, the speed, frictionless efficiency, compatibility with specialized tasks to be discharged by objective rules, and the calculability of results leant themselves well to industrial capitalist enterprises such as manufacturing (1946:215).

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Among the features of bureaucracy which led Weber to hold only a qualified view of its benefits was the fact that it was so sustainable and continuously self-reproducing. Indeed, Weber considered bureaucracy among the forms of human organization the most difficult to destroy (1946:228). This is one reason Weber had little belief in Marx’s view that capitalism would end in proletarian revolution: bureaucracy, once entrenched, was “superior to every instance of ‘mass’ or even ‘communal action’ ” (1946:228) due to its accretion of power with respect to established relations within the overall social structure. For this same reason, the individual was subordinated to the bureaucracy even though the organization might be dedicated to ostensibly serving human needs. Thus, Weber observed that the “individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus in which he is harnessed” since he is “chained to his activity by his entire material and ideal existence” (1946:228). Weber was also distrustful of the ascendance and intractability of bureaucracies for other reasons, too. He noted, for example, that the bureaucracy seeks always to increase the superiority of the ‘professionally informed’ and does so, in part, by conducting its business in the course of secret sessions in so far as possible. This has the effect of hiding its knowledge and actions from both criticism and dispersal among the uninitiated. If it is not already clear, bureaucratization therefore has quite serious consequences for the nature of the men and women who will both inhabit bureaucratic positions and receive both the tangible and intellectual products that bureaucracies distribute. With respect to bureaucratic officeholders, Weber decried the type of person that mechanized administration sought and formed—a narrowed professional, dutifully examined, approved, and certified, ready for installation in an office where he or she would spend the balance of his or her career (1946:50). Weber saw such petty bureaucrats as reduced to engaging in a life of ritualized routines, “lacking in heroism, human spontaneity, and inventiveness.” As one consequence, they become alienated from their work in the same sense that Marx described factory workers as alienated from the products they manufactured under industrial capitalism (1946:50; Blauner 1964:26–31). The recipient of bureaucratic administration, those who receive the rule-calculated output disgorged from the maw of modern mass production, experiences the alienation of the worker that has become invested in the rational manufacture of the bureaucratic product, whether a tangible or intangible one: the consumer of this alienated product, like the worker who made it, becomes disenchanted. Like the worker, the customer is engaged in an alienated activity as the (largely) passive recipient of something with which he or she has had little involvement and virtually no control (1946:50; Ritzer 2005). As one consequence of this disenchanted experience, businesses

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must increasingly invent what Ritzer (2005:x–xi) describes as ever newer and more attractive “means of consumption” to dispel the alienated experience of living in mass consumer society in an attempt to ‘re-enchant’ a routinized, everyday world. Weber, too, believed that individuals, stifled by the strictures of a rationally organized, bureaucratic society, would need to seek means of escape in order to retain their humanity, although Weber envisioned means other than enchanted consumerism as the ideal (1946:347). Weber’s conception of mankind arises from his conception of the sociological enterprise which has been labeled verstehen—an attempt at understanding the individual and society. Weber conceived of society as consisting of systems of action at different levels of generality—society, community, association, family, and the individual. While Weber recognized the explanatory utility of rationality with respect to the activities of ‘economic man’ and major societal transitions from one form of human organization to another, Weber’s analysis of charismatic leadership acknowledges the power of irrational grounds for human motivation as does his study of traditional societies (1946:56–58). This range of rationality-irrationality along a continuum leads him to believe that empathic understanding of the subjective intentions of the individual may offer the best explanatory model so long as the analysis objectively comprehends that the individual’s own understanding may not wholly coincide with the societal reality. Ultimately, this approach leads Weber to the view that social life consists of a broad field of competing values. In Weber’s view, mankind must then exercise deliberate choice between the open alternatives among these values (1946:70). Although Weber’s theory provided space for mankind to seek and experience freedom rather than purely submit to ‘historical necessities,’ he was pessimistic that the individual would be able to partake of freedom in many instances. Weber wrote: According to all experience, history relentlessly gives rebirth to aristocracies and authorities; and those who deem it necessary for themselves, or for “the people,” may cling to them. If only material conditions and interest constellations directly or indirectly created by them mattered, then every sober reflection would convince us that all economic weathercocks point in the direction of increasing servitude. (1946:71) In sum, while mankind’s quest for freedom remained a touchstone for Weber’s hope that liberal human values would prevail, his analysis of history and economics suggested otherwise. Seeking the freedom to become a self of one’s own choice, the ‘compulsive apparatus’ of the economic system would

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likely prevent the creative unification of the external demands of society and mankind’s internal urges.

Conclusion Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—the three towering figures of nineteenthcentury social analysis—forecast, generally, a pessimistic view of the prospects for the individual. While Durkheim may be marginally less pessimistic than either Marx or Weber, all three question whether the external forces that pervade the history of the world can be surmounted, or evaded, so that the self may realize its own self-conceived destiny. The question arises whether other nineteenth- to early twentieth-century thinkers offered views that would counter this pessimism. Vilfredo Pareto comes to mind. Pareto’s sociology is founded upon his conception of society as being held in a state of dynamic equilibrium. This permits him to recognize the existence of classes, which he principally divides into a governing elite and a lower stratum of the governed or ruled (Lopreato 1965:113–114). Although counter-posed to one another, the two classes must co-exist and interact. This means that while society is in constant motion, there is a continual resettling in that some forces and individuals are in the ascendancy and others in decline. The consequence, according to Pareto, is a circulation of elites in two senses. On the one hand, the various constituencies that compose the elite—Pareto mentions the military, the business leaders, the plutocrats—shuffle influence among themselves as some wax and others wane in display of qualities that contribute to governance. More importantly, however, quality individuals and families rise from the lower classes reinvigorating the governing cadre and refreshing the mix of values and sentiments “necessary for keeping them in power” (1965:115). Should either regenerative cycle of movements ever come to an end (or, if both do so), the governing elite can be swept from power, often taking the nation down with it. In short, at all times there is constant movement which, among other things, means that individuals and families of the lower classes always have a chance of rising—even though only a very few may do so. How then does Pareto conceive of the individual identifying who she or he might be? Pareto’s approach is to follow the model of nineteenth-century pure economics by leaving the decision of what constitutes utility—what is best or most advantageous—to the person (1965:127–128). This permits Pareto to conclude, as Weber does, that “these various utilities sometimes stand in overt opposition” among one or more individuals or groups

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(1965:129) thereby acknowledging the basis for dissent, conflict, and contradiction with society. Indeed, underlying Pareto’s theory is a theory of individual, intra-class, and inter-class competition. The nature of the competition is rather indistinct, and the qualities needed to ‘win’ the competition arbitrary and subject to regular reformulation; still, Pareto sees the ‘churn’ in society as one of individuals seeking to maximize their benefits and reduce their disadvantages (1965:134–135). Thus, those among the lower classes compete to develop themselves and their families so as to gain admission into the elite and, especially, the governing elite (1965:145–146). This permits Pareto to use the analogy of being successful in ‘examinations’ to the success an individual, family, or group might possess in being held “fit to govern.” Pareto does not consider that there are those who simply shun the competition and are content to tread water at the level at which they find themselves other than to suggest that such individuals contribute to the stability of society. In sum, Pareto envisions a sort of democratic meritocracy where the superior and successful are anointed on grounds that display a certain appeal of competence and integrity but ones that can never be definitively named or calculated. Rather, society is pretty much a free-form scramble where actions result in reactions and movements inspire counter-movements until one force or set of forces or another rises to the top—temporarily. Pareto’s analysis of society does enlarge the space for individuals and families to act in an intentional way to navigate within and even beyond their position within a class. In this regard, it offers a slightly more optimistic paradigm than Marx and Weber—or even Durkheim. Still, Pareto’s scheme of continual, albeit arbitrary, competition among members and groups retains some of the flavor evident in each of his sociological forebears: external forces impinge on individuals and while those forces do not determine how individuals will respond, or compel them to passively acquiesce in the face of forces delimiting who they will elect to become, the power of external forces cannot be readily ignored in their imprint on the individual self. Our historical discussion of the nature of social life in this chapter has been inspired by an acknowledgement that to understand the nature of the individual, it is necessary to understand the nature of the society in which the individual lives. Foremost among the qualities to be considered are the historical era under examination and the cultural legacy and level of attainment which, taken together, characterize the nature of social life in a society within which the individual exists. In the course of our review, we have moved from primitive tribalism to what Marx termed ‘bourgeois individualism.’ In so doing we should keep in mind Philip Slater’s (1990:8) cautionary reminder that

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“collectivism has been the more usual lot of humans [throughout history].” As Slater (1990:8) went on to observe, Most people in most societies have lived and died in stable communities that took for granted the subordination of the individual to the welfare of the group. The aggrandizement of the individual at the expense of his neighbors [in such communities] was simply a crime. Now that we are leaving the nineteenth century and entering first, twentieth-century industrial society and then post-industrial society (and its many euphemisms), we have entered that phase of social development in which the relationship between self and society has, in many ways, been reversed. Individualism, which has always had a strong influence in the United States since de Tocqueville’s visit in the 1830s, now becomes the dominant factor while family, neighborhood, community, and nation-state recede into the background. As Daniel Bell (1996:222) sums up the transition from the nineteenth century onward, “In bourgeois society, the individual, not the state, is the unit whose purposes are primary for the society.” In this conception, which still largely prevails in the United States in the twenty-first century, “[mankind’s goal] is to be free of the ascriptive ties of family, community, or state; to be responsible for one’s self; to make or even remake one’s self in accordance with one’s ambition” (1996:224). Our focus will become the nature of the twenty-first century U.S. society in which individuals find themselves and the ways in which individuals attempt to navigate those social circumstances by forming, and re-forming, the self. What is the nature of our United States today? Generally, there is substantial agreement that it is disunited and divided. Robert Putnam (2015:1) recalls a nation in the 1950s as “a place that offered decent opportunity” to both the well off and those who were less well off. Today, having conducted interviews of the rich and the poor in communities across the country, Putnam (2015:227) finds that “economic disparities among the families [interviewed] have been an important part of each story.” An even more important quality observed about the contemporary United States may be the lack of trust in people generally, in neighbors, and in institutions. Putnam’s (2015:95) interviewees report “You cannot trust people”; “you don’t even know where people work now” (2015:201); and the rich and poor report not only living in materially different worlds, they say they live in markedly different states of trustworthiness with those around them (2015:219–221). Differences like these have led Putnam and many others to see the United States today as politically divided as well. Indeed, Hochschild (2016:6), quoting a 2014 Pew

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Research Center study, reports that politically engaged Americans do not merely see their political opponents as mistaken or wrong but as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Indeed, as Hochschild (2016) argues, the narratives Americans of different political persuasions use to explain their views of the contemporary United States are so extremely divergent that there is little room for conversation. Indeed, some commentators have contended that Americans no longer principally move for better jobs, better housing, better schools, or milder climate. Rather, many today move to self-segregate in communities anchored by shared political and social views, burrowed deeply among those who think alike, walled off from those dangerously misguided other Americans (Bishop and Cushing 2008). This is the contemporary United States to which we will turn next.

References Bagley, J.J. 1960. Life in Medieval England. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Bell, Daniel. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bishop, Bill and Robert G. Cushing. 2008. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Blauner, Robert. 1964. Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brooks, J. 2013. Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Collins, Randall and Michael Makowsky. 1984. The Discovery of Society. New York: Random House. Cooley, Charles Horton. 1962. Social Organization. New York: Schocken Books. Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in an American City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dewey, Susan. 2011. Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engels, Frederick. 1968. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer. New York: Oxford University Press. Farley, John E. 2003. Sociology. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1976. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills.1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Anchor Books. Goode, William J. 1960. “A Theory of Role Strain.” American Sociological Review, 25:483–496. Harris, Marvin. 1978a. Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. New York: Vintage Books. Harris, Marvin. 1978b. Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. New York: Vintage Books. Henry, Jules. 1965. Culture Against Man. New York: Vintage Books.

Exploring Mankind’s Past  29 Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1997. The Time Bind. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: The New Press. Lee, Richard B. 1984. The Dobe !Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Lindsey, Linda L. and Stephen Beach. 2002. Sociology. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Lopreato, Joseph. 1965. Vilfredo Pareto. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. Macionis, John J. 2005. Sociology. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, Prentice Hall. Marcus, Steven. 1975. Engels, Manchester & the Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. Milner, Murray, Jr. 1994. Status and Sacredness. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, Clarence, Ed. 1959. The Great Legal Philosophers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1966. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Platt, C. 1976. The English Medieval Town. New York: David McKay Company. Putnam, Rober D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ritzer, George. 2005. Enchanting a Disenchanted World. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Sahlins, Marshall D. “The Origin of Society.” Scientific American, 203(3) (September, 1960):76–87. Simpson, George, Ed. 1963. Emile Durkheim: Selections from His Work. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. Slater, Philip. 1990. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon Press. Tucker, Robert C., Ed. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Documenting the Divide

2

Social Division in the Twenty-First Century United States

In 2016 a palpable unease spread across the United States. The restlessness and unhappiness was felt by many, perhaps even most, Americans. Research surveys conducted by different organizations spread along the political spectrum documented the country’s mood on the basis of multiple issues and across various dimensions. Still, there existed then, and still exists now, uncertainty as to the origin and inherent nature of our national discontent and the direction our national malaise would track in the future. One indicator, if not consequence, of our nation’s twenty-first century cultural climate is the Democratic-Republican, Liberal-Conservative political divide that has festered for two decades. According to some commentators, political and cultural polarization has reached its apogee, forming a visible nebula that wafts across the American landscape clouding our vision and prospects. The political divide may, however, merely be one manifestation of broader differences that have been re-emerging, or gaining focal ascendency, as groups and individuals in the United States confront one another. This chapter will explore the issues and attitudes that separate Americans. Frank traced the history of American disquiet through the story of the emergence of a revitalized Republican right in What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004). Frank’s book tells the story of radicalism in nineteenth-century Kansas politics. The state was a hotbed of labor unrest, quasi-socialist movements, and grass-roots populism. Frank drew his title from an 1896 essay by William Allen White, a native-born Kansan journalist, who considered the state’s radicalism at that time to be “what was the matter.” Frank then traced Kansas’

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devolution from left-wing populist stronghold to moderately conservative Republican redoubt to bastion of right-wing populists at the vanguard of the Tea Party movement. Highly critical of the manufactured nature of the Tea Party movement there (Frank considered it to be led by “an assortment of millionaires and lawyers and Harvard grads” who were assailing control of the national government by elites like themselves), he was also critical of the Democratic Party’s failure to address and advocate for the working-class and lower-income folks who were the men and women suffering the slings and arrows of twenty-first century market capitalism. In Frank’s view, the two parties were squared off in a debate that, while inexpertly conducted, revealed the depth of the contemporary class divide in the United States. The legacy of this struggle for the votes of everyday Americans in the heartland was perhaps a realization that both political conservatives and liberals were ‘out of touch’ with a wide swath of the American people and had for too long abandoned those struggling to prosper in an economy that was heaping rewards on those better off. Dick Meyer (2008), writing four years later, noted many of the same trends that Frank reported in our politics. For Meyer, our politics emerged in its highly partisan form because it slid into an embrace of regressive tribalism. As our collective communal bonds weakened, leaving Americans adrift without the once stable neighborhoods and shared values of the postwar era, the descent into identify politics fueled further division (2008:47–51). Comparing the then contemporary American political landscape to Balkanization, Meyer had little hope that the divide could be bridged. Meyer’s analysis, more than most, attributed a good part of the division to social factors rather than simply political ones. He noted that American society, if not all Americans, possessed an abundance of material security that facilitated for many comfortable lifestyles and broad choice about how to live. Yet, this had not apparently led to much satisfaction or happiness; rather, at best Americans could be described as “great existential consumers” in many cases (2008:57). To a greater extent than Frank, Meyer focused on the up-rootedness of Americans as a significant factor in our discontent (2008:58). Consequently, the fact that so many Americans appeared to have lost the historic guides they used for navigating American society fostered the need for quick and ready identities that could ‘travel light’ and usefully form connections quickly, if not deeply (2008:61, 66–67, 68–70). Given the loss of historic connection to coherent narrative, Meyer noted, “It is not at all clear to us anymore what an invented or discovered self is to be forged from” (2008:67). For Meyer, it is our separation from one another that drove our political differences, not the other way around.

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The wide social and political divide that Thomas Frank unveiled, and Dick Meyer affirmed, has arguably been amplified by other divisions. Eugene Robinson, in Disintegration (2010), addressed the culmination and effects of the “splintering of Black America” over the preceding 40 years. For Robinson, African American solidarity was once a given: oppressed by their shared subordination in white America, blacks banded together regardless of circumstance for protection from their common foe. Undeniable social and economic changes, however, had cleaved Black Americans along class—and even racial—lines since the end of World War II, changes that had created a gap between the haves and have-nots among African Americans (or the Mainstream and the Abandoned as Robinson characterizes the two groups). Fractured along class lines, Robinson also contends that contemporary immigrants of African descent and those descendants of ‘mixed race’ inheritance are also distinctly identifiable, and to a large extent segregated, factions within the broader Black American community. Indeed, residential, social, and cultural segregation among these four sub-groups is Robinson’s principal point: the solidarity and unity that once existed has been dissolved; these groups have become in many respects as Balkanized as southern Tea Party Republicans and northeastern urban liberals. Robinson reserves his greatest concern, however, for the divide between the Mainstream and the Abandoned because together they constitute the vast majority of African Americans in the contemporary United States. Robinson (2010:197) bemoans the failure to communicate that typifies the relations between these two sub-groups and characterizes the failure of Mainstream American Blacks to even correctly comprehend the actual circumstances of the Abandoned as even more troubling. Given Robinson’s focus on the disintegration of a unified African American community, he has little need to address the fact—one that seems indisputable—that if Black Mainstream Americans have little contact with, or comprehension of, the plight of Abandoned African Americans, white Americans have even less engagement with this sector of our nation. Indeed, as part of the American underclass, few Americans other than professional managers of the correctional, welfare, and public education systems have contact with these marginalized Americans. E. J. Dionne, Jr. (2012), writing a couple of years after Robinson and eight years after Frank, confirms many elements of the nation’s political divide, although he offers perhaps less on the social divisions, that each writer identifies. Dionne’s (2012:1) analysis of the mood of the nation in 2008, just prior to the national election, centers on a perceived yearning to reverse American decline and repair what he characterizes as a “crisis of the soul.” The book, as he explains, is an effort to make sense of the then current political environment

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and identify why political divisions were running so deep (2012:3). As Dionne acknowledges, the book is also an attempt to rebalance some of the political tensions and thereby offer those on either end of the political spectrum an alternative that remains true to the American historical heritage that Dionne sees in our past. For our purposes, however, Dionne’s book serves as one more reminder of how virulent the political division between conservatives and liberals had become. As he noted, a New York Times/CBS News Survey in April, 2010 found that Tea Party supporters were, on the whole, Republican, white, male, married, and older than 45 years of age. Their attitudes toward race were also significantly different from those of the balance of the country (2012:31, 33). Delving deeply into the historical sources of contemporary Tea Party doctrine, Dionne’s careful textual research simply elaborated on the width of the gap between America’s far right and far left. Acknowledging the strength and value we place on individualism, Dionne argues that an equally strong, but recently dormant, communitarianism is also evident in our national character (2012:260). It is, however, the felt urgency of Dionne’s argument that should impress us since the fact that he needs to argue so strenuously is recognition of the magnitude of the political differences continuing to confront the nation. Symptomatic of the nation’s restlessness was the unsettled nature of the 2016 presidential election. Both major parties suffered challenges from dissidents during the course of the nomination process and centrist views were under severe attack in each case. The campaign revealed intense partisan division among Americans, amounting at one extreme to outright hostility between those who most closely identified as either die-hard Republicans or committed Democrats. The Pew Research Center (2016a) reported that its polling found that 55% of registered Democrats responding said that the Republican Party made them ‘afraid’ while nearly as many (49%) of Republicans gave the same answer regarding Democrats. Among those who identified most closely with either party, the percentages were even higher. These negative views were not limited to disagreements regarding the other party’s policies. Rather, polling responses disclosed that members of both parties held negative views regarding members of the opposing party simply on the basis of their choice of political affiliation. The major parties’ respective candidates, Donald Trump (Republican) and Hilary Clinton (Democrat) shared these extremely negative assessments from members of the opposite party. Asked to score each candidate along a scale of 0–100 where the lower score indicated a highly unfavorable rating and the higher score a substantially positive one, Democrats extended to Donald Trump an average score of 11 while Republicans awarded Hilary Clinton a nearly equally low score of 12.

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Other surveys regarding political affiliation and views conducted during 2016 reveal additional striking differences between members of the major parties. Demographically, major differences exist along racial, ethnic, and religious lines with respect to party identification. Overall, registered Republican voters are overwhelmingly white (93%), slightly older on average than Democrats, and much more likely to be religiously affiliated, including a third of Republicans who identify as white evangelical Protestants (Pew Research Center 2016b). An earlier survey taken in late fall, 2015 found that more highly educated adults generally expressed more liberal views on social, economic, and political issues. Registered voters with postgraduate degrees, for example, were much more likely to identify with the Democratic party than the Republican party (Pew Research Center 2016c). The political divide evident in the 2016 presidential election was not an entirely new phenomenon. Earlier Pew Research Center reports, as well as surveys conducted by other organizations, had also documented substantial political polarization within the United States. Precisely two years earlier the Pew Research Center (2014a) led its report on political partisanship by stating, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines— and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive—than at any time in the last two decades.” In this earlier polling, too, each party’s most committed adherents stated affirmatively that they viewed the opposing party as a “threat to the nation’s well-being.” The divide was reflected in many ways. Using a measure of ideological consistency the Pew Center has developed out of data it has been collecting since 1994, the survey results (based on a national telephone survey of 10,013 conducted over January-March, 2014) showed that more than 90% of Republicans were to the conservative right of the median Democrat responding; the same was true for Democrats, who were more than 90% to the liberal left of the median Republican. Separate polling in 2014 found that those most committed to a major party identity and its ideological positions were substantially more likely to vote than those less engaged with party identification and that a very strong motivator for voting was animosity toward the other party, its positions, and its members (Pew Research Center 2014b). These observations are not limited to Pew Center studies or to studies arising from one side or other of the political spectrum. A compilation of research conducted by individuals affiliated with different research and polling operations by the American Enterprise Institute confirms (and in some cases relies on) the Pew Center’s findings. Thus, a survey reported for AEI’s monthly political report for July/August, 2017 notes that 86% of respondents stated that they believe the country is more politically divided than in previous

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years. Likewise, separate polling found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats surveyed believed that Republications felt different about not only politics but probably don’t share their other goals and values either; Republicans, for their part, felt exactly the same about Democrats in nearly identical percentages (American Enterprise Institute 2017). Broadly, across the two major political parties as well as independents, Americans state to polling organizations that (1) they believed the moral state of the country is getting worse (77%); (2) they saw the country changing in ways that they did not agree with (61%); and (3) that the predominant attitude throughout the country was that everyone is in it for themselves (American Enterprise Institute 2017). Economically, respondents reported that they believed the American Dream was harder to attain than in the past (69%) and would be harder to attain in the future (49%) (American Enterprise Institute 2017). But while Americans share general attitudes regarding the prospects for achieving the American Dream, a more nuanced examination of attitudes toward upward mobility across social classes in the United States reveals substantial differences in the attitudes and behaviors of poor versus wealthier Americans. Carol Graham (2017), in her recent book, concludes that optimism regarding economic well-being is reflected in the nature of discourse used by Americans across the widening inequality gap in the United States: those economically better off express frames of reference that emphasize knowledge acquisition as a means of achieving upward mobility and feel more optimistic about the future while the less well-off speak in language emphasizing short-term financial patches and lower optimism about their prospects. The consequence, in part, is that optimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy encouraging those who are better off to do better because of their longer term outlooks and the invested behavior in stable efforts that makes their aspirations for upward mobility more likely to come true. The confluence of these various trends in Americans’ attitudes about contemporary life in the United States has led to some minor areas of agreement across political lines and class location, although many of the areas of agreement merely reflect agreed upon sources of dissatisfaction. Thus, for example, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll (2017) indicates that the percentage of respondents stating that they want the federal government to do more to solve the country’s problems and meet American’s needs has been growing. The question, first posed in 1995, was answered affirmatively only by a third of respondents at that time. In the survey concluded in April, 2017, 57% of those answering agreed that the federal government should do more. The issues divide in American society has ramifications far beyond the political realm. As this initial, capsule summary suggests, the divide extends

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into every realm and facet of life in the United States—economic, racial and ethnic relations, religion, education, generational lines, social views, and personal lives. As these thumbnail profiles of Americans’ attitudes suggest, seldom has the nation been as divided on so many issues at the same time. Perhaps the most serious implications of this degree of polarization extend to the nature of the self and one’s relationship to the wider community and the nation. The question arises whether a nation whose members are separated on so many issues can cohere and function and whether, embedded within the turbulent push and pull of the widely divergent social forces at play, the individual can find and build an integrated self.

Establishing a Foundation: U.S. Society in the Twenty-First Century The extent of the gulf separating Americans across many institutional and issues boundaries has been the subject of any number of studies and reports, including those summarized in the preceding introductory remarks. Routinely, however, reports regarding the differences identified among Americans in recent years have been segregated by narrow topical definitions, leaving the broader outlines of division unexamined. The result has been a loss in comprehensiveness and overall perspective with regard to the state of disunion found within the contemporary United States to the detriment of our understanding. As a consequence, our understanding of who we are and who we might wish to become has been hampered, if not altogether rendered impossible. As our summary review of the historical progression of human organization in Chapter 1 suggests, the essential nature of any society has critical implications for the nature of the self. Thus, we must expand our introductory discussion and establish a broad factual foundation regarding contemporary U.S. society in order to develop further our inquiry into identify formation and the nature of the self.

The Institutional Society The United States has often been characterized as an institutional society with formal organizations dominating American social life. Generally, the prominent, major institutions have included government (politics), the economy (business), the family and wider community, education, religion, law, and media. Today, many Americans are dubious regarding the promise or potential

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offered by each of these institutional sectors. Americans’ confidence in their institutions is of substantial interest because institutional anchors have been the common source for Americans to exhibit their values and beliefs as a foundation for building a self. Indeed, the public self cannot be created without a stage upon which to display itself and, by and large, those stages are found in organizations that form part of the over-arching institutional structure of our society. If Americans become estranged from their institutions and no longer believe those institutions have the potential to make life sustainable and more just, the self has little recourse. An explanation of the nature of institutions will help us understand why. Institutions are generally defined as social arrangements that form ­stable, predictable ways for a society to carry out essential functions. Importantly, ­institutional arrangements must be supported by a society’s culture so that institutional practices are reflective of a society’s values. In turn, ­established institutions are generally accorded widespread respect: they are “taken for granted” parts of everyday reality and legitimated by their continued support within the social structure. Any institution that loses, or otherwise forfeits, substantial support among a society’s population is threatened by collapse. Equally, however, established institutions can undergo change that will permit them to remain viable by transforming their mission, their practices, their relationship to other institutional sectors, or their image among important constituent audiences. It is not uncommon for institutions in modern societies to gain prestige and ascendancy at the expense of one, or another, competing institutional sectors. The consequence is that institutions in fast moving, complex societies like the United States are always seeking ways to sustain themselves. Organizations are the corporeal embodiment of institutions. Thus, education is a sector of society dedicated to developing and communicating knowledge and socializing the young, but the process is carried out through innumerable organizations called, generally, schools. Likewise, government and politics are the institutionalized means for managing public life and coordinating projects and resources necessary for maintaining the social structure, but this mission is conducted through the auspices of tens of thousands of discrete governmental units and an equal or greater number of agencies and departments within those larger federal, state, and municipal government organizations. Often, dissatisfaction with institutions is a lack of satisfaction with a particular entity—the school one attends or the government office one visits. Yet, when dissatisfaction, a lack of confidence, or a lack of respect becomes more generalized, the institutional sector may be identified as the source of complaint. Arguably, this is the sort of institutional crisis the

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United States has entered: there is substantial lack of public confidence that the major U.S. institutions can deliver what they promise; there is likewise a growing belief among many that the major institutions cannot be meaningfully reformed. This combination leaves many Americans with little to cling to in their search for self. At such a juncture, the prospects for revitalization, modification, or change in any form become crucial factors in institutional sustainability. Generally, institutions—although stable and predictable—are not so rigid as to be impervious to the environment in which they operate. Thus, institutions and organizational leaders are often ready to flexibly integrate demands for change by co-opting the change agents and adopting some portion of their program for change or at least create the façade of doing so. The tipping point, if it is ever reached, comes when an institution or organization has been so de-legitimated that any change that might be undertaken lacks the power to influence the constituent publics that it needs to sustain it. In such an instance, neither “throwing the bums out,” rewriting the mission statement, nor any other accommodation can successfully resuscitate the collapsing foundation. The question in the twenty-first century United States is whether established institutions have so lost their luster that widespread reinvigoration appears to many as unachievable.

Politics in Decline An important institutional sector in any modern society, politics has become a focal point for Americans’ dissatisfaction over the last few years. Government, as well as the people who presently fill positions within government, are routinely identified as sources of voter anger and lack of confidence in representative national surveys. Historical trend data suggest that trust in government and approval ratings for current incumbent government officials is reaching all-time low percentages. Gallup, the national polling organization, has been tracking Americans’ trust in government for decades by asking the same questions periodically over the years. When respondents are asked how much of the time they trust government in Washington to do the right thing, longitudinal data consistently show a lack of confidence from the early 1990s through 2009 (Gallup 2017a). Polling by other highly regarded organizations confirms the general lack of trust Americans have in their national government, including data that showed confidence in Washington reaching “historically low levels” in survey results from 2015 (Pew Research Center 2015a). Polls that ask respondents

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how much they trust the “men and women in political life in this country” and “how much they trust the American people” to make judgments about the issues facing the United States also show declines in confidence (Gallup 2016a). The most recent national polling data available on trust in the federal government confirms that the historic lack of trust in government remains at the lowest level over the last 60 years (Pew Research Center 2017a). Americans’ general dissatisfaction with national government is reflected in surveys asking about their assessment of Congress and President Trump. With the exception of a meteoric spike in favorable opinion in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, American have generally had a low opinion regarding the effectiveness and probity of Congress (Gallup 2017b). Most recently the public’s approval rating for Congress has remained around 20% (Gallup 2017c), not a historic low but generally a lower rating than most polls have reflected on average since 1975 (Gallup 2017b). A year earlier a Gallup poll that asked about Americans’ level of trust in each of a list of institutions found that only 3% of respondents stated they had a ‘great deal’ of trust in Congress while 6% said a ‘quite a lot’ of trust. By way of contrast, 52% responded they possessed ‘very little’ trust in Congress while 36% stated they only had ‘some’ level of trust in the institution (Gallup 2016a). Satisfaction with national political leaders is also low. While some survey results show that President Trump’s approval ratings are higher than those in Congress and other national government officials (Bedard 2017), his positive support across all respondents remains anemic. The Zogby Analytics survey rating of 41% (Bedard 2017), while marginally higher than other recent poll results (Gallup 2017d; CNN 2017), remains substantially below the average approval rating for presidents since 1960 (Gallup 2017d). Indeed, Gallup’s latest daily tracking poll as of the date of this writing shows that President Trump’s approval rating (at 37%) is below the percentage of respondents favoring his impeachment (Marcin 2017). These remarkably low indicators with respect to confidence in and approval of the U.S. national government are mirrored by survey results of Americans seeking to assess the recent national mood. Rasmussen Reports, for example, citing results from an Opinion Research, LLC telephone survey, notes that Americans view the nation’s ‘best days’ as behind it as compared to its future (Rasmussen 2017). Other polls attempting to assess the mood of the nation have asked Americans to name something in politics that made the respondent feel proud. Notably, 49% of respondents in one such June, 2016 poll replied ‘nothing,’ ‘not much,’ or ‘very little’ (McCourtney 2017). The same poll and subsequent follow-up polling by the McCourtney Institute conducted in September, 2016; November, 2016; and February, 2017 also found Americans quite angry about political issues and government, irrespective of

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major party affiliation (McCourtney 2017). Indeed, the intense anger reflected among respondents/ answers led the researchers to characterize Americans as ‘very angry’ overall. Survey data on the political divide in the United States has been supplemented, and corroborated, by numerous interviewers’ accounts from studies conducted across the nation. Kimmel (2013:253), investigating the origin and nature of white male anger in the period immediately before it burst onto the national political scene in full flower in 2016, noted that the men he was interviewing “love America, but they hate its government.” While the individual impetus for blaming government for their troubles varied to a degree among his subjects, Kimmel found that anger at the government was widely shared among them. Putnam (2015:237), examining the state of the American Dream for future generations, states: “In our interviews [of young Americans], we found evidence of widespread and growing political estrangement among kids from all backgrounds—rich and poor.” He went on to observe, “Virtually all Americans nowadays are unhappy about politics and government” (2015:237). Likewise, Hochschild (2016:ix), who began her study in Louisiana’s “chemical alley” region because she was “becoming alarmed at the increasingly hostile split in our nation between political camps,” found that the lower and middle-class white men and women on the political right she was interviewing widely blamed government for their circumstances (2016:6, 143). In sum, few Americans, whether on the right or left, whether young or old, envision government and politics as offering the solution to the nation’s future. As we shall see, this view of politics in the contemporary United States is remarkably similar to attitudes regarding many other established institutions. Kimmel (2013:254), quoting earlier work by Lillian Rubin (1994:186), concluded that the genesis of widespread anger among the white men he interviewed arose from “the [perceived and actual] failure of some of our basic institutions to serve the needs of [the American] people.” Thus, dissatisfaction with the government is simply one element of broader dissatisfaction with the economy and the deterioration of the American Dream; the decline in the family; and so on with respect to the remaining established institutions in American life. It is to these other institutions that we now briefly turn.

Economic Disruption and Hardship The economic sector has been the source of hardship and disappointment for many Americans over the course of the preceding decade. Starting with

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the near collapse of the housing and mortgage markets in 2008, that rather directly lead to the Great Recession of 2009–2010, the last 10 years has thrown further wrenching dislocation into an economy that has been undergoing major transitions for nearly 50 years. As numerous commentaries and studies have documented, the deterioration of the U.S. manufacturing, mining, and agricultural sectors over five decades has imposed severe economic hardship on the working class as globalization has forced U.S. companies to compete with steelmakers, printers, and grape growers, among others, from India, China, Chile, and beyond. Further, business practices—like outsourcing— which have tried to leverage globalization in support of U.S. entities have likewise driven American workers from both the working class and lower white-collar echelons in search of work on U.S. soil. The impact of fewer jobs at a living wage has been accompanied by price squeezes imposed on the working and middle classes for what have become essentials in the twenty-first century United States. Affordable housing, always in short supply, has become nearly extinct in many major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. Housing costs have likewise risen for the middle class as a generally tight housing market has escalated prices at a pace higher than incomes have risen since the Great Recession ended (CNBC 2016). College tuition and related costs in the United States have also risen significantly over the past decade, forcing many, and perhaps most, students to incur substantial debt to finance college degrees (Friedman 2017). In many respects, however, the economic facts facing Americans are less important than Americans’ attitudes and experience of their economic security going forward into the global economy. In early 2016, one nationwide U.S. poll showed 78% of respondents considered the state of the economy as poor or fair (Brownstein 2016). A more recent survey has shown Americans’ views of the economy have rebounded to their highest point since the financial crisis of 2008–2010 (Pew Research Center 2017a). Notably, however, as the headline reflects, the increase in positive evaluation of future economic prospects is influenced primarily by more positive views from Republicans (Pew Research Center 2017b) and not universally shared by all Americans. Moreover, there is a growing concern that many current economic indicators are suggestive of another bubble, although there is debate about whether the stock market, the real estate market, student loan debt, or all three combined are its principal locus (Bukhari 2017). Unexpected financial events that abruptly diminish economic expectations on which Americans have come to rely typically destroy economic confidence for many years, as the Great Recession did. Reports about the vitality of the economic sphere are, of course, highly dependent on the experience, expectations, and perceptions of those whose

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lives are subject to economic forces. Buoyed by the temporary optimism that a change in national leadership can inspire in the short term, qualitative evidence gathered through intensive interview techniques may offer the best grounds for assessing Americans’ attitudes regarding the economic sector. Kimmel’s (2013) interviews with angry white men finds that one conspicuous source of their anger is the economic sphere. He notes: Generations of men had staked their claim for manhood on being good family providers, reliable breadwinners. It has been the defining feature of manhood since the nineteenth century . . . [American men] could do that because [they] assumed the playing field was level . . . it never was; it had always tilted in favor of middle class white men. But what has changed is the angle of that tilt . . . But these middle class white men are right in one sense: the social contract . . . has, indeed, been shredded, abandoned. (2013:202–203) Putnam (2015:231–232), looking at the other end of the generational spectrum, reports remarkably similar levels of despair over the jobs, wages, and the economy from the “opportunity youth” he interviews—those who are neither at school nor at work in the 16–24 age group and whose absence of participation in the workforce is likely not reflected in official employment statistics. Hochschild (2016), interviewing her own group of displaced and disenchanted older white workers, finds much the same thing: men and women who have worked hard and yet find themselves feeling as though they are waiting at the end of the line for the promises of the economy to pay off in the American Dream. As Hochschild (2016:125) sums up, real wages of high school-educated men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. Regardless of whether one is speaking of working-class men whose jobs have disappeared or middle-class men whose careers have stagnated, Kimmel’s (2013) and Hochschild’s (2016) interview subjects suffer in substantial part because of a sense of “aggrieved entitlement” (2013:276): white male privilege created expectations that the economic sphere was no longer able to sustain and these diminished expectations coupled with a lifetime of work that has not paid off as expected have dashed their confidence in the American

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economy. Routine polling likely fails to capture this visceral despair buried in the ‘deep story’ of these Americans’ lives (2016:136–141).

The Collapse: American Family Values and the Decline of Community Two institutions that typically are conceived as nearly synonymous with quality of life for Americans are relations within the family and community. Unlike politics and the economy, which produce macro-structural forces that emanate from far outside, and reach far beyond, the individual, family, and community life impinge upon and influence their members in ways that are more directly personal. Historically, families have been conceived of—as Christopher Lasch’s (1995) seminal titular volume intoned—as havens in a heartless world. However, as Lasch and other authors like Lillian Rubin (1976) and Komarovsky (1967) ably document, the family is often a source of frustration and disappointment, although these dissatisfactions are often suppressed and hidden from view. Survey research, which helpfully illuminates national attitudes toward government and politics or the current state of the economy, less ably captures the nuanced, intimate sources of unhappiness that pervade either family engagement or community involvement. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of survey data with respect to capturing the nation’s shifting attitudes toward family and community are illustrated by the Pew Research Center’s (2016d) June 27, 2016 summary of polling results regarding social trends in the United States. Interestingly, the survey queried respondents about family and community along with questions regarding their personal finances, thereby implicitly suggesting some tangible connection between the three. Moreover, the Center’s report discusses personal finances first, a choice that is not self-evident but is, nevertheless, perhaps revealing. The reason, according to the summary, is that for white Americans, satisfaction in each of these realms is tied to income level, a link that is less clear for Black Americans (Pew Research Center 2016d). Overwhelmingly, however, both black and white Americans express satisfaction with family life. How can we square such survey results with the dissatisfaction found by many other researchers conducting interview studies regarding family and community life? The answer is clearly found in the differences in the two methods. Surveys, which generally ask only closed-end questions and offer preconceived response choices along a 5-point continuum, invite respondents to collapse their answers and to avoid addressing more specific questions

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that might elicit different responses. Interviews, on the other hand, have the advantage of permitting the interviewer to explore the nuances within more general topics such as “satisfaction with family life.” The interviewer can probe the respondents’ initial answers, thereby exploring in depth areas which the subject is reluctant to offer at first (Phillips 1971). Trained interviewers are able to take into account the motivations of respondents as well as reach beyond the range of preconceived formulations to seek information held by respondents more closely, at a deeper remove (Denzin 1970). Finally, studies that combine other methods such as time data journals and behavioral observation lend themselves to distilling differences in actual observed happiness (such as engagement in deeply immersive activity for an extended period) as compared to backward looking self-reports in response to very broadly conceived questions. In each of these respects, unhappiness, frustration, and disappointment are camouflaged by the closed end survey, whereas other methods which attempt to pierce our self-protective public veils elicit much more specific statements from study subjects and in the course of doing so identify more sources of explicit dissatisfaction. The implications of these initial observations are many for evaluating satisfaction with family life and the relative functionality of outcomes from family life that different lifestyles produce. For example, one reason that personal finances are so important with relation to experiencing life satisfaction or happiness that family members report is that numerous studies have shown that the experience of stress, especially what has been called ‘toxic stress,’ is more common among those with lower incomes (Putnam 2015:109–113, 130–132). Stressed adults, whose anxieties can include financial concern, can create a stressed household that is communicated nonverbally to children even too young to articulate their own experience of stress. In this regard, worries about personal finance can contribute to what has sometimes been called a “context of chaos” (Putnam 2015:116) within family life that is only reflected in life much later for children growing up within such a household. Indeed, factors like these can lead to problems in even developing, let alone sustaining, a family life. How do individuals who consider themselves without family respond to survey questions about satisfaction or dissatisfaction with family life? This sort of question is seldom pursued in demographic analysis. Changing lifestyles have redefined what we mean by ‘family’ and thus questions about happiness with one’s ‘family’ often raise the question of ‘which family?’ In what have been called ‘fragile families,’ as one example, a child’s parents may have never been married or even stably connected to one another for any appreciable period of time (McLanahan 2011). If the respondent to a standard survey question about family happiness interprets the

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question to only involve the experience of his or her single parent family, then perhaps a response of ‘very happy’ or ‘somewhat happy’ could capture some approximation of the truth. Yet, does it really? Numerous counter-indicators suggest that there is substantial dissatisfaction with family life that will never be reflected by such mass survey methods. One trend that complicates interpreting positive responses to survey questions about satisfaction with family or household life is the spread in the number of Americans living alone. Klinenberg, in Going Solo (2012), has investigated this phenomenon through both demographic data and extensive interviews. Historically, as we have seen, human life has meant group life: in a primitive tribe group life is immersive and the individual effectively can have no life outside the group; indeed, banishment is an early and effective punishment for transgression simply because the small group was each member’s entire world. As societies became more complex, the domination of the group lessened. Klinenberg (2012) notes that benefits of group living still predominated and made it the preferred mode: group living provided security, contributed to satisfying biological and emotional needs, and supported developmental growth, especially for the young. Klinenberg (2012) argues that living alone has become more common in the United States over recent decades and it has done so, in his view, for some of the same reasons group living was favored in earlier eras. Notably, choosing to live alone would seem to be a ‘vote’ against family life, regardless of the design and composition of the family. Klinenberg’s (2012) analysis rests on figures that show living alone has become more common. Thus, he notes that in 1950 22% of American adults were single but that only 4 million (9% of U.S. households) lived alone. Moreover, in 1950 living alone was generally a short, transitional stage of (primarily) young adulthood. Today, in contrast, Klinenberg notes that 50% of adult Americans are single and approximately 31 million American adults (14% of the population constituting 28% of all households) live alone voluntarily. Equally interesting is Klinenberg’s (2012:5) observation that living alone today is a very stable choice: over a 5-year period, living alone is more likely to persist than any other group form with the exception of married couples with children. Are Americans who live alone ‘happy’ with their ‘family’ arrangements? The evidence is quite equivocal. Klinenberg (2012) pursued the question of why people live alone and sought an evaluation of their experiences through intensive interviews with 300 subjects who live alone. Klinenberg (2012) reports that many of the people interviewed who live alone stated they were happy with the experience. However, the subjects who reported happiness with their living status were clustered among young urban professionals (ages 28–40) and middle-age,

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middle-class adults (ages 40–65) who could afford to live alone quite comfortably (Hauhart 2016:202–203; see also Klinenberg 2012:112–114). Raised within the cultural ethos of American individualism and often well adapted to spending time successfully alone, these subjects could very truthfully respond positively to broad survey questions about satisfaction with their household. Even members of these groups noted, however, that living alone required substantial efforts—initiating and pursuing solitary projects and routinely making major life decisions without support. Others who live outside of these groups, who are uninsulated by comfortable incomes, express far less satisfaction with living alone; rather, it is simply a necessary evil that may be superior to the alternatives. Klinenberg (2012:114–122) summarizes several interviews with men who live alone in single-room occupancy dwellings through circumstances that at very best can be described as the “lesser of evils.” Can satisfaction with living alone really constitute satisfaction with family life? It is the sort of question that makes survey data regarding qualitative life experience of so little value. Even in-depth interviews have difficulty plumbing the complex sets of circumstances, self-assessments, and motivations that have contributed to the increasing numbers of Americans living alone today. The decline of community has become perhaps even more evident in recent decades. An AP-GIK poll from 2013 reported that more than two-thirds questioned about whether or not they trust other Americans said they did not (USA Today 2013). This result constituted a record low for a question which has been asked in one form or another since 1972. Earlier studies—from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) to Robert N. Bellah’s Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) and Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness (1990; originally published in 1970)—likewise argued and documented that Americans meet less often to participate publicly in shared activities and that the sense of community in the United States has thereby suffered. Although each of these authors relied on different sources of data and placed their emphasis on different lines of argument, all three generally shared the view that the value Americans place on individualism somewhat inevitably leads to isolation and disconnection. Although persuasive, Alexis de Tocqueville analyzed American life in much the same terms two centuries earlier in Democracy in America (1961), originally published in two volumes in 1835. Tocqueville attributed the strength of individualism in American life to the democratic ethos which emphasized the equality of social, political, and economic conditions. Tocqueville was not pessimistic about the prospects for community, however, as he believed that Americans would always wish to be engaged in managing

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their own affairs and that Americans’ tendency to cooperate by forming voluntary associations to achieve common objectives they otherwise could not carry out alone would insure that a sense of American-ness and community survived. This depended, in Tocqueville’s view, on whether Americans grasped correctly “the principle of interest rightly understood” (1961:II:45) which was founded on regularity, moderation, temperance, foresight, and self-command. Where those values flourished, Tocqueville believed community would flourish as well, even where trust, association, and participation have reached near all-time lows, as they apparently have in today’s climate of separation and polarization.

The Education Crisis Every few years, when Americans have time to fit it in between the latest economic meltdown and the political arena’s most recent descent into immobility, it seems that Americans wring their hands over the imminent, ultimate education crisis. When this occurs, self-proclaimed and otherwise credentialed and certified experts arise out of the ether and offer their prescriptions for reviving the dying schools, whether at the elementary, middle and high school, or collegiate levels. In recent years, however, the enthusiasm for “education reform” has waned and the intractability of progress—whatever that may mean—within this institutional sector has pierced the consciousness of even the most obdurate and inveterate progressives. Conservative educators, for their part, are always ready to roll back the clock and harken a new age of study devoted to the classics, as though education—long considered an elevator to the good life of the American Dream—can be reframed as the search for knowledge within a materialist, consumerist culture. Recent public opinion polls tell the story. Public Agenda, a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to fostering progressive initiatives supportive of democratic institutions, reported on survey data compiled in late summer, 2016 that Americans had expressed reduced confidence in publication education. Among the findings: •

Americans expressed a loss of confidence in the necessity of a college education for success in the workforce; • Job skills, rather than knowledge or critical thinking, are an essential college outcome for most Americans; • A significant number of Americans responding to the survey—40%— expressed concern about budget cuts to public universities; and

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•

A majority of Americans responding viewed high schools that failed to prepare students for higher education as a significant problem (Public Agenda 2016).

A Gallup poll taken during the same time frame—summer, 2016—confirmed these results. When asked about their confidence in a list of major U.S. institutions, a representative sample of Americans responded favorably only 30% of the time that public education earned a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence. For the most part, Americans expressed a lack of confidence in the conduct and results achieved by public education (Gallup 2016b). Concerns about the ability of public schools to successfully educate the nation’s children, support upward mobility, and reduce social problems—like drug use and unemployment—are nothing new. Putnam, reviewing the state of American education in his 2015 book Our Kids, notes that American education has done little to reduce the achievement gap between children from high and low-income families; indeed, it may have exacerbated the divide (Putnam 2015:160–161). As Putnam (2015:163) soberly recites, quantitative studies over many years have consistently found wide differences in academic achievement between schools attended by children from affluent families and those schools attended by children from the lower quartile of the income curve. Putnam observes what everyone who studies public education knows: that residential sorting according to class (as well as according to race or ethnicity) is a predominant factor in dividing high-income and low-income student into separate schools. Indeed, just about every measure or comparison Putnam (2015:160–183) considers suggests that public education is failing a substantial number of students, almost always those from poor, racially or ethnically segregated schools. The outlook is little different for college attainment and achievement according to Putnam. The causal factors for various ‘college gaps’ tend to be the same factors identified for variations in academic achievement in the public schools (2015:185). More importantly, perhaps, is the carefully calibrated stratification of colleges that has only grown more layered over the long twentieth century. As one example, Putnam (2015:185) notes that in 1972 about 14% of poor kids who went to college were enrolled in community colleges; by 2004 that percentage had risen to 32%. As Putnam (2015:185) knows, “for most kids, community colleges are not really a rung up on a taller ladder, but the end of the line.” In short, the public’s lack of confidence in public education is justified by many research studies regarding school outcomes. Equally, Americans’ hopes for college education to cure individual limitations on upward mobility and the broader desire to narrow the class

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gap in American society both seem unlikely based on many measures over many years.

Diminishing Belief in God and Religion Religion, like the other major U.S. institutions we have so far considered, shows a continuing diminishment in importance in Americans’ lives. Longitudinal survey data shows that more Americans are reporting that they are unaffiliated with any particular organized religion or church. In one recent poll, 23% of respondents placed themselves in this category of ‘none’ (Pew Research Center 2015a). This change is significant in and of itself, but it is also important because those who identify as unaffiliated with any formal religious organization are increasingly less observant than in the past and less often state that religion is ‘important’ to them in life (2015a). The degree to which Americans subscribe to some religious view and/ or practice is ultimately important because unlike one’s connection to the economy or business, which are inherently individual (or individual family) matters in the final analysis, religion and religious organizations—like public schools and education—are intrinsically parts of the public sphere that help define and sustain the essence of community and particular neighborhoods. As Putnam (2015:223) notes, religious communities in the United States are important service providers for vulnerable Americans, including children, young people, and the poor. As one example, Catholic schools and the parish have anchored many neighborhoods in the United States for well over a century. Generally, within each denomination, too, there was a leveling that narrowed and drew together, rather than separated, rich from poor: members of the Catholic well-off mingled and mixed with the Catholic poor in the parish church more than with any other sector of society. However, as Putnam (2015) documents, while church attendance has fallen across the nation in recent decades, it has fallen fastest among children and youth from the poorest third of the income spectrum. This trend reinforces the decline of poor neighborhoods where for more than a century churches stabilized and unified those communities. Moreover, the impact on religious engagement on schooling parallels the influence of higher income: students from religiously observant families gain some of the benefits in terms of academic achievement and college attendance that family income otherwise provides (or low family income inhibits). Children from poor families, already at a disadvantage, could use the benefit but poor youth’s reduced engagement with religion hinders their progress.

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Thus, religion—like the other institutions we’ve considered—is suffering diminishment and loss.

Law and the Legal System Like other U.S. major institutional sectors, the legal system suffers from the public’s lack of confidence. A Clarus poll conducted on behalf of Common Good, a public interest organization, in June, 2016 found that only 26% of respondents believe that the civil justice system provides timely and reliable resolution of disputes (Faucheux 2016). In a different poll Gallup found that only 23% of Americans have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in the criminal justice system (Gallup 2016a). A year later Gallup recorded a small increase in the percentage of respondents expressing the same level of confidence in the criminal justice system in its annual update but the overall figure remains very low at 27% (Gallup 2016a). Lack of confidence in the criminal justice system is exacerbated by the polarized divide regarding the nature of the problem and how to fix it. Thus, separate polling indicates that Americans are nearly equally divided between believing that more law and order is needed as compared to the belief that the criminal justice system suffers from bias against minorities as its principal problem (Gallup 2016c). The responses from the poll also reveal stark party differences between Republicans and Democrats. Republications overwhelmingly favor measures to strengthen law (77%) as compared to responses that express concern about inherent bias against minorities in the system (17%) (Gallup 2016c). Views expressed by whites and nonwhites also differed with nonwhite respondents favored reducing bias against minorities while a majority of white Americans favored law and order measures (Gallup 2016c). Thus, although both Republicans and Democrats agree in many recent surveys that they want criminal justice reform (Reddy 2017; Wheeler 2016), there is only modest agreement on the direction such reform should take while substantial disagreements on specifics remain. As noted earlier, Americans remain divided on the nature of the problem within the criminal justice system and therefore hold different views on how to ‘fix’ the problems they perceive, regardless of modest expressions of common ground regarding ‘the need for reform.’ Indeed, the history of criminal justice generally is one of cyclical reform movements that fail (or, ones that are simply jettisoned) over time, and sometimes rather quickly. In either case, the system then requires a new series of reforms which often are simply a return to the earlier reform agenda which has been defeated, disregarded, or

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discarded. A case in point is the sad saga of mass incarceration at present in the United States. One can argue that reformation of prisons in the United States began with the construction and program design introduced at Elmira Reformatory in New York in 1876 (Reid 2008). Although considered somewhat successful, overcrowding, changes in public opinion, and changes in penal philosophy led to more construction of maximum security facilities over the early decades of the twentieth century in New York rather than progressive expansion of the Elmira model. Indeed, by the mid-to-late twentieth century Elmira Reformatory was just another prison. In the 1960s a ‘new’ rehabilitative model briefly emerged but this was quickly replaced by the ‘get tough’ approach that involved mandatory sentencing, harsher sentences overall, the elimination of parole, and reliance on three strikes laws which swelled prison populations nationwide for more than 40 years. Now, a mood that favors reducing mass incarceration and increased attention to rehabilitation and reintegration has re-emerged and been increasingly embraced by both sides of the political spectrum. The staying power of the sentiment, and its efficacy, have yet to be determined, however. The outcome of the reform efforts may simply be: the more things change, the more they remain the same, which is often the case.

Distrust in the Media/Despair in the Nation Modern mass media have become, over time, a major institution in the United States and around the world. The expansion of media’s reach and influence over the twentieth century has only been exponentially increased in the twenty-first century by the proliferation of cable channels on television, the explosion of alternative talk radio, and the apparently limitless tendency of the internet to generate new venues for distributing personal expression, political opinion, information, and disinformation. The confluence of these forces has produced, in the words of one recent Gallup poll, a ‘new low’ (Gallup 2016d) in the public’s trust with respect to mass media with only 32% of respondents saying they have a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of trust in what they hear in the media. While distrust of the media crosses over among most sectors of the population, public distrust of the media is sharpened by the political divide with more of those who identify as Republicans expressing a lack of confidence as compared to those who identify as Democrats or independents (Gallup 2016d). Indeed, a more recent survey of American public opinion by the Harvard-Harris poll concluded that a majority of Americans responding now believe that the mainstream media distributes ‘fake news’—a

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concept that did not even exist a decade ago (Easley 2017). The consequence of media distrust according to Harvard-Harris poll co-director Mark Penn is that “Every major institution from the presidency to the court is now seen as operating in a partisan fashion in one direction or another” (Easley 2017). Distrust in the media, perhaps more than the lack of confidence in the other major institutions we have seen, impels the analyst to examine the nature of legitimacy and authority within society more generally. Max Weber (Gerth and Mills 1946:294–301) was among the first to examine how legitimacy is conferred and what it means to possess authority. As Weber notes, the concept of legitimacy is intimately connected with the power to rule or command: essentially, legitimacy is the rationale upon which the ruling power claims to hold its position of authority, thus giving those it rules a ground for obeying. Media’s ability to influence is dependent on its perceived legitimacy and little else. If the content mass media distributes garners attention, favorable approbation, and redistribution, then it has achieved legitimacy. If, on the other hand, the content of media is widely dismissed as ‘fake news,’ then it has lost its persuasive authority—which is the only source of command available to it. An official within a legal-rational model—such as the President of the United States within the national government—has a power to command arising out of the U.S. Constitution and laws. Media outlets, on the other hand, only have the power to command if the consumer of media content is persuaded to relinquish his or her independent judgment and time to consume media products based on the compelling nature of their substance, that is the perceived quality and authoritativeness of the material the media fashions. The media is in this sense an exemplar of the plight of modern institutions generally and crystallizes the essential problem for each institution: why should anyone obey the reputedly authoritative statements that emanate from the institution? The challenge for institutions—and more particularly for the institutional office holder—is how to evoke, and thereby maintain, legitimacy among constituents, adherents, viewers.

Institutional Crisis and Self-Investment Organizations in our culture routinely face crises of mission failure, engage in repair and recovery, and somehow survive. On January 28, 1986 the Challenger shuttle, carrying six astronauts and “America’s teacher,” Christa McAuliffe, broke up 73 seconds into flight killing all aboard. The disaster resulted in suspension of the shuttle program for 32 months and severely undermined confidence in the U.S. space program. An investigation revealed that

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a problem with the O-rings that provided flexibility to the joints between the shuttle and its fuel tanks was well-known by engineers prior to the shuttle’s disintegration. Reports regarding the engineering failure identified elements of the organizational culture and decision-making process within NASA as the principal contributing factors that led to the final decision to launch in cold weather that precipitated the inability of the O-rings to withstand the aeronautical forces they were subjected to under winter weather conditions at the launch site. Vaughan (1997), in her incisive analysis of the series of internal reviews that led up to the agency’s decision to ultimately go ahead with the launch, described incremental deviations from accepted engineering practice produced by features of NASA’s organizational culture that she argued constituted a “normalization of deviance.” Although NASA’s management failure that led to the disaster produced serious questions about the agency’s operations as well as an erosion of public (and Congressional) confidence, the agency survived. Indeed, the shuttle program itself survived—even though the program suffered a second shuttle disaster in 2003 when Columbia broke apart minutes upon re-entering earth’s atmosphere, again killing seven on board—until the program was finally phased out in 2011. On August 29, 2015 hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the southern Louisiana coast, causing widespread flooding, devastation, and loss of life. Residents trapped in the disaster zone lacked food, water, and shelter in the hurricane’s aftermath; some residents died from thirst, exposure, and exhaustion while sporadic violence engulfed New Orleans. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, although responsible for responding to and coordinating disaster relief efforts, was unprepared and its relief efforts floundered. When the city and region’s recovery effort stagnated over the next two years, sizable fraud, waste, and mismanagement in agency operations came to light as well. Michael D. Brown, the FEMA director at the time, was forced to resign based on the harsh criticism the agency’s efforts received (Cooper and Block 2007). Still, as with NASA, the agency survived. Why, then, should lack of confidence in U.S. institutions pose such a danger and challenge for sustaining the self in the twenty-first century? The answer has to do, in part, with the fragility of Americans’ broader participation in civic life. As Callero (2018:34–35) and many others have documented, community involvement, civic engagement, and social participation have steadily declined over the last four decades. Survey data show that Americans are less likely to attend public meetings, express less interest in politics, and vote less than they did 40 years earlier. Membership in voluntary organizations has declined, proportionately fewer Americans share family dinners together, and

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it is less common to “have friends over” for socializing. Indeed, the asocial trends seem to extend to having fewer close confidants and a smaller number of interpersonal connections. Klinenberg’s (2012) findings about the extent to which Americans live alone is simply one small indicator of a series of interrelated, broader social trends. Absent effective, thriving institutions, the social self finds itself without connections. In organizations, failure can be addressed, over time, by a change in personnel (as with the departure of Michael Brown at FEMA), a change in agency policy and practices (as at NASA), or even by a re-engineered mission. Institutions, by way of contrast, consist of nothing more than a constellation of ideals, which cannot be reconstituted by practical changes. When ideals lose their resonance—sometimes through the failure of organizations attempting to implement those ideals—the institution no longer can command the loyalty, or investment, of those in society who are abjured to sustain them. This problem is best illustrated in our recent history by the Vietnam War and the corresponding challenge to existing institutions supporting the war. The crisis was driven only partly by the public’s dissatisfaction with the failure of the United States’ strategic and tactical conduct of the war. Rather, the war effort itself was effectively undercut by disaffection, disaffiliation, and withdrawal of support, primarily on moral grounds that grew out of broader generational criticisms regarding the status of African Americans, women, and other ethnic and gender orientation minorities. Dissatisfaction with the war thus spiraled into a broader lack of confidence in President Lyndon Johnson and his cabinet, especially Secretary of Defense McNamara, and from there accelerated into a lack of trust in the presidency, generally, under Richard Nixon. Since many Americans still supported the military, the President, the government, and the American way of life overall, there emerged a polarizing divide that fractured the common bonds that formed the basis for a successful union. Although individual heroes emerged from the fray in the course of resolving the Watergate political scandal ( Judge John Sirica, Senator Sam Ervin, John Dean, William Ruckelshaus, Elliot Richardson, and Archibald Cox, among them), the crisis of confidence in the presidency also diminished trust in government even though the courts and Congress acted responsibly. The lack of confidence and trust in institutions more generally was also further eroded when the deep rifts created by these events failed to quickly heal—if, indeed, they have ever healed. (Slater (1990:92) points out that “The issues that people got so excited over in the sixties are still unresolved.”) This is the nature of the institutional crisis at hand: individuals and groups withdrawing their support for American institutions, sometimes actively,

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sometimes apathetically. Perhaps the disenchantment is principally with American political institutions, but the data suggests it goes far beyond politics and government to include family, work, education, religion, and even social life more generally. In any event, the effect seems to leave an increasing number of Americans with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to talk to, a measure of withdrawal from American life that is astonishing in its reach and threatening in its prospects. U.S. institutions, perceived as hollow at the center, with ideals that no longer resonate as they once did, can no longer command undivided allegiance nor offer Americans sufficient sustenance, leaving many isolated, alone, disempowered. Succeeding chapters will take up the question of why this is so and explore the ways in which our current national malaise has arisen.

References American Enterprise Institute. 2017. “The American Spirit: A Snapshot in Time.” AEI Political Report, 13(7). ( June 28, 2017). Retrieved July 2, 2017. www.aei.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/06/Political-Report-July-August-2017.pdf. Bedard, Paul. 2017. “Poll: Trump’s Approval Higher than Congress, Schumer, Pelosi, Ryan, McConnell.” Washington Examiner. ( June 18, 2017). Retrieved July 5, 2017. www. washingtonexaminer.com/poll-trumps-approval-higher-than-congress-schumerpelosi-ryan-mcconnell/article/2626318. Bellah, Robert N., Ann Swidler, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan and Robert Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: HarperCollins. Brownstein, Ronald. 2016. “Where Do Americans Think the Economy is Headed?” The Atlantic. (February 5, 2016). Retrieved July 7, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2016/02/america-economic-outlook-heartland/458727/. Bukhari, Jeff. 2017. “Famed Investor Predicts Historic Market Drop.” Fortune. (March 9, 2017). Retrieved July 7, 2017. http://fortune.com/2017/03/09/stock-market-sell-bubble/. Callero, Peter L. 2018. The Myth of Individualism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. CNBC. 2016. Home Prices Rising Faster than Wages: Report. (March 24, 2016). Retrieved July 7, 2017. www.cnbc.com/2016/03/24/home-prices-rising-faster-than-wages-report.html. CNN. 2017. Poll: Trump’s Approval Rating Dips to 34%. ( June 8, 2017). Retrieved July 5, 2017. www.cnn.com/2017/06/07/politics/donald-trump-approval-rating-quinnipiac/. Cooper, Christopher and Robert Block. 2007. Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. New York: Holt. Denzin, Norman K. 1970. The Research Act. Chicago: Aldine. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1961. Democracy in America. New York: Schocken Books. Dionne, E.J., Jr. 2012. Our Divided Political Heart. New York: Bloomsbury. Easley, Jonathan. 2017. “Poll: Majority Says Mainstream Media Publishes Fake News.” The Hill. (May 24, 2017). Retrieved July 16, 2017. http://thehill.com/homenews/ campaign/334897-poll-majority-says-mainstream-media-publishes-fake-news.

56  Documenting the Divide Faucheux, Ron. 2016. “By the Numbers: Americans Lack Confidence in the Legal System.” The Atlantic. ( July 6, 2016). Retrieved July 15, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/ national/archive/2012/07/by-the-numbers-americans-lack-confidence-in-the-legalsystem/259458/. Frank, Thomas. 2004. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Friedman, Zack. 2017. “Student Loan Debt in 2017: A $ 1.3 Trillion Crisis.” Forbes. (February 21, 2017). Retrieved July 7, 2017. www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2017/02/21/ student-loan-debt-statistics-2017/#3c894a4b5dab. Gallup, Inc. 2016a. Americans’ Trust in Political Leaders, Public at New Lows. (September 21, 2016). Retrieved July 5, 2017. www.gallup.com/poll/195716/americans-trust-politicalleaders-public-new-lows.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2016b. Confidence in Institutions. ( June 1–5, 2016). Retrieved July 12, 2017. www. gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2016c. Americans’ Confidence in Institutions Stays Low. ( June 13, 2016). Retrieved July 13, 2017. www.gallup.com/poll/192581/americans-confidence-institu tions-stays-low.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2016d. Americans Divided on Priorities for Criminal Justice System. (October 14, 2016). Retrieved July 15, 2017. www.gallup.com/poll/196394/americans-dividedpriorities-criminal-justice-system.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2016e. Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low. (September 14, 2016). Retrieved July 16, 2017. www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-mediasinks-new-low.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2017a. Historical Trends: Trust in Government. Retrieved July 5, 2017. www. gallup.com/poll/5392/trust-government.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2017b. Historical Trends: Congress and the Public—Congressional Approval Ratings. Retrieved July 5, 2017. www.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2017c. Americans’ Approval of Congress Unchanged in May. (May 10, 2017). Retrieved July 5, 2017. www.gallup.com/poll/210104/americans-approval-congressunchanged-may.aspx. Gallup, Inc. 2017d. Presidential Approval Ratings: Donald Trump. Retrieved July 5, 2017. www. washingtonexaminer.com/poll-trumps-approval-higher-than-congress-schumerpelosi-ryan-mcconnell/article/2626318. Gerth, Hans Heinrich and Charles Wright Mills, Eds. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Graham, Carol. 2017. Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hauhart, Robert C. 2016. Seeking the American Dream. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: The New Press. Kimmel, Michael. 2013. Angry White Men. New York: Nation Books. Klinenberg, Eric. 2012. Going Solo. New York: Penguin Press. Komarovsky, Mirra. 1967. Blue Collar Marriage. New York: Vintage Books. Lasch, Christopher. 1995. Haven in a Heartless World. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Marcin, Tim. 2017. “Support for Donald Trump’s Impeachment Is Way Higher than His Approval Rating.” Newsweek. ( July 3, 2017). Retrieved July 5, 2017. www.newsweek. com/support-donald-trumps-impeachment-higher-latest-approval-rating-631212.

Documenting the Divide  57 McCourtney Institute. 2017. Trend Report: Like Everything Else in Politics, the Mood of the Nation is Highly Polarized. (May 15, 2017). Retrieved July 6, 2017. http://capr.la.psu. edu/documents/ReportTrendsInTheMoodOfTheNation.pdf. McLanahan, Sara. 2011. “Family Instability and Complexity After a Nonmarital Birth: Outcomes for Children in Fragile Families.” In Marcia J. Carlson and Paula England, Eds., Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Meyer, Dick. 2008. Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium. New York: Three Rivers Press. Pew Research Center. 2014a. Political Polarization in the American Public. ( June 12, 2014). Retrieved on July 1, 2017. www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-americanpublic/. Pew Research Center. 2014b. Political Polarization in Action: Insights into the 2014 Election from the American Trends Panel. (October 17, 2014). Retrieved on July 1, 2017. www. people-press.org/2014/10/17/political-polarization-in-action-insights-into-the-2014election-from-the-american-trends-panel/. Pew Research Center. 2015a. Trust in Government: 1958–2015. Retrieved July 5, 2017. www. people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/. Pew Research Center. 2015b. U.S. Becoming Less Religious. Retrieved July 14, 2017. www. pewforum.org/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/. Pew Research Center. 2016a. Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016. ( June 22, 2016). Retrieved on July 1, 2017. www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-politicalanimosity-in-2016/. Pew Research Center. 2016b. The Parties on the Eve of the 2016 Election: Two Coalitions, Moving Further Apart. (September 22, 2016). Retrieved on July 3, 2017. www.people-press. org/2016/09/13/the-parties-on-the-eve-of-the-2016-election-two-coalitions-movingfurther-apart/. Pew Research Center. 2016c. A Wider Ideological Gap Between More and Less Educated Adults. (April 12, 2016). www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-betweenmore-and-less-educated-adults/. Pew Research Center. 2016d. Views of Community, Family Life and Personal Finances. ( June 27, 2016). Retrieved July 9, 2017. www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/6-views-of-com munity-family-life-and-personal-finances/. Pew Research Center. 2017a. Public Trust in Government Remains at Historic Lows as Partisan Attitudes Shift. (May 3, 2017). www.people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-ingovernment-remains-near-historic-lows-as-partisan-attitudes-shift/. Pew Research Center. 2017b. As Republicans’ Views Improve, Americans Give the Economy Its Highest Marks since Financial Crisis. (April 3, 2017). Retrieved July 7, 2017. www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2017/04/03/americans-give-economy-highest-marks-since-financial-crisis/. Phillips, Bernard S. 1971. Social Research: Strategy and Tactics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Public Agenda. 2016. Public Opinion on Higher Education: Survey Results Suggest Public Confidence in Higher Education Is Waning. (September 12, 2016). Retrieved July 13, 2017. https://publicagenda.org/pages/public-opinion-higher-education-2016. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster.

58  Documenting the Divide Rasmussen Reports, LLC. 2017. America’s Best Days: Most Think America’s Best Days Are Behind Us. ( June 1, 2017). Retrieved July 5, 2017. www.rasmussenreports.com/ public_content/politics/mood_of_america/america_s_best_days. Reddy, Vikrant P. 2017. “The Conservative Base Wants Criminal-Justice Reform.” National Review. ( July 8, 2017). Retrieved July 15, 2017. www.nationalreview.com/article/447398/ criminal-justice-reform-donald-trumps-supporters-conservative-base-want-fresh. Reid, Sue Titus. 2008. Criminal Justice. Mason, OH: Thomson/Atomic Dog. Robinson, Eugene. 2010. Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. New York: Doubleday. Rubin, Lillian. 1976. World of Pain. New York: Basic Books. Slater, Philip. 1990. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon Press. USA Today. 2013. Poll: Americans Don’t Trust One Another. (November 30, 2013). Retrieved July 12, 2017. www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/30/poll-americans-dont-trustone-another/3792179/. Vaughan, Diane. 1997. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll. 2017. Retrieved on July 2, 2017. www.wsj.com/public/ resources/documents/17119NBCWSJAprilPollFullRelease.pdf. Wheeler, Linda. 2016. “Poll Shows Bipartisan Support for Criminal Justice Reform.” The Hill. (February 11, 2016). Retrieved July 15, 2017. http://thehill.com/regulation/ legislation/269085-poll-shows-bipartisan-support-for-criminal-justice-reform.

The Social Self

3

Early and Mid-Twentieth Century American Sociological Theories

Sociology arose in the late nineteenth century as an independent discipline from diverse, and sometimes contradictory, inspirations. On the one hand, early theoreticians like Herbert Spencer, influenced by the survival of the fittest doctrine found in early evolutionary biology, attempted to model an understanding of society on the same thematic foundation. Spencer’s focus on bitter competition that was reflected at the societal level by colonial domination and war among nations was soon superseded, however. Others, following the early directions established by either Marx or Durkheim, placed their emphasis on particular forms of human organization that modern, industrial societies developed. For Marx, as we have seen, the economic relations between men predominated as he plumbed the hegemonic forces inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism, thereby distilling an early theory of ‘economic man.’ Durkheim, moved by the nearly anarchic disorder he observed in the swollen French cities of his day, invested his sociological energies into understanding the unifying forces of the division of labor at the secular level and the binding appeal of organized religious belief at the spiritual. In each of these models the ‘self ’ was conceived of as—more or less—formed by discrete, identifiable influences arising from general conditions each theorist located as ‘driving’ human action, thereby creating the specific manner of organized social life predominant at that time and in that place. American social thought—still isolated in the late nineteenth century by geography and, later, in the early twentieth century by intellectual predisposition—vacillated along theoretical lines as doctrinal influences

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formed, shifted, and dissipated. Yet, its many practitioners shared a preoccupation with examining the nature of the self within American society at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century that continually reasserts itself as the unique province of sociology. It is, as merely one example, the inspiration for the present undertaking which must, necessarily, develop its analysis with reference to these intellectual precursors. A dominant theme in American social life since the early observations of Alexis de Tocqueville has been the abiding influence of individualism. As de Tocqueville (1961:118 in Volume II) defined the concept, Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and friends; so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Sociology, by its nature, constituted a form of intellectual resistance against the notion that the principal unit of analysis for understanding society could consist of the individual. Yet, in the United States, the cultural importance of individualism and those themes associated with it has survived, relatively vital and intact, up to and including the present day. The consequences for the individual in American society, and the nature of the self he or she may sustainably create within the American twenty-first century cultural space, thus become the province, and principal subject, of a contemporary inquiry such as this one. Sociological explanation, however, as a disciplinary counter-balance to the notion of competitive individualism, has traditionally struggled—and struggles now—with reconciling the broad principle that ‘each exists only as a member of the greater collective’ with the obvious difficulties that face both the individual and society in achieving some manageable détente. Among the early twentieth-century American sociologists who attempted to offer a compelling alternative vision of the central dynamic of social life, Charles Horton Cooley stands out as an exponent of a form of communalism that minimized the role of individualism while exalting the primacy of the intimate primary group. In Cooley’s conception it is self-evident that the individual could not possibly survive without the largely nurturant surround of some immediate others who create a supportive context. Philip Rieff, in his introduction to a 1962 reissue of Cooley’s Social Organization, alludes to one contemporary critique of Cooley’s analysis when he characterizes his theory as seen by some as offering a “serene vision of the self lying peacefully in the maternal bed of society” (Cooley 1962:xi). Cooley’s exaltation of the primacy

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of the primary group arises from his initial observation that all mankind is born into a primary group and, only when later forced to leave it, does the person (somewhat reluctantly) bend his or her will to mastering the behaviors and attitudes required by participation in secondary groups. Yet, Cooley’s twin beliefs that mankind always sought a return to the warm nest which it has been compelled to leave, and that modern forms of social organization could somehow provide support for “the differentiated unity of mental and social life” (1962:4) which, in his view, defines a good society, have been sorely tested by twenty-first century American life. Cooley’s opposition to the centrality of the egoistic self is manifest in the first few pages of Social Organization where he disputes the adequacy of Rene Descartes’ famous aphorism, “I think, therefore I am” (1962:5–7). Cooley, contending that social consciousness is inseparable from self-consciousness, characterizes the notion of a separate and independent ego as an ‘illusion.’ In Cooley’s view, the essential weakness of Descartes’ observation is the simple failure to acknowledge that it is simply one-sided: by accentuating the ‘individualistic’ ‘I’ over and above the (equally obvious) social, or ‘we,’ aspect of existence, Descartes’ distorts our understanding of the self by a mere act of will. To Cooley, Descartes’ initial error consequently renders the balance of his thinking unpersuasive and permits Cooley to freshly investigate the manner in which the self is formed. Although Cooley does not begin his investigation with a discussion of how the developing fetus is literally tethered to social life though the umbilical attachment to his or her mother, starting at this early point strengthens the argument that he does make: that the mental experience of the newborn child does not focus on his or her separateness but rather the newborn’s behavior rather clearly demonstrates the child’s experience as an object indistinguishable from his or her surroundings, whether material or social. As Cooley phrases human consciousness at the very earliest post-natal stage, “[the child] is not aware of itself or of society” (1962:8). Moreover, even as the child becomes aware of himself (or herself ) as separate from the physical and social environment, the child does not conceive of a self it can name as “I,” nor name “his mother, his sister or his nurse” (Cooley 1962:8). Rather, these social distinctions can only be articulated once the child continues to mature in his or her cognizance of the relationship between the self and the non-self, including the child’s relationship to others. Cooley’s mission throughout his mature writings is to attempt to reconcile the diversity of individual minds with the whole that is society. This is a mission that has largely been abandoned in more recent times and, generally, for very good reasons. Among them, one can count Cooley’s largely unsuccessful effort. Cooley’s thought in this regard veers far too closely to a more

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or less religious mode and suffers from weaknesses inherent in adopting a conceptual language that is too far distantly removed from the cultural principles that govern, for the most part, other realms of life in the United States. Cooley’s general prescription, offered in the early pages of Social Organization, is representative of his approach: Good and evil are intimately bound up together; no sort of men are chiefly given over to conscious badness; and to abuse men or groups in the large is unjust and generally futile. As a rule the practical method is to study closely and kindly the actual situation, with the people involved in it; then gradually and carefully to work out the evil from the mixture by substituting good for it. No matter how mean or hideous a man’s life is, the first thing is to understand him; to make out just how it is that our common human nature has come to work out this way. This method calls for patience, insight, firmness, and confidence in men, leaving little room for the denunciatory egotism of a certain kind of reformer. It is more and more coming to be used in dealing with intemperance, crime greed, and in fact all those matters in which we try to make ourselves and our neighbors better. (1962:15) In passages such as this one, it is apparent to the contemporary reader that the strengths of Cooley’s posture (the effort to apply a version of Weber’s verstehen approach to the particulars of a person’s social situation) is hindered, and arguably rendered futile, by adoption of concepts wholly applicable to the individual that are nebulous and unhelpful in their explanatory power (good and evil; badness; mean and hideous). Equally unhelpful is the list of qualities Cooley identifies as necessary for those who wish to reform society as they, too, are defined in terms of the individual and couched in vague descriptors: patience, insight, firmness, and confidence in men. This regrettable tendency is repeated (1962:16) in many passages not quoted (heroes and villains; sins and virtues) that are among the features of Cooley’s thought that have limited his influence on contemporary sociology. Yet Cooley, in those missing passages devoted to what he does not say, is on to something that is essential to developing a better understanding of what any contemporary theory of the self must encompass. Thus, Cooley is distancing his effort from the delimiting restraint built into the conception of ‘economic man,’ a model that still is put forward contemporaneously as a useful explanatory construct. His approach thus avoids an artificial reductionism that is everywhere evident in many other similar attempts to grasp the nature of the

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self. Moreover, there are many instances in which Cooley adroitly and presciently focuses on processes that he quite correctly recognizes as critical for the development of the self. These include the necessity for agency and action as elements conducive to the creation of a dynamic self; the requirement that any construction of the self must arise from the foundational platform that the historical and cultural record can support; and the clear recognition that the future self can only arise from the burning, Phoenix-like fires of the presently existing self (1962:17–19). Finally, though Cooley’s ideas are often steeped in tenets that are conducive to individualism, he is also aware of some of the obvious shortcomings of that mode of thought. Thus, Cooley recognizes that the successful individual in American society and culture, however that concept may be defined, may disfigure the self by exalting himself or herself over and above the common lot of mankind, consequently despising those whose lives, and intellectual and personal development, have been less successful according to some artificial cultural standard (1962:19–20). In short, Cooley implicitly recognizes that the principles underlying the American Dream have the potential to change the affirmative qualities associated with aspiration, achievement, and the exertion of will into outcomes that are self-defeating as well as distort the processes themselves. Ultimately, Cooley’s conception of the self and the influences that shape it has been rendered an historical footnote by social and cultural changes that have undermined the foundational setting on which he premised his theory. As perhaps the best example, Cooley’s identification of, and reliance on, the primary group as the core building-block of society has simply been defeated by the failure of many late twentieth-century and twenty-first century Americans to recreate small groups characterized by “intimate face-to-face association and cooperation” (1962:23). Cooley considered such associations ‘primary’ because in his view such intimate groups were “fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual” and, at one and the same time, fusing those individuals in a “common whole, so that one’s very self, for many purposes at least, [shares] the common life and purpose of the group” (1962:23). For Cooley, social life necessarily achieved this wholeness— and the individual found a ‘self ’—by transforming and socializing the isolated individual from an atomized ego into one member, among several, of the group ‘we.’ In this manner, the individual found “the chief aims of his [or her] will in that feeling [of intimate group membership]” (1962:23). Even more dated, as he recognized at the time he was writing, are Cooley’s meditations on the extended sympathy that once undergirded the neighborhood and the village community which, he believed, “played a main part in the primary heart-to-heart life of the people” (1962:25).

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Dozens, if not hundreds, of studies over the last 50 years, however, have described—and often lamented—the loss of such intimate group associations in the context of American life. Likewise, the demise of the interconnected neighborhood and the absence of any shared ‘small town feeling’ have been prominent themes within American culture. Indeed, there are innumerable published accounts of individual lives disconnected from any semblance of association with such primary groups that the story has become a conventional, almost clichéd narrative of modern American life. Thus, the American boy or girl, man or woman, who must go in search of himself or herself, fundamentally alone in his or her quest is a staple of both our literature and our social science. Both Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Kerouac’s Sal Paradise in On the Road typify the modern American individual, cast out of any meaningful association of intimates and facing, alone, an existential quest. Indeed, each of these protagonists may be fruitfully contrasted with the idealized ‘self ’ projected by Cooley, who becomes immersed symbiotically in group life and draws vibrant sustenance from his or her role, contributing to a group association collectively embodying what Cooley characterized as a ‘moral unity’ (1962:34–35). As Cooley defined it: A congenial family life is the immemorial type of moral unity, . . . The members become merged by intimate association into a whole wherein each age and sex participates in its own way. Each lives in imaginative contact with the minds of the others, and finds in them the dwelling-place of his [or her] social self. (1962:34) Cooley finds a comparable unity in the way in which “the merging of the one in the whole” is found in group sports. Quoting Joseph Lee, Cooley finds that through deeply participating in a common purpose . . . [the individual’s] conscious individuality is more thoroughly lost in the sense of membership than perhaps it ever becomes in any other way. (1962:34) Yet, Cooley’s subservience to the primacy of his own conception disregards the widely recognized weaknesses of group solidarity, notably the tendency of in-groups to erect barriers to repel outsiders and unite against opposing groups. Likewise, Cooley’s tendency to find what he conceives of as the ideals

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of primary group membership expressed in every other province and form of human organization, including democracy and Christianity, is far too facile, and fatuous, to sustain serious analysis (1962:51–57). Cooley’s strong desire to unify opposites also reveals itself in his unsuccessful effort to reconcile ambition, competition, and greed with group ideals (1962:35–38). Ultimately, Cooley’s theory of the self as arising from small group intimacy founders on the thoroughly documented empirical reality of self-interest, polarization, and fragmentation that characterize twenty-first century American life. Elements of Cooley’s thought regarding the self may be found, however, in the work of subsequent twentieth-century theoreticians, notably in George H. Mead’s social psychology. Like Cooley, Mead placed priority on humankind’s distinctively adaptive mental processes as the key to understanding the emergence of the self. Indeed, for Mead the centrality of mind suggested that the self, mind, consciousness of self and other, and symbolic language were inextricably interrelated and, in a sense, precipitated together through very elemental interactions between humans (Morris, Ed. 1967:xxiii). Also like Cooley, Mead identified elementary role taking as the essential mechanism upon which more sophisticated behavioral systems rested. These interactions were premised upon the exchange of shared language symbols which in both Cooley and Mead’s conceptions permitted each individual to take the role of the other. Thus, rather than seeing the ‘other’ as an inexplicable stranger, the properly socialized individual can look back upon himself (that is, respond to the other as himself ). By becoming an object to himself [or herself], Mead theorized that the individual could respond to the ‘other’ as simply a semblance of oneself, someone who could interchangeably assume roles that he or she could play. Moreover, like Cooley, Mead saw both human play and organized games as critical in providing the basis for interaction that could produce the social self (1967:xxiv). Mead’s description of play emphasizes its basis in mimicry and its flexible transition between roles that are fundamentally incompatible because they do not necessarily form part of a role set but rather they are simply adopted by the individual for their expressively symbolic value. A child, for example, engaged in elementary play will sequentially adopt and display the [imagined] role of various animals [the lion roaring; the domestic cat purring and rubbing] followed, without preamble or rational connection, by expression of a human role that has, in some manner or other, become accessible to him or her in life experience. In an organized game, however, the individual must be able to conceive of, and reciprocally respond to, all of the roles that form a part of the whole in order to successfully play one’s part in the common activity. Like Cooley, the problem to be solved for Mead becomes how the

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individual comes to grasp the nature of the group activity, examines his or her own place within the group, thereby judging his or her performance in group terms, sanctioning oneself—and correcting one’s performance—according to the group’s goals, and finally comes to identify one’s own success and happiness as merely a reflection of others’ happiness and the group’s desires. For Mead, the roles, attitudes, and goals one has adopted from others constitute one part of the self he denominated the ‘me.’ Such an underdeveloped self, however, would be merely the mirror-like reflection that Cooley named the “looking glass self.” Acknowledging this insufficiency, Mead defined the ‘I’ as the source of independence, impulse, and action within the self that remains beyond the thrall of the society in which he or she exists. According to Mead these processes, together, permit the individual to engage in reflective thought which enable one to direct action in terms of the foreseen consequences of different courses of action. This ability to perceive oneself as an object to oneself allows the individual to live in a common world where one’s actions take into account the responses of others thereby facilitating the “conscious pursuit of ends-in-view” (1967:xxvi). Mead’s theory offers certain advantages over Cooley’s conception. By introducing and championing the active ‘I,’ Mead’s model favors a society— much like the American culture it arises from—in which bare sustenance and re-creation of any set of traditionally supported values is not idealized as the preeminent good. To the contrary, the dominance of the active ‘I’ would insure that such a society would be ultimately ‘experimental’—or in today’s over-used adjective ‘innovative.’ Mead’s ideal society would thus encourage a continual remaking of human values through regular reinterpretation of the human situation in light of emergent knowledge. Mead’s vision, however, is limited by his rather optimistic belief that such a society can be achieved without pain, damage, and loss. He believed, for example, that institutions such as language, religion, and the economic process held the potential to extend the elementary process of role taking, upon which each depended, to engender and enhance further the universal good. Mead, envisioning the religious attitude as simply encapsulating “the pattern of helpfulness in family relations” on a larger scale, or defining economics as “offering to others some surplus for what one himself needs,” believed that—like the malleable potential range of language—each could assist mankind to beneficially extend its capacity for good “as far as common activity extends” (1967:xxxiii–xxxiv). Indeed, Mead’s optimism was so far-reaching that he detected “no undesirable leveling tendency, and [society] puts no premium on mediocrity.” Rather, he saw the good society as “compatible with great differences of ability and contribution” but one that “has no place for the superiority of class or possession or power” in

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and of themselves. In their place, Mead optimistically predicted that American society would instead take “pride in [that] superiority which arise[s] in the performance of diverse social functions” (1967:xxxiv). It is readily apparent, however, that this optimistic estimate of society’s potential comes up hard against the contemporary American reality. Rather than an approximation of the rational meritocratic ideal, American society today evinces hardening class and racial barriers, a return to very substantial differences in resource inequality, a regularly reinvigorated return to the ‘culture wars,’ and bitterly contested politics centered around status, class, race, and gender differences. In short, Mead’s theory—like Cooley’s—has come upon the hard reality of a society whose divisions have grown larger and more recalcitrant than either theorist anticipated. In this regard, perhaps the best contribution that either theorist makes to the present effort is a reminder that theory that becomes disconnected from the actual behaviors of society’s members is announcing its own irrelevance. In the 1950s and 1960s many American writers and social scientists examined the fate of the individual in light of that era’s institutional life, postwar affluence, and the American Dream. In so doing, they illuminated, if only in an occasionally backhanded sort of way, the contemporary dilemma of constructing a self within the context of a culture that is riven with division and contradiction. Their analyses, individually and collectively, can be used, however, to reveal some of the persistent tensions in American culture that continue to configure and frame the individual’s quest for an authentic self. These analyses, when posed against the background of Cooley and Mead’s ideas, portray starkly the struggle for self-determination hidden beneath the placid façade of American public life of the period. Whereas Cooley and Mead envisioned the self deeply engaged in the purpose of a small group, these writers saw individuals confronted with the coercive requirements of life in modern organizations or alienating institutions. Two of the more revealing theoretical analyses and commentaries in this regard are David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte’s classic of cultural analysis, The Organization Man. Riesman, Glazer, and Denney’s The Lonely Crowd (1961:3) is described on its opening page as a “book about social character.” As the authors summed it up, “It considers the ways in which different social character types, once they are formed in the knee of society, are then deployed in the work, play, politics, and child-rearing activities of society” (1961:3). By social character, they mean that part of an individual’s identity or personality that is shared among social groups within a contemporaneous time period. It is really that configuration of attitudes which provides a person the framework necessary to live in a

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particular society at a particular time. Thus, social character enables individuals to conform to the degree they must conform. Quoting Erich Fromm favorably, the authors remark that the character formation process requires that members [of a particular society] must acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of the society or of a special class within it. The have to desire what objectively is necessary for them to do. Outer force is replaced by inner compulsion, and by the particular kind of human energy which is channeled into character traits. (1961:5) To understand American character after World War II, Riesman and his collaborators reflect on the historical periods that brought the United States of the mid-twentieth century to the point at which they find it. Generally, they observe two lengthy (although of different lengths) historical developments. First, the authors describe the cumulative, modernizing influences of the roughly 400-year period that includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the corresponding political revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The effect of these successive waves of change had the overall effect of loosening the ties of individuals to “family- and clan-oriented traditional ways of life” (1961:6) that had been the basis for society since time immemorial (as the anthropological studies in Chapter 1 found). Second, the authors describe subsequent changes they find converting the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century into the modern day capitalist and organizational society of the twentieth century. These cumulative changes have had, in their view, the effect of shifting the mid-twentieth century United States from a culture of production to principally a culture of consumption (1961:6). Both phases produced discernible effects on the nature of the social character necessary to fit within the demands of successively contemporaneous eras. The Lonely Crowd’s resulting division of social character types into tradition directed, inner directed, and other directed is well known. Originally, Riesman and his co-authors tied their characterological types to periods of population growth. Thus, the period of high population growth potential was said to develop social character in people tied to their tendency to follow tradition. The form of society that Riesman, et al. found to coincide with what they termed “transitional population growth” was said to be consistent with inner-directedness. Finally, what the authors foresaw as society’s entry into

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a period of “incipient population decline” would lead, in their view, to the emergence of the most recent form of social character, other-directedness (1961:8). However, the authors also aligned each population growth phase with the general forms of economic activity occurring. Thus, societies with high growth potential were often engaged in primary economic activities like agriculture, hunting and fishing, and mining. Societies in the transitional population growth phase were more often engaged in secondary economic modes such as heavy manufacturing. Those societies that attained incipient population decline were more likely inclined to be involved in global trade, communications, and services. The examples offered in 1950 were, in order: India, Russia, and the United States (1961:9). For our purposes, however, it is the nature of character that is of principal interest, more so than the context from which the social character arose, although there is undoubtedly an inevitable nexus between the two. A society bound by tradition will naturally be relatively stable and unchanging in comparison to succeeding forms. The type of social character generated will therefore hew closely to the requirements of his or her immediate social surround and reflect the attributes expected of a particular agegrade, gender, clan, or caste. The individual will be socialized to adopt social practices and patterns that have persisted for generations. The important relationships in life can be learned from direct association with the previous generation because society is closely reproduced in each generation. Many aspects of the culture emphasize ritual, routine, and religion which are widely shared and encourage a coherence that will become increasingly less apparent in successive eras. There is little time and energy directed at innovation so that tried-and-true solutions to age-old problems are relied upon. Although the individual will be limited to accommodating to existing traditions, these also provide a very solid foundation for the self. Riesman and his collaborators (1961:11) note that such societies provide a “well-defined functional relationship to other members of the group” so that individuals are often well integrated within a traditional society into which they have been born. This is contrary to the contemporary dilemma of not only having to make one’s way economically in modern society, but to establish the contours of oneself without any solid foundation on which to build. In such a society, one’s life goals are preordained within a narrow range and there is no consciousness that one must shape one’s own identity; rather, one is socialized from birth to simply accept one’s place in life and therefore the premise that drives this book would seldom if ever occur to anyone raised in a tradition-bound society. Traditional societies raise children to adapt to the existing institutional roles and provide marginal niches for those individuals who cannot take their otherwise rightful

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place. Depending on the phase and culture of the society under examination, roles like court jester, shaman or medicine man, or members of holy orders— such as monks and sisters—would permit variations outside the normal range of social character types available in these societies (1961:12). The decay of traditional society in the western world is evident in the social and morbidity trends that led to the slow—and then later, fast—expiration of feudalism as a viable model for society. Briefly, these forces included the reduction in the death rate leading to longer life spans; increased personal mobility; expanded accumulation of capital; increased reliance on technology; increases in productive capacity; a burgeoning population; and (for the first time) substantial investment and engagement in exploration, colonization, and imperialism (1961:12). The feature that distinguishes this phase of societal development and therefore compels creations of a different form of social character is the nature and speed of change. Traditional society changed very slowly and concentrated its energy in socializing its progeny to adapt to relatively rigid organizational requirements. In the transition to this subsequent phase, change is accelerated, thereby producing many more frequent instances in which novel experiences and problems are encountered and adaptive behavior becomes continually required. Yet, how could preparation for a static role based on transmitted codes of formal behavior and etiquette effectively prepare one for sailing beyond the horizon of the known world? Hence, tradition-direction needed to give way to what Riesman and his colleagues define as inner direction. As the authors concede, the term “inner-directed” can be misleading if it is not understood in its complexity. The convergence and emergence of the trends itemized previously have as one direct effect an increase in the division of labor. As technology gradually becomes more prominent, the number and range of occupations is expanded and in this regard the choice of “what to become” first emerges, although it is rather severely limited to the question of how to make a living. The expanded influence of the guilds during the early phase of transition has the effect of helping to guide and channel choice to a degree but new ventures without precedent—such as maritime exploration— produce individuals with the opportunity to pursue life journeys “without maps.” To frame the change in contemporary terms, the closed, feudal society has become more ‘open’ and the range of choices considerably broadened. The character type required by these developments must be one that permits an individual to leave the strict confines of family, clan, and village and travel successfully beyond the framework of what he or she has known. Riesman and his co-authors develop the notion of the psychological gyroscope to illustrate the phenomena: set in place through early training, this internal monitor

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permits the inner-directed individual to stay on course toward achieving distant goals even as the external environment changes and the individual must adapt (1961:16). The maneuverability that this internal balancing mechanism provides is both critical and limited. While the inner-directed individual must make his or her way through a landscape that changes, his or her internal monitor can filter information from experience and use it—but only within the set of internal controls acquired early in life and the goals established as worth pursuing. At some point, as Riesman, Glazer, and Denney observe (1961:17–18), resources in some societies become plentiful enough (or come to be utilized efficiently enough) to permit the ongoing rapid accumulation of capital that began with early industrial capitalism. This process is aided by a declining birth rate that—when joined with the further decreasing death rate—produces less demand on accumulated capital even as consumption rises. In the face of these intersecting trends the scarcity psychology that characterized, and drove, the period of inner direction must be revised to take in the fact that abundance has become the dominant force. The problem in this period is not to produce more but to develop a psychology of abundance and affluence that can motivate people to consume ‘surplus’ product so as to inspire further production-employment-and-consumption in a never-ending round. This, of course, is the general situation of the United States that the authors found post-World War II which, in their view, compelled creation of a compatible social type. Inner-directedness was thus forced to give way because while the individual imbued with Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic was sufficiently flexible and adaptive to develop new ‘soft’ industries to complement the manufacturing innovations of the Industrial Revolution, the inner-directed person was not sufficiently flexible to overcome their scarcity psychology and shed their intensive, life-long commitment to producing. What was needed were new men and women who could respond to and enjoy the era of consuming abundance, the type of person the authors saw emerging in the United States in the years immediately before they wrote. As work days shortened and labor became less physically demanding, the dominant social character of Americans needed to become more sensitive to the human environment—to become “other directed” (1961:18–19). For Riesman, et al., other directedness was the emerging trend for middle and upper middle-class individuals in the post-World War II United States, a trend likely to accelerate in his view. The inner-directed social character representative of the ‘old’ middle class would, correspondingly, fade since the conditions that brought about inner direction were also changing. In the place of those who formerly worked in primary and secondary industries, the

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new, other-directed individual would take his or her place alongside millions of others working in white-collar employment and service fields (1961:20). Other authors writing at the same time—C. Wright Mills in White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), for example—confirmed Riesman, Glazer, and Denney’s observation that employment in occupations that emphasized management, communication, and manipulation of people, not things, would continue to dominate post-industrial societies of the future. Social changes in all aspects of life began to spread through society at a faster rate generally. As Riesman and his co-authors (1961:20) wrote, “[with the increased] process of distributing words from urban centers, the flow becomes a torrent in the societies of incipient population declines.” The result is that political events (and, eventually, all of experience) is mediated through a screen of words spewed from the outer world toward oneself and the individual, unprotected by either the shield of tradition or the properly aligning factor of disciplined inner gyroscope instilled early in life, must swim among eddies and whirlpools unleashed by the forces of mass communication and affluence. (As the rock group Jethro Tull (Anderson 1971) later characterized the sensation: Well the lush separation unfolds you And the products of wealth Push you along on the bow wave Of their spiritless undying selves.) The social consequences were manifold. These forces led many people in the United States to pursue other paths to success, develop different goals, and generally modify all behavior so as to adapt to the more demanding social nature of society. The practical difference that Riesman, et al. (1961:21) describe as “other directed” is simply that rather than listening closely to themselves and their inner rudder—as the inner directed do—the other-directed individuals substitute an ‘antenna’ for a gyroscope so as to be able to monitor, and attune more closely to, the signals that are reaching him or her from others, particularly those others in the relevant peer group rather than those of prior generations. Moreover, while the inner-directed social character that The Lonely Crowd describes would certainly wish to conform to externalities of good reputation, prevailing standards of dress, homemaking, and bank credit (1961:24), the other-directed individual would add a desire to meet and conform with his or her peers’ inner experiences by sharing their fluctuating opinions and tastes more closely. The difference between the two social types is marked: the inner-directed person can ‘go it alone’ in a strange

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environment due to a muted sensitivity to others and a heightened sensitivity to guidance from his or her internal piloting mechanism; the other-directed person, habituated to listening for those signals from outside, is continually scanning the peer group, capable of quickly developing a superficial intimacy and responsiveness to anyone and everyone, thereby diminishing the gap between the familiar and the new, different, or strange. Subjecting the self to constant bombardment by incoming messages, the other-directed person feels he or she must attend to them, interpret them, and respond to them to maintain psychological balance. Consequently, the inner-directed person often displays stability and resolve whereas the other-directed person, absent the balancing guidance of a steady stream of incoming messages from relevant peer groups, may suffer from a ‘diffuse anxiety’ that he or she is ‘out of touch’ and without direction (’1961:25). While the triad of social character types Riesman and his colleagues developed offer an interesting theoretical heuristic, it is important to note—as the authors themselves do—that not only do eras and character styles overlap but individual human beings are all composed of some degree of each of the character styles (1961:30–32). Moreover, humans retain agency and thus have the capacity to alter their character, undoubtedly only to a greater or lesser degree, but this, too, adds variation among the ‘types’ and individuals that constitute any particular society or become representative of an era (1961:29, 31). Perhaps most important for the nature of the present endeavor is the authors’ recognition that in addition to adoption and accommodation as a means of acquiring social character, members of a society may also resist and repulse cultural pressures to adapt to societal changes that are influencing the evolution of a different, emerging style (1961:33). As Riesman, et al., observed in what is almost a now forgotten passage of their very popular book: I think that there are millions of inner-directed Americans who reject in similar fashion [to Sioux native Americans] the values that emanate from growing dominance of other-directed types. Their resentment may be conscious and vocal. As with the Sioux, this resentment is culturally supported both by the old-timers and by the long memory of the past which is present to all in rural and small-town areas. . . . Here, the resentment can express itself  . . . over the representatives of other-directed types. Nevertheless, these [resisters] . . . , do not feel secure . . . their resentment hardens . . . [and their characterological style can become a caricature of itself]. (1961:34)

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So, too, did Riesman, et al. discern pockets of resistance to changing tradition-bound ways among immigrants from those countries which had not completely transitioned from their tradition-bound past and among the highly gendered working class where the dominance of ‘manly’ values showed resistance to a style that was exemplary of “smooth or soft city ways” (1961:34). All that has been said so far is, in part, by way of foundation for as Riesman and his collaborators discuss at length, all of the adaptive tendencies of social character are subject to increased pressure as roles within a society, like the United States, become more complicated as the division of labor progresses— as it was doing when Riesman, et al., were writing and as it continues to do (1961:41). Consequently, as will remain true in our examination of twenty-first century identity formation in subsequent chapters, the accelerating division of labor (which will later be accelerated further by the onslaught of globalized competition) means that for increasing numbers of each new generation children can no longer take their parents as role models as to how to succeed at becoming adults (1961:41). As Riesman, et al. note, adaptation to the increasingly complicated modern world will depend on greater investment in formal character training—that is, the sort of public character development instilled and required for formal schooling. This will be true because (as more recent studies will confirm) children will need to be “fitted for roles not as yet fully determined” (1961:42). Such an individual must remain alert to change—and be prepared to engage in “continuous experiments in self-mastery” (1961:42) so as to be ready to adapt to whatever society next throws at him or her. The modern individual must “decide what to do—and therefore must decide what to do with himself ” (1961:44)—a demand of identity formation that seems vibrantly alive within the twenty-first century as much, or more, to the degree it was present when Riesman, et al. noted it. For Riesman and colleagues, this developmental task was the most treacherous feature of the transition from inner-directed to outer-directed social character that he observed: the other-directed child faces not the usual pressure to ‘make good’ vis-à-vis the outside world but also the dilemma of deciding and defining what that might entail (1961:48). Thus, the anxious child forced to attend to all the signals must especially attend to signals that might tell him or her just what it is the peers think success means—whether it is becoming a successful person, a partner in a successful marriage, an employee within a successful company, or—what? In such a state of uncertain standards and goals, approval itself, regardless of substance, can appear to be the only criteria and reward worth seeking (1961:48). For Riesman and his collaborators, what an other-directed child most often might learn from such a cauldron of pressure amidst ambiguity was an anxious disquiet that

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did not afflict the inner directed, even as their lack of flexible responsiveness began to seem counter-productive in the more dynamic society that was then emerging (1961:51). Finally, The Lonely Crowd analyzes the cultural movement from an emphasis on work to the sphere of leisure, self-gratification, and fun and the corresponding changes in identity styles that accompany that change. Thus, the issues between parent and child—and the resulting effects of their socializing influence on each other—more often than not begin to concern the ‘nonwork’ side of life (1961:54). In retrospect, however, this is only true if one defines work narrowly, as would have been true in the Industrial Revolution. In the post-World War II ‘modern’ United States, consuming leisure, seeking self-gratification and ‘fun’ are work—and serious work at that. For even as Riesman, et al. observe that “there is no [necessary] work for children to do inside the urban home, and little outside” (1961:54), the modern parent in the United States, tasked with fashioning a growing up process for his or her child, will still find plenty for that child to do, especially if he or she is middle or upper middle class since the form of socialization employed is child management through ‘concerted cultivation’ (Lareau 2011). The implications of Riesman, Glazer, and Denney’s analysis of changing forms of character in the post-World War II United States were also broadly observable in patterns of child interaction and socialization. Thus, for the inner-directed child, sometimes raised predominantly by a governess, a nanny, or a hired tutor in the upper middle-class home, the child becomes aware, early on, of the disparities of power among adults and experiences a reduced level of emotional intensity in the home since these outsiders act as buffers, and even allies, shielding the child to a degree from the parents (1961:56). The parents, in turn, can maintain a distance from the child within the home that will no longer be possible in the following phase of other-direction. Children raised in such circumstances develop the ability to conduct impersonal relations with people from all walks of life but sometimes the impersonality may reach an extent where they can manage to experience no other kind (1961:56). The inner-directed child becomes, as one consequence of these experiences, highly adept at defending himself or herself from intrusions by others whereas the other-directed child, raised in a highly personalized environment in the home, may grow up without the sort of characterological defenses that permit the child to erect psychological boundaries that will establish a stable social distance from others. It is apparent that individuals with these two different character styles, if forced to live with one another with even a mild degree of intimacy, will find themselves at odds regarding the nature and quality of contact and interaction that is compatible with each style.

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The Lonely Crowd’s discussion of the transition from inner-directed to other-directed also demonstrated ready application to changes in the teacher-pupil relationship since the near exclusive emphasis on intellectual content of the inner-directed era gives way to an increasing focus on group adjustment, emotional open-ness, and morale in the other-directed school (1961:58–62). The inner-directed child, often isolated but not always lonely, gives way in such a setting to a child highly attuned to the group with few barriers between students. The peer group becomes the relevant reference group and the influence of parents recedes at a younger and younger age. This enables the “rapid circulation of tastes” that is one of the more notable developments of other-directed society, with implications of its own (1961:62–63). According to Riesman and his collaborators, the inner-directed person could easily maintain an individuality at odds with his peers if he or she developed one because the person was somewhat impervious to the attitudes and tastes of others. The other-directed person, however, taught to conform early to group participation and attitudes, often finds it impossible to assert himself or herself in a manner not consistent with peers. Taught to suppress differences for the benefit of smooth adjustment, the temperament training the individual has undergone will repress individuated emotional expression and restrict any independence of judgment or taste, which might act as ‘rough edges’ to successful interaction within the group (1961:71–73). The inner-directed person, having developed a means of discreetly avoiding people as well as approaching people, is not subject to the dictates of others in the same way as the other-directed, who are reduced to continually scanning other’s tastes so as to sniff out the small qualitative differences that swings in fashion signify the style and status markers that are ascendant and, therefore, must be observed and adopted (1961:74–75). All of this leads to a culture of ‘competitive consumption,’ where the self becomes a ready receptacle for the taste judgments of the peer group, and group members must look around to see what others think before committing to any opinion as to their taste preferences or opinions. This produced, in the authors’ view, a fear of nonconformity that created other-directed individuals who would endure pursuing almost any activity as obligatory but limited them from experiencing a genuine, personal interest if the object of their interest was not endorsed by the group (1961:77). All this led, according to the authors, to a cultural atmosphere in early postWorld War II years where “relatively stable and individualistic pursuits” were being replaced by the ‘fluctuating tastes’ driven by the collective opinion of the peer group. While desires for this or that thing or aim are thus more easily satisfied—as the peer group tends to level taste to an attainable standard— Riesman and his collaborators still discern a yearning among the remaining

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inner-directed members of society, who wish to experience the satisfaction the other-directed seem to easily attain, largely because their “individuality [has been] trained out” (1961:79). But the real change according to the authors is that membership in the peer group has become a ‘consumer item’ itself, a main object of pursuit that shows one’s ‘good taste,’ and competition for the peer group’s approval is a form of striving that becomes the principal driver of upward mobility in the new phase of social character display (1961:81). The peer group, The Lonely Crowd’s arbiter of all that is good or to be sought after, assails the self with the force of its numbers and the intensity of the collective will, leaving few defenses available to the individual that it cannot hammer down (1961:82). Although Riesman and his colleagues wrote long before the era of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the internet generally, their analysis of the changing forms of media entertainment remains instructive. As one example, Riesman, et al. focus on the popularity of comic books among children and adolescents because “it compresses into a few minutes’ reading time a sequence which, in earlier eras, was dragged out in many pages of print” (1961:103). He cites as an example the Count of Monte Cristo’s years of suffering in confinement, as well as the patience and industry he displayed and his study of the abbé’s teaching, all of which were sustained over many years until he escapes from jail, becoming older in the process, before he experiences the satisfaction of winning against his enemies (1961:103). It is worth noting that today’s modernity theorists, with their emphasis on the speeding up of time as the evanescent, fluid quality to experiencing time, were presaged 50 years earlier by Riesman, et al.’s observation regarding the media telescoping of time that was already happening in his day. Certainly, there is widespread agreement that simply the speed of modernity itself may be a problem for the individual, one that the self cannot easily solve while maintaining the pace required. Whyte, in The Organization Man, took as his subject matter the apparent ubiquity of organizations in American society of the 1950s and their tendency to enforce on the individual a collective, cooperative mode of being that he named the Social Ethic (1956:6–7, 10–14). The central problem, as Whyte conceived it, was that organizational life had come to so dominate the lives of individuals, and the ideology of cooperation had become so pervasive, that there was little intellectual space—and even less social support incentive—for a person to resist engulfment in the organization’s purposes to the exclusion of his or her own sense of self. It is worth noting at the outset that Whyte’s definition of the organization, and his attribution of the qualities of organizational life, was expansive. While he conceded that the ‘corporation man’ was the most conspicuous of the American personas he was addressing, Whyte

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considered the bureaucratic similarities of the modern seminary, the medical school, the physics laboratory, and the Wall Street law firm to produce men and women who shared many of the same mental characteristics and would be enveloped within the same core ideology. Historically, the organizations of the 1950s were often the grown children of determined late ­nineteenth-century industrialists epitomized by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor, and Vanderbilt, driven by the self-­interest inherent in the Protestant Ethic, had built financial and industrial empires by organizing companies to exploit the dynamic power of industry. This same energy had more recently been harnessed to oppose and defeat Nazism in the 1940s when the corporate mission of General Motors was converted to supplying military might. In each instance, men saw that devotion to collective effort could contribute to aiding and improving the lot of all. And, by the middle 1950s when Whyte was writing, the organizations men and women found themselves inhabiting had not only promised, but delivered, a level of prosperity to the average citizen that prior generations could barely conceive of enjoying. It began to seem perverse for anyone to want to resist the golden shackles of organizational and bureaucratic life. Whyte’s assessment of the generally pernicious influence of the organization on the individual begins with a review of what he terms scientism: a faux social science prevalent at the time that contended human organization and human happiness could be understood by a unified theory of human behavior. The argument underlying scientism rested upon our increasing ability to accumulate data, and measure, multiple features of both society and the individual (1956:23–8). Systems theory, whether the version proposed by Talcott Parsons in sociology or another variant offered by behaviorists like B. F. Skinner, was then ascendant in the social sciences and as Whyte well understood the common denominator among these approaches was the utopian vision of a harmoniously cooperative society. One feature of that vision was a society that was fundamentally suspended in a stable equilibrium that, arguably, fulfilled all of mankind’s wants. An unaddressed weakness of these approaches was how to explain, or otherwise incorporate theoretically within a model that rested upon harmonious equilibrium, events and persons who disharmoniously disrupt the prevailing system (1956:29). In short, scientism is one of the ways in which the good of the collective is exalted over the interests of the individual and, thus, in this regard, is an obvious facilitator of the organizational ideology that Whyte is attempting to depict. A second theme that Whyte finds prevalent, and coincident with one of the features of scientism, is what he perceives to be a trend within 1950s society aimed at building a social “environment in which everyone is tightly

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knit into a belongingness with one another” (1956:32). Whyte characterizes this conception as a social order in which “there is no restless wandering but rather the deep emotional security that comes from total integration with the group.” Whether or not Whyte’s expression of this tendency was as pervasively powerful as he suggests, he was not alone in detecting widespread conformism in the era in which he wrote (Wilson 1955; Wylie 1943; Yates 1961). Indeed, many spoke out openly against the trend, including some of those administering large organizations, such as Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley at the time (1956:46). What in some ways Whyte missed was the continuity in thinking about the relationship of the individual and the group that preceded his study. As the earlier sections on Cooley and Mead readily demonstrate, American social psychology of the early twentieth century had long been consumed with grasping the manner and means by which individuals came together to form a group with a shared purpose that constituted something more than the cumulative self-interest of its members. This question, never definitively answered, soon devolved into the plethora of subsidiary concerns to which students of organizational and management culture devote themselves today. Meanwhile, the question of the nature of organizational impacts on the individual awaited more definitive resolution. Whyte’s meditations on the confluence of scientism and belongingness led him, finally, to consider the influence of the two trends in the context of the then increasing frequency of group work in project teams and committees within American organizations. As Whyte perceived it, the increasing emphasis on group work in the 1950s arose from two propositions. First, there was the argument that better ideas arose, and could be further refined more successfully, from a group working together on a problem as compared to each working separately at a desk (1956:47). Second, the group offers a refuge from the hard-driving, often authoritarian leader whose domination of an organization can approach tyranny. This rationale draws on the appeal of our democratic heritage and, to a degree, acts to reinforce the will of the group over and against the individual, albeit a particular type of individual with a domineering style. However, Whyte’s investigation of the organizational group led him to conclude that it functioned in many respects as an impediment, particularly to creativity and that while the group stifled the tyrannical usurper, it also stifled any group member whose individual qualities of mind, character, preparation, and motivation held the potential to develop ideas superior to those that might be generated by the collective members (1956:52–53). Ultimately, Whyte’s portrait of ‘the organization man’ identifies his [or her] character as one buffered by the security and comfort of group life and

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dedicated to pursuing only those ‘safe’ aspirations that ask little, promise less, but protect comprehensively. In this vision, each role one plays within an organization is merely preparatory training for the next phase of life in an organization, not a qualitatively different organization but simply another organization, the features of which hardly matter and hardly differ. Thus, graduation from high school precipitates a nearly seamless transition to college which begets a shift to the orientation and probationary training period at the government office, corporate headquarters, or foundation-sponsored think tank. Whyte, describing the highly organized process of a college placement program in the 1950s, comments that the standardization of this human lottery system might, in another era, be repugnant because of the standardized future that it forecasts for those churned through its doors. However, as Whyte perceives, the youthful aspirants of the 1950s have been perfectly honed so that their ambitions mesh closely with the organizational modes of existence that are being offered by each interviewer and the entity he or she represents (1956:63–64). Whyte’s discussion of the nature, and cause, of the restricted aspirations he observed is instructive. Initially, he notes the climate of fear in the United States during the mid-1950s, a period dominated nationally by the Army– McCarthy hearings and a general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism (Hofstadter 1963). Anecdotally, Whyte quotes a professor who states that he and his colleagues find students of the day “less inquiring of mind, more ready to accept an authority” (1956:66). Generally, Whyte’s reflections on the different predispositions among the generations are both the least satisfying as well as the most revealing sections of his book. Painted in extremely broad strokes, Whyte’s capsule evaluations of the values that are motivating the era’s students are purely anecdotal, and to that extent rather unreliable. At the same time, the cultural tensions that Whyte’s summaries examine will be familiar to any American from virtually any generation. Thus, Whyte and his sources found members of the rising generation less directly concerned about economic security. In large part, as Whyte recognized, this could be attributed to seven years of continuing prosperity in the immediate postwar years (1956:72) but at one and the same time his interview respondents expressed values unrelated to their own economic success. Notably, his interview subjects expressed little direct criticism of then existing American society but rather saw their personal dilemma as merely a matter of finding the correct ‘fit.’ College seniors often saw large organizations as offering both economic security and opportunity, often unspecified, to pursue significant career paths. Neither rebellious nor adventurous, in the main, those about to enter the adult workforce who Whyte interviewed were more likely to

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express interest in service, including teaching, where such respondents envisioned they could live a variation of the ‘good life’ while reserving some portion of themselves from encapsulation within a large organization. As a corollary, many expressed an aversion to simply selling the products of the large corporations, preferring to see themselves as collaborators rather than manipulators (1956:72–75). Ultimately, the most illuminating sections of Whyte’s study are his comparison of two training programs developed and administered by large corporate entities. Whyte’s purpose in summarizing the two approaches is to contrast what he considers to be examples of one program that incorporates the underlying values of the individualistic Protestant Ethic and one program that models the emergent collectivist values he defines as the Social Ethic (1956:112). Arguably, what these comparison summaries actually portray, however, is the dedication of each organization to inculcating in the latest cohort of probationary employees the attitudes, and to a lesser degree the skills, the organizational elites determine are requisite for them to display in order to further the predetermined mission set by others. Equally important is the elimination function each program serves: those who don’t fit the organizational culture will be weeded out. Thus, each program is simply a manipulation of the self by the existing representatives of the organization. These approaches’ legitimacy is premised on the underlying assumption of the period: “that the goals of the individual and the goals of the organization will work out to be one and the same” (1956:129). However, as Whyte’s synopses reveal, the goals of the two do diverge for some and when they do, the individual is sacrificed—or to much the same effect—intentionally extricates him- or herself from the organization’s reach, recognizing (without being directly told) that the organization is not a ‘proper fit’ (1956:115, 123–125). Whyte’s conclusion reflects his recognition that the ostensible agreement between the aims of the individual and the goals of the organization is illusory. As he states in part, [The individual] is not in the grip of vast social forces about which it is impossible for him [or her] to do anything; the options are there, . . . [but] [the individual] must fight The Organization. . . . It is wretched, dispiriting advice to hold before [a person] the dream that ideally there need be no conflict between [the individual] and society. There always is. (1956:404) Whyte’s recognition of the ultimate irreconcilability of the individual and the group paved the way, in a certain sense, for Erving Goffman’s perceptive

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analyses of the performative aspects of social life required in order to sustain ‘polite society.’ Nearly any page of Goffman’s works is instructive in this regard but the following (somewhat lengthy) section of a single paragraph (1959:9–10) distills the essence of his observations about the manner in which unarticulated, implicit processes allow self and society to connect: When we allow that the individual projects a definition of the situation when he appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may be seen to be, will themselves project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to him [or her]. Ordinarily the definitions of the situation projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur. I do not mean there will be the kind of consensus that arises where each individual present candidly expresses what he really feels and honestly agrees with the expressed feelings of the others present. This kind of harmony is an optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary for the smooth working of society. Rather, each participant is expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing his own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service. Further, there is usually a kind of definitional division of labor. Each participant is allowed to establish the tentative official ruling regarding matters which are vital to him but not immediately important to others, e.g., the rationalizations and justifications by which he accounts for his past activity. In exchange for this courtesy he [she] remains silent or non-committal on matters important to others but not immediately important to him [or her]. We have then a kind of interactional modus vivendi. Together the participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored. Real agreement will also exist concerning the desirability of avoiding an open conflict of definitions of the situation. Goffman’s focus on the successful elements required for the presentation of self in the routine, normal settings of social life also presages the potential for the breakdown of the consensus definition of the situation. Events may occur

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within the interactional membrane of the group that contradict, discredit, or undermine the fragile consensus regarding the definition of the situation, thereby setting the stage for rupture. Unless there is an effort to rescue the definition of the situation by a member of the group, the group interaction may come to an abrupt, perhaps uncomfortable, and even irreparable halt. While all breakdowns in group interaction are not always attributable to an individual member, it is not uncommon that disruptions are so attributed. In such an instance, the individual whose presentation has been discredited may be made to feel ill at ease, embarrassed, or shamed (1959:11–12). To avoid such breakdowns, preventive practices are often employed and one measure of the importance of the group to its members is the degree to which individual members anticipate the possibility of breakdown and fashion their roles, and responses, to present performances that sustain the group rather than undermine it. These defensive practices can also be supplemented, as indicated, by protective responses intended to realign the definition of the situation (1959:13–14). Finally, groups that have a history will often have a ready store of anecdotes regarding the social faux pas of former members, the purpose of which is to educate individual members into proper role performance as well as to illustrate the prospective protective strategies that current members can employ to retrieve errant performances from destroying irrevocably the prevailing definition of the situation (1959:14). Goffman’s analyses, while seemingly at odds with some of the prior theories of group behavior, are consonant with them in this respect: like the theories of Cooley and Mead and the detailed observations of Whyte, Goffman’s principles emphasize the power of the group, whether it is a small group or a large organization. For this reason, the group member who wishes his or her performance to be taken seriously must make an effort to present a performance that its audience, or constituent public, can embrace and support, whether ‘sincerely’ based on their own beliefs or ‘cynically’ based on their belief that, while necessary, the performance is offered principally to manage the impressions of the audience and not out of some inherent belief of their own (1959:17–19). The dilemma that Goffman’s theory presents for the individual, however, is how a person will be able to determine whether the self they are prepared to present to the world is ‘genuine,’ ‘authentic,’ and ‘sincere’ or not, whether ‘cynical’ or simply something other than the ‘real thing.’ As Goffman recounts, the continuum from conviction to unpracticed aspiration to cynical portrayal can begin at any point and traverse in either direction, and then move back again. As one example, Goffman notes Becker and Geer’s (1958) field observations of medical students who must forego idealistically driven goals of service to humanity in their first two

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years to substitute, instead, a desire to simply pass their required examinations (1959:20–21). Although Goffman does not emphasize the point, they do so because the medical school environment gives them no other realistic options. That is, the environment is powerful and unrelenting; the medical students are, in turn, relatively powerless and captured by their original idealistic investment in the process. That most precious commodity, their selves, which is the subject of this book, has been sunk too deeply in a dream from which they cannot extricate themselves readily. Goffman’s social psychology may be most beneficially contrasted with the theories of Cooley and Mead by noting its underlying acceptance of social hierarchy and status and its general applicability to social systems in which social rank varies along a continuum. Thus, the ‘purpose’ of many of the social psychological principles Goffman describes is to maintain either social status or social distance. Still, Goffman does not ascribe to the view that the social system of any society is merely a static ladder of organized rankings. Rather, in all of his examples actors are strategically positioning themselves in an effort to maximize status rewards and minimize status losses. Moreover, Goffman does not perceive social actors as mechanistically employing only those strategic moves calibrated carefully in every instance to achieve their intended effect but instead envisions social actors as often forced to select their lines of action from among a limited range of expressive signs and status markers and then hoping that their choice pleases the audience toward which it is directed. In this regard, Goffman’s theorizing emphasizes the fluidity of status rankings along different dimensions in different settings and the relative ambiguity of the behavioral qualities that can be displayed effectively in a particular setting, whether to maintain or enhance one’s status (1959:22–30). The notion of status, and the evident importance of maintaining it implied in Goffman’s reasoning, leads us to consider those instances in which tasks and the related performances they entail are considered ‘beneath one’s rank,’ or the corollary, where a person of a certain rank assumes prerogatives associated with a higher rank. In either instance, it is highly probable that one or another social actor will lodge a protest, whether silent or vocal, thereby demonstrating explicitly the importance of the status ranking system to individuals, even as the appropriate rank for a given activity remains nebulous. Equally important are the behaviors and qualities that should be—and within the context of a particular socio-legal environment—can be considered with regard to elevations in social rank or demotions in social status. Garfinkel (1956) long ago comprehensively considered the ritualized ceremonies designed and executed for instances of status degradation. While impressively detailed with respect to the ceremonial event itself, Garfinkel’s analysis does

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not inform us of the particular behavioral qualities that warrant either an elevation in status (a promotion; a graduation; a selection for an award; an appointment to a valued post) or, correspondingly, a social demotion (a failing grade; placement on probation; a suspension from school). These are highly context specific and always becoming more so in our specialized society. Moreover, because status is so important in American society the question of what the proper standards should be and the related question of whether they were applied properly in the instant case are inherently controversial ones. Both questions devolve into whether one was ‘treated fairly’ or ‘treated properly,’ but neither of these framings will typically suffice in raising a challenge to any particular status reduction because virtually all modern bureaucracies have developed elaborate schemes with which to justify either an elevation in status or a status downgrade. Thus, the individual social actor is constrained by the current scheme in place and must couch his or her claim for elevation, or present his or her defense against status depreciation, in the terms—and along the range of criteria—made available by the institutional context in which the action arises. Goffman’s explanations of social behavior are also explicitly directed at only those situations which involve face-to-face interaction. It is this second feature, in addition to status considerations, that impels the social actor to project certain behaviors in order to maintain the definition of the situation and its related performance that is sought for the social actor, in every instance, is attempting to construct a performance by all means available that he or she can ‘pull off ’—that is, not have questioned as inauthentic, inappropriate, or substandard by those for whom it is being exhibited. The ‘face-to-face’ setting by its nature leads the social actor to conceal information that, while integral to the social role being executed, must not be displayed in order to maintain a suitable social performance. As one example, the requirement of social suitability for face-to-face expression leads to the commonly understood use of the ‘white lie.’ Thus, when speaking with a parent socially whose child does not in some respect—whether academically, athletically, or morally—‘measure up,’ one conveniently disregards any mention of the child’s inadequacies, although, in private, one may assign a lower academic grade, strike the child from the first team athletic roster, or distance oneself socially from the child. In addition to hiding or otherwise eliminating features and qualities that the social actor does not wish to convey because they might spoil the definition of the situation, the social actor must organize and mobilize his activity so that he or she successfully conveys just the information requisite in order to foster the impression he or she wishes to offer to those present for the interaction (1959:30–34). This performance element attains superordinate importance

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where the social actor aspires to incorporate, and align oneself with, the idealized, officially accredited values of a society. Thus, while there is always a certain effort to introduce a level of consistency between the setting, manner, and appearance of any performative action (1959:2–27), any attempt to call upon the core values of the society and use them, in effect, as ‘props’ in support of the performance must be adroitly organized and seamlessly executed lest the emperor be viewed ‘without any clothes.’ Goffman’s dramaturgical theory has often been criticized on the ground that it reduces society to play acting, often done badly by poorly coordinated amateurs. In this sense his emphasis on appearances suggests a social reality that is akin to shadow play or one that possesses the features of Kabuki theater experiences. This view gives insufficient credit to Goffman’s recognition that every society, including middle-class American society, has multiple stages where performances are constructed, and each stage has both a ‘front stage’ and a ‘back stage,’ which must be at least metaphorically separated by a curtain so that an audience only sees the performance that is intended and therefore does not see the fevered preparation, makeup application, and other ancillary steps taken to manage the impression the individual wishes to present. A more cogent critique within the ambit of the present project is the question of whether the persuasiveness of Goffman’s argument regarding the nature of society suggests that the goal of creating an authentic self is, by definition, a futile exercise. In this view, one certainly ‘constructs’ a self, but one does so only in response to the limited choices that the existing social order offers. This posture erects an undefined, but otherwise rather impermeable social structure arrayed against the aspirations of the individual. Yet, Goffman manages to slip this noose from around his neck as well, leaving open creative adaptation within role performances and transition from one role to another, thereby enlarging the performative space that one can inhabit. Goffman’s account of the Shetland Isle crofter (peasant farmer) couple who came to manage the area’s only inn is exemplary of his handling of this issue. As he describes, the couple—life-long members of the lower class crofters—were required, by the nature of their new positions as mister and mistress of an establishment offering accommodations to middle-class tourists—to acquire and offer middle-class amenities they had never experienced nor heretofore desired. Still, as the couple interacted with their guests, extolling and providing upgraded services, they, too, came to enjoy the prerogatives and pleasures that now were within their reach (1959:20). In this manner, Goffman demonstrates how a set of habitual, nearly ingrained, performances can be jettisoned in favor of adopting a new set of performance standards to the extent of virtually making them one’s own.

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There remains, however, the question of motivation, as well as the necessity of realizing both available opportunity and negotiating successful adaptive innovation, within the context of the theoretical paradigm Goffman devised. Goffman is elusive in this regard. At times, his analysis suggests that the individual actor is pursuing lines of action intended only to foster and advance his or her self-interest. At other times, he appears to propose that the strategy is being pursued by an actor desperate to attain a level of social acceptance that has been previously withheld from him (or her), or otherwise foreclosed, to him or her. Still other times the social actor may only seek to maintain social standing, not advance it, and therefore works to sustain impressions that will vitiate actual or anticipated action directed against him or her. Each of these approaches, however, shares one element: a reference group whose impression and estimate of the individual matters to him or her, thereby precipitating the need for strategic action so as to present the proper ‘face’ to the other(s) within a particular milieu. In short, Goffman’s theory makes room for what may be called ‘role enterprise,’ in which a member within the confines of an existing set of social arrangements “attempts not so much to move into a higher position already established as to create a new position for himself [or herself],” a position that will permit the actor to exhibit qualities and attributes that are congenial to his or her self-conception (1959:248). Yet, the capacity for ‘role enterprise’ is not unlimited but is bound rather tightly in some circumstances by (1) the particular social structure of the setting; (2) the nature of any perceived social disqualifier that reflects negatively on an individual’s ability to perform a particular role with, or without, special aids; or (3) the ability to alter his or her manner or appearance that will permit him or her to convey a suitable impression that overcomes the perceived deficiency. Those situations which limit ‘role enterprise’ most severely can be illustrated best by Goffman’s (1961) and others’ work on what he termed ‘total institutions.’ Settings such as the prison and the modern asylum were built upon, and sustained by, a rigorous code of separation, not only the obvious point of division between staff and inmate, but between position holders across the institution’s division of labor and among those holding ranked levels of authority. Within the asylum, those held in solitary confinement face the most severe limitations on their role performances. Examining this most extreme setting within a total institution that is, itself, at the extreme margin of contemporary society is instructive for understanding the limitations of ‘role enterprise’ in other, less restrictive, settings. Remarkably, little has changed except by way of minor detail with respect to solitary confinement over the course of several hundred years.

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In the United States, the so-called ‘separate system’ was first employed in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Jail in 1790 ( Johnson 2002:36). Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville (1964:57), in their magisterial report on the American prison system written in the early 1830s, described its fundamental feature as: According to this system, the convict, once thrown into his cell, remains there without interruption, until the expiration of his punishment. He is separated from the whole world; and the penitentiaries, full of malefactors like himself, but every one of them entirely isolated, do not present to him even a society in the prison. In solitary, therefore, the ability of the convict to communicate was severely curtailed and his (or her) social world extremely reduced. The opportunity for ‘face-to-face’ interaction—the setting that creates both the need and the opportunity for impression management—is therefore severely constricted, almost to the point of elimination. In such a setting, the range of ‘role enterprise’ available is small and often becomes socially counter-productive. As Crouch and Marquart (1989:167) comment: ad. seg. (i.e., solitary confinement) was a grim place for officers to work. Being assaulted, grabbed, cursed daily, and splattered with coffee or even urine came with the territory. It was noisy and often wet as inmates regularly flooded their cells in protest. In sum, the confinement of a person to a prison cell for as much as 23 hours per day and little opportunity for face-to-face interaction has the collateral effect of reducing the social actor’s range of social skills while eliminating the desire to engage in successful impression management. The desire to innovatively adopt a role that is more congenial than that of ‘inmate’ is purposefully destroyed by the prison generally and made even more remote by subjugation to the Spartan social environment imposed by the conditions of solitary confinement. As Johnson (2002:75) observes, the inmate becomes “[b]ereft of a personal identity” and has no other options but to accept the role of prison inmate or person in solitary. Indeed, as Westervelt and Cook (2012:62–64) discovered, the setting is so debilitating that those confined to solitary confinement have trouble enacting the social role of ordinary person any longer. When released, for example, those who have been so confined experience problems eating non-prison diets, walking due to compromised stamina, and sleeping on something other than a hard pallet, outside of a locked cell, and

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most especially with another person. Thus, not only is the space for role innovation or exploration minimal to nonexistent within the solitary confinement environment, but even the ability to act out the social role of ‘normal person’ is undercut. The second situation that can inhibit ‘role enterprise’ is one in which the social actor is perceived to possess, or exhibit, personal qualities that incapacitate such a person from providing a socially acceptable performance of certain kinds. Goffman (1963) addressed these situations as ones requiring the management of impressions relating to instances of ‘spoiled identity.’ Thus, persons who possess a ‘stigma’—an attribute or quality that is deeply discrediting—are compelled by the nature of the societal reaction they receive to develop attitudes, employ tactics, or adopt aids of one kind or another to manage the impression they might otherwise convey and thereby earn the ‘right’ to perform social roles that would otherwise be socially closed to them. Notably, as Goffman emphasizes, the attributes themselves that are the ostensible source of the stigma act merely as signifiers since the feature or quality at issue is neither creditable nor discreditable in and of itself (1963:3). Rather, the fact that a stigma exists is simply the recognition that a relationship exists between the individual possessing a stigmatized feature and others who imbue the quality or attribute as worthy of social categorization and consequent treatment of the person. Thus, while the attribute that inspires a stigmatized response may be an “abomination[s] of the body,” “blemishes of individual character,” or tribal membership (race, nation, religion) the response is the same in all cases—the person who might otherwise be readily accepted in everyday intercourse is perceived as different and turns those who are faced with him or her away from the individual (1963:4–5). The fact that others acknowledge the relevance of the stigmatizing attribute as worthy of consideration may result in the individual becoming socially categorized as deserving of particular treatment, often discriminatory in nature. The social fact that a stigma is recognized, and the related fact that others in society may react negatively to it when perceived, leads to the question of whether, and how, the stigmatized person responds to his or her situation (1963:8). There are the extreme responses at either end of a continuum— denial and acceptance—but more commonly there are efforts to ‘manage’ the stigma, that is, one way or another to conceal, repair, or evade the stigma and the social reactions it provokes. The various ways in which these strategies are pursued are not necessary to examine here for the impact on the stigmatized person is the same in each instance: the ‘self ’ has been identified with the stigmatizing attribute and the individual, accepting a stigmatizing condition exists, acts to manage it. The stigmatized individual thus recognizes that he

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or she is not ‘normal’ but must socially navigate what may be perceived as a sea of ‘normals’ while always possessing an acute awareness of his or her difference. Yet, the stigmatized person whose awareness of his or her stigma has come to define their life may find acceptance from two sources. One is a small social circle of the similarly stigmatized. The second is a broader movement or organization dedicated in one manner or another to those with a particular form of stigma. Examples of either are easy to identify but in each case of affiliation the person’s ‘self ’ will be primarily identified with their stigmatized condition. While affiliation with others similarly stigmatized lessens the need to socialize with ‘normals’ and thereby manage the tension and awkwardness that may be a byproduct of such interaction, it also reduces and restricts various life opportunities and segments the ‘self ’ within the half-world of the stigmatized (1963:20–31). The stigmatized, regardless of the nature or severity of their perceived stigmatization, face a quite different dilemma of the ‘self ’ than the asylum inmate involuntarily held in solitary confinement, however. Here, the metaphoric prison in which the individual finds himself or herself is principally social, noticeably less physical and less subject to the pure application of power, and arises solely from others’ social reaction and the stigmatized person’s response. (Comparing the two examples reveals one of the anomalies in Goffman’s theory: his less than direct appreciation, and lack of discussion of, power even though his discussions of social action often reflect the many strategies individuals employ to evade regimes in which they may become subject to the socially powerful controls that can be imposed by others (Burns 1992:54).) Yet, while not as completely delimiting, the stigmatized individual may, like the segregated, isolated, and confined inmate, find their range of role innovations severely impacted. Indeed, much like the person who becomes institutionalized in the asylum setting, and therefore has difficulty reacquiring those performance skills required by ‘normal’ society upon release, the stigmatized individual can continue to depend upon, and act out, the adaptations embraced to counter their original experience of stigmatization even where the negative, rejecting reactions of others have attenuated. Both examples therefore illustrate the malleability of the social self in the face of environmental circumstances—whether those are predominantly physical or exclusively social. Goffman’s theory often raises uncomfortable reflections for those who have not previously considered the less attractive, often hidden, principles and practices of social life. Rather than heroic, affirmative action, the self may be viewed engaged in sometimes evasive, sometimes duplicitous lines of action—almost akin to the sleights of hand employed by a pickpocket or the

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perpetrator of a ‘con.’ Reality begins to appear less transparent and ‘real’ and more a matter of ‘games’ and ‘gamesmanship’ that goes against the grain of what many middle-class Americans would like to believe. As Goffman phrases it more delicately, “When persons engage in regulated dealings with each other, they come to employ social routines or practices, namely, patterned adaptations to the rules [of society]—including conformances, by-passings, secret deviations, excusable infractions, flagrant violations, and the like” (1971:x). Accordingly, rather than confidence and trust, Goffman’s dramaturgical orientation introduces the distinct possibilities of misplaced trust and social vertigo. The individual whose own experience in society has been buffered and supported by a firm foundation, and who has built a ‘self ’ on what he or she thought was terra firma, can therefore become disoriented by a glimmer of realization that perhaps it has all been nothing but a ‘show.’ The ‘self ’—becoming less certain of what, if anything—can buttress its tentative claims for acknowledgement and recognition, must renew a search for self that heretofore the individual believed, and acted as if, had been completed. Goffman’s theory, which introduces the possibility—one may say almost the certainty—of dissonance between the self and other leads us to crystallize the problem of ‘self ’ and ‘identity’ in its most direct, pure form. Heidegger (1969) grappled with the meaning of identity in his lecture, later published, given on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1957. Beginning with the philosophical equation that identity can only be expressed in the form ‘A = A,’ Heidegger progressed through discussions of sameness, unity, belonging together, and being until he confronted the dilemma that difference presents for the question of identity: if difference in being exists then how can there, in fact, be unity and identity in being? This existential dilemma, generally hidden from our view in the dayto-day interactions of society, emerges and confronts the individual in society when, as Goffman’s work reveals, the normal categories of experience and the normal aspirations of individuals within a given social order come into question. The developmental trajectory of these twentieth-century sociological theories of the ‘self ’ anticipate, but do not necessarily presuppose, the twenty-first century dilemma of constructing a ‘self.’ There is no obvious reason on the surface that these theories of identity, individualism, and self-image which persuasively explained Americans to themselves in the twentieth-century United States should lose their saliency and expire. Rather, as some have argued, it is the conjunction of these multiple theoretical orientations with the remarkable expansion of what have been called ‘lifestyle options’ (Elliot 2016:1) that produces the new landscape on which the self must be acted out that has

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destroyed, to a degree, the explanatory force of these theories. Although I am primarily interested in the variation this structural shift has created for Americans in U.S. society, there are many indications that the phenomenon of self-transformation and the adaptations sought, experienced, and even compelled by changes in social organization are emerging globally (2016:7, 40–42). As several commentators on the topic of identity transformation have recognized, the genesis of the process has been the dissolution, or lack of continuing relevance, of previously influential social, cultural, and political institutions. Giddens (1990), for example, has spoken of the ‘runaway’ nature of social change in modern societies and the ‘de-traditionalism’ that has accompanied—or perhaps, more accurately, helped to drive forward—the felt necessity for changes in oneself. The phenomenon has been remarked upon not only by sociologists dedicated to monitoring changes in the social order but contemporary writers such as Don DeLillo (1998), who has referenced the speed and frequency with which transnational corporations relocate their operations from country to country and to the enormous changes in cultural patterns regarding nearly every facet of contemporary life. Arguably, the response to the hyper-accelerated demands of modern life could take any number of directions. The experience of a continuous stream of external, unwanted demands could, as one example, have inspired a return to collectivism in the form of newly sought, social utopias. And while there certainly have been some contemporary attempts to reconstruct bucolic, often rural, collectivist enclaves, many commentators have observed instead trends that essentially re-conform the nature of individualism, trends which are particularly relevant to understand the American experience since individualism has been a key component of American character since the time of de Tocqueville (Tocqueville 1961). Elliot (2016:33–42), as one example, traces the arc of change in conceiving individualism along three axes which he terms manipulated individualism, isolated privatism, and reflexive individualism. Elliot’s short-hand account of the transformation in the early twentieth century from reliance on an independent, self-made, and moral form of individualism to an undifferentiated mass of isolated individuals united only in their subservience to the new authoritarianism of the popular media of radio and television is the basis for his definition of manipulated individualism. In this conceit, the means of mass communication that Hitler used to whip up the fury of the German people, target the weak, despised, and vulnerable, and inspire their Götterdämmerung fantasies, turned out to be the same means the west used to pacify the masses. The former ‘rugged individualist’ of American character had become, in the process, the passively helpless consumer of commercialized culture, de-politicized and deposited on a suburban couch,

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bereft of any motivations not prefabricated and shrink-wrapped for him or her. By way of contrast, this isolated privatism, which arose from—and was an extension of—the political processes of the pre-World War II era, inspired its own counter-revolution in the course of opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States and the eruption of what came to be called ‘youth culture’ everywhere. Elliot (2016:37) proposes that rebellion, when it arises in cultural opposition to the status quo, can only be understood as an undeniable sign that something has gone drastically wrong. Unfortunately, Elliot’s analysis of what, precisely, went wrong is superficial and unconvincing although, in one sense, he is quite correct in his assessment: all the affluence in the world could not satisfy Americans who over the last 15 years have had to live in a shattered, fragmented, polarized society. As Elliot (2016:40) pithily observes: Come home from a day at the mall and what do you have? Tired feet, unbearable debt, and (more often than not) worthless stuff bought on sale that in the dulling light of home is fit only for consignment to the back closet. The consequence is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to talk to in the empty void that is the contemporary cultural United States—and perhaps the world. The modern individual, confronted by the meaningless of his existence and doubting any redemption in the future, echoes George Bernard Shaw’s retrospective narrative of his youth when he recalled his view of the ‘opportunities’ being offered him: “behind the conviction that they could lead to nothing that I wanted, lay the unspoken fear that they might lead to something I did not want” (Erikson 1968:143).

References Anderson, Ian Scott. 1971. “Slipstream.” On Aqualung by Jethro Tull. No. 1C 064–3 210441. London: Chrysalis Records. Beaumont, Gustave de and Alexis de Tocqueville. 1964. On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Becker, Howard S. and Blanche Geer. 1958. “Student Culture in a Medical School.” Harvard Educational Review, 28 (Winter, 1958):70–80. Burns, Tom. 1992. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. Cooley, Charles Horton. 1962. Social Organization. New York: Schocken Books. Crouch, Ben M. and James W. Marquart. 1989. An Appeal to Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press. DeLillo, Don. 1998. Underworld. London: Picador. Elliot, Anthony. 2016. Identity Troubles. London and New York: Routledge.

94  The Social Self Erikson, Erik H. 1968. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Anchor Books. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. Garden City: Anchor Books. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public Places. New York: Basic Books. Harold, Garfinkel. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology, 61(5):420–424. Heidegger, Martin. 1969. Identity and Difference. New York: Harper and Row. Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Johnson, Robert. 2002. Hard Time. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Lareau, Annette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, Charles W., Ed. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: Phoenix Books. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. 1961 [orig. 1950]. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1961. Democracy in America (Two Volumes). New York: Schocken Books. Westervelt, Saundra D. and Kimberly J. Cook. 2012. Life After Death Row. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wilson, Sloan. 1955. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wylie, Philip. 1943. Generation of Vipers. New York: Rinehart. Whyte, Jr., William H. 1956. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster. Yates, Richard. 1961. Revolutionary Road. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

The Formation of the Self Under the Conditions of Globalized Capitalism

4

The nature of human selfhood has been a principal concern within psychology since its founding ( James 1948; Freud 1961; Jung 1971). Psychological studies of the self, in comparison to social psychological studies or sociological studies, concentrate primarily on the internal processes that characterize personhood and produce behavior with relative inattention to the existing social environment. The insights gleaned from experimental psychology are thus limited since most studies create controlled environments for gathering data regarding human response which necessarily cannot be replicated in a dynamic, uncontrolled social setting. At the same time, the conclusions psychological researchers have reached are often suggestive of processes that social psychologists and sociologists see played out on society’s many stages. Psychological theories of identity and personality typically define divisions within the autonomous self, starting as early as Freud’s famous tripartite scheme of id, ego, and superego. More recently, one theoretical perspective has suggested that the ‘symbolic self ’ may be best understood as encompassing three different divisions: a representational aspect, its interior executive functions, and the potential for reflexivity (Sedikides and Skowronski 2000). Baumeister (2000) has proposed a modestly different triad of concepts to encapsulate the variegated self: reflexive consciousness, interpersonal membership, and executive function. The similarities between these two sets of theoretical divisions are evident as both include identification of executive functions and reflexivity as crucial components of the self. Moreover, while it may be possible to quibble over the relative emphases, or precise delineation of core properties

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within each concept, the representation of one’s personality and characteristics envisioned within the symbolic representational feature of the self, with its emphasis on self-knowledge, social roles, and social relations (Sedikides and Skowronski 2000:92), certainly has significant overlay with Baumeister’s (2000:9) reliance on what he terms “interpersonal membership” with its corresponding focus on aspects of the self that promote interpersonal relationships and their use in extending further one’s connection to broader social networks. Starting with that aspect of the self that is subsumed under the term ‘executive function,’ it is apparent that a person must have elements that guide information-seeking, goal-setting, and goal-directed behavior in order to function (Sedikides and Skowronski 2000:92). Thus, the executive function, as its name implies, governs action and otherwise facilitates the self-agency necessary to carry out action. In practical terms this means that the executive function makes it possible for the individual to choose, to control himself or herself, to engage in behavior directed at having an impact on others, to enable coping with feedback—whether negative or positive, and to support experiencing the emotional consequences of one’s actions that arise from favorable and unfavorable evaluations of one’s behavior (2000:93). Given that this aspect of the human ‘self ’ controls initiative and regulates behavior generally, it is clearly an important, and virtually indispensable, feature of what we mean by the self of a person. Various theories of how the executive function works internally have been offered by psychologists (Baumeister 2000:10). Regardless of the neurological mechanism at work, studies have demonstrated a number of the executive function’s effects on human behavior. Self-regulation has been one prominent area of study since failures of self-regulation often have such serious consequences for the individual and society. It is hardly necessary to list the obvious problems created by excessive alcohol consumption or the protracted use of cigarettes. Likewise, certain forms of addictive drug use, unrestrained anger, and obsessional over-eating all lead to less than desirable personal and social outcomes. Consequently, attempts at understanding how the self ’s executive function operates—including how it successfully navigates away from less desired outcomes and behaviors—has produced an explanation that focuses on the self ’s exploratory and learning impulses. In essence, the contemporary theory of self-regulation emphasizes the existence of a ‘feedback loop’ in which the ‘self ’ tests itself against the environment, measuring itself against some model of how it should behave within that environment; reflexively operates on itself to bring the individual’s behavior closer to the perceived ideal; tests its ‘reconfigured self ’ against the environment again; and—if satisfied—exits the testing sequence (2000:10–11).

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The question of whether impulses are so strong that the self cannot overcome them (as in the case of addiction to certain powerful drugs) or that, conversely, while temptations exist (for example to steal what belongs to someone else), the self ’s regulating willpower is either strong enough to withstand the impulse or alternatively, too weak, still may not have been definitively resolved. (As Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism observed, “I can resist anything but temptation.”) Studies have been conducted, however, which suggest that exercises of the will may, in the short term, deplete the energy needed to resist subsequent impulses—including different forms of impulse requiring entirely different types of self-control (2000:13). Collectively, then, initial studies of self-regulation suggest that there is a unity within the self-control mechanism that is activated regardless of the specific nature of the impulse temptation. This is consistent with many sociological studies of persons with low impulse control in which individuals often do not limit their behavior across the range of socially disapproved and anti-social behaviors but more typically reveal low impulse control across multiple deviant forms of conduct (Reisig and Pratt 2011). Other forms of self-regulation that are often considered as separate psychological processes include decision-making/choice and initiative/agency (Baumeister 1998). One question that therefore arises is whether there is further unity among self-regulation, choice, and initiative within the executive function mechanism. Through a series of studies researchers have concluded that the act of choosing (as compared to the dutiful ‘act’ of following required instructions as to what to do or how to behave in a particular situation) calls upon the same mental resource as that of regulating one’s impulses. Further, like self-regulation generally, the act of affirmatively choosing seems to weaken the will of an individual in the short run, thereby making it more difficult to make sequential choices in a short timespan or, equally, to find it difficult to choose followed by efforts at self-regulation in the near term. Likewise, active agency—such as initiating a line of action and carrying it through to some point of completion—seems to draw on the same mental stamina as direct self-regulation and active choice (Baumeister 2000:13–15). Given that we have seen that the contemporary twenty-first century experience entails what many social psychologists and sociologists have described as a world that requires substantial self-regulation across many environments, frequent—if not constant—engagement with situations requiring active choice, and numerous instances that demand active initiation and follow-through on the part of individuals, the implications for understanding what it entails to create and sustain a modern self are clearly substantial.

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Several other findings from psychological studies of the self are germane to the present investigation. Self-concept has long been an area of study within psychology. Generally, it refers to the series of beliefs about one’s self that an individual holds as well as a person’s evaluation of those attributes which are socially desirable or socially undesirable, leading to one’s overall level of self-esteem (Campbell, Assanand, and Di Paula 2000:67–68). Structurally, theorists have also reflected on the degree to which the self is unified with a coherent set of beliefs, typically reflected in attitudes that actively resist dissonance through discrepancy reduction in a person’s behaviors. This concept is commonly termed integration or the integrated self (2000:68–69). Differentiation, on the other hand, refers to the degree to which the self is structured according to a number of different dimensions that a person unconsciously employs in thinking about themselves. A person who is highly differentiated might occupy numerous social roles but do so by engaging different personas, even contradictory ones, in performing those roles. A more integrated personality would perhaps have developed role identities that are more consistent across their performances in different milieus (2000:68–69). When viewed in light of executive functioning, there arises the obvious question as to how these different modes of self- organization manage self-regulation, choice, and initiative. Does integration or differentiation better support optimal executive functioning? To some extent the answer depends on whether one is speaking of a person with highly differentiated aspects of the self but ones that are poorly integrated, thereby exposing highly discrepant facets of the single self, or, to the contrary, whether the highly differentiated features of the self flexibly co-exist within a more or less (low discrepancy) whole. The question of how the executive function operates under highly integrated, highly differentiated, low integration, or low differentiation conditions is magnified by studies of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed first by Festinger (1957), rests on the observation that cognitive discrepancy causes psychological discomfort that motivates the individual to make an effort to reduce or eliminate the dissonance between cognitions. The concept of cognition is defined broadly so as to include any attitude, belief, or feeling about oneself, others, or the environment (Harmon-Jones 2000:120). The source of cognitions is not addressed by the theory nor is any explanation offered as to why, or how, they occur in relation to one another. Thus, two cognitions may have no relation to one another, and therefore have no effect on one another, or, alternatively, the cognitions may have a bearing on one another and in this circumstance the two can be consonant (that is, compatible) or dissonant (i.e., discrepant). Dissonant cognitions are hypothetically experienced when one does not logically or psychologically fit with the

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other; hence, the cognitions are incompatible and the individual is moved to resolve the tension between the two to relieve the attendant discomfort and make the two cognitions compatible. The fact that discomfort is experienced is generally attributed to the fact that the individual has attached an emotional valence to one or both of the cognitions and the discrepancy between the two arouses a recognition of their incompatibility with greater or lesser intensity. Clearly, when the intensity is greater, the individual is induced to make some alteration in his or her behavior or attitudes to reconcile the discrepant notions. Festinger’s theory has produced a stream of studies, emendations, and analyses since it first appeared in print. Two of the principal variations that have been proposed illustrate the implications of cognitive dissonance theory for any discussion of the ‘self.’ One variant, which focuses on self-consistency, suggests that dissonance arises when an individual behaves in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes regarding themselves (Aronson 1968). The question of whether the individual’s behavior, or his or her attitudes that are discrepant with the behavior, will be altered to accommodate the other, has not been fully resolved. A second variant, referred to as self-affirmation theory, posits that discomfort does not arise because of incidents of cognitive dissonance but rather because the self needs to maintain an overall semblance of integrity that results in a positive self-image (Steele 1988). In this conception, voluntarily choosing to behave in a way that is contrary to one’s attitudes or making a difficult decision that has the potential to produce negative consequences threatens an individual’s positive self-image. The resulting alteration in behavior is an effort to restore and reaffirm the positive view of the self that has been brought into question. Although these psychological studies of the ‘self ’ explore important issues, psychology has not been particularly strong at translating its experimental research findings into understanding everyday behavior in real world settings. As one example, contemporary life in the United States—and the modern global context more generally—has been described, as we have seen, as requiring frequent, almost constant choice, and often at high speed. While acknowledging that choice is a critical feature of executive function, and certainly influenced by cognitive dissonance, experimental psychology does not offer ready answers for how and why individuals make day-to-day choices other than a rather unsophisticated, almost implicit, reliance on reference group theory. A review of Jay MacLeod’s (2009) study of two groups of older teenagers, one white and one black, growing up in a low-income housing development in a northeastern U.S. city provides an opportunity to look at the act of choosing in a real world setting that produces real world consequences.

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MacLeod’s participant observation study entailed intensive engagement with approximately 15 teenage boys living in the Clarendon Heights housing projects in 1983. MacLeod’s principal interest lay in the occupational aspirations of the teens and their perceived prospects of getting a better job and experiencing the dream of social mobility that is a hallmark of the United States. The boys MacLeod studied constituted two separate peer groups— who he called the Brothers and the Hallway Hangers (2009:9). The Hallway Hangers received their group pseudonym because on any given day except during the coldest months of the year, a group of predominantly white teenage boys of Italian or Irish descent would congregate on the hallway landing near one of the building entries—doorway #13. As MacLeod (2009:26) describes them, the eight core members of the Hallway Hangers range in age from sixteen to nineteen. Five have dropped out of school, two graduated last year, and one continues to attend school. They all smoke cigarettes, drink regularly and use drugs. All but two have been arrested. Stereotyped as ‘hoodlums,’ ‘punks,’ or ‘burnouts’ by outsiders, the Hallway Hangers are actually a varied group. MacLeod’s 12-month period of participant observation and the informal discussions, field notes, and transcripts of taped, semi-structured interviews he collected enabled him to provide detailed biographical profiles of each member of both the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. The many stories the boys told regarding themselves and others permitted MacLeod to record dozens of choices made regarding work, school, criminal involvement, and a host of other issues. These contextualized choices offer perspective on academic psychologists’ theories regarding the factors that inspire social action, choice, and motivation. Effectively using the Clarendon Heights teens’ stories to examine how they became who they were when MacLeod found them requires untangling cause and effect, often many times over. In a brief series of thumbnail profiles early in the book, MacLeod (2009:27) notes, apropos of nothing in particular at that point, that Stoney, is the “only Hallway Hanger to hold stable employment” from among the core eight. One wonders: what made Stoney different? That thought is quickly followed by a desire to understand what made the remaining seven members of the group unemployed (and, perhaps even unemployable)? To unravel the skein requires a rather strenuous dissection of both the environment and the choices the teens made at sequential choice points in their lives. The immediate environment in which the boys live is within a low-income public housing project within a low-income community in a major

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metropolitan area of the northeastern United States in the early 1980s. In such a community there were likely few ‘good jobs,’ whether as skilled craftsmen or white-collar workers. This feature of the work life environment is critical as a foundation for understanding the influence on other factors the teens rely on in making their choices. Early on, MacLeod examines and reports on each teen’s family life since the family is the ‘launching pad’ for most everyone in life. In relating these family biographies, MacLeod is especially attentive to teasing out the boys’ relations with older male siblings and their fathers and confirming their occupational histories. Chris, for example, lives with his mother and two younger sisters because, as he explained to MacLeod, “I kicked my father out” (but for reasons that are not provided). MacLeod does note that Chris has two half-brothers and one half-sister; the brothers work in unskilled, manual labor jobs and the sister is a part-time secretary (2009:51). MacLeod also observes that, “Chris seems to have free run of the household,” as his mother is lenient and never married; she must “plead” with Chris to attend school regularly—but to what MacLeod reports is “no avail” (2009:51). Although these are just a few sparse details about Chris and his family, several things are readily apparent: parental control is either absent (father) or weak (mother) and a high school-aged teen has the autonomy to decide whether to attend high school or not; when he chooses it is often not to attend. His male siblings, who stand as role models by default in the absence of the father, apparently did not emphasize achievement in school either as both hold ‘unskilled, manual labor jobs.’ These observations, however, must be seen in context, so we are returned to the point we originated at in this paragraph. As Bruce Davis, a school guidance counselor, comments: “These kids [enrolled in the school’s Occupational Education program] go directly into hard jobs. They’re generally from homes where people are laborers. . . . That’s where these kids are coming from; they’re geared to manual labor jobs, like their brothers, sisters, fathers, uncles, whatever—mothers, like the jobs they have” (2009:116). The teens that MacLeod studied raise, most directly, the issue of reference groups and role models. Reference groups are those persons whose opinion matters to an individual. Role models are other persons who are looked upon by an individual as worthy of respect and whose achievements are viewed as a standard that one may aspire to attain. Role models matter but will only have an impact on the ‘self,’ to the extent that a person compares himself or herself to the model. Moreover, the question of whether the role model will inspire effort and energy expenditure aimed at copying the role model’s achievements, or act as a cautionary tale discouraging efforts to be like the person, will depend upon both whether the person is viewed favorably or

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unfavorably and whether the success the role model has achieved is considered attainable (Lockwood and Kunda 2000:148). Psychologists have found that individuals are most likely to select someone as a relevant role model when there are correspondences between the projected model and the subject. The likelihood is highest when there is a ‘good fit’ between the potential role model and the person considering them as a reference point. Clearly, “a more similar role model will be more relevant, making social comparison more likely” (2000:149). In particular, similarity in the domain of achievement may be among the most important variables. One is likely to be more influenced by one who is successful in one’s chosen field than one who has achieved within a different field that is not of interest to the subject. As Lockwood and Kunda (2000:149) comment, “A psychologist, . . . , may be more likely to draw a comparison between herself and another psychologist than between herself and an athlete.” These elementary principles, combined with some of the more sophisticated psychological findings discussed earlier, seem to offer a basis for understanding the choices that MacLeod’s subjects reported making prior to and during the course of his study. An illustrative case study among the Hallway Hangers is Frankie, whose family has lived in the Clarendon Heights projects for 30 years (MacLeod 2009:52). Frankie’s father attended high school for a few years before dropping out and died when Frankie was only seven years of age. While both his mother and his sister finished high school, none of his seven brothers completed their work and received a high school diploma. Equally important, perhaps, is the fact that all seven of Frankie’s brothers have served time in prison (2009:26, 52). Indeed, MacLeod reports that Frankie’s family is “held in high esteem by the city’s underworld” (2009:26). When not in prison, his brothers work irregularly in construction, landscaping, or painting although, at any given time, “one or two may be unemployed” (2009:52–53). Frankie is, according to MacLeod, the uncontested leader of the Hallway Hangers due to his physical toughness, fighting ability, cool, calculating demeanor (admittedly with occasional flares from a fiery temper), and his family’s ties to organized crime. Given this family background, who then has Frankie become and what does he anticipate for the future? Frankie, unlike his brothers, finished high school but otherwise MacLeod (2009:93) reports that he “exemplifies the Hallway Hangers’ attitudes toward school.” Frankie commented, “I didn’t give a shit at the school” (2009:93), but after being expelled for fighting he found a haven in the Adjustment Class as the only student among 50 who had not been ordered into the program by a court. Indeed, MacLeod reports that most students in the Adjustment Class had come directly from the county jail. It is widely agreed that Adjustment

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Class at public Lincoln High School is the “easiest way to graduate” (2009:95) and faced with the choice of spending two hours (from 9:20 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.) in class and getting credit or not doing so and failing, Frankie stuck it out. As one measure of his influence as a role model, other Hallway Hangers followed Frankie into Adjustment Class. Yet, what has Frankie gained from his degree? As MacLeod (2009:115) concludes, the Hallway Hangers have been influenced by the negative experiences of their family members in both school and the workplace, but they also have their own experiences to assess with respect to forming aspirations. As MacLeod (2009:115) recounts, “The [boys] have seen their older siblings fail in school; they see their friends fail as well.” Perhaps even more important is the teens’ belief that school performance is only marginally related to success in securing a job. This is true even though they do know people—like MacLeod and Bruce Davis, the young school guidance counselor—who have succeeded in school and beyond. However, the discussion of role models, earlier, certainly goes a long way to explaining the Hallway Hangers’ views. While Bruce Davis states, “We constantly stress to the kids that they have to be responsible, reliable and dependable” (2009:118), there is little indication that the teens are listening carefully. Rather, it is family members or other teens, like Frankie, who are role models for the group—not the teachers or other occasional middle-class professionals who are observed or interacted with in the course of their lower class lives. It is also possible to see how cognitive dissonance theory is implicated in the Hallway Hangers’ decision-making processes. As we have seen, and as MacLeod (2009:73) pithily comments, “[The teens] immediate world is composed almost entirely of people who have not made it.’ ” Their families’ occupational histories, for example, can best be summed up (as MacLeod (73) does) as “sad and disillusioning.” Frankie, all too aware of the realistic potential for getting a good job coming out of Clarendon Heights, answered MacLeod’s (2009:70–71) question about the jobs members of the group might have in the future by saying: Well, some of them are gonna do okay, but, I dunno, some of them are just gonna fuck up. They’ll just be doing odd jobs for the rest of their lives, y’know. Still be drinking, y’know; they’ll drink themselves to death, what’s some of them will do. That’s what I hope I don’t do. Yeah, some of them are gonna drink themselves to death, but some of them, y’know, they’re gonna smarten up. Although the teens are vaguely aware of the existence of various class-based obstacles to economic and social advancement (2009:73), they are also well

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aware of the dominant American ideology that suggests everyone can make it if they work hard and apply themselves. These two discrepant ideas—‘it is the built-in, class-based obstacles to occupational success that prevents lower-class kids like them from achieving’ versus ‘it is our own failure to make it by not buckling down, doing the work’—although irreconcilable, must be reconciled in one way or another to eliminate the dissonance. Generally, as MacLeod persuasively documents in his interviews with the Hallway Hangers, the teens resolve the tension by accepting, as some of Frankie’s earlier observations reflect, that they are personally inadequate while at the same time leveling their social and occupational aspirations so as to minimize the likelihood of failure. These lowered expectations amount to “a decision, conscious or unconscious, to withdraw from the running” of a race they believe they cannot win (2009:75). At the same time, the teens also shelter themselves from acknowledging that their low status vis-à-vis the job market is solely their own fault by claiming it is “who you know,” rather than meritocratic acquisition of credentials like a high school diploma (2009:74–75), or simple racism (2009:42) that precludes their inability to obtain a better job—or sometimes any job at all. MacLeod’s study provides a wealth of field work data that illustrates the applicability of experimentally derived psychological principles to the question of how the self is formed. MacLeod’s study is, however, somewhat dated and therefore raises the question of whether the principles he and other earlier social researchers have found present remain vital in the United States in the twenty-first century. The question assumes even more significance given that more recent commentators are ascribing different processes as ascendant in defining and constituting the self in the modern era. Elliot (2016:54–55) contends, as one example: Ours is the era of a new individualism: our current fascination for the instant making, reinvention and transformation of selves is, in some sense or other, integral to contemporary living. Living in the global age of a new individualism requires individuals capable of designing and directing their own biographies, of defining identities in terms of self-actualization and of deploying social goods and cultural symbols to represent individual expression and personality. In current social circumstances—in which our lives are reshaped by technology-induced globalization and the transformation of capitalism—it is not the particular individuality of an individual that’s most important. What’s increasingly significant is how individuals create identities, the cultural forms through which people symbolize individual expression and desire, and perhaps above all the speed with which identities can be reinvented and

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instantly be transformed. It is this stress on instant transformation—and in particular the fears and anxieties it is designed to displace or lessen— that distinguishes the theory of the new individualism from notions such as reflexive modernization [that Giddens proposes] and individualization [based on Foucault’s notion of “self-surveillance” in light of constant coercion, constraint and domination by modern institutional society]. Elliot’s “new individualism” theory is of relatively recent vintage (see, for example, Elliot and Lemert 2009a, 2009b; Elliot and Urry 2010; Elliot 2010). As one consequence, there is little but anecdotal evidence to support an estimate of the phenomenon’s depth and breadth. Further, due to the theory’s level of abstraction, it is difficult to measure its impact on different demographic groups in the United States. The claim that “recent decades have witnessed a remarkable transformation in lifestyle options, work and employment as a result of technological innovations in automation, artificial intelligence and robotics” (Elliot 2016:1) is incontestable but does not help us understand which Americans may have been in a position to take advantage of these new ‘lifestyle options’ and which have not. MacLeod’s (2009:277) research on the Clarendon Heights teens is instructive in this regard since he updated his original 1983 field work eight years later in 1991 and then again in 2006. The Hallway Hangers, as one might suspect, were not able to overcome their familial, educational, occupational, and personal handicaps in each instance and emerge as global ‘new individualists.’ Frankie, by his own standards as a teen, did pretty well. He worked in the parts department of a car dealer until he obtained a job in maintenance for the Housing Authority. In 2005, a year before MacLeod interviewed him for the third time, he moved over to the Highway Department, a union job. Married and with a teenage son, Frankie is a working-class success story but hardly transformed due to innovations in technology or the speed of modern society under the “new individualism” theory (2009:278–281). Steve, who lives still with his mother about four miles from Clarendon Heights, is another story altogether. When MacLeod spoke to him in 1991, he had been involved in a stabbing incident and ended up serving 36 months on a 5-year sentence in state prison from 1992 to 1995. As soon as he was out, he was arrested again for assault and battery and spent another two years in state prison. Steve did a training program to operate steam boilers and has had a few jobs since, but he’s also been turned down for jobs because of his criminal record. At other times he was unable to work because his licenses were taken by the state due to unpaid child support for his two daughters. And, for a

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period, he was strung out on heroin and lost a good car and a good job. Asked what he would do different, Steve replied, “Everything! I wouldn’t have kids, I would fucking go to school more. I’m living with my mother; I’m fucking forty years old, and I’m practically fucking homeless. I would do a lot of shit different” (2009:315). Chris, too, has not been able to overcome his circumstances, his dependencies, and his choices. MacLeod found him incarcerated in a local country jail on a possession of paraphernalia charge. When MacLeod last saw him in 1991, he was in prison awaiting new trials on three armed robberies. Chris was found guilty on each charge and received sentences of five to eight years, to be served concurrently. Once released, he was arrested again for armed robbery and “a lotta little shit” (2009:328). All in all, he conceded to MacLeod that he had been in prison for “almost all of the fifteen years since [we last saw each other]” (2009:328). Like Steve, Chris found it almost impossible to get jobs because of his criminal history. As Chris described his life to MacLeod (2009:329), I’ve hardly been out since [I saw you last]. Been locked up eleven, twelve, thirteen times. Same old shit. Just hanging on, getting high: coke, crack, heroin. Sleeping in shelters, in the park, outside churches. More recently, he hooked up with a female former addict. Briefly clean, she became pregnant and then again become addicted. The child was born prematurely at 5 ½ months, addicted as well. Chris, serving out his time, wonders if she will take him back once he is released. Yet he concedes, I want to be a good dad so bad. More than anything. I just don’t know if I can. I’ve been on the inside so much and I’ve been in so long, it’s so hard when I’m out . . . but now I’ve got a big incentive to put away the drink and drugs for good. Two big incentives. Still, although Chris says, “I’ve had enough of this . . . I’m almost forty years old and I don’t want to come back in here” (2009:332), it is difficult to look favorably on his chances of turning things around. MacLeod’s longitudinal findings over a quarter of a century grimly document the challenges that low-income youth like the Hallway Hangers face in ‘making it’ in contemporary U.S. society. Although Elliot (2016:166) recognizes that “the gap between those keeping on the move and those less on the move—to say nothing of those not moving at all—is of fundamental significance to contemporary boundaries between self and others,” Elliot does

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little to pursue or expand upon the observation. The fact of the matter is that the “new individualism” appears to do very little to change the lives of the lower and working classes in the contemporary United States which are still bound by the constraints of their class location and the subcultures they inhabit. Julie Bettie’s (2014) study of ‘women without class’ conducted in California’s central valley in the early twenty-first century reveals the limitations that teen, predominantly working-class girls, face. Like those of MacLeod’s low-income boys, Bettie’s (2014) girls have difficulty in creating and sustaining a viable self in contemporary society. If it is true, as Elliot (2016:8) asserts, “[w]hat matters, in a social order of individualization, is how people refashion and reorganize their identities—the demonstration that people are choosing new options and new possibilities in the never-ending task of do-it-yourself identity-building,” then the subjects of Bettie’s study are, like the Hallway Hangers, choosing poorly. Rather than a boon to personal liberation, the ‘mobilities’ that Elliot (2016) heralds as new and exciting aids to personhood may simply be one more set of barriers that the lower classes must overcome. As Bettie (2014:xiv) describes her study in a new introduction, it is “about the cultural politics of how inequalities are reproduced,” and how “the performance of class” constitutes a major barrier to elimination of class inequality in the United States. Bettie’s study of girls’ cliques at “Waretown High,” in a rural town of 40,000 people in California’s central valley, led her to conclude, as others have done before her, that schools are typically one of the principal institutional venues for reproducing inequality rather than solving it. Her findings regarding the aspirations and class futures of Mexican American and white working-class girls are compatible with the conclusions MacLeod reached: the subcultural values of the Hallway Hangers, which are contrary and antithetical to the middle-class values of the schools, drive low-income teens away from education while at the same time the credentialist and meritocratic values the schools extol block the Hallway Hangers from the normatively enforced, conventional pathway to success. As Bettie (2014:192) notes in her conclusion, “While these structures [of inequality] are not automatically or inevitably reproduced, . . . by and large structures of inequality reappear over time, albeit with new veneers.” Indeed, Bettie’s observations led her to believe that “with few exceptions” the working-class girls she studied would end up living “working class futures” while the middle-class girls from Waretown High would stay firmly ensconced in the middle class (2014:192). Bettie’s ethnography of the seniors at Waretown High revealed six distinctive student cliques. The smokers (who smoked cigarettes) was a group of mostly white students from hard-living families whose parents had not finished high school or barely done so. The parents typically held working-class

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jobs; Bettie found it difficult to find seniors among this group as many had dropped out of school while the few who remained hung on, just hoping to graduate (2014:14). Cholas and cholos were primarily Mexican Americans from hard-living, low-income families. The terms suggested that members were, or wanted to be, in a gang but the street style of dress these students adopted more often reflected, in Bettie’s experience, a mark of racial/ethnic identification and belonging. The parents of this group often worked in the most difficult, low-income jobs including field agriculture, canneries, food preparation, and domestic work (2014:14). Las Chicas were also Mexican American girls but from settled living families who had ‘performed’ chola identity at younger ages but had ‘matured out.’ This group’s parents had sometimes finished high school and achieved a certain stability by owning modest homes and maintaining regular employment. These girls anticipated completing high school and attending a vocational business school or community college or, in rare instances, a four-year college (2014:15). The skaters constituted the large mass of white students at the school who did not fit meaningfully into any other clique. This group belonged to settled living families whose stable jobs provided health care benefits and modest homes. Like Las Chicas, who also came from settled living families, these students’ parents had usually finished high school and some had attended community college. Girls among this group also planned to attend community college but more often with the explicit goal of transferring to a four-year college later (2014:15–16). ‘Hicks’ were predominantly white students with an interest in agriculture, including some who came from farming families in the area. Most anticipated attending community college while some of the boys planned to apprentice in blue-collar vocational programs or industries upon graduation (2014:16). Finally, the ‘preps’ were principally white students from the middle class. Parents of this group were generally college educated although some families had gained middle-class status by succeeding over generations in blue-collar, stable employment. Students from this group invariably intended to enroll in private or public four-year colleges or universities (2014:16). The school, as one might suspect, was the center of these students’ lives just as the school centered itself around these middle-class achievers who accepted, without question, the school’s values. As Bettie concedes, however, her principal interest is how working-class girls perform their class, race, and gender identities and anticipate their futures. As Bettie recounts in her chapter discussing the Mexican American girl groups at Waretown High, Las Chicas were visibly different than the ‘prep’ girls, adorned in makeup and form-fitting clothing. Bettie found them in the business classes at the school, bored with their vocational schooling and filling

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their classroom time, whenever possible, with heterosexual romance and ‘girl culture’ (2014:58–59). Once Bettie became privy to Las Chicas girl conversations, the topics typically included “fashion, shopping, and recent events on the television soap opera Days of our Lives” (2014:60) with little engagement with the official curriculum of the school. These overt, shared displays of ‘girl culture’ were missing from the prep classes that Bettie visited. It is not as though prep girls did not share any interest in fashion or makeup, but rather that prep girls did not permit such interests to intrude into the classroom so openly and thereby maintained their engagement with the school narrative. This distinction between the Las Chicas girls and the prep girls foreshadowed their anticipated futures. The prep girls, looking ahead to what they foresaw as the obvious next stage of their lives, accepted the adult and middle-class norms of the high school and were preparing themselves for participation in a similar institution—college or university. The other groups, anticipating no likelihood they would be attending college or university, were less inclined to subordinate themselves to these middle-class adult values and sought, instead, to carve out distinctive, emergent grounds for adult identity that contradicted, or resisted, conformance with the official behavioral norms. Rejecting the school-sanctioned guidelines for a proper expression of adolescent femininity, Las Chicas and others began appropriating adult expressions of sexuality, and in some instances motherhood, as their markers of anticipated adult futures. Pregnancies and babies thus became one more avenue for a shared class, racial/ethnicity, and gender experience that simply extended the bonded ‘girls culture’ to the next logical stage among the non-prep groups (2014:69). Yet, while baby clothes and delivery date discourses effectively distracted non-prep girls from their disinterest in vocational track classes and their belief in its irrelevance for their working futures, their engagement with baby culture also confirms the working-class girl group’s immersion in a lifestyle option that is restrictive in its implications for the future. These cultural group bonding practices—which were symbolized elaborately by stylized patterns of hairstyles, clothes, shoes, and the colors of lipstick, lip liner, and nail polish the various girl cliques adopted (2014:62)— when joined with the school tracking curricula created constricting avenues of almost involuntary self-identity. As Yolanda, one of Las Chicas explained to Bettie (2014:77), Oh, yeah. That happened to me. The counselor told me to take all the non-required classes. Now I’m way behind in English and math, so that is why I can’t go to a state school. The counselor said I wasn’t ready. I heard she got fired for that.

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The consequence—much like the experience of MacLeod’s Hallway Hangers—was a de-emphasis on education and achievement generally. Although many of the senior year Las Chicas expressed some ambivalence and regret about their business-vocational curriculum to Bettie, they realized it was too late to redirect their schooling. The focus then turned to simply graduating, regardless of their grades. This meant that if it was not necessary to pass an elective course to receive a degree, little effort would be invested. The girls disregarded assignments, did not prepare for tests, and skipped school whenever it appeared convenient to do so. The girls’ recognition that they had now been slotted into a narrow future lifestyle also led to reduced demands for their future. As Yolanda admitted (2009:79): I don’t know. I don’t want to work as hard as my aunt. . . . I don’t have to have a fancy job like a lawyer. I just want a simple life. I want just a pretty good life. No guys, no one controlling me. But [asking sincerely] what kinda job like that is there? After her nine months of intensive participant observations, it was easy for Bettie to generalize about her subjects’ anticipated futures based on group affiliation because, like their shared experience in school tracks and their adoption of certain class-based performances of gender and race/ethnicity, the girls saw themselves as pursuing (and, perhaps limited to) a similar range of possible futures. As Bettie (2014:82) concludes, simply graduating from high school or even completing a year or two of community college deceptively suggests they are succeeding above and beyond the levels of their parents to Las Chicas, but the reality that Bettie finds is that most of these girls end up in low-wage clerical or retail jobs (2014:82). Comparing MacLeod’s study of the Clarendon Heights white and black boys and Bettie’s study of working-class (and to a lesser extent, middle-class) white and Mexican American girls may, at first glance, appear difficult. Yet, as Bettie (2014:134–44) herself makes clear, there are direct similarities that can be drawn. Thus, while not diminishing the importance of structural barriers to class mobility, both noted the relevance of the role of aspirations in either enabling or restricting the potential for upward economic and social movement in the contemporary United States. Yet, as both readily acknowledge, higher aspirations—in and of themselves—are not enough. In MacLeod’s (2009:75–83) study, the black Brothers had higher aspirations, and more conventionally adaptable behaviors and attitudes toward education, than the white Hallway Hangers. Yet, he also reported that the Brothers’ higher desire to achieve, and even their better conventional preparation and acquisition

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of basic credentials like a high school diploma through school, did not initially produce the desired outcome in the job market (2009:198–239). When MacLeod interviewed the Brothers in 1991, eight years after his initial field work, he found that their hope—and his own optimistic predication—that their preparation and positive attitudes would produce decent work and better economic circumstances for them turned out to be unfulfilled. Bettie’s (2014:155–168) investigation suggests that like MacLeod’s low-income boys, her working-class girls will make little headway in terms of economic ­mobility. Rather, those Mexican American girls who can successfully ‘perform’ their racial/ethnic and class origins as ‘middle class’ will—like the middle-­class white girls—have a chance to succeed further in a state college or university although, as Bettie and the girls (2014:161–162) themselves realize, there is a cost in cultural pain that may be exacted from them in the process. Those who cannot do so, like most of the Cholas and Chicas, will continue to experience the economic and social marginality of their parents. The sociological field work reports of MacLeod and Bettie, among many others, provide us with a contextualized, ground level understanding of how individuals construct a self out of the materials at hand in society. As each of their participant observation accounts reveals, individuals find themselves socially situated in particular circumstances—familial, legal, economic, social, and institutional. Importantly, however, individuals never find themselves there alone but rather find themselves with others in similar circumstances. Thus, MacLeod’s Hallway Hangers find themselves all living in Clarendon Heights with its lack of economic security for their families, a shortage of unskilled and skilled jobs for teenagers (as well as for adults), and the requirement that the teens attend school, with boys (and girls) of roughly the same age. They coalesce as a group because they are predominantly white boys in a society that places a premium on racial and ethnic heritage as an axis of identity and association as well as a society that discourages adolescent cross-gender bonds between boys and girls. The Brothers, finding themselves in Clarendon Heights in much the same situation as the Hallway Hangers, also join together in racial solidarity—and for pretty much the same reason. The two groups diverge with respect to their orientation to the shared problem of involuntary attendance and participation in public education (through the age of 16) and with regard to the normatively encouraged completion of high school. The two groups also diverge to a lesser degree with respect to their conformance with more general norms of comportment and law-abiding behavior. The choices the teens make within this milieu are bounded by the social circumstances in which they find themselves. Reframed, this means their range of options is not unlimited; to the contrary, the environment

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severely restricts the alternatives the teens can envision and perhaps restricts even further the options they can realistically pursue with some degree of confidence. In considering the wealth of detail that MacLeod provides with respect to each of the 15 boys who constituted core members of the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers, those details of their lives only emerge because each individual is responding to the context in which he finds himself. Each must choose from the limited palette facing him and then work within the consequences of that choice. Given this stark reality, the fact that the teens struggle mightily but often fail to achieve their goals does not seem all that surprising. The high school girls in California’s rural central valley who are Bettie’s subjects find themselves situated in a very particular set of circumstances as well. Like the boys MacLeod studied, the girls live in a world that is gender-segregated and where cross-gender, adolescent cultural bonding faces socially severe limitations. While the adolescent boys and girls mix and interact, the girls do not ‘privilege’ their relationship with boys, who they know to be unreliable sources for economic and social mobility. As a result, the girls construct ‘girl groups’ centered around racial/ethnic heritage (as did MacLeod’s boys) and class origin. Equally important, even within the matrix of gender, race/ethnicity, and class, groups distinguish themselves—as did the Hallway Hangers and Brothers—with respect to their orientation to the major institution in their lives, the high school, and their aspirations for the future. Like the boys from Clarendon Heights, the degree to which the teens engage with the official normative culture of the high school and pursue the conventional ladder of economic and social mobility that the educational process ostensibly offers stands as a sorting mechanism for their futures. While adopting middle-class ‘performative’ standards and performing middle-class values associated with the school environment does not guarantee the economic and social mobility that is at the heart of the American promise, Bettie’s research suggests, as did MacLeod’s, that groups whose identity and subcultural behavior resists and opposes the dominant orientation of the schools effectively eliminate themselves from the status competition. Importantly, for both MacLeod’s boys and Bettie’s girls, American society makes arrangements for those whose identification and affiliation choices act to make them ineligible for upward social mobility. It does so, in part, by making available access to environments that will simply reproduce the lack of cultural capital low-income students bring to the school, briefly housing them until they will be disgorged back out into society to become clients, and sometimes the problem, of other social institutions, whether trade schools, community colleges, or jails and prisons.

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MacLeod’s Hallway Hangers, as we have seen, respond to their social location by developing attitudes that forcefully, but ineffectually, resist the power of the school and its middle-class officials to coerce them into conformance with mainstream thinking and behavior. As Frankie colloquially and colorfully expressed his attitude, “I didn’t give a shit at the school. I used to tell the teachers to their face to fuck themselves” (MacLeod 2009:93). Frankie, like other members of the Hallway Hangers, sought to evade both the academic and behavioral requirements of the school, preferring to seek out the confines of the Adjustment Class due to its light academic workload and lax conduct environment. Indeed, one can argue that the Adjustment Class merely incorporates the Hallway Hangers’ subcultural values into the school. As Steve tells MacLeod (2009:95): It’s way better than the other school. Come in at nine-thirty, get out at eleven-thirty. The guy ( Jimmy) is just like us; he swears and shit, tells all the other teachers to go fuck themselves; he doesn’t care. Got weights, punching bag; get out early. In short, asked to learn nothing in the Adjustment Class, the Hallway Hangers find it congenial. Asked to only invest two hours of their day at school, the Hallways Hangers rejoice. Permitted to bring their hostile attitudes and expletive-laden voices into the school rather than curtail them and learn to be a different person, the Hallway Hangers happily accept the opportunity. Given accessories (weights, punching bag) to reinforce their lower class cultural enthusiasm for macho toughness and physicality, the Hallway Hangers couldn’t be more pleased. In short, largely left to their own cultural predilections, and supported in their subcultural preferences by a school that elects to let them do so, the Hallway Hangers simply continue to smoke, do drugs, fight, engage in petty crimes, and inhabit the lower class cultural milieu they inherited at birth. Eventually, more than one member of the group finds that society’s response is to involuntarily place him in either jail or prison In sum, the Hallway Hangers’ strategies are ineffectual in either (1) preparing them to succeed within the cultural limitations built into American society or (2) challenging the power relations that are dominant in institutions like the schools and government that control their fates. As MacLeod recognizes, the school system in place facilitates the process of social reproduction by failing to use its resources meaningfully in a way that would mitigate this process (2009:116). In this regard, he agrees with Bourdieu that the ‘habitus’ encourages only those aspirations that reflect the objective probability a person will be successful under the existing arrangements in society (2009:117).

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The societal result is a circular process in which the failure of individuals to possess the requisite values and skills to navigate middle-class institutions is exacerbated by the institutions’ failures to reorganize their mission to effectively address the disjunction between students’ entering behavior and the opportunity structure found in the United States those students will face upon graduation. Bettie’s study some 20 years later suggests very little has changed, although given the differences in gender socialization in American society, her working-class, female subjects do not incorporate into their lower class subculture the same degree of hostility, profanity, and physicality as the Hallway Hangers. Indeed, rather than openly resist the school’s middle-class ethos, the working-class girls she studied generally adopted subtle, and often evasive, techniques of class-based opposition to the middle-class school environment. Still, the failure to embrace the dominant school ethos and its organized pathway from high school to college to career left Bettie’s working-class students adrift in secondary choices that held little potential for social and economic mobility outside of the stratum of their birth. We are left, ultimately, with two portraits of lower/working-class identity formation that paint low-status, low-income boys and girls as limited in their objective chances for upward economic and social mobility in the United States and equally limited in envisioning strategies and futures that can overcome the restricted environments from which they originate. Given these empirical— if non-quantitative—findings, we turn to examining whether contemporary sociological theories of the ‘self ’ offer a persuasive analysis of identity formation for the twenty-first century. Elliot (2016) has recently considered the contributions that sociological theory has made to our understanding of the forces that impinge on identity construction in late modernity. His review of the ideas presented by Giddens (1991), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001), Bauman (2005, 2007), and his own theorizing with Charles Lemert (2009a, 2009b) offer a starting point for examining the contemporary relationship between self and society. At the most abstract level, Elliot observes that each of the theorists argues that individuals find that they must become “the architects of their own lives” (2016:70). This entails engaging continuously in ‘do-it-yourself ’ identity revisions based upon the necessity to reorganize one’s individualized solutions to changes in the environment and what Elliot characterizes as broader “systemic social problems” (2016:70). Many of these theorists, including Elliot, see the twenty-first century conditions that have inspired intense globalization as the single most influential underlying condition that has driven these constant identity reformulations. As Bauman (2007:6):observes “on a planet open to the free

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circulation of capital and commodities, whatever happens in one place has a bearing on how people in all other places live, hope or expect to live.” The boundaries that once existed have been erased in this assessment of global changes. Elliot (2016:70) begins his review by referencing Giddens’ notion of reflexive self-identity, a process that consists of regular monitoring, and then responsive reflection in relation to, psychological and social information about possible life trajectories. In this understanding of modern social life, Giddens argues that social practices are continually re-examined and then reconstituted in light of the new information brought to bear upon them. The imperative to read and then respond to cultural signs enveloped in the notion of reflexivity defined in this way is reminiscent, although perhaps distinguishable by its attribution to globalizing forces, of the concept of ‘other directedness’ identified by Riesman and colleagues in The Lonely Crowd (1961). Like the other directed individual, Giddens’ modern individual must apparently keep his or her antenna constantly attuned to social flux so that he or she does not miss an important incoming signal as to how they must respond. Emphasized, too, in Giddens’ conception is the apparent felt necessity for modern man to remain au courant with regard to whatever is ‘new.’ In Elliot’s view, Giddens perceives this tendency to extend to all cultural dimensions, whether it is in regard to “serious social criticism (in which commentary refers to previous commentary), to the latest trends in pop music” (2016:70). Giddens’ argument in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) is premised, like the work of Bauman, Beck, and Elliot, on a globalization thesis. He contends, modern social life is characterized by profound processes of the reorganisation of time and space, coupled to the expansion of dis-embedding mechanisms—mechanisms which prize social relations free from the hold of specific locales, recombining them across wide time-space distances. (1991:2) The upshot of this process, for Giddens (1991:3) and each of the theorists named, is that modern society becomes a ‘risk culture,’ yet one that reduces many types of risks while introducing new risks that prior generations did not need to address. As Bauman reiterated 15 years later (quoted earlier), Giddens (1991:4) notes that, “the influence of distant happenings on proximate events, and on intimacies of the self, becomes more and more commonplace [as a consequence of globalization].” It is in this context that what Giddens terms “the reflexive project of the self ” (1991:5) plays out by individuals being

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forced to sustain “coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives” within a matrix of multiple choices embedded in abstract systems. Here, however, Elliot (2016), in his summary of the globalization theorists’ work, fails to capture a critical acknowledgement by Giddens (1991:5–6): while modern conditions may require reflexively organized life planning, the whole project of lifestyle choice likely has different implications for those in different classes. As Giddens (1991:5–6) comments, “The poor are more or less completely excluded from the possibility of making lifestyle choices. In some substantial sense this is true,” while conceding that he makes no effort to document the inequalities that arise across differences in gender, race/ethnicity, and class in his work. Yet, his recognition that modern institutions, while holding out the possibility of emancipation, “at the same time create mechanisms of suppression, rather than actualization, of the self ” (1991:6) is essential to a correct understanding of his work as well as that of Bauman and Beck. It is, really, the missing connection between the theories of modernization and globalization and the field studies of MacLeod, Bettie, Silva, and many others. According to Elliot (2016:71), Beck has also become interested in his twenty-first century work with the effects of globalization on identity but, in doing so, developed his own terminology for the reflexive process: individualization. In this conception, the relative disappearance of tradition as a foreground for developing the self, which Riesman, et al. (1969) also addressed decades ago, as well as asserted changes in the stability of fixed gender roles, the significance of impermeable class boundaries, and masculine domination of occupational roles all require the modern individual to continually adapt. Absent the more fixed social and institutional markers of earlier periods, Beck—like Giddens—sees the individual buffeted by winds that require him or her to engage in nearly continual experimentation and renewal. In Beck’s (2000:27) estimation it is the fact that capital is global but that work is local that must be recognized. Like Giddens’ view, Beck argues that globalized modernity has the “capacity to eat up distance and to organize in real time a fragmented labour process” (2000:7), thereby routinely impacting the modern individual, who must constantly respond to the speed, and reorganizing tendencies, of modern capitalism. It is within this context that society has shifted from regimes of bureaucratically and rationally organized workplaces to what many of the modernity theorists characterize as a ‘risk society’ where loss of economic and social insecurity is an ever present threat due to the forces of global capitalism (Beck 2000:67–91). Here, Beck (2000:47), too, recognizes the fundamentally different allocation of lifestyle options that Giddens acknowledges: “The fixed location of labour means that working people are losers in the struggle to distribute the global risks of [the process

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of] globalization.” Yet, for Beck working people may well turn out to be not the only losers. Rather, he notes that capital’s constant tendency to take flight may drive a race to the bottom where the middle class becomes impoverished, the poor become ‘complete have-nots’ and the economic and political elite classes lose their legitimacy, creating a potentially explosive social force (2000:47). Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) thinking about globalizing modernity’s consequences for class, however, reveals an unwillingness to fully tackle the subject. There is a tendency to speak in speculative possibilities rather than try to empirically ground any new class relations in actual observations. On the one hand, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002:35) are likely correct that relationships are no longer exclusively dependent on physical proximity, but it is questionable whether, in all instances or even very many instances, relationships are now inevitably “formed by individuals who regard themselves as organizers of their own circles.” Even if true, it is not a salutary development as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002:35) admit: this “freedom to choose” may simply result in a division into “culture and counterculture, society and alternative society (including a growth of far-right violence), such as we have repeatedly seen in the last 20 years.” While talk of the ‘working class’ may have disappeared from the language of discourse to a certain degree, that does not suggest that barriers endemic to class origin do not remain vital and exclusionary. Indeed, the studies of various segments of the lower-income and working classes that I have summarized show that very definite differences in resources and cultures continue to typify different life circumstances based upon life origins. Certainly, one can’t say about the Clarendon Heights boys or the Central Valley California Latina girls that physical proximity no longer matters with respect to relationship formation. It was precisely the fact that the Clarendon Heights boys shared a physical and social environment— which the Hallway Hangers narrowed further to the landing at doorway #13 (MacLeod 2009:25)—that cemented them in their lower-income class location and dictated their life chances. Bettie’s Waretown High Chicas also built their working-class girl culture around a shared milieu and experience: to the extent they had any real choice in their relationships (which is highly debatable) they did not exercise it. Thus, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim—much like Giddens and Bauman—have shied away from pursuing good answers to some of the actual impacts that the broader forces of globalizing capitalism observably produce. Giddens’ analysis with its focus on the forces of globalization likewise provides a foundation for Bauman’s (2005, 2007) emphasis on the increased precariousness and concomitant uncertainty that individuals face in the twenty-first century, Thus, Bauman more directly connects the anxiety he perceives in modern personhood with the painful effects arising from the movements of

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global capital. Dislocations arising from corporate outsourcing undermine the stability of individuals and families that characterized an earlier period of industrialism and such displacements create unanchored ‘selves,’ fearful of any attachment, and consequently loosely drifting for self-protection. Government and politics are no less the source of this uncertain state than corporatism in Bauman’s view. Unable to manage effectively the modern nation-state, members of society are thrust back upon themselves without the former support of stable family, community, city, state, and nation to support them. The shared culture of modern-states seems, at times, in total collapse. In Bauman’s estimation, the individual is faced with an irresolvable dilemma. Freed from traditional restraints, the modern individual must achieve a balance between imagination and what Bauman (2000:17) calls “the ability to act.” Thus, the experience of freedom in contemporary society is dependent on whether one’s imagination is no greater than one’s actual desires and neither of the two reaches beyond one’s ability to act to satisfy them. Selfhood thus becomes a continual balancing act since the historical hindrances to complete freedom (legal and social norms; family morality; the gravity of place as well as place in society) have all been severely attenuated, if not abolished altogether, and the individual must manage entirely his or her own navigation through modernism by either trimming their desires, curtailing their imagination, or expanding the realm in which they can act without resistance (2000:17). This is the self-conception that Bauman (2000:1–3) crystallizes as the necessity for being “light and liquid” in the modern era: since the “solidities” have all dissipated, and no new solid foundation for society and selfhood has emerged, one must remain flexible so as to go with the flow. In Bauman’s view, the individual is reduced to reacting, not committing, since little anchors the self or incentivizes it to do so today but also because power, too, has become extraterritorial and fluid. Power, rather than seeking an engaged domination with those it rules over, now seems to overpower but then remove itself from the requirements of active management of those it has subdued. Ruling requires administration, which is tiresome, costly, and frequently ineffective so that the modern technique is to establish dominance from a distance, from the air, and then to actively avoid ‘nation building’ through exit plans, escape, slippage, avoidance, elision, and neo-liberal laissez-faire (2000:9–13). The individual, seeing the fluid approaches now favored by government and corporations, whose deployment of capital mimics the nation-state’s deployment of military power, responds in kind—by minimizing commitment and ‘traveling light.’ However, the unmoored self, devoid of all commitments and routines, reduces to what Richard Sennett (1998:44) has called a “life of momentary impulses” dominated by short-term,

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episodic action and absent sustained, shared meaning. Such a life would arguably become the ultimate mindless existence, driven this way and that, but without purpose of its own. Indeed, Bauman conceives of the emancipation that elimination of heretofore established modes of domination and restraint constrained as illusory in its benefit. He argues (2000:20–21), Freedom cannot be gained against society. The outcome of rebellion against the norms, . . . is perpetual agony of indecision linked to a state of uncertainty about the intentions and motives of others around . . . Patterns and routines . . . spare humans that agony . . . situations in which decisions are to be taken on their own responsibility and without the reassuring knowledge of their consequences, [make] each move pregnant with risks difficult to calculate. The absence, or mere unclarity of norms—anomie—is the worst lot which may occur to people as they struggle to cope with their life-tasks. Yet, the dilemma facing the contemporary individual cannot be easily solved since the solid ground on which many Americans were formerly born into— stable communities, well-paying jobs in industry, clear personal and national goals—has evaporated. Individuals are thus cast adrift—not by a single change in American life but by a cascade of changes—with the consequence that “[n]eeding to become what one is” (2000:32) dominates all other lifetask agendas for the modern individual. Thus, the entire history of humankind, which has successively moved from systems of ascription to systems of achievement, has now perhaps reached its ultimate extension where the achievement that is now required is the individual’s self-creation with virtually no solid foundation, reference points, guideposts, or analogs to use as measures or moorings. It is as though under modern conditions every man, woman, and child must compose themselves anew, as Gatsby (Fitzgerald 2004 did, by display of the odd photograph of oneself shown against an historic backdrop, arms draped across the shoulders of famous and admired persons, or by possession of some treasured medallion that shimmers authentically, even as one suspects that the picture has been photo-shopped and the icon created for the effect it was intended to produce. Indeed, Gatsby may epitomize the one strategy left remaining to the unmoored self—to clothe oneself in garments of choice, like Gatsby’s many elegant shirts, in the hope that their patina may wear off and provide the basis for a self. In the end, Bauman reaches a conclusion that is also compatible with the scene in which Jay Gatsby displays his many-splendored shirts: the modern

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individual is faced with “an infinite collection of possibilities,” “a countless multitude of opportunities yet to be chased or already missed,” an “infinity of chances” (2000:61). He states (2000:63): The world is like a buffet table set with mouth-watering dishes, too numerous for the keenest of eaters to hope to taste them all. The diners are consumers, and the most taxing and irritating of the challenges consumers confront is the need to establish priorities: the necessity to forsake some unexplored options and to leave them unexplored. The consumers’ misery derives from the surfeit, not the dearth, of choices. (Emphasis in original) For Bauman, the world full of potential opportunities “is an exhilarating experience” (2000:62) “where few defeats are final, few if any mishaps irreversible, yet no victory is ultimate either” (2000:62). Yet, while it is a compelling rhetorical vision, Bauman’s “fluidity” thesis is substantially undercut by the rather hard realities that MacLeod’s Hallway Hangers, Bettie’s Chicas, and Silva’s working-class 20-somethings face. Rather than a world where “little is predetermined” (Bauman 2000:62), these groups all share a twentieth- and twenty-first century American reality where well-paying, unskilled jobs no longer constitute any appreciable percentage of jobs in the United States. Moreover, the stories that MacLeod, Bettie, and Silva recount about their interview subjects suggests that all share the experience that once out of the game it is nearly impossible to overcome the barriers that face them and get on successfully, wholly contrary to Bauman’s (2000:62) contention that “the game goes on . . . the inventory of wonders which life may offer is far from closed, is richly satisfying and pleasurable.” Thus, although they do not know it, the fates of MacLeod’s Hallway Hangers, Bettie’s Chicas, and Silva’s new working-class youth are substantially ‘pre-determined’ where modern society’s demands have outrun them and they have no way of catching up. Chen (2015), in his comprehensive interview study of displaced auto workers in the United States and Canada, also fails to find workers who are experiencing the possibilities of life as open, satisfying, and pleasurable. Worker after worker who speaks to Chen expresses his or her experience of the pains of unemployment, barriers to retraining, regret for choices made and paths taken at an early age, exclusion from better jobs due to meritocratic individualism, and negative family impacts ranging from impoverishment to dissolution. Hannah, 54 years old, told a long story of sexual abuse as a child, a bad marriage and a child, divorce, work as a waitress and homelessness,

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training as a medical assistant, work as an investigator, unemployment and— finally—stable factory work at Chrysler beginning in 1995 (2015:37–40). However, after several good years she herniated her back inspecting a transmission and when car production slumped during the Great Recession of 2008–2009, Hannah was reassigned to a different plant when less senior workers were let go. There she suffered harassment and, even worse, job consolidation and speed-up of the line that made the work more demanding and the time to complete it less. Hannah could not keep up. Her boss told her to take the buyout that Chrysler was offering—and she did. She thought the financial terms would be enough to hold her over while she looked for a new job but then her marriage to her second husband fell apart and she struggled to keep up with the mortgage payments. At the same time, she was having difficulty accessing the job search assistance and retraining through government programs. Hannah, feeling defeated, began taking anti-anxiety medication. As Chen notes, “Now that [Hannah] realizes how tough the job market has become for someone like her, [she] regrets the decision to take the buy-out” (2015:40). She is again living in a neighborhood with drug addicts and alcoholics on the corner. Unlike the ‘exhilaration’ that Bauman identifies as a contemporary response to ‘fluid’ society, Hannah tells Chen, “I’m just feeling kind of hopeless. I tried to get help and I’m just being pushed aside” (2015:40). Ray Chong, 39 years old, an auto parts worker, tells Chen (2015:44–45) that he wasn’t a particularly good student and after he graduated high school he went in the Navy. Upon discharge, he started working in a plating plant where he spent nearly 20 years. Then, the plant shut down, shunting Ray on to unemployment. Now, faced with finding a job in the new economy, he finds his lack of education a steep barrier. As Chen notes, skilled factory jobs have decreased as a percentage of the labor sector due in part to automation and the two sectors that have grown—white-collar clerical work and ‘Mc-service jobs’—are either unlikely to hire workers like Hannah and Ray or pay so poorly that formerly middle-class workers (in terms of income) cannot sustain their indebtedness. (As Torlina (2011:38) reports from his interviews with blue-collar workers, many make more money than white-collar workers—so long as they remain employed.) For Chen, the “dreary underbelly of low-wage work” (2015:450) that constitutes the core of the new economy is not an ‘exhilarating prospect’ arising from one’s knowledge that opportunities for new experience are endless; for Chen’s workers the new awareness is that they are no longer needed, their skills are no longer in demand, their self has been rendered obsolete—and worse, there are no prospects on the horizon for the situation and their circumstances to get better any time soon. This knowledge of obsolescence would be a crushing realization for perhaps any

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worker but as Torlina (2011:37–41) reports from his interviews with blue-collar workers, work means much more than a paycheck to them. Rather, in many cases their identities are wrapped up in what they consider as doing ‘real work’ (Torlina 2011:60–62) and would never consider any other type of work that was not manual in one way or another. Elliot and Lemert’s (2009a, 2009b) conception of individualization, building on each of these precursors, finds in the plasticity of Bauman’s new modernist a ‘self ’ that is formed in substantial part by the increasing speed and change that is driven by the high-tech culture of globalization. The twenty-first century dynamism of global capitalism, and the capriciousness of world markets, has spawned the well-known world of short-term contracts, corporate downsizing, serial product obsolescence, layoffs, and part-time workers without benefits. Buffeted by the demands of the marketplace for constant adaptation, unsure of the future, the ‘new individualist’ does not merely drift, unmoored, amidst a thrashing sea but rather acts to reinvent himself or herself in nearly constant fashion. In the place of stable families, institutions and relationships there has grown, instead, services and social arrangements that meet the need for flexibility, aided and abetted by everything from portable cell phones with an endless series of apps to the emergence, and tremendous popular success, of Uber and Airbnb. The self must either be prepared to adapt to the global flow of forces by reconstituting identity as necessary or risk submersion in those same forces. The ‘new individualism’ thus recognizes not only the imperatives of globalization, and the disjunctions that the new world order inspires, but the rapidity with which new forms of social organization, like ‘Brexit,’ are formed and the corresponding need for the individual to be light of foot and fluid in his or her response to wrenching change. These analyses of the fate of individual identity in the twenty-first century can be read as either refuted by the experiences of the working-class teens studied by MacLeod and Bettie or, in some modest but important ways, affirming their findings with an added layer of explanation. The argument that the lower class subcultures that MacLeod, Bettie, and others examined contradict the contemporary reflexivity of the ‘self ’ theses propounded by Giddens, Beck, Bauman, and Elliot and Lemert is premised on the stability of working-class culture over decades of change in the larger society. In the 1950s Walter Miller, in a famous paper entitled “Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency” (1958), observed that lower class subculture embraced a series of values that were oppositional to the dominant (primarily middle-class) values of American society and that these values predisposed lower class youth, particularly boys, to join gangs and engage in delinquent acts. The values he identified included a focus on trouble,

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smartness (street smarts), toughness, fate, and autonomy. Twenty-five years later, MacLeod found these same values intrinsic to the low-income culture of the Hallway Hangers (who, he also found, committed the types of delinquent acts Miller described). Without belaboring the matter, what both studies, taken together, found was stability within the subcultural values embraced by low-income adolescent boys growing up in a subculture of delinquency over time. Thus, the sorts of ‘selves’ these youth constructed were not, by and large, flexible, fluid, or plastic. Rather, their working-class selves were generally fixed in relation to their class experience and their location vis-à-vis mainstream institutions like the schools. Moreover, as MacLeod (2009) found in his follow-up field work in 1991 and 2006, as these youth ‘aged out’ of adolescence the changes they underwent were modest, and restricted to the foreseeable outcomes of their class origin when acted out in light of the behaviors they engaged in and the choices they consciously or unconsciously made in the particular milieu in which they found themselves. Indeed, rather than the ‘fluid’ self that was poised to respond to the vicissitudes of globalizing change that some of the new identify theories proposed, some (even perhaps many) of the Hallway Hangers could be described as nearly immobile—that is, ‘stuck’—in rigidly self-defeating selves that were not responding to the changed (and changing) life circumstances and societal conditions of the late twentieth- and then twenty-first century United States. Bettie’s (2014) working class girls in California’s Central Valley were also denizens of a well-established low income culture that had persisted over generations although not one dominated by drifts into delinquency. The girls, whose parents generally reflected lower educational attainment, lower class employment, and lower economic standing, proceeded to adopt—under both the pressure of coercive school tracking and their own limited understanding of any alternatives—a restricted (and restricting) ‘girl culture’ in opposition to what they experienced as the dominant, middle-class, official academic culture of the school system. By so doing, they set in place the socialization processes that would reproduce the stable, working-class and lower-income culture that they were, in fact, hoping to economically escape. The adolescent ‘selves’ they created were not flexible and plastic but rather were steeped in a rigid conformism bounded by group affiliation. Las Chicas wore their hair a certain way, used makeup of a certain type, and dressed similarly in tight-fitting clothes that accentuated, rather than minimized, their sexuality (although their actual sexual practices differed little from other peer girl groups like the ‘preps.’). Bettie’s girls were not fluidly adaptable nor loosely drifting, ready to quickly react to the dynamic fluctuations of global capitalism by reinventing themselves, but rather conservatively clutching at each

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other in a formulaic subculture whose principal purpose seemed to protect them from invidious competition with other status groups at Waretown High, primarily the middle-class ‘preps.’ In sum, Bettie’s subjects, bound as they were by their ‘performances’ of working-class girl culture within the context of traditional racial/ethnic categories, displayed little of the plastic responsiveness to the imperative demands of the burgeoning and fast-paced global economy that Giddens, Beck, Bauman, and Elliot and Lemert ascribe to the character of the modern individual. It is possible, however, to explain the discordance between the selves constructed by MacLeod’s low income boys and Bettie’s working-glass girls and the nature of the modern selves propounded by the contemporary social theorists. It is only possible to do so, however, by noting the failure of the theorists of modernity to (1) acknowledge and incorporate the sociological findings regarding subcultural stability over time and (2) tether their theoretical explanations more carefully to the actual behavior of individuals stratified by class divisions in the contemporary United States. Several observations will illustrate the ways in which the theories of the modern self in the context of global society are applicable to certain strata and the ways in which those same theories fail to address empirical findings that contradict their shared theses. The key, as always, is in the details. The principal sociological feature of U.S. society that the modernity theorists disregard is the less than flexible contour of the permanent social structure and the reduced aspirations that post-industrial, institutional society promotes for members of the low-income, working class. As one example, the modernity theorists ignore the relative impermeability of academic educational settings administered by middle-class professionals—like Lincoln (Clarendon Heights) and Waretown High Schools—to the globalizing forces that may swirl outside, around, and beyond these relatively stable institutions. Likewise, the modernity theorists minimize the extent to which globalizing forces even reach certain segments of the population in the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States. The fact is that the impact of many of these forces remain hidden to those who lack the ability to tie and interpret their own experience of class society to changes that are occurring on the other side of the globe. While it is true that members of the lower-income and working classes may hunger for the products of global commerce, like smart phones, this is not the same as members of this strata feeling the personal urgency to meet the ‘selfhood’ requirements that members of higher classes perhaps feel compelled to incorporate under the impact of globalization. Thus, the modernity theorists fail to accumulate and present any evidence that the globalizing forces have (1) reached the American underclass

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and lower classes in a way that alerts them to the effects of the globalizing phenomena on their life chances and (2) had the observable impact they contend of producing ‘fluid, flexible, plastic’ selves ready to respond to the changes in society. While there is some evidence that globalizing forces have reached these strata, the modernity theorists have, by and large, not generated it and incorporated it into their arguments. Perhaps more importantly, these theorists have not persuasively shown that globalization’s influence has produced the new type of constructed selves they describe in populations like the Hallway Hangers, Bettie’s Cholas and Las Chicas, and Silva’s young working-class adults. In large part this latter failure is due to the modernity theorists’ oversight with respect to the economic and occupational barriers which act to encapsulate those from the lowest income strata within a cocoon of immobility that locks them into stable cultural selves that inhibit them from responding to the imperatives for adaptive changes that other classes, like the skilled working class and middle class, experience and recognize as demanding awareness and responsiveness. The working-class girls Bettie studied therefore have no pressing need to address distant forces changing the world economy when, in fact, the local forces that impinge on them are, with only very minor variations, the same. The working-class girls’ parents, especially the mothers, often worked in retail; many of the working-class girls themselves also worked in retail although often on a part-time basis while in high school. Although the working-class girls’ Bettie studied would like to have adult work other than retail, or other low income, working-class options that they and their friends know exist in California’s Central Valley, they recognize working retail is one of the realistic outcomes they may face. There is, in their view, little advantage to creatively constructing, at great effort, some more flexibly modern self when the likelihood is they will have no need for it and will end of living a life not unlike the one their parents and peers live. The working-class girl peer group therefore provides the identity they know, need, and want—a relatively stable role that has subcultural group support and an achievable future they can envision, even if it is a less upwardly mobile one than their most optimistic hopes entertain. Thus, they are not ‘light and fluid’ and will likely find themselves glued to a subcultural self that has not amassed the cultural capital they need to escape their foreordained class future. The better argument for the modernity theorists with respect to the class divide, and other relevant social factors, is to acknowledge class differences in the necessity, ability, and willingness of class members to adapt flexibly to the demands of technological innovation driven by global competition and the correlative fast pace of change. This approach permits theories of identify formation in modern society to incorporate the field work and other data

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findings from sociology, psychology, and related fields and consider the independent and interactive effects of gender, race/ethnicity, and class on the manner in which individuals go about constructing self-identity. In particular, the modernity theorists seem to disregard the influence of relative social power that class privilege either supports, or denies, on identity construction. Those from groups with relatively little social power, like the Clarendon Heights teens and the California Central Valley working-class girls, cannot simply adopt a ‘plastic’ style and insinuate themselves into the middle class in every case. The degree of cultural capital, and actual capital, available to many (and perhaps most) in these groups is insufficient to produce a credible middle-class ‘performance,’ Moreover, both the Clarendon Heights boys and the Waretown cholas and chicas have already invested their ‘selves’ in attitudes and behaviors that are marginally—or in some cases completely—disqualifying for ascension into the middle class. Thus, any number of adult commentators told MacLeod and Bettie that this group member, or that one, had foreclosed his or her middle-class future by failing out of school or merely failing to do well enough to move on. Likewise, the Clarendon Heights boys and the Waretown High School working-class girls have developed subcultural styles that include reduced aspirations so that rather than remaining ‘fluid’ so that they could attempt class mobility whereupon they could create an alternative, middle class identity, these groups have embraced attitudes that rigidly resist and oppose the prospect. All of this suggests, as I have argued earlier, that neither the social structure nor individual persons are as adaptable, flexible, changing, and changeable as the modernity theorists contend.

References Aronson, E. 1968. “Dissonance Theory: Progress and Problems.” In R.P. Abelson, E. Aronson, W.J. McGuire, T.M. Newcomb, M.J. Rosenberg and P.H. Tannenbaum, Eds., Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook, 5–27. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baumeister, Roy F. 1998. “The Self.” In D.T. Gilbert, S.T. Fiske and G. Lindsey, Eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology, 1:680–740. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Baumeister, Roy F. 2000. “Ego Depletion and the Self ’s Executive Function.” In Abraham Tesser, Richard B. Felson and Jerry M. Suls, Eds., Psychological Perspectives on Self and Identity, 9–33. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Beck, Ulrich. 2000. The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich and E. Beck-Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization. London: Sage.

The Formation of the Self  127 Bettie, Julie. 2014. Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. Oakland: University of California Press. Campbell, Jennifer D., Sunaina Asanand, and Adam Di Paula. 2000. “Structural Features of the Self-Concept and Adjustment.” In Abraham Tesser, Richard B. Felson and Jerry M. Suls, Eds., Psychological Perspectives on Self and Identity, 9–33. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Chen, Victor Tan. 2015. Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Oakland: University of California Press. Elliot, Anthony. 2010. “The New Individualism After the Great Global Clash.” The Journal of Studies in Contemporary Sociological Theory, 4:55–66. Elliot, Anthony. 2016. Identity Troubles. London and New York: Routledge. Elliot, Anthony and Charles Lemert. 2009a. “The Global New Individualist Debate: Three Theories of Individualism and Beyond.” In A. Elliot and P. Du Gay, Eds., Identity in Question, 37–64. London: Sage. Elliot, Anthony and Charles Lemert. 2009b. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. London: Routledge. Elliot, Anthony and J. Urry. 2010. Mobile Lives. Oxford: Routledge. Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston: Row, Peterson. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2004. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “The Ego and the Id.” In J. Strachey, Ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 19:12–66. London: Hogarth Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harmon-Jones, Eddie. 2000. “An Update on Cognitive Dissonance Theory, with a Focus on the Self.” In Abraham Tesser, Richard B. Felson and Jerry M. Suls, Eds., Psychological Perspectives on Self and Identity, 119–144. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. James, William. 1948. Psychology. Cleveland: World Publishers. Jung, Carl G. 1971. “Extracts from Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.” In J. Campbell, Ed., The Portable Jung, 139–162. New York: Viking Press. Lockwood, Penelope and Ziva Kunda. 2000. “Outstanding Role Models: Do They Inspire of Demoralize Us?” In Abraham Tesser, Richard B. Felson and Jerry M Suls, Eds., Psychological Perspectives on Self and Identity, 147–171. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. MacLeod, Jay. 2009. Ain’t No Makin’ It. Boulder: Westview. Miller, Walter B. 1958. “Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency.” Journal of Social Issues, 14:5–19. Reisig, M.D. and Travis C. Pratt. 2011. “Low Self-Control and Imprudent Behavior Revisited.” Deviant Behavior, 32:589–625. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. 1961 (Originally 1950). The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sedikides, Constantine and John J. Skowronski. 2000. “On the Evolutionary Functions of the Symbolic Self: The Emergence of Self-Evaluation Motives.” In Abraham Tesser, Richard B. Felson and Jerry M. Suls, Eds., Psychological Perspectives on Self and Identity, 91–117. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

128  The Formation of the Self Steele, C.M. 1988. “The Psychology of Self-Affirmation: Sustaining the Integrity of the Self.” In L. Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21:261–302. San Diego: Academic Press. Torlina, Jeff. 2011. Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Self Identity in Field Studies in Twenty-First Century American Class Settings

5

Implications for Modernist Theories

The modernity theorists have argued, generally, that the forces of twenty-first century global capitalism have exacerbated the tendency of modern society to exalt the individual over the communal and created a novel, and heretofore, not widely known, character type: the fluid, flexible, plastic ‘self ’ built to respond to the anarchic gyrations of the modern economy and polity. The genesis of this character type lies, according to these theorists, in one or more of the qualities attendant in post-industrial, global capitalism: the mobile capacity of capital which, in turn, has fostered its flight from first-world countries like the United States to what was formerly called the ‘developing world’; the adaptive corporate strategies of downsizing and outsourcing, which pummel the individual; capitalism’s constant demand for new products to sell to continuously generate profit, which itself arises from, and then begets further, unconstrained technological innovation; the corresponding rapidity of social change compelled by the organizational changes modern capitalism drives; and the political sphere’s inability to harness these anarchic upheavals in the social structure that leave the individual vulnerable and exposed, thereby producing an individual who is unanchored by traditional ties and becomes, by sheer necessity, the new individual, nearly formless due to the need to remain continuously adaptable.

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While these modernity theorists do not agree in all respects whether these developments are all good or all bad, at least some contend that individuals— retreating into a privatized individualism—experience contemporary social life as increasingly superficial, brittle, and chaotic. However, as Castoriadis (1987:48) observes, any existing society must maintain a certain level of coherence for a truly incoherent society would collapse in and of itself. As he points out, this means that societies themselves are continuously adapting in order to maintain a fragile coherence. In this way, the tensions and crises of any particular socio-historical period or motive force—such as advanced capitalism— are necessary components of, and may be usefully recognized as, part of the drive for coherence. Thus, the crises may result in the fall of dynasties, the destruction of a stable economic order (as in the Great Depression), the colonization of a people, or the conscious effort to eliminate an entire race (as the Holocaust sought to achieve in World War II), but none of these crises has ever led to utter collapse (Castoriadis 1987:47–48). In a sense, these crises are simply inherent in the organic process of a complex system, such as capitalism, working out its tensions while in search of a new equilibrium. It is simply a social fact that an old order has been demolished and some new phase of readjustment is in process; it is merely inadvertent that no new, stable social order readily appears that can immediately cohere and provide individuals with a meaningful, fixed hold on a position within it. This development, while instilling substantial collateral damage in its wake, consequently leads to the ‘new individual’ who must accept that he or she must continually reposition himself or herself, reinventing personhood to accommodate the constant change that is demanded of the individual by these modern social forces. While the group of theorists concerned with the globalizing effects of transnational capitalism have identified those forces that have, collectively, sent shock waves of dislocation through the new world economic order, they have been notably less successful in persuasively demonstrating that the result, at the individual level, has been the type of character structure that they have imputed. Indeed, one can argue, as I have, that the modern theorists have generally failed to convincingly gather and present evidence of the widespread existence of this character type in modern societies, including the United States. Indeed, when the existing evidence supplied by other sociologists and social analysts is examined, there is widespread agreement that changes in contemporary social life have often left individuals “bewildered, disoriented, and powerless” (Silva 2013:24), but no corresponding agreement that individuals have responded broadly by developing the ‘fluid, plastic, flexible’ selves that the modernity theorists project. Rather, the evidence supplied by these other investigators suggests that the response produced more often is the

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moderately dysfunctional self—an individual who is unmoored as the modernity theorists observe but not an individual who has reconstituted themselves effectively to adapt, in a flexible way, to the societal changes impinging upon them. Rather, the individual is most often described by these other researchers as unable to flexibly respond to the labor market while maintaining any sort of equilibrium amidst what they experience as social chaos. Often submerged by the social changes washing over them, many young Americans are described as protectively embracing a ‘self ’ absorbed with personal psychic development rather than projecting a self that can nimbly manage adaptation to the global system changes the modernity theorists recognize. There is evidence available regarding the ways in which individuals within the United States are experiencing, and responding to, contemporary life over the last two decades. The evidence of how individuals are responding to the seismic changes in social conditions that the modernity theorists and others have documented is necessarily ‘close to the ground’ of interaction socially situated in the context of everyday life. Consequently, much of that evidence has been gathered through intensive field work of the sort MacLeod (2009) and Bettie (2014) have conducted. One of the more recent investigations of this type is Jennifer Silva’s (2013) study of the struggle that young working-class adults are facing in their transition to full adulthood in the fragmented social order of the twenty-first century United States. Silva’s social structural account of the contemporary United States distinguishes carefully between the differing social landscapes that confront today’s middle-class young adults as compared to working-class youth from the same generation. By making this distinction clear and prominent, and convincingly demonstrating the existence of a radically different set of social circumstances facing the two groups, Silva’s work fleshes out the missing foundation of socially situated facts that are absent in, and therefore weaken, the modernity theorists’ claims regarding the nature of the twenty-first century individualized selves that they see as socially ascendant. Rather than a broad-based claim that the emergence of global post-industrial capitalist forces has produced a new form of ‘fluid’ selfhood that crosses all countries and social classes, evidence from Silva, Hochschild (2016), and others points to distinctive responses from individuals based principally on their class location and generation. Silva’s research, like that of MacLeod and Bettie before her, describes working-class youth as facing a set of class-based circumstances and social structural barriers that the middle classes do not face. Likewise, Hochschild’s (2016) intensive field investigation of older, white, predominantly working-class adults in the southern United States reveals a subculture of patterned individual adjustments that similarly is distinguishable from the accommodating adaptations

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those from the middle and upper classes of that generation perform. Arguably, the modernity theorists’ characterization of the plastically responsive ‘selves’ they observe is more limited in its dispersal in society than they posit. Rather than a broadly emergent phenomena that cuts across national and class boundaries indiscriminately, it may more accurately consist of a series of characterological qualities that members of the middle and upper middle classes embody among rising generations of youth who must adopt and accentuate certain personality features to benefit from, and not succumb to, the transnational forces the modernity theorists’ delineate. The fact that the middle and upper middle classes can successfully do so—while the emergent working-class youth transitioning to adulthood cannot—is simply an extension of the principles of cultural capitalism that have been recognized by Bourdieu (1977) and others. Few studies in recent years have as carefully explored the intersection of self and society at the field work level as Silva’s Coming up Short (2013). Silva’s interview subjects, young working-class adults, are all struggling to cobble together a life in the twenty-first century United States. They are invariably ‘coming up short’ as her title states. Reading Silva’s interview accounts, it is easy to see that her subjects are all engaged in constructing a self but failing to find the combination that successfully makes them feel whole. Her respondents flounder, unable to connect with traditional American ways of life and values, equally unable to successfully navigate contemporary institutions, workplaces, and relationships. Their quest is plotted along the dimensions of the American Dream by a series of dreams envisioned and dreams deferred, each dream begetting a dream self that is cultivated, then jettisoned, as disappointment sets in. Contrary to the modernity theorists’ hypotheses of a new characterological type that is fluid, plastic, and flexible, surfing the wave of new technology and the global economy, Silva’s (2013:5) respondents most often describe themselves as ‘stuck.’ Silva’s subjects are solidly working class, young people whose parents worked in maintenance, retail, or wherever they could (2013:6, 26), who themselves work as retail managers, line cooks, cashiers, and serve in the military. As Silva recounts, her subjects’ starting model for adulthood generally consists of a conception that focuses on the traditional pathways and normative markers that guided earlier generations—graduation from high school, a job, perhaps a college degree, marriage, advancement or promotion, children, a house, and retirement (2013:6). Yet, their collective experiences reflected disappointment or failure with respect to these traditional markers of working-class adulthood—unused college degrees, unexpected layoffs, jumping from one minimum wage job to another, failed relationships—in

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short, unsuccessful life transitions that left her respondents stuck in dead end jobs, unmarried, caring for children out of wedlock, and harboring anger, bitterness, and resentment at their dreams betrayed. Silva’s subjects are not living the lives portrayed in accounts of middle and upper middle-class 20-somethings—filled with hope and possibilities—but rather live in constrained circumstances that are characterized by an absence of choice (2013:8). As Silva argues, the working-class way of life and paths to adulthood that existed for previous generations have not merely been delayed or interrupted but instead have been dismantled, citing similar forces (economic restructuring, profound cultural transformations, and deepening economic inequality) as the modernity theorists. In their place, Silva finds a personal quest for a protected, private ‘self ’ dedicated to therapeutic self-healing that mirrors, in certain respects, the modernity theorists’ conception of a newly reconstituted form of individualism. This escape into a realm of privatized isolation is directly the result of the successive disappointments Silva’s interview subjects describe in their quest for an idealized dream self for the twenty-first century.

Dream No. 1: The College Degree Dream As Brandon, a 34-year-old black man, told Silva, he was encouraged from an early age to seek a higher education because it was the path to “the land of milk and honey” (2013:3). Diana, a 24-year-old white woman in Lowell, Massachusetts, likewise explained to Silva that “Everyone says you can’t really go anywhere unless you have a degree” (2013:5). Jay, a 28-year-old black man echoed these sentiments. After seven years, Jay finally earned a degree, but said, “They tell everyone to be something you have to go to college. So here I am, finishing high school, trying to go to college, and I get there and I don’t know what I want to do” (2013:49). Brandon, Jay, and Diana, and many more working-class youth like themselves, have been sold—and sold themselves— on the dream of attaining a college education, a dream that is intimately tied in their minds (and the collective American mind) of attaining and pursuing a financially rewarding career and successful life. Yet, Brandon, Jay, and Diana, and many of their peers, have found the college degree dream unfulfilling and abandoned their hopes for it living up to its advertised promise, whether before or after completion. Brandon graduated in the top 9% of his high school class in a college preparatory track and was admitted to a private university in the southeastern United States. He incurred $80,000 in loans to finance his dream of working in aeronautical and space engineering but found himself unable to pass calculus and physics

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in college, so he switched his major to criminal justice. When he graduated, he met several disappointments in applying for jobs as a police officer. In need of money, Brandon obtained a job as the night shift manager of a clothing store where he remains after 11 years. When his undergraduate loans became due, he pursued a master’s degree, in part to put the loans on hold but also to take the next step in higher education; as he explained to Silva, it had been “hammered into [my] head” that education was the path to success and a better life (2013:3–4). Diana pursued her own college dream for only two years when she began to doubt whether the promised benefits of a college degree would ever justify the costs. She dropped out, converting her part-time job into a full-time position as a cashier, reasoning that at the end of each week she was paid enough to live on where “I would have to wait five years to get a degree, and once I got that, who knows if I would be working to find something I wanted to be” (2013:5). Jay, who finished a degree in communications after seven years, concluded gloomily, “ultimately I’m not even sure if that was what I wanted but there was a point where I was, like, I have to pick some bullshit I can fly through and just get through. I didn’t find it at all worthwhile” (2013:49). Having abandoned his dream of a professional career in politics, too, Jay feels he has failed at creating a narrative for an adult self, saying “I mean does college really mean anything? . . . Are you a man afterwards? Adolescence seems to keep going on and on. Now our entire generation is lost. We’re coasting and cruising and not sure about what we should be doing” (2013:50). Brandon, Jay, and Diana’s stories, like those of many of their working-class generational peers, highlight the experience of college dreams that did not deliver what the dreamers expected and left them with a deflated, unhappy sense of self rather than as a vibrant whole with a sense of direction and purpose. While about half of the young working-class adults Silva spoke with pursue at least some higher education, the ideological promise that college would lead to professional jobs and financial security went largely unfulfilled. Much like the other pathways Silva’s young working-class respondents pursued, the college dream evaporated, leaving these young men and women stuck in place (2013:5, 46–50).

Dream No. 2: The Stable, Living Wage Job One feature of the idealized, mid-twentieth century working-class dream was the stable ‘job for life’ that would support a family with a living wage. Although such jobs have been endangered, and disappearing, for decades, Silva reports that this theme “runs through every interview transcript,” whether

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the interviewee is unemployed or falls within those who have ‘made it’ to a steady job (2013:30). While Silva’s subjects invariably hope and hunt for such a job, they encounter a labor marketplace that modernity theoreticians like Beck (2002) describe, where the industrial capital, technological, and globalizing forces place a priority on flexibility which, for workers, means less predictably stable jobs and lower wages. Silva’s interviews reflect evidence of the accommodations her subjects must endure to survive in this environment, “bending and adapting to the demands of the labor market until they feel they are about to break” (2013:30). Thus, the good, stable job dream—like the college degree dream—leaves most of her interview subjects stranded on the shoals of the shifting and contingent job market that exists in the present day United States. Rob, a 26-year-old white man, worked first at a paper goods factory during high school where his mother worked. The company closed the factory, shifting production overseas to achieve lower production costs. In high school he had learned the skills of a traditional machinist to manufacture tools by hand. However, by the time he graduated the work of a machinist was increasingly performed with the aid of computer-controlled programs. Made obsolete, Rob has worked stacking lumber, installing hardwood floors, landscaping, and working in a motorcycle factory, supported by pay for National Guard service. Rob described to Silva that his inability to land and keep a stable, well-paying job led to a profound sense of hopelessness about his prospects for the future (2013:30–31). Curtis and Kiana are a young, black married couple who encountered work and relationship difficulties when Kiana became pregnant after a few weeks of dating. Curtis, a veteran and member of the National Guard, became unemployed after his last deployment. His effort to become a police officer has been stymied because municipal and state budgets have instituted hiring freezes, leaving Curtis on a waiting list. Kiana meanwhile has sought to get into nursing school while balancing classes at a community college with her job as a medical billing clerk. Still, even with help from WIC, they do not make enough money each month to maintain a household so they have been forced to move in with Kiana’s mother (2013:70–71). As for others Silva interviewed, the labor market—whether driven by globalizing forces of transnational post-industrial capitalism, technological innovation, or simple economic demands—has been unwelcoming to Curtis and Kiana’s situation.

Dream No. 3: Relationships While both working-class young men and working-class young women suffer in the contemporary labor market, the impact may be experienced more

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deeply by working-class men due to their often continuing psychological investment in traditional masculine roles (2013:63). Men who cannot fulfill their traditional economic obligation as a breadwinner, for example, often present a problem in relationships. Working-class women, who might otherwise be willing to contribute unevenly to economically support the relationship, can’t count on a male partner who will be able to handle such a partnership psychologically—let alone someone who can contribute equally both emotionally and financially. Moreover, the goals of relationships for men and women of all classes have shifted in the twenty-first century, transformations that may have impacted the traditional working-class conception of heterosexual love, intimacy, and marriage more than relationships formed across other social categories. Allie, who grew up in a ‘settled’ working-class family, lived with her family while completing a two-year degree and beginning work as a secretary. Traditionally, Allie should have been satisfied with the working-class ideal of distinct social and legal obligations between a man and a woman; the long-established gendered division of labor; and a shared working-class cultural history. However, as Allie acknowledged to Silva, what she wanted out of a relationship was “chemistry—psychic satisfaction, a sense of uniqueness, of self-fulfillment” (2013:55). Working-class men, like Brandon, the 34-yearold black man working as a night shift clothing store manager, is also leery of trying to maintain a relationship—but for more traditional reasons. Unhappy with his own level of financial success even though he possesses a college degree and a master’s degree, he has been avoiding committed relationships, believing that “no woman wants to sit on the couch all the time and watch TV and eat at Burger King” (2013:4). Hewing to a more traditional notion of the masculine role vis-à-vis relationships, Brandon noted, “I can only take care of myself now” (2013:4). The consequence of these contending visions and the labor market forces that buffet the working class leads many of these young adults to learn what they believe is the modern lesson regarding relationships. Commitment, in this vision, rather than providing a “haven in a heartless world” (Lasch 1977) that shields one from the risks and disappointments inherent in the new working class economy, is merely another demand that can’t be fulfilled—and one demand too many (2013:66). Indeed, for many the idea of engaging in a relationship is laced with fear—the fear of investing time and energy in something that, like many other working-class dreams, won’t work out. Wanda, a 24-year-old black woman who watched her own parents pull apart and get back together many times, and Jillian, a 25-year-old white woman who is reluctant to disturb the small degree of stability she has achieved by working 70 hours

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a week at a local tavern since she graduated from high school, both refrain from taking any risk that would upset the precarious grasp each of them has on everyday existence. Fear of losing what little they feel they have already attained keeps many of these young, working-class men and women from moving ahead into a more defined adulthood, including marriage (2013:68).

Dream No. 4: Marriage The considerations and experiences that color working-class young men and women’s views of the uncertainties embedded in modern relationships somewhat naturally extend to reservations about entering marriages. Andrew, a 21-year-old white automobile mechanic, seeks a somewhat conventional model of working-class spouse to go along with his working class life. He told Silva, I want, you know, a wife, you know, somebody that you can trust 110 percent. . . . Growing up, like I said, I moved around a lot and I never really had a solid family structure so that is something I have always wanted. Quiet, secure household, where everything is fine . . . just being able to get old with somebody and know that you did the best you could. (2013:60–61) The traditional working-class heterosexual marriage Andrew always dreamed of, however, has kept him from acting. As he told Silva (2013:68), “I have had a lot of great girls and you know I got rid of a lot of great girls. Women are tough. . . . Finding girls is easy; making sure they’re the right one is tough.” So, for the present, Andrew stays with his girlfriend but had no immediate plans to propose marriage, unconvinced she is the ‘right one’ to complete his marriage dream (2013:69). Working-class young women often seek a conventional gender-stereotyped, stable heterosexual relationship, too, according to Silva. Kelly, a 28-year-old line cook, struggled over the past decade to shake a severe drug addiction that left its visible marks on her arms, sometimes living in her car in order to survive. Having struggled to achieve a level of sobriety, independence, and security, Kelly idealized a stable, supportive marriage, if one at all, since she was not actively pursuing one. Depending on another person who perhaps could not be trusted held little appeal for Kelly, who longed for someone with whom she could share and trust, and would not upset the very fragile sense of self she had painfully constructed (2013:64–65). Jillian, the white 25-year-old

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young woman working long hours at a tavern, wanted a strong, traditional, committed man or none at all. Jillian told Silva, I want a guy that’s going to be patient and can wait . . . that’s willing to make the relationship work. . . . I want a guy that’s romantic and is in it for the same reasons I am. You know, wants to make it work for the long lasting. (2013:67–68) As Silva (2013:68) noted, Jillian—“like the vast majority of [my] respondents”— waited and watched nervously as the conventional milestones that are used to measure adulthood, like marriage, passed her young life by. As Jillian ruefully observed, You know, I don’t want to be a first-time mom at forty. You want to be a young mom. So starting a family around thirty or so, it’s like I have five years to get my shit together. So, yeah, which is definitely not going to happen. (2013:68) At the same time, some of the young couples Silva interviewed attempted, often unsuccessfully, to dispense with the traditional, gender-stereotyped, working-class marriage. However, the absence of a settled model for organizing the marital relationship often led to a search for relational balance that required regular negotiation and re-negotiation. Neil and Celeste, a young black couple married for four years when Silva interviewed them, are representative of an alternative style that sidesteps the dilemmas encountered when working-class marrieds move away from the traditional approach. Neil, who trained as a teacher in college, now runs a successful educational consulting business and, according to Silva, was earning nearly $80,000 a year, far in excess of her other respondents. Neil’s income on top of Celeste’s earnings permit the couple to share many activities in what has typically been called a ‘companionate’ style of marriage (Komarovsky 1967; Hauhart 2016:120). They have intentionally chosen to postpone having children to focus on themselves, although while they share a great deal they primarily cultivate their individual interests alongside each other, rather than forming a bond that depends upon shouldering obligations found in a traditional working-class home (2013:71–73). Sandy and Cody, another working-class couple, were much less successful in building an alternative model. Both were raised in families that were

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characterized by violence and alcoholism. As a result, the couple is determined to not reproduce that atmosphere in their own family. Still, having an example of what one does not wish to do does not solve the problem of affirmatively imagining, and then implementing, an idea of what kind of marital relationship one does wish to develop. This history, plus the common working-class marital experience of early childbearing and severe economic limits, has placed substantial strain on the marriage. Moreover, unlike the experience of earlier working-class generations, they find themselves isolated, rather than situated, within a matrix of working-class family relations (which they have kept at a distance), working-class friends, and working-class neighborhood. Without the social, legal, and familial supports that these interwoven ties provide, both Sandy and Cody find themselves straying into the modern language of personal growth and individual choice, where dissolution of the marriage arises as a real option. Yet, longing for a marriage commitment that transcends expressive individualism and absorption each in their own needs, the couple has sought therapy but faces the reality that they do not have the resources to support a marriage that can supply personal growth, child-rearing, and a successful union. For couples like Sandy and Cody, the absence of a conventional form to follow has led to rather constant conflict over whose needs get met and how they work together to sustain an effective, functioning family unit (2013:73–74).

Dream No. 5: Children The forces unleashed by unrealized working-class dreams of upward mobility through higher education, disappearing working-class jobs, fear of the risks within relationships, and the dilemma of the meaning and contours of modern marriage reach their crescendo when working-class young adults have children. On the one hand, there is little doubt that having a child or children constitutes a clear signification that one has achieved full status as an adult; the responsibility that parenthood entails clearly demarcates child-rearing from the other adult markers which remain more self-focused. Moreover, the existing literature suggests that parenting is conceived of as an especially attractive path to maturity for economically disadvantaged men and women since it can supply a source of self-worth, social integration, and lasting commitment that might otherwise be unavailable or more difficult to sustain (2013:75). Among Silva’s interviewees, 26 respondents offered coming of age narratives that depicted birth of a child and parenthood as the crystallizing event that galvanized their maturity, bringing a sense of order to their otherwise “unsettled and nebulous lives” (2013:76).

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Sherrie, 31 years old, summed up the salience of parenthood for defining the self by stating, “I didn’t have any dreams until I had my daughter” (2013:76). For Sherrie, her pregnancy and the anticipation of giving birth to her child, acted as the catalyst to dissolve her relationship with an abusive boyfriend and focus on other changes she needed to make for her daughter. As Sherrie observed to Silva (2013:76), “You have a baby to take care of! That is what I say: my daughter is the reason I am the way I am today. If I didn’t have her, I think I might be a crackhead or an alcoholic.” However, parenthood—like the other working-class dreams Silva’s subjects articulated—did not resolve the problems that young working-class men and women face in trying to build a viable conception of the adult self in the twenty-first century United States. As Silva relates, U.S. family values rhetoric is often contradicted by the actual operation of our social institutions— conditions that impact forcefully on working-class parents and families. Rachel, a single mother, joined the National Guard in order to gain college benefits she could use later. Working 40 hours a week as a customer service representative and participating in Guard drills on weekends, however, left her little time for anything else. Hearing that she and her unit may face a possible deployment, Rachel is trapped between her work, service, and parental commitments. She is considering a discharge from her army obligation so that she does not need to face extended separation from her son. Yet, she wants to be able to give her son the best life she possibly can and resists foregoing the educational benefits and even the higher, tax-free combat pay she would receive if she deploys. The dilemma Rachel describes highlights the contingent quality of the life working-class men and women face in negotiating contemporary marriage and parenthood: The last deployment, the money, I ended up coming home with $10,000 because I was sending $500 home every month to help with the bills and for my son. It’s a matter of me budgeting . . . That is why I am kinda happy about it and kinda not. I missed the first two years of my son’s life and now I might have to leave again. It’s just tough. You can’t win. (2013:77) Ultimately, Rachel chose to deploy—concluding that given her circumstances as a single, working mother the only route to providing a better life for her son was to accrue the later benefits and the present financial incentive by endangering her life and leaving her child in the care of others. In reflecting on the nature of motherhood, Barbara Katz Rothman (2000:28) addressed the age-old question of ends and means by considering

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Aristotle’s distinction between making and doing. Aristotle noted that humans make ships, houses, statues, and money, among other things, but engage in sports, politics, or philosophy. In answering the question, “but how shall we live,” Aristotle came out definitively on the side of doing, or as it is sometimes called, ‘being’ of and for ourselves through our investment in our actions. Rothman notes that Aristotle’s answer “is not the modern conclusion,” stating: “The world and all that is in it, including our bodies and selves, become personal resources, something to make something of ” (2000:29). Rothman worried, however, about what would become of us if we did not value ourselves and each other in and of ourselves, regardless of what we made of us. Quoting Caroline Whitebeck (1987), Rothman (2000:29) reflected: To regard everything, even ourselves, as a potential resource, is to implicitly regard all possible goals or ends as on a par. As a result, efficiency—that is, the efficient use of resources in the pursuit of goals—is implicitly taken as the overarching value. The determination of goals or ends appears as a matter of personal taste. As Rothman (2000:39) goes on to observe, the elimination of the ends-means question is concomitant with capitalist economics in the United States: “there is a price tag on everything.” Certainly this is the essence of Rachel’s dilemma. In order to make ends meet and provide for her son, Rachel not only works but also joins the National Guard to accrue extra income and benefits. Thereafter, to maintain, and even increase, her income and future college tuition incentives, Rachel must abandon her child for an extended period and set aside the doing of motherhood. In Aristotle’s terms she must forego the doing and being of what she is for the making of money. As Silva (2013:77) concludes, parenthood merely “opens up a new world of dreams” for young, working-class adults. The former dreams of economic security, higher education, and a stable, loving relationship now constitute means aimed at providing for the child or children and often consisting of an attempt to give those children more, and better, than they themselves had. Silva’s earlier findings remain pertinent though as she concludes that most of the parents she interviewed end up bound to jobs that do not provide the level of financial stability they sought, with little promise of advancement, lacking the time, other resources, preparation, and circumstances conducive to further education, and often without the help of a stable partner. The consequence is that the dream of [good] parenthood is as tenuous and fraught with risk as the other dreams on which the working-class adult identity is formed.

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Dream No. 6: A World of Helping Institutions Contrary to the underlying emphasis on technological innovation as an essential force in stimulating the transformation of the contemporary ‘self ’ according to the modernity theorists, Silva (2013) gives primacy to the dominance of neo-liberalism in the United States. As a political philosophy, it is impossible to separate the search for untrammeled profit-seeking sought by advanced industrial corporate interests and the neo-liberal government policies that aid and abet contemporary business goals except to say that there are modern governments that do not subordinate their policies to just what is good for business. Thus, while Silva would not dispute that technological advances, like the modern computerized cash register, can be used to bind cashiers to their money-making post for life-long eight-hour stretches, she would suggest that it is not the technology per se that traps the young, working-class retail worker to his or her unforgiving place in life. Rather, it is those government policies (or failure to adopt different policies), such as the lack of universal health care or free or subsidized child care, that create the social structural barriers that lock emerging working-class adults into reproducing the class system from the bottom up. Neo-liberalism’s embrace of capitalism’s demand for unfettered markets, which leads to policies supporting deregulation, lowered corporate taxation, and the allocation of public resources for public profit-making, persuades young, working-class adults to themselves embrace a style of hardened individualism. Convinced by their experiences in the labor market and their personal lives, where they have often faced what they interpret as forms of ideological and institutional betrayal, the paucity or lack of (or, as some would have it, the pretense of ) government assistance provided by the neo-liberal state simply extends and confirms their sense of disappointment. Ultimately, Silva (2013:93) contends these young men and women have come to the conclusion that there is no one, and no source, to turn to with respect to any of their goals, whether their efforts go right or go wrong. Rather, they find themselves alone amidst a fluctuating social world that is uncertain, unpredictable, and risky. In short, while the individuals Silva interviewed expect the labor market to be impersonal and driven by its own imperatives, they are less accepting of their disappointment with the various institutions and professionals who run them when those, too, fail to provide them, in their experience, with any form of help in terms of negotiating the transition from dependent adolescence to independent adult identity. Allan, a 26-year-old white emergency medical technician, told Silva (2031:96) a tale of two friends to illustrate this theme.

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One friend suffered from spina bifida, a partially disabling spinal condition, and was ‘babied by his parents but when he became an adult, and no longer had parental help, he could not cope. The second friend, with only one leg, was given a ‘tough love’ upbringing which steeled him against feeling sorry for himself or expecting anyone’s help. Allan opined: Which I think is the right way [i.e., the way his second friend was raised]. Because there’s nobody in the world that’s gonna baby you. When you get out from under the wing of mommy and daddy the government doesn’t care if you’re disabled. They’re gonna tax you just like everybody else. (2009:96, emphasis in original) Thus, the young working-class men and women Silva met evinced lowered expectations, foreclosed or abandoned dreams, experiences of personal and institutional betrayal, and a sense of disappointment with respect to their development of a secure adult identity as they moved forward in life. In the face of individual, but often a cumulative series of, life events Silva’s respondents often hardened themselves to others and the world, indiscriminately, concluding that trusting either institutions or others was a too risky game, one that they routinely lost. Numbing themselves emotionally, they embrace an individualism that goes far beyond isolated; it goes to the point of identifying themselves as alone in a hostile world.

The Disappearance of Intimacy Reports that intimate relations, whether relationships or marriage, are in trouble in the United States may strike some as the distress call of a canary in a coal mine that has long since collapsed after gasses and coal dust have precipitated its end. Giddens, for one, writing in 1992, opened his monograph on the transformation of intimacy by remarking that sexuality represented to many in the years immediately before his book’s publication as “a potential realm of freedom, unsullied by the limits of present day civilization” (1992:1). He concludes, by writing in the book’s last sentence, “[but] sexuality is not the antithesis of a civilization dedicated to economic growth and technical control, but the embodiment of its failure” (1992:203). In between his first and last pages Giddens charts a path troubled by the assault on intimacy that modern society imposes. This change in the potential for, and quality of, contemporary intimacy, to the extent it is real and pervasive, is an especially important development, both for the individual and society. Thus, we have

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seen the difficulties that globalization’s impact has produced on workers and the collateral damage it has inflicted on some relationships and marriages as a consequence. Giddens’ (1992) analyses extend further, however, by suggesting that what remains as the sole source of private identity has been sundered and desiccated well beyond the reach of the negative effects of either jobs or joblessness. Rather, reading Giddens today, one comes to understand that any and all of the forces that either constrain, or unleash, individuals from a firm attachment to society independently and directly attack the ability, and motivation, to develop intimate relations. Indeed, extrapolating Giddens’ observations to the twenty-first century and the trends others have identified, it seems apparent that the lack of trust Americans now hold for many institutions, their neighbors and co-workers, and society generally, has invaded and infected the private realm with equally devastating virulence. As Giddens (1992:2) begins his exploration of intimate relations, he notes the importance that many were placing at the time he wrote on modern society’s potential to support a pure relationship of sexual and emotional equality. Romantic love, a correlate and precursor of the more general proposition, presumes—as Giddens (1992:2) observes—“that a durable emotional tie can be established with another on the basis of qualities intrinsic to the tie itself ” in some form of perpetual feedback loop. For the pure relationship to occur, however, the nature of sexuality itself needs to undergo change, it would seem, arguably from the former dominant focus on male sexual experience (and reproduction, a change that had already occurred at the time Giddens was writing). The qualitative change that Giddens sees as a necessary contributor to the pure relationship he terms ‘plastic sexuality,’ akin in certain respects to what Giddens (1990), Baumann (2000, 2003, 2005), and Elliot (2016), among others, refer to as the liquid self, the flexible self, or self-reflexivity. As Giddens (1992:2) acknowledges early on, plastic sexuality can become embedded as a characteristic of modern personality and to this extent it becomes intimately bound up with the very nature and conception of the self. Considering the transformational possibilities of intimacy as ‘very real,’ Giddens (1992:3) notes that the change will require a democratization of the interpersonal domain. Yet, 30 years later, both political democracy and interpersonal democracy seem elusive targets in the contemporary United States. Giddens (1992) begins his exploration to changed sexual mores by discussing Lillian Rubin’s (1990) interview study of almost a thousand heterosexual Americans. The most dramatic finding in Giddens’ view is the demarcation between the attitudes and the conduct of those over 40 years of age with those under 40 years of age (1992:11). Yet, he also finds the changed expectations of women with respect to the sort of sexual experience they

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anticipate from the marriage relationship as critical for the nature of intimate transformations he is investigating (1992:12). And, from other studies, he notes changes in homosexual sexuality for both men and women that have embraced the centrality of relational sex over indiscriminate, impersonal sex (1992:13) and the liberation of masturbation from its own relatively dark past to a more contemporary exposure as part of the broader changes at work (1992:15–16). For Giddens, these findings collectively point to a form of sexuality that has become more ‘free-floating,’ (1992:14) a malleable feature of the self (1992:15)—a point at which the person converges, and emerges, from a connection of “body, self-identity and social norms” (1992:15). As we have seen from a number of the field studies—Silva (2013), Bettie (2014), Chen (2015)—sexual and emotional relations between persons in the twenty-first century are fraught with tension often produced by, or at least attributed to, jobs, income, and children. However, Giddens (1992:49) introduces the idea that cultural differences arising from gendered socialization practices tied to changes in modern society create their own barriers to sexual and emotional intimacy, whether between men and women, women and women, or men and men. First, there are the conflicting natures of sexual expression, romantic love, and marriage. Marriage, historically, has been a mundane matter largely based on economic considerations (1992:38–39). The erotic nature of passionate affairs has always introduced a disruptive element of social chaos into the established, orderly affairs of the household and society more generally. Sexual license was largely a preserve of the aristocracy at one time (1992:39) but was not as much of a threat to marriage as romantic love because it asked nothing of the participants other than periodic participation. When the notion of romantic love emerged in the eighteenth century, and then spread and blossomed as the nineteenth century ushered the world into early modernism, it was distinct from both marriage and passionate affairs. While it drew upon the nature of amour passion, it differed by introducing the idea of a narrative: the temporary idealization of the object of one’s love became joined to the idea of a more permanent involvement (1992:39). The narrative requirement introduced a formula that took what was episodic and a moment of passion and embedded it in a story that extended the affair into an idealized relationship. Moreover, disconnected from the social structure of marriage and family, it became a personal story, one individualized to the two persons involved. Finally, romantic love went further and began to distinguish itself from its source in passionate love, emphasizing the element of idealization over that of sexual conquest and ardor (1992:40). In this regard, romantic love is far more critical for the nature of identity than sexual passion which, once spent, need not concern itself with the other—a distressing

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emotional lapse with respect to the romantic love narrative. In this sense romantic love is incompatible with lust or even an earthy sexuality, principally because it is premised upon a unique psychic connection that emphasizes the special qualities of the other. The other, possessing whatever traits he or she possesses, fulfills an absence of one or another quality, or alternatively provides a palliative or balm, for a need the individual can hardly articulate until the love relationship is entered (1992:45). It is the uniqueness of the fit that matters, as the flawed self-identity is thereby made whole by the connection with the loved other. All this led to the romantic love narrative taking the form, over time, of a quest tale. The love narrative became a quest odyssey, where the searcher seeks a lost piece of himself or herself and, once finding it, reaches completeness and validation through loving the other (1992:45–46). Nearly as soon as the romantic love complex began to take shape in western society, it became the subject of commercial stories—romance novels. The fact that romantic love is essentially a narrative made this an expedient combination for commercial purposes. The romance novel takes a narrative form meant to be highly individualized and, rather magically, generically alters it so that it can be re-sold to those susceptible to the narrative’s charms. For various economic and social reasons Giddens (1992:46) notes, those who became—and still are—purchasers of the form are predominantly women. As Thompson (1989) discovered in research she conducted in the 1980s, teenage girls she interviewed could, with little prompting, offer up their own stories of intimate relations that brimmed with romantic connection, swoons and anticipation, and heartbreak. Thus, what was meant to be the intimate space for connection between two unique selves was able to become generic fodder for paperback book racks in drug stores. Now, in the twenty-first century, the romance novel has become the primary source of income for some online book retailers in the United States and all over the world where the notion of romantic love has been transported and then culturally incorporated. The critical feature of the girls’ romantic tales that Thompson (1989) elicited was perhaps the way the narratives interwove sexuality into their anticipated futures so that the overall trajectory was directed toward an eventual destiny of romantic love (Giddens 1992:50). The sexual relationship itself was often experienced as a prelude to romance although, as often as not, the romance did not materialize (1992:50). Moreover, the gendered nature of the relations appeared to make little difference so that the romantic quest persisted regardless of whether heterosexual attraction and coupling, or homosexual attraction and coupling, predominated (1992:51). The fact that romantic love quests are often inconclusive, incomplete, or produce bad outcomes spurs some girls and women to shift their focus (at least partially) to work and career which

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they quite correctly perceive as inevitable in any event. Yet, as we have seen, there are innumerable reasons why the world of work in modern societies like the United States is neither satisfying nor reliable. Moreover, work does not always fulfill the quest for meaning, especially meaning beyond the realm of work. While many of the recent studies we have examined thus far address the circumstances of the lower and working classes, there is little to suggest the middle and upper middle classes are entirely immune from the effects of modern social forces, as we will discover shortly in succeeding sections. As numerous sources have attested to over the last two centuries, women’s experience was almost always framed in relation to marriage even if, in fact, they did not marry (1992:53). Women’s identities when they did marry disproportionately arose from the marital relationship, often to their detriment. Giddens summarizes Emily Hancock’s (1990) interview with a woman named Wendy to illustrate the point. Emily used her first marriage to break free from her parents’ home and achieve independence from them but her traditional marriage also embedded her in a state of financial dependence (1992:54). When her husband died from a freak accident, the result was devastating: Wendy’s entire self was wrapped up in, and derived from, this single relationship. She experienced a severe crisis of self. Her adult identity, lacking other foundation, melted away. It required hard work to reconstitute it (1992:54–55). Yet, Wendy, while she entered into both her first, and later her second, marriage for love did not do so exclusively since factors like escaping her parents’ household and control were prominent elements in her narrative. Still, it was the marriage relationship—not just a ‘love relationship’—that provided her status and an anchor for her identity. When the marriage ended unexpectedly, her identity approached dissolution. Modern women, one can argue, who have an independent self, whether married, single, in a relationship, or in between them, have escaped exclusive reliance on a married identity but, one may ask, to what end? Having achieved modern independence and sexual freedom, where exactly does one go next? As Giddens argues, the impact of these transformations in sexual relations has not only, or even principally, affected women. Yet, it has affected heterosexual men differently and, as Giddens contends, perhaps men have not adapted to the changes as thoroughly as women have been forced to do. In substantial part Giddens argues that this is due to the fact that historically men have sought to establish identity through work. Their goals were tied to status enhancement and material reward and in this respect their standing and identity mattered most in relation to other men who were in a position to confer such rewards (1992:60). This meant, correspondingly, that men neglected to focus on both their inner selves and their intimate relations as

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sources of self-identity. Unreflective, men were also insufficiently reflexive, and failed to grasp that the self requires a continual reconstruction of experience in order to project a coherent narrative of the self forward into an anticipated future (1992:60). Men became, in other words, unsuitable partners in the romantic narrative partnership. Limited by their orientation to the worlds of work and achievement, men have not generally become capable of engaging with the other intensely, to participate in the give and take that romantic love in the form of a pure relationship would involve. Since love only develops to the degree to which intimacy arises, the length to which each partner can reveal concerns and needs to the other is crucial. For many men, emotionally repressed in their isolated quest for status among other men, their expressive constipation forecloses their embrace of the romantic love/pure relationship model. Men, who long benefitted from using women to offer them emotional sanctuary from the competitive public world, may be said to still lag behind women to a substantial extent in their romantic quest for relational equality. Faced with implicit demands for substantial changes in their character, many men in modern society—much like many women—seem unmoored and directionless and therefore unlikely contributors to solving the riddle of how one might create, and participate in, the idealized pure relationship that has been projected onto contemporary interpersonal aspirations. As Giddens (1992:117) suggests, rather than being unable to express their feelings such men “are unable to construct a narrative of self that allows them to come to terms with an increasingly democratized and re-ordered sphere of personal life.” The foregoing discussion has more to offer regarding identity and the difficulties both men and women experience in constructing a self in the twenty-first century United States than has so far been made explicit. Historically dedicated to overcoming external obstacles as one illustration of their prowess, and often committed to female conquest as another, many men failed to develop more than a surface, almost rhetorical, engagement with the caring and nurturing features of the self. These men’s failure to develop the capability of emotionally communicating with themselves then rather severely impaired their ability to develop an emotional narrative that unifies the past, the present, and the future in a flexible, but coherent, self. In terms of heterosexual relationships or marriages the fragmented male self poses a real problem for the contemporary independent woman. Unable to participate equally in the idealized pure relationship, relations may devolve into a form of companionate marriage, where sexual involvement is low but a degree of equality and mutual affection is present, or an invested form in which both partners treat the relationship as a relatively stable platform from which each

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issues out to participate with the wider world (1992:155). However, as the field studies presented in the last few chapters show, neither relational model can withstand the pressures that the globalizing world of later modernism has thrust upon society. The selves, too fragile and brittle perhaps on many men’s parts, and actively—even assertively—autonomous and demanding engagement on the part of many women, face a chasm that neither can reach across for long. Subordinated to existing institutions and the global capitalist order, neither men nor women seem to be able to emancipate themselves from the power of the financial/labor systems in place nor from the reified, symbolic constraints erected by the guardians of social institutions that have lost both their legitimacy and their purpose for many. Chained to security in habit and routine within the violent throes of globalization and neo-liberalism, modern men and women in the United States in the twenty-first century would seemingly need—like Marx’s workers—to throw off their [psycho-social] chains to achieve a state sufficiently liberated to embrace the demands of pure relationships. To performatively enact such a freeing of the self, however, a person would seemingly need to be free already, an obvious impossibility. Alternatively, Stoltenberg (1990) prescribes the less extreme strategy of “refusing to be a man” (or, one assumes, demanding to be a full-fledged, embodied woman) as the only available means to break the gendered character deadlock that has isolated both men and women in separate spheres of the contemporary search for both sexual, and self, identity. For Giddens (1992:187–189) the entire project simply depends upon democratizing both political life and personal life, yet like Chen’s (2015) aspiration to unseat meritocracy from its ascendance in American life and replace it with a compassionate humanism, neither agenda has—to date—achieved much traction.

Globalization and the American Middle Class Analyzing the effects of globalization on the lower-income working class has revealed a sizable cultural gap between the possibilities some of the modernity theorists have identified as constituting a liberation/emancipation thesis embedded in changes driven by globalizing effects and the actual impact experienced by members of the working class. So far, I have paid little attention to the effects that globalization has produced for the working, professional, and economic lives of the middle class. However, as Leicht and Fitzgerald (2007:9–10) argue, globalization and the emergence and ascendency of neo-­ liberalism have had a substantial impact on the changes that have been occurring to middle-class American life as well. They note that the political ideology

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that has supported increased global trade, post-­industrial capitalism, and free market ideas has reduced trade barriers, increased the world-wide movement and transfer of capital, and pitted workers around the world against each other in competition for jobs. Generally, this has led to disinvestment by many corporations in first-world locations thereby ‘outsourcing’ jobs to environments that offer government subsidies, lower fixed costs, lower labor costs, and substantially fewer regulations that add costs to business (2007:10). In their view, neo-liberalism accentuates the search for quick profits by slashing costs which produces a tightening of control over all workers, whether lower income or middle class, although the intermediary factors that directly affect different classes and categories of workers vary. Lower-income workers may be most affected by automation and improvements in technology whereas white-collar workers may be more impacted by streamlining middle management ranks through job consolidation and raised performance expectations. While technology and manufacturing innovation may have most directly affected blue-collar workers, these forces have also had the effect of flattening organizational hierarchies as the new modes of information technology have lessened the need for an expansive middle layer of management (2007:10). At the same time, the speed-up of product innovation has meant that companies operate less often in terms of a stable, sustained product line as compared to a constantly revolving series of projects. Consequently, many industries have adopted the practice of subcontracting projects to others or relying on temporary workers to perform very specific jobs on short-term contracts, thereby deemphasizing and downsizing their permanent workforce. Like the lower-income working class, which lost many stable, long-term, high-paying jobs—often guaranteed under union contracts—middle-class managerial and white-collar workers have seen the number of jobs in their ranks often shrink in number and quality (2007:10). The consequence is that “no longer do layoffs, job instability, ever-shifting earnings, and difficulty paying bills” (2007:11) only effect blue-collar workers. Rather, stagnant (or even reduced) incomes, rising taxes, the pocketing of productivity gains by the elite, increased health care and pension burdens that have been shifted to the employee from the employer, and other trends have become common to some members of both classes. One outcome is that middle-class narratives in the United States have begun to sound eerily like those expressed by lower-income working-class respondents with some obvious distinctions. ‘Bill and Sheryl,’ a married couple for 20 years with one child in college and one in high school, live outside Cleveland, Ohio. Bill, a computer software engineer, was laid off by the engineering company he worked for 10 years ago and has failed to find a new, permanent position. His job was eliminated

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when a corporate takeover specialist pursued a leveraged buy-out of the firm. Since then, Bill has cobbled together different short-term consulting jobs from around the area but it is a precarious initiative since he must continually seek out new work. His income is lower than the salaried position he left and perhaps more importantly he has no fringe benefits. Sheryl, a social worker, has a steady income and fringe benefits, including health insurance, which is a significant boon. However, there are indications that the county may decide to eliminate her program as governments try to consolidate services and trim the budget. All this might not seem bad if Bill had not cashed in his retirement plan from his former firm to provide cash to live on while he sought another permanent job in the wake of his lay-off. Facing a modest shortfall every month when Bill’s consulting work didn’t quite add up to his previous salary, the couple started charging to credit cards routinely, building up a $15,000 balance. Bill worried, too, that even his consulting work would dry up since he perceived his competitors for projects as younger and more recently trained. He was experiencing what Richard Sennett (1998:91) summed up as “the current conditions of corporate life,” which often include prejudices against middle-aged workers and their ‘dated’ training and work experience. They have also taken out a second mortgage on their home when their son entered college and have a home equity line of credit they access as well. In short, Bill and Sheryl have virtually no savings nor equity in their home and with another child college-bound they find themselves in an unsustainable financial trap (2007:19–20). Tied to a specific geographic area with only specific job skills and experience to offer, they find themselves in a position not too unlike that of many members of the working class recounted herein. While the economy may be ‘humming along’ for elites, for many—if not most—in the working and middle classes in the United States the income and budget squeeze has forced them to work long hours, often with little job security, pile up debt, have two incomes in the household, take on second jobs, and simply scramble and forage to make ends meet (2007:133). Like Chen’s working-class auto workers, Leicht and Fitzgerald’s middle-class post-industrial peasants yearn for the days when if you worked hard at a steady job things worked out and you could lead a good life in the United States.

Cultural Capital Speed-Up for the Upper Middle Class Thus far, we have considered at some length the conditions confronting young, working-class Americans in the context of the modern global economy and

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the price these conditions exact with regard to the self. To a lesser degree we have also examined the lives of those from the contemporary middle class, who often find that they must respond to market pressures directed at the white-collar world not unlike those faced by their working-class neighbors. Their lives, engulfed in debt and subject to the whims of globalization, reflect a difference of only degree, not kind, with respect to the choices they are forced to make and the lives they are compelled to forego. We have not, as yet, investigated the upper middle class nor the elite, and their progeny, however. To do so, we must enter a rarefied world that those Americans of lesser rank and station seldom enter. The upper middle class and elites in the United States possess their own, relatively exclusive, institutions. Many of these were first established in an earlier era, as Baltzell (1964) and others documented. One could assume that these institutions, including the higher education campuses that serve the upper classes as feeder and finishing schools, remain relatively unchanged. However, Deresiewicz (2014), in his examination of the contemporary climate in elite higher education, argues that forces akin to capital speed-up— which might usefully be characterized as cultural capital speed-up—have infiltrated elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The result, according to Deresiewicz, is a campus culture that is reluctant to examine itself and one that produces students who are equally reluctant to hesitate for a moment to examine themselves or their purpose. Instead, students are embedded in what Deresiewicz (2014:39), and others before him, have called the ‘resume arms race,’ one more stage in a driven sequence of achievement that is devoid of any real purpose other than the pursuit of the next credential in an ever-accelerating competition to jump through more hoops, faster and higher, than one’s peers. In short, what Deresiewicz describes are individuals who have mastered intellectual and social skills that permit them to excel at the exercises demanded by elite educational institutions but college-age students who are unable to consider just what kind of person it is they wish to become, and why. Like their working-class and middle-class counterparts, who are driven by the external forces generated by the speed-up and transnational reach of capital’s continuous demand for profit, the upper middle class and elite are compulsively engaged in an analogous effort to accumulate advantage after advantage measured in the form of symbolic capital. Acting like mini-capitalists, the upper middle-class and elite students Deresiewicz profiles are intensively focused on showing a ‘profit’ from every activity, every relationship, and every moment in their lives. If, in their pursuit, they lose themselves, as Deresiewicz reports sometimes happens, this is not apparently a warning that they are on the wrong path; rather, it is at most a signal that

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they must double-down and commit to a higher level of striving since the person on the next treadmill is still running. Deresiewicz does not attribute the competitive nature of upper middle-class and elite lives primarily to the effects of globalization as other modernity theorists do (2014:39). Rather, he provides modest quantitative and anecdotal evidence that the forces he describes have become global in their reach in the twenty-first century. One source of evidence is the fact that about one out of every ten students admitted to the most prestigious colleges and universities in the United States today comes from other countries (2014:24). Moreover, the ancillary services that now augment the competitive college admissions practices pursued by the American upper middle class and elites (private tutoring, SAT/ACT prep courses, admissions essay ghosting) are undeniably available and commonly sought in many countries around the world. Indeed, for students not seeking to gain admission to prestigious schools in the United States like the ones Deresiewicz examines, almost all countries offer their own national version of highly competitive admissions to elite institutions. As a correspondent from India writes to Deresiewicz (2014:24), “[Here] (w)e call them Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIM). Every single thing you mentioned I have witnessed happening in practice.” The result, too, is apparently the same: a self that is reduced to striving within the existing system until one reaches the point where there is no longer an achievement system to strive within, and then being forced to confront what one has become. As William Fitzsimmons tells Deresiewicz (2014:24–25), It is common to encounter even the most successful students, who have won all the ‘prizes,’ stepping back and wondering if it was all worth it. . . [of later ending up as mid-life professionals who] sometimes give the impression that they are the dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot camp. Deresiewicz supplies a detailed account of the many forces and elements that support the competitive admissions system for these elite schools, the competitive campus environments they harbor, and the moneyed careers the elite schools’ graduates seek and obtain. More importantly, however, he thoughtfully describes the type of person students of these institutions become—based on their own words, his personal observations of them, and the descriptions provided by others familiar with them. They are, first of all, the successful high-achievers who are the “winners of the race we have made of childhood” (2014:7) in the upper middle class in the contemporary United

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States. They are, writes Deresiewicz (2014:12), “[P]olite, pleasant, mild and presentable; well-mannered, well-groomed, and well-spoken (not to mention, often enough, well-medicated), they have fashioned that façade of happy, healthy, high achievement.” But they also suffering from what has been characterized as ‘Stanford Duck Syndrome’—serene and confident on the surface while at the same time paddling furiously underneath the water (2014:10). According to Deresiewicz (2014:8), the high achieving students who master the elite college environment are often experiencing “toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.” Inhabitants of a competitive higher education system, the students Deresiewicz knew are merely experiencing the next stage after an equally competitive high school environment that left them stressed out, over-pressured, and often struggling with their mental health (2014:8). Many exude and report feelings of hopelessness. The most common qualities that Deresiewicz and others describe in these otherwise admirable young Americans, however, are extensions or correlates of fear and risk aversion. They are, as a group, so fearful of failure that they commit every waking moment to being consumed by fulfilling the system’s requirements. A student in the process of transferring out of Stanford wrote Deresiewicz that he had seen students sacrifice their health and relationships for the sake of grades and resume building (2014:9). The same student commented that it was not uncommon for Stanford students to forego exploration and other activities that could not be measured by credits, majors, and diplomas but that arguably are essential for living a full life. A former Yale student confirmed to Deresiewicz that students there “do not have time for real relationships” (2014:9). A University of Pennsylvania student, quoted by Deresiewicz from an article in the New York Times, reflected “I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people I am interested in are always busy, too” (2014:9–10). Isolated from their peers, Deresiewicz notes these students find themselves cut off from themselves and without the ability to give themselves a different direction. Addicted to achievement, these students exhibit little of the intellectual curiosity they once possessed; adept at reading, writing, and studying, they show little interest in pursuing intellectual or scholarly goals simply for the sake of genuine learning (2014:12). While they have learned to be very successful students, they have not learned to use their minds by coloring outside the lines of an assignment (2014:13). In Deresiewicz’s experience, very few of those he writes about were passionate about ideas or expressed any interest in a quest for intellectual discovery. While occasionally offering rhetorical interest in creative challenges, Yale students only expressed interest if

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those projects could somehow be integrated into the system of credits, grades, and safely predictable progress toward graduation and lucrative employment (2014:13–14). As Deresiewicz concludes, terms, places, and acronyms like GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright, MCAT, Harvard Law, and Goldman Sachs signify both these students’ achievements and their fates; more insidiously, they come to constitute the students’ identities. In Deresiewicz’s (2014:16) words ”[These achievements] are who you are, and what you’re worth” for these students of elite institutions. As Deseriewicz cogently recognizes, credentialism of the sort these students have embraced produces a narrow practicality that focuses consciousness on the immediate utility of any action. These students, carefully attuned to the costs and benefits to be secured, are savvy investors of their time and energy but accruing short-term advantages can lead to unhappy long-term outcomes. Told that their options are limitless, they have limited themselves to such an extent that they have lost whatever sense of inner purpose they once possessed. Told that they can be whatever they want in life, students at the elite schools seem to have all come to a similar conclusion, through some combination of inertia and security-seeking (2014:20–21). Moreover, as Deresiewicz (2014:23, 56–57) reports from conversations with various alumni of these schools, graduation does little to make these issues go away as the character formation that the system has bred is only reinforced by the career choices made. Cossetted by status and generous incomes, these super students continue to pursue their jobs and professions in the same diligent, instrumental fashion that brought them to this point in their lives. Having learned to commodify their institutional experiences, the students Deresiewicz is portraying have packaged themselves for consumption and go on to seek out experiences to commodify their future as adults (2014:57, 79). It is the exact opposite of doing things for their own sake, an interest that these students have forsaken in their quest for the golden ring. As Deresiewicz remarks, having successfully proven themselves masters of the conventional American achievement race, they have failed to develop a rich, inner life for themselves (2014:87). Having done “what they are supposed to do,” they successfully found a career, but they have not—in many instances—found a vocation (2014:97–99). As Deresiewicz (2014:110–112) finds, the idea of a true calling eludes these compulsive achievers because the desire to eliminate uncertainly eliminates spontaneity, eliminates the possibility of mistakes, eliminates challenges to the self, and— in the end—eliminates life. The shrunken self, stifled by narrow ambition, has lost the sense of freedom that permits oneself to, simply, be oneself. Deresiewicz’s social analysis is culturally akin—if almost entirely reversed at times in cause and effect—with respect to many of the observations Philip

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Slater (1990) made originally in 1970, especially with respect to the relations between generations. Slater made several arguments regarding generational attitudes between parents and children, as does Deresiewicz, and both authors attribute substantial power to the social dynamics each identifies as contemporary in middle-class and upper middle-class lives. Slater (1990:54–56) begins his generational discussion by emphasizing the respect that the World War II generation held for rituals, ceremonies, and social institutions. To the contrary, Slater observed that members of the post-World War II generation no longer share a willingness to set aside their own goals—thus, their very selves—for institutions that have lost their allure. As evidence of the change in orientation, Slater offered the central scene in Mike Nichols’ film, The Graduate (Nichols 1967), as well as the character of social protest in the 1960s. In both the willingness to make a scene and act disruptively to achieve either a personal goal (Benjamin’s desire for Mrs. Robinson’s daughter in The Graduate) or social goal (integration of facilities, civil rights generally, an end to the Vietnam War) was embraced by the younger generation and considered in poor taste by the older generation. Yet, Slater (1990:56–58) found the genesis of the younger generation’s willingness to set themselves first before submission to convention in the same or similar child-centered household that Deresiewicz writes about today. As Slater (1990:56) described it: Dr. Spock’s emphasis on allowing the child to develop according to her own potential . . . focused the parent’s attention on the child as a future adult, who could be more or less intelligent, creative, and healthy according to how parents behaved toward her. This was unlike the older view . . . [in] which the parents tried to give a socially acceptable wrapping [to the child] . . . The parents under the old method felt they had done their job well if the child was obedient, even if they turned out [uninspired and ordinary]. Spockian parents feel it’s their responsibility to make their child into the most all-around perfect adult possible. In essence, as Slater (1990:1959) saw it, Spock’s emphasis inspired ‘Pygmalionesque fantasies’—focusing parents’ attention, particularly that of mothers, on the complexity and importance of the task of creating a successful person out of the child they were given. The post-World War II child thus became, in Slater’s view, the hand-made object of his or her parents’ attentive nurturing. In short, it is the child as product (1990:62) that defined the Spockian era. Deresiewicz, writing some 40-plus years later, sounds themes remarkably similar to Slater in this regard. Like Slater (1990:8, 14–15), Deresiewicz

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(2014:41) identifies the underlying ethic and social dynamic in the United States as competitive individualism. (He calls the United States “a winnertake-all society.”) The effect this has on parents is very much like the effect Slater was describing: intense focus on one’s child or children so they can be among those who succeed in the bitter race toward the top. In both Slater’s analysis and Deresiewicz’s argument, parents invest themselves intensely in their children’s futures, although the terminology we have adopted to discuss the phenomenon has been modified slightly over the years. Thus, Deresiewicz (2014:42) speaks of the “overbearing upper-middle-class parent” who helicopters around “hovering, pressuring, criticizing” and the overindulgent parent, who gives in to the impulse to let his or her children do whatever they want with a constant stream of praise to support their every whim. In both cases, however, Deresiewicz sees the principal dynamic as one of over-attentiveness and over-protection. Just as in Spockian times, he observes child-centeredness. Ultimately, the intense parenting style is a result of over-identification (2014:43). Like the domestic suburban mother at the heart of Slater’s intergenerational musings, Deresiewicz sees contemporary upper middle-class parents as projecting their own needs—whether to be merely a successful American parent or to have his or her child live a life the parent never had a chance to live—as (and in place of ) the child’s needs. In either instance, the child ‘product’ is asked to function as an extension of the parent, to adopt parental goals rather than identify one’s own goals, and then to execute so as to make the parents’ goals a reality. (As one person noted to Deresiewicz, the whole parenting thing can become a matter of reflected prestige: “When your kid gets into a prestigious college, it’s as if you got an A in being a parent” 2014:44). This explains, for Deresiewicz, the laser-like attention paid to skill development and achievement in the child-rearing practices of the contemporary, striving American family. Using Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), as an extreme example of the archetype, Deresiewicz argues that today’s child-centeredness takes the form of a demanding perfectionism with conventional institutional achievement. As Deresiewicz quotes Chua explaining the influence of her Chinese heritage, “the child is [seen as] the extension of the self ” (2014:48), and the parental self requires a successful child. Thus, it is Amy Chua’s need for gratification through achievement that is inflicted on her children and like the children of other demanding parents, the child will never perhaps be good enough. The consequence that Deresiewicz (2014:52–53) sees is young adults who are too dependent on praise and recognition, producing a self that swings wildly between grandiosity (produced by an artificially inflated, praise-based ego) and depression (when the brittle self-esteem erected on a foundation of

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inflated valuations implodes). Contemporary child-centeredness in his view leads often to creation of a ‘false self,’ since the child—rather than developing an inner self with goals of his or her own—becomes dependent on continual symbolic infusions of approval from the outside world (2014:55–57). Yet, the over-identification between parent and child which Deresiewicz (2014:121–123) describes fosters precisely such an inability to break free from filial piety and commit the act that it would take to create an individual self: an act perceived as family disloyalty that would involve unapologetically putting oneself and one’s own desires first. Deresiewicz (2014:123), quoting Terry Castle, characterizes the necessary break with one’s parents as ‘self-orphaning,’ a form of forced rebellion—rebellion for those who need it but can’t quite muster up the necessary emotional fortitude. In its place, one can at least cut oneself off from the restraints that are holding one in suspended animation. Part of Deresiewicz’s jeremiad regarding the system of elite education— and the ‘system’ of society generally—is not news to many adults but is one of the major stumbling blocks to developing a ‘self ’ for his audience of upper middle-class and elite American youth: the principal goal, and effect, of higher education is to reproduce the class system in the United States and, in doing so reproduce the type of persons who created and inhabit those institutions. (2014:203). Elite institutions—whether colleges, law firms, or exclusive, lucrative businesses—exacerbate inequality, reduce and restrict social mobility, and contribute to reproducing a new generation of elites that are isolated from ordinary Americans. As Deresiewicz cautions, admission to such an exclusive world smothers the self in many of the things Americans are often taught to desire—money, status, cultural cachet—but has the danger of extinguishing qualities of character that achievement systems don’t value, such as intellectual curiosity, spontaneity, and adventurousness. Moreover, D ­ eresiewicz (2014:211) finds in the elite college or university environment the same pernicious manipulation for self-interest that he finds in the striving, upper middle-class American family: the institutions he is studying use the relatively small number of poor students they admit to reassure everyone else that the rigged system of faux meritocracy they are operating is, indeed, legitimate. Once admission letters are distributed and students enrolled, the schools have many reasons to continue stoking students’ egos with praise, inflated grades, and ceremonies of belonging—it keeps the customers happy and the money flowing (2014:213). Cossetted by a conspiracy of well-financed mini-managers dedicated to overseeing them, the youthful American college students Deresiewicz is describing must be able to demonstrate bold action to break away from the yellow brick road that has been carefully laid for them. This isolated self, so carefully cultivated, however, is precisely the type of self that has

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difficulty both envisioning, and executing, some radical departure outside the sheltered confines of its comfortable upper middle-class existence. As Deresiewicz (2014:223) petulantly declares toward the end of his book, “Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal, but the real problem is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else.” Privilege, it appears, has its own rewards but also produces in many instances a shallow, brittle self that requires constant support and upkeep. Fortunately for the chosen, D ­ eresiewicz doesn’t envision any meaningful change in society that will threaten the privileged any time soon. Though Deresiewicz has unraveled for the reader many of the wellintentioned forces that beset youth in the United States as they make their way tentatively toward the adult self, perhaps his most useful perception has to do with the contemporary absence of national purpose. Very much like the members of an older generation that Hochschild found isolated, often bitter, and disengaged in Louisiana in her epochal Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), Deresiewicz finds his youthful subjects cynical, disengaged, and lacking any essential purpose in their lives. For Deresiewicz, the connection is obvious: our recent national leaders have themselves lacked purpose and no national goals of any moral or urgent consequence have been announced in the last 30-plus years. As he puts it (2014:228): Once, we dreamed of eradicating poverty, winning the Cold War, reaching the moon, ensuring racial justice, creating a more equitable society. Now—what? What large national project are we pursuing, or even talking of pursuing? So much freedom. So much wealth and power. Such technological sophistication. But in the end, to what end? For Deresiewicz, this absence of national purpose is critical because collective purpose is an anchor for the self. Beliefs, values, principles are an insulator that protects us from solipsism, emptiness, and despair. The absence of a more resonant national narrative is one factor that influences the fulfilling attachments that people seek elsewhere.

The Centrality of Work What has been said so far suggests that identity in the twenty-first century United States is still principally molded by the nature and conditions of work for adults and by the private and public institutions of education for those who have not yet entered the contemporary labor market as a full-time

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worker. When these fields for identity formation and engagement fail, Americans suffer a measure of identity loss. The theorists of modernity who focus on the emergence of global capitalism in the late twentieth century emphasize its disruptive reach in outsourcing and otherwise reconfiguring workplaces to compete internationally, and there are very strong indications that such forces are dominant in many respects with respect to labor markets. Ribas (2016), in her detailed ethnographic account of workers ‘on the line’ in a single meat-packing plant in North Carolina, painstakingly documents how the relations between hispanos (newly arrived immigrants from many countries of Latin America) and African Americans map the group boundaries and shared identities for workers. As Ribas (2016:9) notes, in many departments of the processing facility workers spend a majority of their day in a single location, reproducing the same few cutting, killing, or transporting movements for between 12 to 15 hours, five to six days a week. As Ribas contends, work—“as a setting, structure and process”—remains critically important for understanding the lives of Latino/a immigrants (2016:9–10) because their very selves are predominantly defined by the work experience. Ribas characterizes this environment as the “stratified system of belonging” within the United States (2016:10). As Ribas queries, who among these workers could contemplate an alternative way of life? Given the grueling nature of their work day in the plant, and with only a handful of hours to sleep before resuming another shift, few have the time or energy to do so. (2016:xx). Ribas’ observations in this regard are bolstered by numerous other recent observational studies of work lives in the United States. Indeed, it is the demanding nature of twenty-first century employment that drives many to seek independence from tying their existence to a traditional job within a corporate environment. Yet, as the modernist theorists predict, the reach of transnational advanced capitalism cannot be contained within the company gates, nor the industry, just as it cannot be contained within national boundaries. Perhaps the single most persuasive demonstration of these principles is Viscelli’s (2016) examination of the contemporary long-haul trucking industry in the United States. Viscelli’s field study helps explain why these trucking jobs are currently so bad, why people take them anyway, and why, even when truckers become knowledgeable about the oppressive and unfair conditions under which they work, they find there is little they can do to ameliorate the situation except leave the industry and find another job. While in long haul trucking, driving is their life; it is who they are and determines to a great extent who they can become. Viscelli found that trucking, once one of the best compensated blue-collar jobs in the United States, had become one of the worst. From 1935, with

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passage of the Motor Carrier Act until the advent of deregulation in 1980, the unionized trucking industry provided good, steady jobs at a living wage (2016:9–15). Pressures for a deregulated trucking industry began in the 1970s as economists’ arguments over the Teamsters’ increasingly generous union contracts swayed lawmakers to enact legislation that permitted thousands of new firms to enter the market (2016:15–22). In 1978, 56.6% of all truckers were union members. By 1997, the percentage had dropped to 19.7% overall with only 10% of long haul truckers unionized. By the time Viscelli conducted his study in 2005–2008, he could only find a single trucker working for a union company in the long haul industry (2016:22). The change in employee-employer relations and its effect on the balance of bargaining power led initially to chaos and increased competition in the freight hauling business. Today, the trucking firms that remain in the industry maintain their hold by strategies that insure enough cheap, compliant workers to operate their business while scheduling those drivers to work more hours for less pay under worsening conditions (2016:24). While Viscelli’s discussion of the changing economic landscape for the trucking industry over the last 50 years is instructive, it is the internal economic dynamics companies exploit to control employees that tell us something about the way in which work molds the self. In essence, truck drivers—to use Bob Dylan’s (1964) phrasing—are “only a pawn in their game.” In his sociological study of delinquency—a topic seemingly unrelated to the present discussion—Albert K. Cohen (1955) identified one source of peer group solidarity as a shared problem that needed a solution. He noted that subcultures arise, generally, because of special problems that individuals face; joining a group with a shared experience of the problem has the potential to generate (or at least appear to generate) a solution. (In Cohen’s analysis of delinquency the shared problem that delinquent boys faced was the inability to achieve status within established society; by forming an alternative society—the delinquent gang—these boys could redefine the standards for belonging and the criteria for ‘success.’ Thus, by creating an alternative status order, the boys could gain status in their own eyes.) Viscelli’s (2016) study of the trucking industry is, by and large, an illustration of Cohen’s observation at work in an entirely different context. As Viscelli relates, the trucking industry in the United States discovered it faced a small number of shared problems after deregulation. First, during regulatory years, many large manufacturers and retailers had developed large private fleets to avoid the relatively inflexible and expensive transport services provided by the common carriers (2016:20–21). Second, there was more capacity generally than the industry required so that freight rates dropped

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dramatically (2016:21). Third, although the industry was awash with capacity, new firms—sensing chaos in which they perceived opportunity—entered the market in record numbers (2016:21). Finally, the first year of deregulation— 1981—coincided with a financial recession and freight volumes dropped substantially (2016:21). The immediate response to this newly competitive environment was for many general freight carriers to go out of business. The Teamsters, in turn, lost jobs and union membership as many new entrants into the market hired non-union drivers (2016:21–22). Those trucking firms which remained, however, now faced a new problem: hiring and maintaining their driver workforce. Heretofore, the Teamsters controlled entry into many, perhaps most, driving jobs and helped provide ‘on the job’ training for new hires brought in under its aegis. With the union no longer a player, the trucking firms faced a shared dilemma. Faced with a shortage of trained and experienced drivers, trucking firms began to create systems for actively recruiting, training, and retaining drivers. The system that evolved is premised in substantial part on Cohen’s (1955) observation about formation of subcultures as well: the trucking firms target an otherwise invisible audience with shared needs and from that pool cull those who fulfill the companies’ need for compliant, cheap drivers. As Viscelli (2016:32–33) makes clear, the trucking industry faced a formidable task in the new deregulated environment: it needed to convince people to become applicants to work as truck drivers in a market where all the forces make the job unattractive and barely profitable. To do so, the trucking industry recruits from those who perceive their working lives as even being worse than what they believe trucking will provide. Viscelli’s capsule profiles of the applicants he met in the lobby of a national chain motel in a mid-sized Midwestern U.S. city illustrate the principle in practice. Gathered to attend their first day of Commercial Driver Licensing (CDL) school, several dozen would-be truck drivers sipped coffee and described their backgrounds. Matt, in his mid-twenties and with a four-year college degree, was fleeing his job of several years counseling street addicts; he said he couldn’t stand the stress (2016:29). Denise, a black woman in her thirties and a single mom, came from a poor neighborhood in Kansas City. She had previously worked a series of low-paying retail jobs paying barely above minimum wage (2016:29). Mitch, in his mid-fifties, had retired after 30 years with Chrysler on a pension but a recent divorce left him in need of a better regular income (2016:29). Rick, a white truck mechanic nearing 40, explained that he needed more income to pay his bills after leaving his old job with a wife and child to support (2016:29). Jackie and Laura, a lesbian couple who planned to drive as a team, had been working as a temp office worker and in food service at a diner, respectively

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(2016:29). Joe, a veteran, had been working as a warehouse forklift operator for eight dollars an hour (2016:30). Larry, an African American in his fifties, had worked a ‘laundry list of bad jobs’ (2016:30). In short, the applicants— who already had demonstrated they had a steady work history, no (or minimal) criminal record, and a satisfactory driving record—were all people with few prospects, financial need, and who would be leaving little of value by quitting their old jobs and departing their former lives. While the ‘would-be’ truck drivers Viscelli met would mention the allure of the open road or the satisfaction of ‘being one’s own boss’ behind the wheel, virtually all were drawn by what they believed would be a higher income working as a driver (2016:33). Finally, although Viscelli doesn’t put too fine a point on it, all of the applicants appeared to have little idea of what long haul trucking would mean for themselves and their families and what life as a general freight driver would be like (2016:33). These qualities, as Viscelli notes, constitute the “shared problem to be solved” which joined all the applicants together in the lobby of the chain motel and which permitted the firms in the trucking industry to solve their own shared workforce problem. Luring targeted applicants to apply for admission to trucking school is only the first of a series of coordinated steps that trucking firms take to address their contemporary workforce issues. As Viscelli describes, it is necessary for firms to conduct extensive advertising, initial screening, and then intensive interviewing, guiding, and training before an applicant can master even basic articulated truck driving skills and obtain CDL certification. At each stage, applicants are weaned out. Initial screening eliminates those with unsatisfactory criminal, driving, and work histories. A series of application protocols, drug tests, and the necessary willingness to agree to the company’s terms for driving school also narrow the number of applicants. In 2004, Schneider National, a major carrier with 14,000 trucks, reported that it received 320,000 inquiries about driving jobs and sent out 112,000 applications in response to those who could meet initial screening requirements. The company received 72,400 of those applications back and then interviewed further half of those applicants (37,700). Another 10,000 of those applicants were eliminated but of the 27,000 applicants who remained only 9,959 were eventually hired (2016:32–33). For those who did not already possess CDL certification, the company had to convince applicants to undertake training at their own expense or sign an agreement to pay for the training if they did not last a year on the job in order to maintain competitive in the industry. As Viscelli recounts, firms and the industry generally rely on applicants’ unfamiliarity with the economics of the industry to lure them into thinking that there is a promise of good money to be made in long haul trucking. As Viscelli makes

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clear, it is not uncommon for many firms in the industry to mislead workers by catering to their misconceptions with vague, broad income numbers (2016:33–35) while emphasizing other supposed benefits of the job—i.e., you will be in charge of your own rig. The heart of Viscelli’s account, however, describes what he experienced as a long haul driver and the stories other drivers told him. The core of his story is what the job does to him as a person, what it means to be a driver, what a driver’s ‘self ’ must become as he subordinates himself to the job. His notes from a driving journal he kept after several months on the job show that he arrived one evening at 6:30 p.m. at a railroad yard in New Jersey after struggling through commuter traffic from Long Island via New York City. It took the yard shift dispatcher more than an hour and a half to fax basic information about his pick-up before it could be processed. By 10:00 p.m. Viscelli’s load is still not ready. Now, by government regulations, he cannot load and drive but must take a ten-hour break. With no load and nowhere to park the truck, he backs his trailer in between a couple of other trailers in the yard and hopes no one will see. In the morning, once loaded, he will face traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway on his way to Connecticut and then Rhode Island, where his load is due. The fact that he could not load in the evening and get to Connecticut that night will cost him a lot of time and, as he points out ‘a lot of stress.’ Viscelli reflects on his journal page, “Once again, the only one who isn’t getting paid is me. My company’s dispatchers are getting paid. The guy in the guard shack is getting paid.” In italics he writes, “I hate that damn road” (2016:1–2). Viscelli’s account of his own experience as a long haul truck driver and his interviews of other long-haul truckers focus our attention on two features of the self that so far have garnered only our limited attention: the physical self and the emotional self. Viscelli’s journal reports routinely mention the physical elements of truck driving that bear on the self. Even in the limited time Viscelli spent as a temporary driver for the purposes of his study, he notes suffering “excruciating pain in both my right knee (from operating the clutch) and right upper back (from reaching for controls on the dash and repeatedly scanning satellite and CB radio channels” within just a few weeks of full-time driving (2016:64). Viscelli’s chronic physical deficits from driving are only one part of the physical self that has become normal, however. At the end of a bad week of short, unprofitable runs and plenty of unpaid dead time, which he describes in detail, Viscelli observes his physical and mental state being tested: cumulative fatigue is setting in from the series of long days, one after another, and the crushing boredom of staring at the thousands of highway miles he has driven (2016:72). Until he gets home, his physical environment

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in the truck cab reeks from the nauseating smell of burned diesel fuel that has infested his clothes and bunk linens. A week ago he could refresh himself with a home-cooked frozen meal or fresh fruit or vegetables but those precious food sources have run out and he must face overpriced truck stop food heavy on calories, carbohydrates, and cholesterol, the truck driver’s bane, and the source of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes (2016:72–74). In short, long haul truck driving is an assault on the physical self, one that colors every other aspect of the self, including the intense frustration often experienced as part of the job. As Viscelli routinely reminds the reader, good days on the road blend into one another without separation, a blur of long distance interstate driving, but bad days lodge themselves in the memory as sequences of repeated frustration so annoying that the standard requirements of the job become insulting demands on the self. After a particularly bad forced layover, Viscelli (2016:74) wrote: Days like this tell you something as a trucker. They say: your time is not important. Your paycheck is not important. Whether you are home with your family for special events and holidays is not important. You are not important. (Emphasis in original) As he wrote those sentences, years after the actual experience, Viscelli (2016:74) is reminded how angry he was at the time. Although he knew precisely what he was angry about—wasting a day of his life, largely unpaid, at a truck stop somewhere in the United States—he was uncertain whether he should be angry with his manager; the load planners; the salespeople who book the loads; the company; the industry; or himself. As many of Viscelli’s interviews make clear, dissatisfactions like these, and the intense feelings they elicit because the drivers’ income depends on driving, are endemic and lead to substantial turnover. They are the common lot of drivers, however, as they are a built-in part of the trucking industry. The ‘pay by the mile’ system, which is the cornerstone of the trucking companies’ profit plan, induces so much stress that drivers are commonly forced to voluntarily work harder despite little economic return and run more miles than is lawful or prudent. This practice—colorfully and evocatively termed ‘self- sweating’—arouses intense feelings among more experienced drivers. The emotional self can sometimes only endure so much. Finally, Viscelli’s own experience permitted him to confirm what many of his interview subjects told him: long haul truck driving is hard on family

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life and relationships. Indeed, Viscelli characterizes long haul truck driving as “about as family unfriendly as one can imagine.” Time apart and away from home is one of the many negative collateral effects that burden the self for long haul truckers (2016:101). Viscelli’s own experience bears this out so that when he talks to his wife over the phone from Columbus, Ohio on a Wednesday, the talk turns to Friday—his wife’s birthday and their fifth wedding anniversary. Will he be home Friday evening so they can go out? Viscelli says he’s “hopeful” while explaining the various uncertainties that prevent him from saying, “I promise.” As they say goodnight, Viscelli recognizes that “the tone of her voice tells me the report does not please her” (2016:72). In addition to lost home time, the need to make economic sacrifices is especially common for contractors who are buying their trucks and the financial strains are difficult on marriages and relationships (2016:161). Indeed, several former contractors attributed the break-up of their marriages to the financial drain that independent truck driving periodically demanded in order to meet contractual obligations (2016:162, 225). Even where contracting did not lead to divorce, contractors typically took less time off than company drivers, leading to tension and dissatisfaction in the marriage over and above the ‘normal’ unhappiness of being away on the road regularly for days and weeks at a time. Long haul trucking had the same negative effects on other relationships, including parenting, for the same reasons (2016:224). In sum, the physical self, the emotional self, and the social self of long haul, and especially contractor, truck drivers became shells of pain, woe, and loss for many.

Conclusion Castoriadis (1987:115), in his seminal The Imaginary Institution of Society, remarks that alienation is neither inherent in the history of human society nor is it endemic in the existence of human institutions. Yet, alienation undeniably arises and thus an important task, as Castoriadis reminds us, is to understand how and why alienation becomes a modality attached to a particular institution in an epoch or era. For Castoriadis (1987:115), this task will involve, initially, reconsidering the way we normally look at institutions, which he characterizes as commonly the “functional economic point of view.” This conventional approach assumes that the institution arises due to, and its characteristics can be explained by, the so-called ‘function’ the institution fulfills in society, that is the role the institution plays in the overall economy of a nation-state or culture (1987:115–116). Thus, in this view, it is an institution’s place within the chain of everyday means and ends, or causes and effects, that

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matters so that the institution delivers a satisfactory correspondence to one or more of the ‘real’ needs of the society to sustain itself (1987:116). While Castoriadis does not wish to dispute the functional necessity or nature of institutions, he does caution that this approach is limiting in the sense that institutions, while functional, cannot simply be reduced to this minimalist definition. Moreover, as Castoriadis observes, it is insufficient in part because this definition cannot satisfactorily explain why various functions within institutions go unfilled, when in fact those functions could be filled at the level of sustainability for the society and the period (1987:116). This social fact raises the question of whether or not the institution under examination is actually serving the ‘real needs’ of society or not. It is obvious beyond discussion that a society can only exist if it meets the biological needs of its members, supports child-bearing and child-rearing, education, administering the distribution of goods, resolves disagreements, and so forth but—the important point is—society cannot be reduced to simply carrying out these functions. It is evident to Castoriadis, and to anyone who considers the matter, that societies—through culture—embody established ways to manage and address problems but, even more so, have the capacity to invent, define, reinvent and redefine new needs and new ways of responding to needs (1987:116–117). These reflections lead us to the missing element in the functional-economic point of view—the symbolic façade that clothes every human institution that is presented to us as its first, and defining, aspect. The difficulty this presents is aptly summarized by Castoriadis (1987:117): institutions cannot be reduced to either the functional-economic or the symbolic but they can exist only in the symbolic and therefore generate a particular symbolic network that then becomes ‘real.’ An economic system, a legal system, a political power structure arising out of a constitution, a religious hierarchy—all institutions arise initially perhaps from a set of needs experienced by members of society but then become sanctioned symbolic systems that have a life of their own. The institution, often bureaucratized in modern societies, then can turn against human needs, much in the manner Jules Henry (1965) characterized as “culture against man.” As Castoriadis (1987:117) summarizes the effect: the symbolic systems consist of relating symbols to objects through a discourse of significations so that an ordered arrangement of actions takes place within the institutional framework. The significations can assume many common forms (representations, commands, inducements, and myriad variations in-between) but all related to motivating, restraining, or forbidding action within the context of the particular institution. Those who direct action within an institution, as well as those who are directed to engage in action within an institution, are embedded within the

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discourse network available to the particular institutional setting, which is both a vehicle for successful action (i.e., achieving goals within the umbrella of the institution’s overall mission) and a source of frustration (no institution can accommodate an infinite variety of human goals and therefore every institution, by definition, is intended to frustrate some human yearnings or ambitions). The consequence of all this is that any institution can be (and often is) analyzed in terms of symbolic performances and the actual or intended effects those performances are thought to produce. For illustration purposes, one might consider the notion of punishments within a criminal justice system. Criminologists and others often talk about two effects that punishments are thought to achieve: specific deterrence and general deterrence. First, as the performance of an institutional act, the citation for wrongdoing is a symbolic act. The police officer’s ticket for speeding or a magistrate’s signature on an arrest warrant are wholly symbolic acts issued (arguably) on the basis of social performances that are in some way a transgression of some enshrined prohibition against violating a social norm, itself arising from a symbolic act such as a written constitution or laws or regulations that have been promulgated. Second, the speeding ticket or arrest warrant will then lead to further symbolic acts: the recipient of a speeding ticket will either write a check (a symbolic act expressed in numerical, economic terms) or demand a hearing. At the hearing, a prescribed ritual of symbolic exchanges will be carried out in the form of discourse (legal) of the relevant institution (the courts) and a symbolic conclusion (a judgment) will be entered in a written record (oral symbols reduced to marks on paper) and, in one manner or another, the case dismissed from the institution’s aegis. Lost in this maze of symbol manipulation is the original question or concern with respect to deterrence. Has any of the symbolism induced the motorist to drive more slowly? Has the enactment of the symbolic detention (i.e., arrest)—whether or not it results in the further symbolic act of conviction— induced the arrestee to proceed, and generally behave, more carefully within the social norms? (In either instance, of course, one can ask whether the initial symbolic action was justified by the prevailing legal norms that are supposed to guide such action. It may well be that issuance of the ticket or the arrest warrant were unjustified symbolic performances that might, or might not, be followed by further unjustified, punitive symbolic institutional action. Can wrong institutional actions still have a deterrent effect? Will any deterrent effect on the subject of the wrongful symbolic action be vitiated by vindication—or will a symbolic deterrent effect still be achieved?) Finally, has any of this symbolism made any wider impression on the general audience

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that is the public by inspiring what is called general deterrence? Have others who have witnessed the enactment of any of these symbolic performances (the officer pulling the motorist over and writing a ticket; the court convening one or more hearings to address the arrestee because of the arrest warrant) inspired restraint by members of the public audience? To the extent that the criminal justice system is viewed in rational, functional-economic terms, we would need to obtain reliable, empirical answers to such questions. Yet, in symbolic terms we are simply mired within a discursive language that is institutionally based and from which there is perhaps no exit. Moreover, upon reflection it is an open question as to whether the complex, symbolic network that has arisen within the context of modern legal norms and legal institutions continues to serve ‘human needs.’ If so, what need is it that is being served? It is this tendency of modern institutions to have moved beyond the question of human needs into a Wonderland of interconnected discursive elements that should concern us. Robert Blauner, in his perceptive analysis of alienation among workers in factory industries, has considered some of the critical elements that foster alienating environments. While Blauner’s focus was limited to the nature of work, work environments, and, most particularly, the shop or factory, his observations usefully point toward psychological states and conditions that exist in other contexts. As Blauner (1964:1) remarks in his opening paragraph, the abundance apparent in affluent American society was inspiring many to seek social arrangements that led to a fuller inner life. In his view, the social forces that produced the highly mechanized systems of production that determined the outcome of World War II and ushered in the era of postwar prosperity were exemplary of the conditions that, in turn, led to worker dissatisfaction. Central among these is the process of rationalization. Rational production processes are highly efficient when the goal is to construct a volume of similar items for mass distribution. A rationalized division of labor can produce consistent outcomes with a lower investment of time, power, and energy than serial craftsmanship of single items. Yet, in rationalizing the work process by breaking the overall job down into minutely specialized tasks, the worker has been reduced to the handful of functions he is asked to perform, operations that he (or she) must perform over and over, always in the same manner. In such a system, the worker became nearly as mechanized as the process itself: she (or he) was shorn of responsibility and concern for the final product and distanced from any real connection to the production process or his or her co-workers. As Blauner (1964:2–3) observes, the worker loses his or her sense of purpose from fragmentation of the productive process that the increasingly specialized division of labor imposes and

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acquires a sense of powerlessness over his or her fate since the worker’s control over his or her relation to the process is reduced. The worker’s bodily movements, the worker’s consciousness, the worker’s very life is sacrificed to a process over which the worker has lost influence. It is these conditions that lead to worker, and indeed human, alienation. Work, regardless of the hopes of many, remains a central component of modern society, whether symbolic or physical in nature, and therefore a critical source of identity. Chen’s (2015) workers who have lost their jobs are perhaps the best exponents and spokespersons for this view but Silva’s working-class 20-somethings are also eloquent in their hard-earned disenchantment with their limited career choices and progress as well as what they perceive, perhaps correctly, as their dim prospects for improvement in the future. In earlier generations, working-class men and women often only required steady jobs, a reasonable, living wage, and employee benefits to give them moderate investment in society, a meaningful role, and enough social power to live satisfactorily in the present and look to the future. The erosion of ‘good [working class] jobs’ with both a living wage and benefits has undercut this post-World War II equation. The flight of many jobs overseas, the demand for increasingly sophisticated command of technical and higher education requirements, and the profit squeeze driven by global competition—leading to wage and benefit squeezes in white collar jobs as well—has made it increasingly difficult for workers at all levels to carve out an affirmative identity that derives from their working lives. By analogy, then, we should look at the wider context of society to identify those forces and conditions that lead to social alienation in those nonwork institutional sectors where we can discern patterns of meaninglessness and relative powerlessness. Blauner’s work is helpful in this respect as well. In earlier times, men and women survived work lives that were not filled with meaning, which did not provide intrinsic satisfactions found in the nature of the work itself, nor conferred any appreciable amount of social power on the worker by experiencing a sense of community in one realm or another of society. Yet, modernity, as we have seen, has undermined these sources of identity as well. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber each addressed the effects of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and numerous authors have discussed the fragmentation, isolation, and polarization of the United States in our current century. Increased social and economic mobility weakened family ties, the expanding influence of secularism tore at the bonds offered by religion, and the proliferation of meritocratic training and higher education widened the gap between social classes. Individual efforts to de-emphasize occupation and work as critical elements of

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selfhood therefore founder on the absence of other realms in which an active, viable community of interest, and thus, shared purpose and identity, can be constructed. Relationships, as we have seen, can simply founder because of the weight placed upon them: with so little outside of the relationship on which to connect the self to the wider context, the overburdened dyad often reels and implodes.

References Baltzell, E. Digby. 1964. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. New York: Vintage. Baumann, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baumann, Zygmunt. 2003. Liquid Love: On the Family of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baumann, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2002. Individualization. London: Sage. Bettie, Julie. 2014. Women Without Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blauner, Robert. 1964. Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” In J. Karabel and A.H. Halsey, Eds., Power and Ideology in Education, 487–511. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chen, Victor Tan. 2015. Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Oakland: University of California Press. Chua, Amy. 2011. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin. Cohen, Albert K. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: Free Press. Deresiewicz, William. 2014. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite. New York: Free Press. Dylan, Bob. 1964. “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” On The Times They Are A-Changin’. New York: Columbia Records. Copyright Held By: Warner Brothers (Los Angeles). Elliot, Anthony. 2016. Identity Troubles. London and New York: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hauhart, Robert C. 2016. Seeking the American Dream: A Sociological Inquiry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Henry, Jules. 1965. Culture Against Man. New York: Vintage Books. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: The New Press. Komarovsky, Mirra. 1967. Blue Collar Marriage. New York: Vintage Books. Christopher Lasch. 1977. Haven in a Heartless World: The family Besieged. New York: Basic Books Leicht, Kevin T. and Scott T. Fitzgerald. 2007. Post-Industrial Peasants: The Illusion of Middle-Class Prosperity. New York: Worth Publishers.

172  Self Identity in Field Studies MacLeod, Jay. 2009. Ain’t No Makin’ It. Boulder: Westview Press. Nichols, Mike. (Director). 1967. The Graduate. Screenplay by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham; based on the novel of the same name by Charles Webb. Los Angeles: Embassy Pictures. Ribas, Vanesa. 2016. On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rothman, Barbara Katz. 2000. Recreating Motherhood. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Rubin, Lillian. 1990. Erotic Wars. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Silva, Jennifer. 2013. Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press. Slater, Philip. 1990. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon Press. Stoltenberg, John. 1990. Refusing to be a Man. London: Fontana. Thompson, Sharon. 1989. “Search for Tomorrow: Or Feminism and the Reconstruction of Teen Romance.” In Carole S. Vance, Ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora. Viscelli, Steve. 2016. The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitebeck, Caroline. 1987. “Ethical Issues Relevant to Women’s Health and Medical Technology.” (Unpublished Paper).

Life Projects in the Twenty-First Century United States

6

Rising Inequality, Global Capitalism, Neo-Liberal Government, and the Great Recession

The present examination of the means and prospects for constructing a ‘self ’ in the twenty-first century United States has traversed a substantial amount of ground. Most of the effort has been directed at reviewing earlier theoretical positions and analyses offered by the more prominent commentators on the nature of identity formation. No doubt many useful interpretations have been neglected or not given the extended treatment they deserve. In this final chapter, I will begin to pull together various strands of explanation that I have offered in earlier chapters. The goal is to unify a range of empirical observations from the field studies into a more concentrated, issues-oriented narrative, thereby distilling the factors that impinge, and imperil, the active assertion of self-identity in the twenty-first century United States. To a substantial extent I will proceed by reviewing another recent interview study, Victor Tan Chen’s research on laid off automobile and parts workers in Cut Loose (2015). Chen’s study will serve as a ground for comparison with the more abstract theoretical discussions that have been proposed with respect to the trend toward global capitalism supported by neo-liberal governmental policies and their consequent impact of self-identity.

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Inequality Like so many things, unequal access to resources of all kinds has an obvious, but often undiscussed, bearing on the self. Baumann (2011:5–6), an often eloquent exponent of the fluidity of modernity thesis, counters to some extent his own previous analyses with a stark description of the impact of inequality on the possibility of agency and self-realization: In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the shores of Louisiana. In New Orleans and its surroundings, everybody knew that Katrina was coming, and they all had quite enough time to run for shelter. Not all, though, could act on their knowledge and make good use of the time available for escape. Some—quite a few—could not scrape together enough money for flight tickets. They could pack their families into trucks, but where would they drive them? Motels also cost money, and money they most certainly did not have. And—paradoxically—it was easier for their welloff neighbors to obey the appeals to leave their homes, to abandon their property to salvage their lives, the belongings of the well-off were insured, and so Katrina might be a mortal threat to their lives but not to their wealth. What is more, the possessions of the poor without the money to pay for air tickets or motels might be meager by comparison with the opulence of the rich, and so less worthy of regret, but they were their only effects; no one was going to compensate them for their loss; and once lost they would be lost forever, and all people’s life savings would go down with them. (Baumann 2011:5–6) As Baumann recognized, in a socially indefensible way Katrina had intervened, inadvertently, to support globalization’s continuing effort to manage the redundant populations that modern capitalism creates. Just as the routinely wasted lives of the lower class exposed to globalizing capitalism are the collateral consequences of inequality, the collateral casualties of natural disasters like Katrina are the everyday consequence of official actions that do not consider the lives of the poor to be worthy of preparatory planning. As Baumann (2011:17) notes: Left increasingly to their own resources and acumen, individuals are expected to devise individual solutions to socially generated problems, and to do it individually, using their individual skills and individually possessed assets.

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As Baumann (2011:17) goes on to observe, this places individuals in direct competition, severing human bonds except for those constructed in the form of temporary alliances of convenience which readily dissolve as priorities and conditions shift since they are formed solely on a ‘no strings attached’ basis. Bereft of publicly shared institutional means for addressing common problems, individualization in the midst of inequality fosters the atomism that Marx wrote about enveloping western society in the nineteenth century. The individual, striving alone within the complexity of globalizing capitalist modernity, must hitch his or her destiny to any perceived stairway to individual success and disavow any ties that might threaten those aspirations. In such a context, human bonds, devoid of connection to hallowed traditions, shared norms, widely legitimated and revered institutions or, at bottom, some form of social compulsion, would likely be more counter-productive than productive, given the solitary nature of the quest. Indeed, the very self—the only thing the individual can seemingly have faith in today—must be reserved for cautious and prudent use since expending oneself promiscuously without careful leveraging would leave one fully exposed to the ravages of man and nature, laying one open to the sorts of collateral damage that beset the poor. Baumann, struggling to reconcile the forces that have emancipated some modern men and women from the limitations of space and time but at the same time divided one from another, suggests that sociologists must take up the task of analyzing the contemporary ‘experience economy’ (2011:168), the sphere of society that embraces the volatility, fluidity, flexibility, and short life-span that Nigel Thrift (2005) has described as ascendant in the current phase of globalized capitalism. Yet, as the studies that have been analyzed in earlier chapters seem to suggest, it is difficult to generate the optimism that Baumann expressed with respect to sociology’s potential for reconnecting that which has been fragmented and broken by recent forces. The forces of neo-liberal government within the context of contemporary global capitalism simply seem too fragile and ineffectual to make any difference. Rather, the lonely quest seems destined to abide. A close examination of Victor Tan Chen’s (2015) study of workers within the automobile and automobile parts industries offers a final, sobering look at what twenty-first century (North) American society offers—and doesn’t offer—for the formation of identity. Chen’s book, Cut Loose (2015), examines the fate of automobile and automobile parts workers in the United States and Canada who lost their jobs in the wake of the collapse of the world’s financial markets in 2008 as the sub-prime mortgage recession drove other sectors of the economy toward ruin. Although inspired by the mortgage crisis, the so-called Great Recession was really a culmination of trends that had been emerging over the past

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four decades and that contributed to the erosion of key cultural institutions, including labor unions, the two-parent family, the living wage, pension funds, among many others. Heedless risk-taking by banks and corporate financiers was simply the catalyst that threatened to bring the entire edifice crashing down. It did come crashing down on the subjects of Chen’s study. Chen’s subjects lived in the Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario areas when he began interviewing them in 2009–2010. The auto workers he interviewed had worked at the Chrysler engine plants in Detroit and Trenton, Michigan and the Ford engine plant in Windsor. Automobile parts manufacturers in Highland, Michigan and Windsor supplied Chen with workers to interview who performed chrome plating for bumpers and other parts. As Chen recounts, those working on these assembly lines were once some of the most fortunate working-class people in the North American labor force. Once upon a time they could count on generous overtime, cost-of-living adjustments, pensions, and stable incomes from high hourly wages. These workers were able to use financial benefits to wedge their way into middle-class neighborhoods, middle-class lifestyles, and sustainable middle-class dreams of a stable life and a golden retirement. The Great Recession, however, precipitated a dramatic drop in automobile sales, which had already declined from the heyday of the 1990s, and Chen’s workers were either let go or offered buy-outs to leave. Chen’s interviews with 71 of these workers illuminate the struggle that defining and sustaining identity has become for many in the twenty-first century. The interviewees’ stories do so within the context of the global forces that have been the focus of earlier chapters.

Global Capitalism and Withering Away of the Welfare State Under Neo-Liberal Government The labor market can perhaps be best understood as a microcosm of the global marketplace for goods, services, and jobs. As capital, highly mobile, and technology, also flexibly adaptive and freely flowing across borders and continents, combine in the context of twenty-first century globalization, the ideology of the marketplace invades all sectors. As numerous accounts herald, the economy has come to dominate other institutions in the United States. As Messner and Rosenfeld (2007:75) point out, the balance of power among American institutions has shifted from a rough approximation of equal interdependence between our institutions to an exaggerated emphasis on the profit motive— not only for businesses and corporations—but for monetary success (at the expense of other values) among workers and consumers. Workers compete

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for a good wage and benefits while consumers compete for good prices on quality goods. In the midst of this competitive economic war of ‘all against all,’ those that cannot compete must fail according to the internal logic of capitalism. Yet, the dominance of the financial sector means, among other things, that it can influence other spheres, like the political realm, to shelter it from competition, shifting risk elsewhere—most commonly to individual, un protected workers—those least able to absorb the shock of economic failure. Neo-liberalism, as a handmaiden to global capitalism, can also—under the guise of reducing government expenditures—reduce the social safety net available to these individuals, thereby doubling their exposure to financial tragedy. The same measures can cut aid to education, retain the financial limitations and conservative social policies in place that minimize government aid to families, as well as impose restraints on the amount of financial support available to the unemployed. It is in this environment that Chen finds his automobile and parts workers languishing.

The Great Recession and Job Loss When the world’s financial markets teetered on the brink of disaster beginning in 2008, millions of workers—among them Chen’s subjects—lost their jobs. The financial crisis stalled sales; the slumping sales stalled production; and the loss of productive demand led companies to shed jobs. As Chen’s interviews revealed, the loss of jobs spelled financial hardship for the workers in the first instance, but it did more than that over time. For over a decade, John—a worker in a Highland Park, Michigan chrome plating facility—saw his income steadily rise to $50,000 annually. Initially, he was just laid off for the summer. This caused some financial belt-tightening but eventually he was called back to the plant. Not long thereafter, however, the company decided to consolidate its manufacturing to a larger facility in order to cut costs. More than a hundred workers at the Highland Park site lost their jobs, including John, then 55 years old (2015:1–4). John thought he would be able to get another job with his solid work record, lack of a criminal record, and good work habits and skills. He turned out to be wrong. By the middle of winter John was experiencing real hardship from the loss of income. His biweekly draw of $774 from unemployment compensation must support his family of four as his partner, Christina, was a stay-at-home mom. With the impact of the prior year’s lay-off factored in, they have used up their meager savings. They are three months behind on their mortgage payment and find themselves, in a Michigan winter, with a non-working furnace and

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not enough money to repair it. John, ever the optimist, thinks it will all work out as soon as he can land a job (2015:3). The story is the same across the board for Chen’s laid-off workers. José, now 38 years old, recalls how it was at the plating plant when it was privately owned. The owner would bring in fruit, bagels, and cream cheese every morning and often would hand out bonus checks for fifty or a hundred dollars at the end of the month when sales were good. Then, the company was bought out by a corporation and those perks ceased. When the slump in business occurred, the corporation let workers go, including José. José took the job nearly right out of high school. He had immigrated to the United States from El Salvador as a teen. When he completed high school, he enrolled in a construction engineering program at a local college but could not keep up when he started working at the plating facility. Now, 20 years later, he had only his work experience to fall back on. After more than a year unemployed José has depleted his savings. He and his wife have accumulated $24,000 in revolving credit debt just staying alive. For the last few months José has worked parttime sweeping and mopping floors at another car plant but the hours are few and the prospects for full-time work there nonexistent. José is, like John, near the end of his very short financial rope (2015:41–43). The laid-off worker stories Chen (2015) tells have a dispiriting pattern of symmetry. The details, while varying on specifics, simply tell the story of individuals and their families or dependents, once financially solvent and reasonably secure, now thrown on the sudden brink of economic destitution. Sal Chertiel, 47 years old, a laid-off Canadian autoworker, languished among the unemployed for three years until he began working at a janitorial ­service cleaning the Ford plants where he formerly worked. The pay—$15 per hour—was pretty good but it was still less than half his autoworker wage. Still, it helped keep he and his wife, who works at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop, solvent for a time. Yet, after 89 days—one day before his probationary period ends—he is let go along with three full-time workers. He’s not needed although he needs the job: he and his wife can’t make it with his wife’s low service sector wages. Like the former middle-class family they used to be, the Chertiels’ two older sons are in college and they need money for tuition (2015:45–46). Beyond the depressing similarity of the worker’s economic woes, however, are arrayed the social forces that propelled Chen’s newly unemployed workers into the maw of twenty-first century North American capitalism, the attendant degrading struggles for survival and redirection at advanced ages, and the damaging, non-economic consequences of their precipitous trajectory into downward economic and social mobility.

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Jumping on the Gravy Train/Foregoing Education Chen’s automobile and parts workers shared more than jobs in the auto industry during a period of economic turmoil, the experience of being laid off, and financial pressures. To a person, almost all of the workers Chen spoke with opted to work in the auto and parts industries to make good money while declining to seek further education. Most of the workers, who started young, shortly after completing high school, and now, older and unemployed with skill sets fashioned through years of work in the penumbra of a fading industry, find themselves bereft of the necessary cultural capital that might assist them in moving beyond the landscape of low-wage service jobs. They are marooned on an island of obsolete working-class skills in a sea of rapidly advancing global changes in the twenty-first century workplaces that demand ‘soft’ skills they never took the time nor interest to develop. José Santos, who emigrated from El Salvador to the United States when he was a teenager, began working at the plating plant while he was studying at a local college right after high school. Not long after, the plant’s human resources officer pulled him aside to explain that management was watching him. He had been missing work to keep up with his classes and he needed to make a choice: one or the other. José chose the factory and dropped out of school (2015:42). Now, at the age of 38, he questions the choice he made saying, “I could have made something better out of my life” (2015:43). As Chen relates, most of his workers expressed having little interest in school when they were younger (2015:47). However, even those like José, who initially started in college, were lured away by the high-paying, low skill jobs then available. David, a 45-year-old ex-Ford worker that Chen interviewed, described himself as an A student in high school but a drunken dropout from college after one semester as a young man. Eventually, he obtained the job at Ford and planned on finishing his work life there with a secure union-supported retirement at the end. Laid off in 2008, David is back in school—one of the lucky ones—but struggling to become a student again as he wistfully acknowledges, “I’d go back [to work at the Ford factory] in a heartbeat” (2015:48). Audrey, a laid-off plating plant worker, never bothered to obtain a high school diploma when she was younger. When she was hired at the factory in 1998, she didn’t even need to do an interview. A friend passed her name along and she was called in to do a four-hour trial on the assembly line. She was told to come back in two days: she was hired. Now, facing the bleak Midwestern job market, Audrey, 40-something years old, laments she will never find another job (at $21 an hour) like the one she lost. Unable to access an Ontario

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college retraining program, she thinks she may try to become a massage therapist (2015:78–80). Sensing her personal job prospects are limited, Audrey has come to realize that education has become the decisive factor, noting, “It’s what you’ve done, where you’ve gone to school, what you take, what your credentials are” (2015:80). Gary never finished high school, chasing fun and independence as a teenager. He worked long hours delivering pizzas and when it became too much he dropped out of school. He wanted to finish at night school but the pizzeria manager needed him to deliver during evening hours. He eventually ended up leaving the job but his motivation to finish his education had evaporated by then. After a succession of other low-wage jobs, his father took him into the plating factory where he got a job. Just two months in he ripped off the tips of three fingers in one of the machines but kept on working there—the wages were just too good. Now the plant is closed. Gary has been out of work for eight months and submitted a hundred job applications. He applies for everything but he is also giving education another chance—at the age of 29. Yet, he told Chen he feels directionless. He sees no prospects and feels life is unbearable when he encounters other people (2015:204–206). Education may have once been a pathway for Gary, but like most of the former workers, it is not at all clear where it will lead now.

The Self in Need of Help: The Perceived Failure of Government and Union Assistance When Chen’s workers were laid off, they became eligible for various forms of government and/or union assistance and support. There is little question but that unemployment compensation eased the financial pain—for a time. However, these ‘benefits’ expire after a certain length of time. In many cases the benefits were suspended long before Chen’s workers found comparable employment—or any employment at all. In addition to replacement compensation, laid-off workers in both the United States and Canada were entitled to receive—or apply for—retraining assistance whether through federal government programs or state of Michigan/province of Ontario programs. While well-intentioned, these programs were often under-funded and besieged by more applicants than the programs could serve. Finally, unions—which hold themselves out as advocates for, and servants of, the union membership—were another source of potential assistance. As laid-off workers in both countries told Chen, however, they really did not anticipate receiving any substantial help from their union, although Chrysler workers did receive one-time-only

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negotiated cash payments and car vouchers as part of a buy-out. Most of Chen’s workers were not disappointed with respect to their low expectations in this regard. Unemployment compensation in the United States at that time was normally limited to 26 weeks. In Canada at that time the base time limit was longer at 36 weeks (and up to 45 weeks in some areas) (2015:100). During periods of high unemployment and joblessness, both countries put into effect emergency measures. Canada raised its time limit initially to 50 weeks when the Great Recession began and extended it to 70 weeks for experienced workers. This could be further increased to over two years where laid-off workers enrolled in classes for retraining. The United States also raised time limits. For workers who qualified in full in areas hardest hit by unemployment, like Michigan, those who could not find other work could stay on unemployment for up to 99 weeks—and workers who qualified for readjustment training could receive another year and a half of benefits to support the expenses incurred while in a certified program (2015:100). Eligibility for benefits depends primarily on the level of income the unemployed workers had been receiving from their companies. Due to the middle-class wages Chen’s workers had been earning, all the workers he interviewed qualified for benefits at or near the largest amounts allowable (2015:101). As Chen concluded, this meant that in both countries unemployment compensation amounted to ‘only half or less’ of the amount workers had been receiving when they were employed (2015:102). Moreover, those who accepted buy-out packages in the United States became ineligible for unemployment compensation and most forms of government support due to the loss of their jobs (2015:102). To the casual observer, the range of compensation for unemployed workers appears generous. However, as Chen recounts, his subjects reported “little in the way of savings” and the parts workers, in particular, experienced financial difficulties after they lost their jobs and it became clear they would not be rehired as in a standard lay-off. Thus, a large minority of these workers ended up missing bill payments, some lost their homes through foreclosure, and others filed for bankruptcy (2015:103). Randy, 40 years old, lost his job at one of the parts plants during the Great Recession and quickly cleaned out his meager bank account. Eight months after he was laid off he has only a few hundred dollars left in a retirement account. Randy lives with his mother, who relies on disability for an accidental injury she received, but Randy’s unemployment compensation and his mother’s disability payments do not cover their expenses, even with the addition of food stamps which they also began receiving. Only by refinancing their home through a mortgage modification process have they been able to avoid foreclosure (2015:103). From

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a financial point of view, the relative economic success and security these workers had laboriously achieved over a decade or two meant that their job loss, even when buffered by substantial government assistance, led them to balance precariously on a financial precipice, if not vault over it into an economic void. Chen’s workers offered mixed views of their labor unions but, of course, not all of the workers had a union to complain about in the wake of their lay-off. As Chen notes, workers in the auto industry could be eligible for retraining under the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program which was created to protect American workers who can convincingly contend they were injured by foreign imports. The plants Chen studied were rated to qualify for trade adjustment benefits and the UAW local was responsible for assisting workers to petition for, and receive, the retraining. (Parts workers were initially not eligible but due to emergency legislation were made eligible beginning in 2010 as Chen’s field work concluded.) As Chen reports, however, only one of all the workers he interviewed was going to school with the union’s help. Indeed, a third of the laid-off Chrysler workers complained that they had run into problems accessing the program. The workers were given various explanations and justifications but the end result was the same: they were ineligible for one reason or another—or waiting and waiting and waiting for an answer to their application (2015:58–59). Workers who had to rely on Michigan state programs, rather than the federal trade adjustment program, were—if anything—even less happy. By 2010, the state funding had dried up due to reduced federal support and the state stopped adding people to what was already a long waiting list of “tens of thousands” of persons (2015:59). Some workers, already on the waiting list and told to “call back,” were still waiting after three months when Chen’s field work concluded. Ontario’s program suffered similar lack of funding and bureaucratic problems. Likewise, those workers merely seeking help with a job search complained about a lack of help. Hannah, laid-off from Ford, sought help at a state job center but received no call back. When she went in person, she was told walk-ins were not accepted; she needed an appointment. Eventually, when she saw a caseworker, she mentioned that she should be eligible for government paid retraining yet she was not advised what she needed to do to access it. As Hannah stated, “I’m here asking for help, but I’m not getting any help. I’m slipping through the cracks” (2015:39). Workers often directed their frustration at both the shortcomings in the under-funded, bureaucratic government programs (2015:160) as well as their union’s failure to advocate more effectively on their behalf (2015:179). It is unfortunate that Chen’s workers were forced to face the unenviable fact that the United States is “a society

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that frequently turns its back on those who do not succeed” (Rank, Hirschl, and Foster 2014:155), but to sociologists this should not be too much of a surprise. Resource triage is a common strategy for dispensing aid in the United States (Piven and Cloward 1993) and conceptions of ‘deservingness’ are often among the criteria employed to separate aid and program petitioners into categories; even criminal court case handling programs in the United States have numerous filters to limit the number of participants in special court programs and screen them along multiple criteria (Orlosky 2017; Loeak 2018). Yet, while regrettable, Chen’s workers may face even greater challenges from the meritocracy than even those with bureaucracies created to serve those who become unemployed.

Grasping for an Illusory Handhold in the Twenty-First Century Meritocracy As Chen makes clear, one of the most serious stumbling blocks his unemployed workers faced was the culture of meritocracy that informs modern society. Generally, as he found, there is a widespread belief that merit should be (and perhaps is) rewarded but that the prevailing definition of ‘merit’ does not simply equate to ‘working hard.’ Rather, it involves acquiring the modern skills and credentials that contemporary education and advanced training impart. Thus, as some have argued (McNamee and Miller 2014) while meritocracy may ultimately be a myth, credentialism is not a myth for many, if not for most, in the twenty-first century. The educational skills and credentials that Chen’s laid-off auto and parts workers did not possess, and in most cases were having a hard time acquiring for the many reasons already stated, made their second-career prospects limited to nonexistent. Thus, these workers suffered from a double-whammy: first, they had almost uniformly failed to take advantage of educational opportunities when they were younger and were often held responsible (and held themselves responsible) for decisions made 20 years earlier; second, many were unable to access, or were struggling hard to benefit from, retraining or higher education once they became unemployed. Either way, the culture of meritocracy placed the burden, and even blame, on the workers, as they themselves often did (2015:27–28). In their effort to acquire new credentials to demonstrate merit, Chen’s less educated workers are stymied by meager savings, limited government tuition support, bureaucratic roadblocks and passivity, and lack of academic aptitude, prior academic preparation, and limited experience beyond their working class jobs (2015:71).

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The Discarded Self The essence of Chen’s book, however, is the documentation he provides from his field interviews with respect to the impact his workers experienced on their lives—on their very selves—as a consequence of their unemployment. One notable change was the stress many reported experiencing in their marital and partner relationships. Royce and Elena, with four children—three hers and one born to both of them—were doing well in 2007 when Royce was first laid-off. In 2008, however, the lay-off ended and Royce went back to work. The company said that it was closing operations in other plans to shift its production and focus to the one where Royce worked. But then they changed their plans and Royce was out of work. He hasn’t been able to get a job since and now that his unemployment compensation has run out, their household income has been cut in half. The couple has fallen months behind on all of their credit debt—the unpaid mortgage, two car loans, overdue utilities, and mounting credit card balances plus fees (2015:2016–2017). Suffering, too, is their marriage. Royce the provider has become dependent on Elena who is experiencing a “burgeoning real estate career” (2015:118). Royce has seen himself withdraw from life under the stress and Elena finds him often cold and distant in the evenings when she comes home from work. Royce told Chen, “I’m broke down” (2015:116). He broods over what he considers mistakes that he made in the past, chafes at being confined to the house, and blames himself for his lack of a job. The constant friction with Elena has made Royce bitter and there is little communication between the two of them. They bicker and fight regularly; the police have been called several times in recent months. Royce says she has hit him but he didn’t tell the police. She has locked him out and changed the locks ‘several times.’ Their youngest child has cowered, with his hands over his head, wailing during recent yelling matches between them (2015:119–120). At the extreme, Chen concludes that his laid-off workers have not only become unemployable but unmarriageable. Mal, a former Chrysler worker, separated from his wife a year after he lost his job. Isabella, her daughter, and Markus her older brother, live with their mother. Mal, living alone, has become despondent, noting that his loss of a job has undercut their relationship. His wife now lives with an older man who supports her and even provides generous gifts (2015:132–133). While men were most often the targets of blame for not providing, women laid off could experience the same tension and accusations. Hannah, 54 years old, separated from her husband due to heightened arguments over her lack of income when she became unemployed. She bemoaned the material calculus at the heart of her problems to

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Chen, reporting that she told her husband, “Jesus Christ. I didn’t think our relationship was based on the amount of money that I brought in” (2015:136). As Chen remarks, separation or divorce for laid-off American workers among his interview subjects was a “fairly common occurrence.” Moreover, regardless of whether other forces or issues were at play, Chen acknowledges that it became clear to him in the course of the interviews that the separations or divorces arose from the fact that the laid-off workers “had problems relying on the financial and emotional support” of their partners, predominantly because the partners resented their inability to contribute financially (2015:137). Thus, the loss of a job led to a loss of income and to straightened financial circumstances; the strain on household finances then led to strain in the relationship which laid-off Americans resolved most often by one form of separation or another.

The Despondent Self As Chen acknowledges, being without a job—perhaps especially for Americans—is statistically tied to health problems of a physical nature, including heart disease, alcohol abuse, mental health problems, and suicide. Moreover, since half of Americans receive their health insurance coverage as a job benefit, unemployment delivers what Chen calls a “one-two punch” (2015:89) of job loss plus loss of health insurance. This leaves former workers subject to the United States’ private emergency health care system as the only venue available to those who are uninsured—“overburdened, callous, and infuriating”—as Chen (2015:89) characterizes it. Although the stories Chen tells from his interviews certainly describe many instances of physical health problems his laid-off workers face, many of these are problems that originated in accidents or illnesses that began years earlier when the workers were employed. New physical health issues that arise after the workers are unemployed are, of course, difficult to attribute directly to their newly jobless status. The same is not quite as true for mental issues such as despondency, stress, severe longterm depression, and disabling anger and self-blame. Many of the workers who lost their jobs, quite understandably, suffer from various forms of debilitating thought processes that they never experienced while working. John, 55 years old, was deserted by his young mother and father shortly after he was born. He was raised by his grandmother for about 10 years when she, too, felt compelled to abandon him when she went blind. For a time then he and his older brother were on their own, sleeping wherever they could find shelter in derelict houses, abandoned cars, or in the woods. As he grew,

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John worked every kind of job, whether in Florida or Michigan. His job at the chrome plating factory paid him good money—$50,000 a year, overtime included—for over a decade (2015:1–3). For John, his work was everything; the job was more than just a job for John—it was his entire life. “To me it’s real bad,” he told Chen, “because the thing about my job . . . my job was like my mother and father to me” (2015:4). John starts to sob and wipes his tears on his collar. He goes on, stressing the job’s importance, “When you work fourteen years, them [co-workers] are all the friends you got. A bunch of guys with nowhere else to go. It’s all I had” (2015:4). John is hardly alone when he describes not working for a living “like being in jail, but you have to get your own food” (2015:5). He expresses the optimistic view, like many of those laid-off, that if he could just get a job everything would be all right but, when pressed, he acknowledges the stress, the willingness to blame himself, the tendency to blame others, and the constant anxiety and worry have been debilitating (2015:4–5). John’s despondency is evident, but muted, by his characteristic demand that he not let it all get to him, even though it does. Many of Chen’s other workers, less evidently able to maintain denial, have fallen further into mental troughs and obvious long-term depression. As should be evident by now, Chen’s unemployed workers faced an uncertain, but competitive job market with few contemporary skills or options while experiencing strained relationships and trying to handle the shame of their jobless state and drifting life. The toll of long-term unemployment on the workers, their families, and their communities is immense, especially with regard to the unemployed workers’ mental health. Hannah, laid-off from Chrysler, watched her marriage fall apart. Struggling to pay the mortgage by herself, she moved into a friend’s house, but had trouble finding a new direction. She couldn’t get help accessing training nor find a good job. The stress has filled her up so Hannah takes anti-anxiety medication daily to help her sleep (2015:39–40). Yul Kane, too, found it hard to cope with life after years of working at a Ford plant. He remembered growing up poor in public housing after his parents divorced. Now, he, too, was dependent on public benefits and it pained him. He applied for dozens of jobs and got nothing. Frustrated, he went back to school but he had trouble retaining anything from the lectures and blamed himself, becoming angry at his situation. His temper would get the better of him and he and his wife would fight and yell. He was unsettled and it took him years to get his mental equilibrium back (2015:55–56). Chen’s interviews led him to conclude that in both the United States and Canada about one-third of the unemployed workers he spoke with acknowledged anxiety and depression (2015:96). While some admitted to taking

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medications or, less commonly, seeking counseling, the workers’ lack of health insurance coverage was clearly a factor, as Chen points out (2015:97). As Chen observes, money issues—while prevalent—were not always decisive in affecting the workers’ psychological state. Rather, the mere fact that the workers no longer have a job, no longer have anywhere definite to go, and no longer have a certain future seem to weigh heaviest. North American culture, particularly that of the United States, persuades many to internalize society’s expectation that being an unemployed adult is, in and of itself, degrading—regardless of whether the condition is one’s own doing or not (2015:99). Royce, 31 years old, told Chen, “I’m broke down.” He remorselessly broods over what he considers mistakes he made and “beats himself up constantly, mercilessly, for everything that’s happened” (2015:116), even though he is just one of many he knows who are laid off. His wife describes it as “mental anguish for him” (2015:116). Marital friction and fights ensue. It is difficult not to see that job loss drives the mental state that Royce suffers from, which he then takes out on his wife and children. Mitch, 31 years old, lost his job at one of the automotive feeder plans one year before Chen spoke with him. His wife picked up a second job but resented it bitterly, provoking fights for no reason. Mitch moved back in with his retired parents; having left his wife, he had nowhere else to go. When Chen found him, Mitch was deeply depressed. He had lost 27 pounds, felt guilt and shame for living off his parents even though he paid rent, and hasn’t been able to sleep. He has obsessive thoughts, ruminating ceaselessly in front of the television, wondering why he can’t get a job. Wondering, “Is there something wrong with me?” (2015:176).

The Suicidal Self According to Chen, many of his interviewees rather grimly noted the number of co-worker funerals they’ve attended since the layoffs occurred. Liz, 46 years old and a former Ford worker, remarked “We’ve had guys that have taken their lives because . . . they feel that there’s no way out” (2015:95). Liz has suffered depression herself and has gone back to school, noting that at least when asked what she’s doing she can say she’s a student. Henry Rico, laid off from a parts plant for eight months, tells Chen that what bothers him is losing his worker identity: “ain’t no better feeling but have somewhere to punch out from.” For both Liz and Henry, and for North Americans generally, a job is a marker of status so that when people are out of work their sense of self-worth suffers.

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Being unemployed hollows a person out. D. J. Packer told his wife on a frigid December afternoon two days before Christmas that he just needed to get out and take a walk by himself. He slogged down the freshly plowed road, stepping carefully here and there where snow and ice remained piled. His destination was a bridge where he could see eighteen-wheelers creep by slowly, exiting from nearby piers on the Detroit River carrying heavy coils of steel. The day his own plant closed, D. J. told Chen, “[it] took my dignity and just slapped me in the face with it” (2015:82). That was when his sleeplessness began. After two hours of fitful rest he would lie awake, his mind constantly churning with worry. He worried about taking care of his wife, who did not work so she could care for her elderly mother, and their teenage daughter. There were no more jobs for him in Windsor. Although it was only one o’clock in the afternoon, D. J. felt increasingly desperate as he sat on the bridge that day. He felt tired, used up, a husk of brittle nerves. He had made a plan. The bridge was curved along its length and highest in the middle. Only when an oncoming truck had cleared the rise would the driver be able to see at all on the downward side where D. J. sat. He thought to himself: “All I’ve got to do is take one step into the road and he can’t stop” (2015:83). Though he was warmly dressed D. J. noticed he was trembling. The same thoughts he had every day sped through his mind: “You’re useless. Your family would be better off without you” (2015:83). He thought about all the wasted years and that he had nothing to show for it. All he could think about was how little future he had now and how he had let his family down. His thoughts consumed him as he sat for three hours. He rose and stood on the curb. A loaded truck roared up the bridge; he imagined himself jumping in front of it. His heartbeat so hard it seemed likely to burst out of his chest. But he didn’t jump. He followed the highway back home. He told his wife; they cried; and he started seeing a therapist. In this regard, D. J.—although strapped for cash like all of the other laid-off workers—was one of the lucky ones to realize the extent of his disturbance, have support from a loving wife and daughter, and step forward to get the help he needed. In 1998—20 years ago now, Edward Luttwak (1999:46) warned of the world-wide advance of ‘turbo-capitalism’—capitalism that sped up change every generation or two (often inserting major technological change just every few years). Beginning, first, in the United States in the late 1970s and circling the globe thereafter, Luttwak foresaw little that would halt or slow its development. Richard Sennett (2006:83–150), reflecting on the same supercharged capitalism that Luttwak was observing, considered at some length the history of the specter of uselessness which has emerged periodically

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throughout the history of capitalism as improved efficiency has cast aside, at one time or another, legions of workers. As Sennett (2006:99) observed, the specter of uselessness poses, whenever conditions supporting it make further headway, a challenge to the welfare state since it has often proven difficult, when economic times are tough, for modern governments to reduce unemployment, whether by retraining or other means. For many in the modern workforce, Sennett (2006:101–103) contends that full unemployment is not the concern but structural underemployment, which makes these workers invisible and not deserving of consideration: they have become partially useless. In this way, Sennett (2006:29) arrives at the problem posed by modern society for the individual: how can one become valuable and useful in the eyes of others in a changing, dynamic era of globally shifting capitalism? Sennett’s (2006:126) answer, in part, is that in a large, contemporary organization the modern skill set required is the mobile capacity to solve problems quickly without going too deep into any one problem. Thus, the acquisition of any form of ‘craft skill’—like the manual skills Chen’s workers had developed over a decade—was antithetical to what the ‘new capitalism’ needed in many cases. Thus, it is the problem analyzer-fixer who can ‘move on’ and flexibly work on the next issue with a new ‘team’ that is sought. Acquisition of a skill that can easily become outmoded, or become technologically obsolete by robotic replacement, means that the persons themselves will become unessential to contemporary global capitalism’s project. When that happens, the self that has been fashioned to fulfill a specialized function, but prepared for nothing more, faces extinction. It is, at one and the same time, sufficient explanation for why Chen’s laid-off workers were finding it hard to adapt— to build a new working self—and an insufficient explanation since the social forces in the twenty-first century will continue to assail these former workers in ways that challenge their individual identities.

Self/Society The complexity of the interface between self and society cannot simply be reduced to a formula except by the somewhat dishonest means of narrowing one’s gaze. By looking through a periscope, and defining the issue to be addressed as only the principal issue visible within the scope’s purview, it is possible to offer sagacious sounding proposals for adjusting either society—or the self—or both. This is the most popular approach, regardless of the fact that retrospective examination of yesterday’s proposals generally reveals only how unsuccessful earlier visions and schemes turned out. Society and self—both

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moving objects—seldom hold still long enough for policy recommendations to adhere to their intended target and achieve the aim sought. Chen’s (2015) assiduous work examining the lives of laid-off automobile workers during the Great Recession is representative of so many well-intentioned, but seemingly futile and doomed, efforts in this regard. Chen (2015:7) begins his study with the intention of examining the lives of the ‘luckless’ men and women who form part of the long-term unemployed. By definition, their problem is being unemployed today, possibly unemployed tomorrow, and potentially unemployable at a decent wage for the remainder of their lives. Chen, who does a masterful job of laying out the antecedent causes that contribute to these worker’s dilemma, places himself in the unenviable position of trying to propose solutions to a problem that twenty-first century globalized capitalism creates without any appreciable influence on the manner in which contemporary capitalism operates nor any appreciable influence over the political institutions that, arguably, have control of the levers within society that might be activated to reign in the unbridled capital speed-up Chen reveals. It is a thankless job, yet Chen struggles through 36 dense—occasionally repetitive—pages to consider the possible alternatives. Chen’s understanding of the issues is nonpareil. As he summarizes, the economic crisis known as the Great Recession has receded but the essential facts underlying it have changed very little: capital is mobile and global; competition within markets is fierce; and the nature of both production and consumption can change rapidly resulting in capital speed-up. Various commentators suggested that the Great Recession could lead to political counter-movements and, of course, Occupy filled that expectation—for a brief time. Yet, nations have reverted to their former free-market postures so that capital regulation remains weak to nonexistent. Government budgets, strained by every form of spending, face demands from many quarters to reign in any expenditures but military ones; governments, by and large, have done little but let capital have its way (2015:226). Chen’s (2015:227) response is to explain that “[i]t does not have to be this way.” Acknowledging that the sort of powerfully influential and targeted policies that would be needed to address the future of long-term unemployment among workers in twenty-first century capitalism are unlikely to be adopted and sustained within the current U.S. political climate, Chen points to the need for “a gradual transformation of morality” built upon conscious organizing efforts and mass media exposure as the only viable approach (2015:228–229). Such a strategy would involve eradicating the “culture of judgment” that underlies Americans’ distinction between the deserving and the underserving

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by “downplaying the economic and material concerns that animate the meritocratic and egalitarian ideologies alike” (2015:229). Chen (2015:229) denominates this approach “grace morality” and urges it upon the nation because “it is the right thing to do.” Chen’s survey of the prospects for achieving such a popularly based, activist change to the United States is—three years after it was published—dispiriting to read. Chen laments, first of all, a grab bag full of missteps on both sides of the border that burdened, rather than supported, his workers: on the Canadian side, laid-off workers were too quickly funneled into the welfare system, undercutting their drive to re-enter the labor market; the division of policies into those for the deserving (unemployment) and undeserving (welfare) had a pernicious effect on mental health and motivation for those in both countries but especially so for Americans; and labor unions and government bureaucracies in both countries often failed to make good on their promises of help and their avowed principles of solidarity and support (2015:236–238). Chen is especially sensitive to the fact that jobs are a source of identity and, thus, financial help can only compensate for economic loss—not the loss of purpose and self-esteem that Chen discovered among his interviewees. So what does he favor? Chen (2015:239) favors education, in and of itself, and ‘retraining’ for marketable skills but quickly concedes that “a faulty educational infrastructure is just as much an impediment” to curing economic ills as a lack of education and training. Even with high quality educational and training opportunities, Chen further admits that rising inequality and the ongoing meritocratic race still make it unlikely his laid-off workers will be successful in obtaining the “limited number of good positions” that are available in the midst of globalized, intensified competition (2015:240). Thus, Chen acknowledges that there are “intractable kinds of challenges” that will need to be addressed by, among other things, providing tuition and income supports for the neediest workers, creating an alternative strategy to “college for all,” and “encouraging savings by less advantaged households” (2015:240–241). Yet, as he often does, Chen acknowledges that “efforts to scale up many promising approaches to bring quality education to all have not yet been successful” (2015:241). Chen (2015:242) bemoans the fact that we now live in a society that has attained a generous degree of affluence, noting that deprivation and success are relative under such conditions, and points out that a healthy, affluent economy can support all its citizens without financial strain. Yet, in this regard, Chen is easily 60 years too late: Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1976), originally released in 1958, set out that argument as effectively as it can perhaps be made. Chen’s contention that either a revived labor movement or, in the

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alternative, growing the demand for good jobs that less advantaged workers can obtain, perhaps through increased investment in infrastructure projects, are either political non-starters or simply have not produced the sustained impact on unemployment that Chen seeks. Indeed, only three years after the release of Chen’s book his optimistic hope for political leaders who won office based on platforms premised on reducing inequality to become the vanguard for progressive social renewal (he names Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio) sounds tinny and defeated (2015:245). In the end Chen opts for the hope that his proposal for the United States to embrace a ‘grace morality’ will prevail. Chen eschews continued emphasis on ‘deservingness’ and seeks cultural redirection that dispenses with idolizing (monetary) success so that grace generosity can constitute a politically effective ‘rallying cry’ (2015:248–252). To date, eighteen months into the Trump administration, this hope has not come to fruition and its prospects appear dim. Other theorists poised to address the same underlying structural problems posed by twenty-first century capitalism have offered a different range of answers to the problem of modern society and the self. Beck (2000:126–130) proposes ‘civil labour’ which may be summarized as various forms of civic engagement which can serve, alongside paid work, as “an alternative source of activity and identity” (2000:127) which will not only provide satisfaction but reinvigorate cohesive bonds that have arguably degenerated in many existing democracies. Beck’s proposal is premised on the idea that the “work society is drawing to a close” in the twenty-first century (2000:178). Yet, the work society will not disappear in an instant and Beck cautions that civil labor will need to be coordinated with and established within the existing social architecture. This means that it must be attractive enough to provide social recognition and status that were once derived from work, thereby creating a positive space for modern identity to experience itself. In Beck’s scheme, life will be acted out in the space between paid work and leisure and by this means overcome a division that has festered in society since the time of Marx. Civil labor is different than simply work in and for the community in Beck’s view as it “is voluntary, self-organized labour, where what should be done, and how it should be done, are in the hands of those who actually do it” (2000:127). It is, in this sense, a form of public interest entrepreneurship because the initiative is not governed by hierarchical institutions but rather by individual enterprise. In Beck’s view it should be supported by civic money but not become paid labor; some of the funds may come from monies created by the civil labor itself while other forms of compensation might be in the form of credits and social benefits conferred on the contributor who would need to be active in publicly useful voluntary ways.

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Conclusion The present chapter has juxtaposed the twenty-first century’s seeming demand for a flexible, adaptable self with the reality that constructed selves are often fashioned in a way that makes them less than fully adaptable for the challenges posed by global capitalism. One can argue that this dilemma is limited to the lower and working classes whose limited educational and cultural attainments make them more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the contemporary era than higher social classes. Indeed, 30 years ago Newman (1988) sensitively plumbed the depths of despair of middle Americans who were “falling from grace.” Five years later she continued her excavation of the shards of late modern capitalism through interviews with those who were experiencing ‘declining fortunes.’ (Newman 1993) In sum, the forces unleashed by modern U.S. capitalism hardly restrict themselves to specific countries, regions, or classes and narrowing the scope of inquiry in this manner would simply distort, not enhance, our understanding of the process of constructing self-identity in today’s United States. So long as neo-liberal government policies continue to support globalized capitalism’s ability to dictate the terms under which citizens in the United States live, only those Americans who can escape its maw will be able to experience the freedom to achieve an autonomous, self-chosen identity.

References Baumann, Zygmunt. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2000. The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chen, Victor Tan. 2015. Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1976. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Loeak, Laulani. 2018. The Benefits of Mental Health Courts. (Unpublished Senior Thesis, Department of Society and Social Justice, Saint Martin’s University, Lacey, WA, USA). Luttwak, Edward. 1999. Turbo-Capitalism. New York: HarperCollins. Messner, Steven F. and Richard Rosenfeld. 2007. Crime and the American Dream. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. McNamee, Stephen J. and Robert K. Miller, Jr. 2014. The Myth of Meritocracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Newman, Katherine S. 1988. Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: Free Press. Newman, Katherine S. 1993. Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream. New York: Basic Books.

194  Life Projects in the Twenty-First Century Orlosky, Brittany. 2017. Treatment Courts: A Review of Veterans’ Courts in the United States. (Unpublished Senior Thesis, Department of Society and Social Justice, Saint Martin’s University, Lacey, WA, USA). Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. 1993. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage Books. Rank, Mark Robert, Thomas A. Hirschl and Kirk A. Foster. 2014. Chasing the American Dream. New York: Oxford University Press. Sennett, Richard. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Conclusion

7

Individualism and Meritocracy: Prospects for Constructing Self Identity under the Conditions of Twenty-First Century Modernity

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult? —Herman Hesse, Demian (2000; Epigraph, Untitled Introduction, Original Publication Date 1919)

As all of the foregoing analyses tend to show, the conditions of social instability that have arisen most forcefully in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries provide social identity, or what in former times might be called character, little basis for coherence. This has been the shared thesis of those commentaries which argue that due to the uncertainty injected into modern society, the difficulty of finding one’s place has come to the fore. However, the issue is a broader one and raises the question of whether the former places to which individuals might seek to gain a foothold, and in which they could settle, have been eroding so fast that they cannot any longer serve as stable targets for one’s life project (Baumann 2009:5). As we have seen, the modernity theorists argue that one consequence is that (increasingly) modern identities have become “something local, fluid, unstable, and contingent, made up of momentary stabilities that are then instantly displaced” (Frosh and Baraitser

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2009:167). In this view, the self and all its claims to integrity and coherence (thus, an identity) are simply temporary, artificial constructions, fictions that are often retroactively generated to paper over the emptiness of an unstable, perhaps even nonexistent, core. Is a modern identity forced to become so flexibly free-floating it cannot cohere as a unified self at all? Certainly, it is apparent in the many field work studies that have served as sources of data for this volume that individual fates are dependent on, related to, and subject to unexpected, and often wrenching, disruption by the extrinsic circumstances people face in the twenty-first century United States. Unlike previous eras, the fact of social change, its pace, and the fact that local conditions have become increasingly tied to global conditions and events, has forced individuals to reckon with a more dynamic environment than earlier periods of our history required. (Luttwak 1999) Some of the modernity theorists have argued that this is a liberating process. Nigel Thrift (2005:1) begins his book on contemporary capitalism by pointing out that “For quite a few people, capitalism is not just hard graft. It is also fun. People get stuff from it—and not just commodities. Capitalism has a kind of crazy vitality.” However, those individuals who have been unable to anticipate the forces that will impact their future lives, and thus been unable to prepare themselves to meet the future, have found themselves often incapacitated and without the cultural capital that will permit them to successfully adapt to contemporary capitalism’s vitality, volatility, and speed. Their selves are fixed to a model of the past that is inconsistent with the demands of the future. Consequently, they suffer—like Chen’s (2015) workers—when the social conditions they have prepared themselves for, and served for many years, change. It is then that the relatively ‘fixed’ self they have relied on collides with the necessity, and demand, for adaptability to radically different, and unsettling, conditions imposed by distant social forces. This is particularly devastating in a capitalist economy because as Thrift (2005:3) observes, capitalism—which is often concerned with innovation—is a perpetually unfinished project, constantly mutating. Indeed, it has been characterized at times as a form of creative destruction, one followed by creatively inspired adaptation. For the individual, it is akin to surfing a wave—while there is a consistent pattern to waves, no two begin nor end alike, and the challenge of staying ‘in the curl’ requires skill, tenacity, and constant attention. Indeed, even that may not be enough to avoid a wipeout. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2009:15), writing about the consequences that the new form of individualization entails, suggest that what had heretofore been a series of social guidelines that encouraged development along the lines of what might be called a ‘normal biography’ has transitioned into something else: perhaps an ‘elective biography,’ or a ‘reflexive biography,’ or even

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a ‘do-it-yourself ’ biography. Yet, for people like Chen’s (2015) laid-off workers (or Bettie’s (2014) working class, Latina chicas) there is little that seems ‘elective’ about the process. It is true that modern American society requires individuals to ‘do-it-yourself ’ to a substantially greater degree than perhaps any other society in history. The U.S. cultural emphasis on individualism has made this true since the time of de Tocqueville (1961) as he and others like Riesman, Glazer, and Denney (1961), Henry (1965), and Slater (1990) have argued. The difference may be merely the degree and pace of change that the individual must respond to today, along with the absence of definitive guidelines for further constituting a renewed self and the shortage of help available for conceiving and executing such a project. After all is said and done, the life project of living out the self that one has created has an amorphous quality. This does not mean there are no boundaries whatsoever for the individual. It does mean that for any particular individual, the attribution of cause and effect, of choices made, of directions and detours taken or passed, can be driven by idiosyncratic factors of both self and experience. There are innumerable biographies of individuals, told in the obituary pages of the New York Times routinely, of how an accidental crossing of paths, a fateful meeting, or a spontaneous decision have led to an unexpected turn, life-long partnership, or unique destiny. Indeed, some have argued that randomness in life is a major contributing factor with respect to life directions and outcomes (Rank, Hirschl, and Foster (2014:133–135, 145–147). Retrospectively, we explain things to ourselves; even in circumstances where the ratio and mix of sweet good fortune, synergy, opportunity, skill, industry, knowledge, and encouragement are bathed in such muted shades of light and dark that their respective contributions are nearly impossible to parse. Still, we somehow make up a narrative that explains to ourselves where we have gone, what we have done, who we were yesterday, and who we will be tomorrow. One of the recently celebrated of these retrospective stories has been told by J. D. Vance in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. As Vance tells us, he was born to an Appalachian family from the coal country of southeastern Kentucky. His grandparents—affectionately called Mamaw and Papaw—moved north to Ohio in the 1940s. Dwight Yoakum, the well-known country singer, wrote his own story of getting out of ­southeastern Kentucky via U.S. 23, the road north, “Reading, Rightin’, Rt. 23” (2016:37), and this is the route Vance’s forebears followed. Although he grew up mainly in Middletown, Ohio, Vance tells of spending summers until he was 12 at his great-grandmother’s house in Jackson, Kentucky, where he had his hill country roots reinforced by his relations on the Blanton side of the family. Neither of his grandparents (who married as teenagers) finished more than an

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eighth-grade education and most of what Vance calls the ‘family tradition’ he describes as ‘far from child appropriate.’ It involved, by his explicit admission, a substantial amount of violence, drinking, cheated wives, neglected children, and vice in general (2016:18). In other words, the Blanton family would have been among those who Isenberg (2016:135–136) characterized as poor ‘white trash.’ Starting from this inauspicious lineage, things only got worse for J. D. Vance notes, “I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle” (2016:21). Abandoned by his biological father, who was his mother’s second husband, Bev married Bob Hamel, who became his stepdad. At about 9 years old, Vance reports that things began to ‘unravel’ (2016:69). The family moved away from Mamaw, Papaw, and Middletown to rural Preble County, Ohio. Vance’s mom and stepdad began to fight, insulting and screaming at one another—the way in which J. D. thought adults just spoke to each other by that time. His mother began a year-long affair with a local fireman and then, confronted by her husband, jumped into the family minivan and intentionally drove it into a telephone pole. Within a month after his mother’s car crash, she, J. D., and his older sister, Lindsey, moved back to Middletown. Over the next few years J. D. learned to navigate a long line of pseudo-father figures his mother brought into his life—Steve, with a mid-life crisis and earring to prove it; Chip, an alcoholic police officer, who fixated on J. D.’s own earring, a remnant of Steve; and Ken, who proposed to J. D.’s mom three days after they met and brought along his own two children. Bev, J. D.’s mother, had her own difficult times growing up. Papaw had become, over time, a violent drunk. Not to be outdone, Mamaw drank and battled him back. Eventually, they separated, although Papaw simply moved a few blocks away and during Vance’s childhood and adolescence still spent the better part of every day at Mamaw’s. Back in Middletown, Bev’s behavior continued to deteriorate. She became a party person, cycling through boyfriends, and dragging J. D. through the local mall screaming, an episode that got her arrested for domestic violence. When Papaw died unexpectedly sometime later, J. D.’s mother—who had begun taking prescription narcotics— became a semi-functioning addict under the added stress. J. D., who shifted back and forth between Mamaw’s house and his mother’s house at will, began drinking and missing school. He and his sister were often left on their own. When the school district threatened in a letter to summon his parents about his unexcused absences, J. D. and Lindsey merely laughed. During seventh grade, J. D. spent several months helping his mother go through rehab. As Vance summarizes, “For seven long years, I just wanted it [all] to stop” (2016:151). Fast forward: at the end of tenth grade, J. D. moves in full-time with Mamaw and manages to graduate from high school. While his SAT scores

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may have overcome his lackluster academic career and gained him entrance to college, J. D. chooses, instead, to join the Marines. There, he prospers, and when he is discharged he takes the plunge and enters Ohio State University on the GI Bill, graduating in one year and 11 months (2016:187). Emboldened, he applies to law school for the following year, is eventually admitted to Yale, receives what he describes as “nearly a full ride,” overcomes his hillbilly outsider-ness to a degree, graduates into a judicial clerkship with his girlfriend, marries her, writes a best-selling book, and now lives in San Francisco, where he is a “principal at a leading Silicon Valley investment firm” according to the book jacket blurb. Vance’s memoir tells an improbable tale of upward mobility and personal reinvention in a single generation, an identity restructuring so dramatic that it takes one’s breath away. It is, as Vance realizes, a transition spectacularly outside the statistical norm. J. D. attributes his personal evolution principally to the grit and stability that Papaw, and especially Mamaw, delivered to him at times when he desperately needed it, minimizing—for example—Yale Law School’s targeted and generous admission policies for applicants from under-privileged circumstances. Vance’s story is deceptive in the way that all personal narratives can be misleading: as the story of an individual who avoided the cultural snares that caught others, Vance’s narrative follows the success arc of many popular biographies by telling the life story of someone who ‘made it’ against all odds. Such stories do not discredit the far more common story of ordinary Americans whose fates are governed to a greater degree by family and class origin, cultural limitations, and adversity. As Callero (2017:15–17) perceptively comments, the U.S. ‘culture of individualism’ routinely produces individualist explanations for phenomena that are more correctly explained by theories that rely on cultural and external factors as the actual catalysts. Individualism, which we have touched upon intermittently throughout this volume, may be defined as a belief system that emphasizes the single person over the group, private life over the public sphere, and personal expression over broadly social experience. (Callero 2017:17) Individualist explanations favor certain select narratives and identify certain personal traits as among the important factors in offering an explanation for events and life outcomes. Individuals in the United States are assumed to act freely and the consequences of their acts are assumed to arise from their self-determination. This is part of the myth of individualism, a cultural ideology of substantial force in American life. Autonomy, independence, and self-reliance are highly valued in U.S. culture and it is assumed that persons who exhibit these qualities will influence favorably their eventual destiny. In retelling the story of one’s life, for

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example, it would not be uncommon for an American to emphasize these qualities and gloss over and/or minimize luck, gifts, support from others, and structural factors (like institutional racism and classism) that gave the person a ‘leg up.’ Thus, Vance’s memoir—like all autobiographies—is a selective retelling based on fallible memory and cultural predisposition. It would not be surprising therefore for one to unintentionally emphasize personal qualities over structural elements in a country like the United States where the personal and individual factors are ordinarily given cultural superiority. The emphasis on individualism in the culture can blind the memoirist to the greater influences that may well have—and likely did—arise from favorable structural and environmental factors. These are often the circumstantial factors that played a prominent role in producing the positive (or negative) outcomes in one’s life. Thus, the telling of the tale can obscure the actual forces that were more influential if one simply adopts an individualist style of narrative and focuses on it. This selective ‘enhancement effect’ can explain the benefit serious, objective biographies can offer over and against the autobiographical process which can elevate idiosyncratic or minor experiences disproportionately in relation to those events and factors which memory chooses to relegate to less importance. Persuasive story tellers can weave a narrative that sounds good without necessarily conveying accurately the weight or influence of each and every event within the context of time and place.

Failed Identity and the Efficacious Self As I write, recent events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018 have brought to the fore, once again, the story of a mass killing perpetrated by a lone, white, male shooter. The story is a familiar one—it is the story of a failed, diminished, anti-social self, depicted through official records and the eyes of those who knew the perpetrator. Fausett and Kovaleski (2018) lead their account of what became known about the Parkland shooter within days of the event by writing, “Nikolas Cruz had been causing trouble here as long as anyone can remember.” Specific indications of a troubled life stood out: “Neighbors said patrol cars were regularly in his mother’s driveway. More recently, Mr. Cruz, 19, had been expelled from his high school. He posted pictures of weapons and dead animals on social media.” A YouTube posting from last year, attributed to Mr. Cruz, stated he wanted to be “a professional school shooter.” Admittedly, Cruz’s difficulties apparently stemmed from more than just maladjustment. One neighbor described him as diagnosed as autistic; school records show he was placed

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in special education classes for a time. He exhibited emotional problems, including displays of an uncontrollable temper. School peers remember him randomly and menacingly shouting at them without provocation. Due to his behavioral outbursts Cruz had few friends and was ostracized. Regardless of the source of Nikolas Cruz’s problems, he ultimately became the sort of angry, alienated, lonely, and disconnected self that could dispassionately spew fatal violence at others. Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white male who entered an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, opened fire, and shot and killed nine parishioners was the son of an already broken home. Born three years after his parents divorced, their reconciliation did not last, and his father remarried when Dylann was 5 years old (Robles and Stewart 2015). As a young boy he attended at least seven schools in nine years, shuttling between Lexington, South Carolina, where he lived with his mother, and Columbia, South Carolina, where he lived with his father and new step-mother. After school he was often seen sitting alone on the curb outside his home. Financial problems apparently appeared after his parents’ divorce and by the time Dylann reached high school he was struggling with his classes. He attended ninth grade twice before dropping out of school. It was also about this time that his step-mother moved to divorce Dylann’s father, who she said had become abusive. After leaving school Roof came and went from jobs, began taking drugs and drinking alcohol, and came into contact with the police, with three encounters in the year prior to the shooting. Two of those encounters led to misdemeanor arrests. During this time period he also began viewing white supremacist web sites although friends, including those of mixed race, remember him as racially unbiased as a youth. Some friends described him only as quiet when he was a boy, but some said ‘strange.’ A website Mr. Roof created included photographs of him with patches from white-ruled African governments on his clothes and other photos showed him waving the Confederate battle flag. He also wore the number ‘88’ on his clothes, which has been identified as white supremacist code for ‘Heil Hitler.’ He also posted a 2,500word document that spoke out harshly about black crime, using incidents that appeared on the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, as evidence of a problem perceived as black in origin. The essay praised segregation, saying, “Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to the level of brute animals” (Robles and Stewart 2015), a view contrary to his attitudes many described when he was a young boy. Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, was a former enlistee in the U.S. Air Force when he killed more than two dozen parishioners at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November, 2017. Kelley enlisted in 2010 at

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New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base. Court records from Alamogordo, New Mexico, show that Kelley and his wife divorced in October, 2012. That same year, Kelley was court-martialed and sentenced to a year in military prison for domestic assault (Rosenberg, Hawkins, and Tate 2017). Air Force records show that Kelley “had repeatedly struck, kicked and choked his first wife beginning just months into their marriage,” and hit his stepson’s head with what the Air Force described as “a force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm” (Blinder, Phillips, and Oppel, Jr. 2017). During the period of his early confinement on the abuse charges, he reportedly escaped from a mental health clinic in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, where he was temporarily held. The police report stated that he had attempted to bring weapons onto the air base with the intention of carrying out death threats against persons in his chain of command (BBC News 2017; National Public Radio 2017). A longtime friend, Courtney Kleiber, posted on Facebook after Kelley’s shooting rampage, “I had always known there was something off about him. But he wasn’t always a ‘psychopath,’ ” (Blinder, Phillips, and Oppel, Jr. 2017). He apparently began a long downward trajectory in both his personal and work life after his divorce. He moved into a renovated barn behind his parents’ house in New Braunfels, Texas, and within the next two years was investigated twice for abusing women, once for sexual assault and rape in 2013 and a second time after his then girlfriend sent text messages to a friend saying she was being abused. Neither investigation resulted in further charges (Blinder, Phillips, and Oppel, Jr. 2017). In 2014 Kelley was separated from the Air Force on a bad conduct discharge which again appeared to accelerate further his adjustment problems. Mr. Kelley never held jobs for long. In June, 2017 Mr. Kelley was hired as an unarmed night security guard at Schlitterbahn, a water park in New Braunfels near his parents’ home. Less than six weeks later he was ‘terminated;’ a spokeswoman for the park stated to the New York Times. “He was not a good fit” (Blinder, Phillips, and Oppel, Jr. 2017). For a few months Kelley and his second wife apparently lived in a trailer in an RV park near Colorado Springs, Colorado. On Aug. 1, 2014, sheriff ’s deputies responded to a call regarding a man who was punching a dog at the RV park. A Sheriff ’s Deputy wrote in the incident report. “The suspect then started beating on the dog with both fists, punching it in the head and chest” (Rosenberg, Hawkins, and Tate 2017). Kelley was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty in the incident. In all, Kelley was very much like the other mass shooters—a white male who could not develop stable and successful work, school, or personal connections. To use the language of past eras, he ‘acted out’ by abusing animals and women, actions that further accentuated

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his outsider-ness, made him the subject of official inquiry, and likely contributed further to his resentment and generalized anger with society. The Parkland, Florida shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have reignited concerns about those with a history of adjustment problems but also those with diagnosed or undiagnosed patterns of mental illness. Adam Lanza, who killed his mother in her own bed and then traveled the short distance to Sandy Hook, Connecticut, elementary school to kill 20 children and six adults in a mass shooting in 2012, ignited an earlier call for restrictions on firearms accessible to those with significant mental health problems. Arguably, however, the difference between social adjustment problems leading to uncontrollable, generalized anger that results in mass killings and patterns of mental illness that produce a like outcome is merely a difference of degree and not kind. Lanza, for example, was the son of a broken marriage; his mother, Nancy, became the sole caregiver. Over the years Lanza’s efforts to complete special education classes and become part of a normal school environment were invariably unsuccessful, leading to his reclusive isolation at home. According to his medical history, which was obtained through subpoenas after his rampage, psychiatrists who had earlier examined Lanza made many detailed recommendations for treatment and drug therapies which went largely unheeded. His mother, rather than supporting treatment, tended to indulge her son’s mental disability and acquiesce to his own tendencies toward isolation, anger, and asocial behaviors (Cowan 2014). This pattern on his mother’s part persisted, according to the 114-page report prepared for court, until his adult life when Lanza exhibited “severe and deteriorating internalized mental health problems” (quoted in Cowan 2014). One psychiatrist, commenting on the report, emphasized that it was not simply that Lanza’s mental illness was a predisposing factor in the killing spree, but that his untreated mental illness may well have been the precipitator (Cowan 2014). Other psychiatric experts remarked on Lanza’s undiagnosed anorexia (he was six feet tall and weighed 112 pounds at the time of his death) as another indicator of his disconnection from social life generally and the ‘deeply troubled’ nature of his ‘bubblelike’ existence where he communicated with his mother only through email even though they lived in the same house (Cowan 2014; Salam 2017). His years of isolation, increasing near the time of the killings in 2012, permitted him to immerse himself in an online world of mass killing enthusiasts and develop anti-social fantasies about committing such acts (Cowan 2014). Indeed, four years before the killings, in 2008, a man reported a conversation with Lanza to the Newtown Police Department in which he described Lanza as saying that he had an assault weapon and planned to kill children at Sandy Hook Elementary School and his mother

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(Salam 2017). The man said he was told that the firearms in the house were owned by Lanza’s mother, and purchased legally, and there was nothing that could be done (Salam 2017). A woman who had communicated with Lanza online monthly for about two and one-half years prior to the December, 2012 murderous attack at the elementary school said she knew of Lanza’s obsession with mass killings and the detailed spreadsheet he was developing to document those events. Although the woman said she knew Lanza led an uncomfortable home life and had little contact with society, she stated she had no indication of any violent plans and had never met him. Ultimately, Lanza’s intense social isolation, his limited pro-social skills, his anti-social online absorption, and his access to firearms converged in a manner not unlike the range of social maladjustments that possessed the other young, white, isolated mass shooters who embraced the will to kill as a solution to the problems of the self each faced. While “problems in living” (Szasz 1961) such as these young men faced cannot be attributed principally to the social conditions created by “capital speed-up,” globalization, and capitalism, it is undeniable that social instability typically does little to ameliorate or reduce personal instability. While Nikolas Cruz, Dylann Roof, Devin Patrick Kelley, Adam Lanza, and many another mass shooter in the last 15 years in the United States have many differences, they share—along with many other troubled youth and adults—a number of obvious similarities as well: family and domestic difficulties, academic and other problems in school, drug and alcohol use, prior encounters with the police, social isolation, a lack of stable, positive relationships generally, positive attitudes toward crime, mental health problems, lack of empathy, self-centeredness, and a documented history of social maladjustment in everyday institutions--among them. Criminologists have long known that persons who share personal histories, behaviors, and qualities like these are much more likely than others to commit certain types of crimes that are driven by anti-social attitudes, lack of self-control, and emotional states like anger and revenge (Lilly, Cullen, and Ball 2015:367–368, 441–442, 444–447). The real question for our society is what, if anything, we can or will do for those who are among the underclass, the dispossessed, the dysfunctional, and the uncontrollable? As some have been willing to acknowledge, the United States is “also a society that frequently turns its back on those who do not succeed” (Rank, Hirschl, and Foster 2014:155). Or, as Isenberg (2016:320) phrases it, Politicians have been willfully blind to many social problems. Pretending that America has grown rich as a largely classless society is bad

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history to say the least. . . . Class separation is and always has been at the center of our political debates, despite every attempt to hide social reality with deceptive rhetoric. While Isenberg’s remarks are directed specifically at the dilemma the subjects of her book face, the “Waste People, Offscourings, Lubbers, Bogtrotters, Rascals, Rubbish, . . ., Crackers, White Trash, Rednecks, Trailer Trash, [and] Swamp People” (2016:320), her real point is directed at the rest of us: “They are not who we are” (2016:321). However, her final thought revises that common, and erroneous, estimation: “But they are who we are . . . whether we like it or not” (2016:321). Is there a political solution? A social solution? An app or a pill for that?

Over-coming the Self-Identity Problem More to the point for our inquiry, however, is the essence and quality of these outsiders’ very personhood. In effect, these young men share a dysfunctional, ineffective self—a failed ability to assert and establish a social identity that in a sense ‘works’ to give them a place, provide them a persona, integrate them as an individual into some affirmative human community in today’s diverse and divided United States. They lack, to a more or less degree, what has been called a broad repertoire of foundational pro-social skills whose absence limits the self from developing a full range of positive human traits. The self, restricted and stunted, becomes dysfunctional for the requirements of everyday social life while at the same time acquiring an intense, propulsive quality that projects it in a narrow, unrestrained, anti-social direction. These deviant versions of the self in our contemporary society need ‘retraining’ for proper functioning no less than Chen’s (2015) laid-off, despondent, and suicidal auto and parts workers. Like those workers, they need the support, guidance, and programs that might help these isolated, angry, white, young, outsiders; yet existing programs seem insufficient, a maze-like patchwork, that is neither practically available nor motivationally accessible to these individuals’ damaged, impaired selves. Thus, these disparate isolated selves share not only ‘problems in living’ (to borrow and re-purpose Thomas Szasz’s (1961) evocative phrase) but equally share the experience of a social system that is unprepared to address their respective dilemmas. Traditional institutions in the United States—the family, schools, churches, hospitals, government, even the prisons—are unsuited for the tasks of reorienting and re-socializing the variously defective selves that no longer (or never did) have any place in American

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society. Unfortunately, the resources that might address this task are dispersed elsewhere—to the support of dubious interventions into foreign conflicts and to sustaining the resplendent pleasures of U.S. society’s self-absorbed, affluent lifestyles, among others. Having slipped to the margins—whether through the accelerated speed-up of the global capitalist economy, the inadequacies of our cultural institutions, or the neglect of families, or all three—individuals in the contemporary United States must, in the words of the well-worn cliché, sink or swim on their own. The belief that reformed ‘social policy’ for any or all of these dysfunctional selves can be effectively designed and executed appears, on the historical record, illusory. Constructing the self, and navigating contemporary society in the United States, remains a lonely quest, to be pursued successfully or not alone, since the dominant ideologies of individualism and meritocracy remain firmly rooted in place. Ultimately, individualism, meritocracy, and social structure coalesce in the United States to condemn individuals to the ravages of socially class-based competitiveness that characterize globalized modernism.

Meritocracy and Individualism As Stephen McNamee and Robert Miller, Jr. (2014:217) observe, “Americans desperately want to believe in the fairness of the [meritocratic] system and its ability to deliver on its promises.” Yet, as these authors have gone on to ably demonstrate, numerous non-merit factors and factors that are the antithesis of merit, such as discrimination along many dimensions, influence inordinately life outcomes and where one ends up in the U.S. socio-economic system (2014). As Isenberg (2016:90–91) and Jillson (2004) have thoroughly documented, measures to maintain class status and exclude the poor from accessing social resources and benefits are as old as the nation. As I have argued throughout this book, since one can only construct one’s self from where one is located in the social order, the various resource factors available to any individual matter a great deal. Thus, those who are blessed with substantial material resources, family support, social capital, and cultural capital can control to a somewhat greater degree who they wish to become and who they are as compared to those with lesser command of valuable material, social, and personal resources (Baumann 2011). The fact that belief in meritocracy acts as a blinder to the extent to which non-merit factors in our society influence outcomes means that both those who have ‘made it’ in our society and, quite often, those who have not made it, share the belief that those who have garnered the rewards our society has to offer deserve them.

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This belief has a tendency to isolate Americans in their own self-absorption and immunize them from engaging in any social efforts to change the system, alleviate suffering, forge bonds with others, or simply express compassion for the less fortunate. In the context of meritocratic belief, one is fated to achieve the results one deserves and become the person the system allows without recourse to any broader aspiration to define the self in terms not contemplated within position allocations available at any given historical moment. While certainly most limiting on the lives of the poor, the perceived intractability of the various sub-systems and institutions within the United States is hardly less constraining for individuals from the higher classes, whose own diminished selves may arise from the lack of vision, imagination, and courage engendered by their experiences as much as, or likely more than, from a shortage of resources. Moreover, meritocracy encourages the competitive culture of the United States, setting people at odds with one another regardless of the stakes. As Slater (1990:10) recognized nearly 50 years ago, a loss of a sense of self and the absence of a secure sense of one’s place vis-à-vis other people and institutions creates “a jungle of competing egos, each trying to create a place.” Likewise, the ideology of individualism that constitutes such an influential tenet of American culture, separately and collaterally acts to undercut social bonds between Americans, diminish cooperation and collaboration, and impoverish the self. The self-focus that is one evident outcome of a life lived within the competitive meritocracy is bolstered and enhanced in its self-regarding isolation as a result of the ideology of individualism. Consequently, self-focus, from any mix of factors, diminishes an individual’s ability to develop a self that emphasizes sharing, concern for others, generosity, common enterprise, helping behavior, nurturance, and social bonds. Vulnerability, spontaneity, silliness, pain, and tears are suppressed because they contribute nothing to economic growth and disrupt the otherwise calm, orderly but repressed, routine functioning of the everyday institutions that dominate the twenty-first century United States. The character structure of Americans has been imperceptibly, but incrementally, adapted to minimize the intrusion of these human qualities so that American society can trundle on, unobstructed. The absence of a truly independent self, a thing so rare it threatens to become extinct in many quarters, leads merely to perpetuation of the status quo. This is perhaps the most accurate statement of the manner in which society ‘reproduces’ itself. Reproducibility can explain many of the social trends and events that have been the subject of this volume, whether this concluding chapter or earlier sections. Mass shootings, for example, need to be absorbed quickly and

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anesthetized so that a return to routine can be quickly reasserted; such killings cannot, in the normal course of events, be permitted to impede progress, growth, or the American optimism that sustains conventional society. After suitable (but abbreviated) mourning, a self-identity more accommodating to the rational American character ideally shaped for the everyday American business of family, church, school, politics, and especially the marketplace must then resume forthwith, undisturbed. The collective youth movement that has arisen in the two months since the Parkland shooting threatens to derail the standard American playbook for these tragedies. I predict, however, that while superficial changes may well be incorporated into current laws, the political outcome will likely be less change rather than more change with respect to firearms regulation. The behemoth that is American society will, instead, simply plod along.

Social Structure and Values The ideologies of meritocracy and individualism are not free-floating themes unattached to the structure of our society. Indeed, character is principally formed from an individual’s interaction with the structures of his or her society, the authority figures who inhabit those structures, as well as the symbolic representations (that is, the cultural manifestations) that the structures embody and then reflect back. Structuralism—a theoretical and analytical approach that focuses on those institutional and cultural factors emphasizing collective, rather than individual, factors—is uncommonly understood, and less commonly embraced, by many Americans. Yet, it is an important theoretical direction to consider as societies differ considerably in the complexity of the intersection between their structure and their culture. Milner (1994), for example, has sketched the inordinately complex associations of Hindu culture that buttress and inhabit Indian institutions and form the basis for its system of castes. The density of the interlocking arrangement of ranked positions, religious justifications, and cultural obligations Milner (1994) describes create a tight web of overlapping symbolic mutuality—that is, a shared culture— that permits Indian society to function while still allotting positions (and their accompanying perquisites) on a broadly unequal basis. To make such an observation about India’s Hindu society and culture is not a form of admiration; rather, it is a concrete acknowledgement of the enveloping nature of a culturally dense social structure so elaborate and all-encompassing that individuals born into its fabric of highly organized symbols find themselves immersed in a skein of centuries’ old associations. The dense web of Indian Hindu culture

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is configured so intricately as to offer numerous discretely defined roles, each supported by self-referencing economic, social, religious, and nationalist justifications. The weight of these collective bonds is, of course, both insulating and confining but unlike the open-ended American invitation to become whatever one wants in life, it is not as often an invitation to busy oneself with questions of identity, until, perhaps, one leaves the sub-­continent and its Hindu culture, as in the case of Indian-Americans emigrating to the United States. (See, for example, Chakravorty, Kapur, and Singh 2017, Chapter 4; Dhingra 2012.) As Milner (1994:22–28, 53–54) argues, in the Hindu caste system there is a separation between status and power, a feature that perhaps strengthens both but, most importantly, clarifies class relations. Those with status may possess a particular form of social power but it cannot be converted into economic or political power quickly or easily as in some other systems. As Milner (1994:53) points out, “Lower caste groups know that even poor Brahmans have a kind of power they do not.” This relative separation of status from economic power and political power is important for Indian society because the ‘power sharing’ among different elements of the population meshes with other features of the socio-religious caste system to favor a tendency toward social stability. A fundamental religious idea that plays a role here is dharma. The word enfolds both the notion of the universal laws that govern the regular movements of the cosmos and the rules that control human conduct (1994:43–44). Dharma has become the principal concept of modern day Hinduism whose rules embody what a Brahman’s proper conduct of life should entail. Since Brahmans hold a high status, as householders, their lives, if lived consistent with the notion of proper action, may elevate their status in the next life, their earthly status (and, hence, status power), and their eternal prospects through reincarnation. Indeed, Brahman values mesh delicately but intimately with Hindu theology to imbue Indian society with a favored caste that seeks to maintain, sustain, and support the core patterns of Indian life; hence, their positive impact on social stability (1994:55–56). This has all led to the Brahmans’ centrality within Indian culture over a period of nearly a thousand years. Often dominant in cultural and religious matters, Brahmans have resisted the temptation to gain wealth or political power for their own sake or to permit those who have such power to gain status as a Brahman (1994:56). This, too, contributes to the separation of status power from economic power or political power and leads to one of the fundamental misunderstandings of Indian society for westerners and Americans: while status power has been consistently identified with caste rank for hundreds if not a thousand years, there can be—and have been—considerable historical

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shifts among castes in terms of economic or political power although, naturally, some castes have seen more economic or political mobility than others (1994:57). Since status is largely an in-expansive resource—because a gain in relative status is necessarily someone else’s loss of relative status—Hinduism’s concern with matters of ritual purity and impurity can then be understood as erecting (and maintaining) caste boundaries (1994:58–62). Brahmans, and both lower and higher castes, maintain their position vis-à-vis either conformity or association, or some combination of both. For Brahmans, who derive much of their status from adhering to elaborate religious-based ritual performances related to purity/impurity and norms of proper conduct, conformity is a necessary strategy. The rituals are highly elaborate practices that make it nearly impossible for outsiders to learn and adopt them (1994:69). The result is an intricately balanced mechanism for maintaining an independent source of social status from those with economic and political power, on the one hand, and those without any appreciable claims to social status, economic resources, and political power (such as the Untouchables) on the other. As Milner acknowledges (1994:69), there is a sense of genius to the Brahmans’ effective management of high status—neither too worldly nor too ascetic. As householders they are not expected to lead the lives of monks or priests; as staunch upholders of Hindu theory and religious practices, they are immune from criticism by other castes whose grounds for status are almost invariably non-spiritual and worldly. As an examination of the Indian Hindu-based caste system makes clear, boundary maintenance and exclusivity are crucial concerns to Indian Hindu culture. This means that a good deal of effort and investment is directed at maintaining caste boundaries; it is the explanation for both the stability and the resistance to change (both sides of the same coin) that are evident in Indian society. Since status is so important, numerous protocols for controlling interactions between status groups have arisen and are consciously honored. Many of these practices are evident in our own society; it is simply that in Indian society the boundaries are much more rigid and the attention to enforcing the boundaries much more prominent. For example, as Milner (1994:60) observes, most societies manage eating, mating, and related intimate expressive relations between groups yet the restrictions imposed on these practices in Indian society are more carefully defined and strictly followed. As one example, in village India meals are shared only with those of one’s own caste and, perhaps, only with those of a distinguishable sub-caste or only with closely related family members. This is because engagement in eating together is a sign of intimacy and approval; it is an act that effectively recognizes the other as warranting social inclusion; it is a sign that one deserves to be associated with and implies social equality as well as personal

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approval. In this regard it is simply one of a number of practices that clearly demarcate caste boundaries or, in the case of the United States, class boundaries. Thus, those of higher castes are often unwilling to accept food, water, and expressive familiarity from those of lower castes for to associate in this way would presumably lower their status (and contribute to raising those from the lower caste) (1994:61). Likewise, certain higher castes do no manual labor (1994:58), just as many higher class members in the United States do not. Likewise, non-elites in the Indian caste system take many more orders than they issue whereas elites will give more commands, and express more wishes that have the effect of commands, toward non-elites, who are expected to follow and fulfill their upward duty (1994:66). Again, the analogy to the United States class system is apparent. At the same time, alliances across classes are essential to maintaining the social system. Thus, there are elaborate social rules for gift giving, forms that reaffirm one’s place as a subordinate giving to a superior or a superior giving to a subordinate. While such a system is obviously and inherently unfair, since those in lower castes have very little likelihood of ascending to a higher caste, the security the system offers is reassuring in that everyone is allotted a distinct place; everyone’s role is relatively certain; and negative contingencies are substantially reduced: one is seldom ‘fired’ in such a system. Rather, the social degradation is already built into the system and, since it is so rigid, individual expectations of upward status mobility, economic mobility, or elevation in authority are controlled. One doesn’t need to wonder who one will become, or who one is, because the social structure has provided an answer, and one that is firmly supported by the intersection of all society’s levers— social, familial, cultural economic, religious, and political. Ultimately, this is perhaps the best explanation of why identity (rather than character) has become a lonely quest for the twenty-first century American: the national culture has fragmented and become disconnected from the structural framework to such an extent that individuals are severed from connections that once held meaning and purpose. In Indian society, economic relations, political relations, and status relations are so intricately woven with each other and with widely shared religious doctrine that each realm buttresses the other. As Milner (1994:19) observes, “The separate identities formed through [the processes of] separation and combination do not exist in a vacuum isolated from one another, but are sustained by ongoing ties and relationships.” American society, driven by its extreme commitment to individualism, doesn’t offer such identity protection. Here, one must forge one’s own path, make one’s own way, construct one’s own identity with less-thanfixed boundaries as a guide.

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This brief discussion of Status and Sacredness (1994) does the intricacy and comprehensives of Milner’s work little justice, but it does make it possible to use his understanding of Indian Hindu culture to enhance our own understanding of American society today and the prospects our culture possesses for change. The nub of Milner’s analysis suggests that where status is held to be a key resource for self-identity, there will be a tendency to proliferate and expand the range and intricate inter-development of norms and rituals. Socially, this process is implicitly undertaken to exclude outsiders by making entry into the inner circle more difficult and, to a certain extent, to differentiate insiders according to further criteria amenable to sub-ranking, thereby reinforcing social control over those within the status group (1994:137). The norms and rituals of Indian Hindu society are apt illustrations of the manner in which various codes and signs, developed over centuries, implicitly symbolize the status group’s principal concerns and demarcate the boundary between those who know, and belong, and those who know to a lesser extent but most importantly know they cannot belong. Since a status group like the Brahmans has invested substantial energy and resources in attaining and then maintaining status over centuries, there is substantial resistance to giving up such hard-earned rank. This unspoken but ardent desire to keep one’s exalted place in society, and all of the perquisites that go with it, is the single most important feature of our own social order and the thousands of exegetical analyses that have been offered regarding American cultural values. As the Indian Hindu cultural order demonstrates, this desire to maintain the status quo leads cyclically back to further elaboration of norms and rituals that neither those of lower nor higher status can easily reproduce, making the Brahmans’ position in society secure. Briefly, as I will show, a focus on status and social structure in twenty-first century American society explains why the predatory nature of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism will likely continue unabated and the search for selfhood that is not disfigured by global capitalism’s ravages will remain an elusive quest.

The Sociological Solution Machine American society is replete with proposals to alleviate our various social ills. McNamee and Miller (2014:217–222), having quashed the notion that the United States is a meritocracy, offer a raft of “individual coping strategies” largely aimed at the middle classes. Because inequality—and particularly the unequal share received by the middle class—is conceived as “the problem,”— the strategies are exclusively aimed at either making more income or reducing

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expenditures (i.e., relying on multiple family wage earners; having fewer children; working more hours; delaying retirement; and going into debt). Astute sociologists that they are, however, McNamee and Miller (2014:222–238) acknowledge that individual strategies, regardless of how well executed, will not reduce socially structured inequality itself, especially the substantial gaps in wealth and power that have been emerging in U.S. society in recent years. Thus, they come forward, in a section entitled “What Can Be Done,” with a series of broad policy initiatives to forge structural changes that would lead to fairer outcomes. These proposal include: a more heavily progressive system of taxation, whether on income, or wealth, or both; more centralized funding and standards of quality for public schools thereby leveling educational opportunities; extension of publicly supported, fully free education beyond the high school level; increased efforts, supported by increased resources, to reduce discrimination further; increased use of ‘asset building’ policies to equalize capital accumulation, especially between African Americans and white Americans; reversing the decades long decline in union membership and fostering worker controlled and owned businesses; and sustaining the political climate that has fostered social reform movements, such as Occupy, in recent years. Finally, McNamee and Miller suggest that, “Corporations should be reformed in such a way to make them more publically accountable and more socially responsible.” However, no sooner have McNamee and Miller (2014:238) identified their set of proposed solutions to achieving equality of opportunity than they acknowledge that “true equality of opportunity is highly unlikely.” Moreover, they offer no proposals as to how any of their suggestions can be politically engineered. Robert Putnam (2015), too, is concerned with the rising inequality gap, unequal access to social and economic opportunity, and the slowing—if not stagnation—of upward mobility for today’s youth. Putnam’s concern acknowledges that prior generations benefitted from family and community support structures that appear to have become substantially less available to those growing up now in modest or lower-income circumstances (2015:229). For Putnam, the effect on youthful lives, and who or what a person can become, is foremost. As he states it, “Poor kids . . . are less prepared . . . to develop their God given talents as fully as rich kids” (2015:230). Putnam’s profiles of those subjects from less privileged backgrounds in his book identify ‘skills mismatch’ as critical for these youth because of the substantial gap it creates between what lower-income youth can do and the qualities and skills employers seek in workers (2015:231). Putnam, much like McNamee and Miller (2014), conceives of the nature of the problem, and hence the solutions, as essentially economic and recommends policy initiatives that are

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principally directed at increasing educational and economic opportunity for those who are disadvantaged. To be fair, however, Putnam is also concerned about political participation and the future of democracy. He reports that those from less privileged backgrounds are less likely to believe they can influence government, more detached from civic participation of all kinds, but acknowledges that Americans from all walks of life are increasingly estranged from politics and government in the United States (2015:235–240). Intriguingly, Putnam discusses his proposals for action in a section titled much like McNamee and Miller’s (and identical to the title of Lenin’s (1902) pamphlet analyzing the need for change in Russia), “What Is to Be Done?” Putnam’s “menu of complementary approaches” (2015:242) include changing “childbearing from default to childbearing by design” for lower-income youth (since revival of the working-class family has been largely unsuccessful); giving small amounts of cash to poor families to support better educational completion; efforts to minimize the use of incarceration for nonviolent crime; allowing more flexibility in the workplace for working parents, especially during a child’s first year; subsidizing more mixed-income housing to reduce residential segregation along class, racial, and economic lines thereby equalizing further educational experiences through high school; extending school hours and placing social and health services in schools, especially those serving poor children; increased attention and funding to community colleges to improve student services, encourage better connections to local job markets and four-year schools, and lower the current dropout rates; and, in the absence of neighborhoods and natural communities present in the United States of today, to encourage volunteerism across community and class limes targeted toward mentoring lower-income children (2015:242–261). Nearly all of Putnam’s proposals include either an explicit call for more public funding, or an implicit, quietly glossed need for funding support. With reference to the resources issue, the best that Putnam (2015:243) offers is that, “Our civic leaders will need to reach across boundaries of party and ideology if we are to offer more opportunity to all our children.” Putnam (2015:243, 260) who also helpfully suggests “[I]t will take hard work” to turn his ‘menu’ of suggestions into a “plan of action,” urgently recommends, “we should start now.” No plan of action, however, appears to be forthcoming, although Putnam has many suggestions for other people to do something. (In discussing mentoring, for example, he points out that “churches are just scratching the surface of their possible contribution [in this regard]” 2015:239). As I discussed earlier in Chapter 6, Victor Chen (2015:236) is opposed to the “meritocratic race” and has his own set of policy prescriptions to set things right. Chen’s proposals are not as sweeping (except in one respect)

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as those recommended by McNamee and Miller (2014) or Putnam (2015) because Chen is only trying to address the circumstances of those who are laid off, and consequently often unemployed, like his auto and part workers. While some of his suggestions address the loss of identity laid-off workers face, most of the proposals once again address economic conditions arising from job loss and, to a lesser extent, the need for more ‘good jobs’ and/or the retraining necessary for laid-off workers to obtain good jobs. More ambitious than either McNamee and Miller (2014) or Putnam (2015) in one respect, Chen calls for a grace morality that will simply wash away meritocracy and eliminate from consideration the “deservingness/non-deservingness” nature of those ameliorative systems in the United States (Unemployment/Welfare/ Workfare) designed to mitigate harsh economic circumstances. Here, however, we must veer back in the direction of Milner’s (1994) careful analysis of Indian society and the means of attaining and maintaining status to really understand what is going on. McNamee and Miller, Putnam, Chen, and many, if not most, other American sociologists writing about American society find themselves called upon to ritually offer up proposed solutions as surely as Brahmans offer up ritual prayers, called mantras, to ancient Vedic goddesses or employ efforts to achieve karma (that is, correct behavior in their daily lives).Thus, just as in the case of Brahmans, it is necessary for these authors to maintain their own standing in the status circle they travel within (liberal American intellectuals affiliated with higher education institutions). To relinquish the ritualized aspects of one’s academic performance by failing to list a series of proposed liberal solutions to the problem they have uncovered would act to undercut these writers’ status; such a lapse would be analogous to an Indian Brahman’s failure to conform to the ritualized norms they are called upon to maintain. Indeed, one can theoretically assert with substantial credibility that claims for status legitimacy within American academic sociology and comparable claims within the Indian cultural web are relatively inter-changeable in functional terms: they preserve the actor’s class status while having virtually no effect other than status and class reproduction. There are special requirements in each instance, however, as Milner (1994) elaborates at length with respect to Indian Brahmins. Generally, the ritual prayer liberal American sociologists must offer also needs to conform to its own cultural ideal: to be accepted into the pantheon of the American sociological inner circle one must embrace, and proclaim, optimistic support for some set of propositions that hold the hope, however modest in actuality, for alleviating the problem(s) one identifies. Yet, there is no complementary requirement that one who offers a specific plan of action should actually enter the political arena oneself in an effort to advocate for, or execute, one’s

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proposals. Rather, it is enough to talk about what ‘should be done’ by the non-specific ‘we’ and leave it at that. The crucial social mechanism of association will then take over, leading to the same result as in Indian Hindi culture: social inclusiveness will issue forth so long as the ‘optimism norm’ is honored. (Since shared optimism about the success that deployment of liberal social programs is a required element of this ritual prayer, naysayers and doomsayers are simply not welcome. Status exclusion is the key to maintaining a status system, as Milner (1994) describes, and therefore inclusiveness can only go so far. One must, perforce, draw the line somewhere!) Only after many years, when criticism is filtered through, and mediated by, the professional channels of communication maintained by the official arbiters of mainstream American sociology, will the least hint of criticism be permitted. In the interim, professional influence will be garnered principally by a favorable citation in a peer’s work--although a simple recitation, absent any positive recommendation, may suffice. (Although wrong in almost every other respect, the political right’s arguments against political correctness in the United States do carry a certain weight with respect to the power of associative group thinking.) In short, offering proposed solutions is simply part of the scholarly elaboration that makes theoretical explanation legitimate and exclusive. Reserving book length academic projects for the initiated and status approved thus maintains the status boundaries, which has the further effect of discouraging parvenus and free riders of all description. Yet, like all social boundary markers, the practice has the effect of excluding innovators, too, and risks the possibility of making an established status group irrelevant. Like the Brahmans, whose religious rituals and related norms must be sufficiently complex and esoteric that outsiders to the Brahman caste within Indian society cannot copy and adapt them for their own status aspirations, American academics must safeguard the margins of their common enterprise by erecting detailed programs of (often progressive) policy initiatives. The mechanism is especially important as an example of what Milner (1994:37) terms editing: removing from sight whenever possible embarrassing features of reality as, in this case, the fact that sociologists make a good (or in some instances, very good) living by offering analyses that produce plans for others to implement which, in the great majority of instances, are never taken up. Fortunately, as Milner (1994:38) also observes, habituation eases the process for status group members, reducing stress and leading to eventual institutionalization: it is just something one must do, perhaps akin to assessment in higher education circles. American sociologists, knowing full well the limited range of their influence, can rest easily while their recommendations are studiously ignored. Thus, it is the presence of these analyses and programmatic recommendations

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that is crucial, and the only effect necessary is the positive effect on academic peers who see the writer has honored the tradition. Whether influential or not, indeed whether anything is accomplished or even attempted, proposed solutions have become de rigueur. They satisfy the group’s status requirements, which seems to be all that is required of them.

Disappearing Public Cultural Space The dilemma that arises from the intersection of cultural traditions, ­behavioral norms, and social structure presents the individual a problem in American society which seems only to change the more it remains the same. The marginalized in a society, concerned with identity long before it became a mainstream issue, often developed the most clear-eyed view of the problem. James Baldwin, who lived at a time when other Americans often conceived of Baldwin as having two strikes against him (he was African ­American and homo­sexual), wrote his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, as a semi-autobiographical story of a young African American boy growing up in Harlem. As Baldwin told the New York Times (Bennetts 1985) when a film version of the novel was produced for television by PBS in 1985, “It’s the me that was me once.” When he wrote his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, the story of a young, white, American, David, who falls in love with an Italian young man working as a bartender in a bohemian Parisian quarter while his fiancée travels in Spain, Baldwin’s publisher, Knopf, expressed concern. All the characters were white and the central tension of the novel revolved around David’s homosexual love affair. Knopf, having experienced success with Go Tell It on the Mountain, wanted only to extend the franchise by issuing another novel about African Americans in Harlem so that Baldwin would not lose his audience (Tȯibin 2016:ix). Knopf conceived of Baldwin’s identity as a ‘Negro writer,’ and ultimately declined to publish Giovanni’s Room. David, the white American protagonist, torn between different parts of his being, perhaps another version of Baldwin, or perhaps just an identity Baldwin could imagine, would need to live elsewhere on the page. (Dial Press picked up the option in the United States and Michael Joseph in the UK. Tȯibin 2016:ix.) In essence, forming a socially effective self that somehow ‘works’ seems as elusive in fiction—or at least in publishing—as in life. Moreover, seemingly as in life, an identity once formed can be rather difficult to shed, although Baldwin’s entire life can in some respects be seen as a constant refashioning of identity. Morris (2016), too, writes of the marginalized experience of selfhood but in a uniquely modernist way. As she recounts, she and her peers from second

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generation lesbian feminism achieved the goals they sought—antidiscrimination laws, same sex marriage, openly lesbian public figures—but they are now facing collective extinction within the broader culture of a revised twenty-first century inclusiveness that has rearranged lesbianism’s cultural space. Indeed, Morris’s concerns include not only the loss of cultural space but the decline in physical spaces exclusively dedicated to supporting womanist values, such as women’s bookstores, music festivals, bars, and coffee houses (2016:2, 11). Her point—generally—is that flourishing selfhood is dependent on available cultural and physical spaces, spaces where the neglected, abandoned, suppressed, or simply obsolete self can inhabit. Now, for her, the nearly disappearing, distinctively lesbian self, supported once by positive cultural and physical spaces, although socially restricted ones, struggles to find comparable places to exist. What, possibly, can texts as different as these offer us more generally about self and society? Perhaps just this: as we move further into the twenty-first century, the political and racial divisions in our country, the social identity communities and identity politics, and the capital speed-up of globalized capitalism all threaten to eclipse the spaces in which uniquely individual identity can flower. Human capacities and experiences not adaptable to the prevailing regime—whether political, social, or economic—wither, and may expire. Thus, those human qualities that are made to appear as though they serve no purpose for existing political and economic institutions—among them solitude, generosity, compassion, helping behavior, nurturance, the performance of necessary, but unglamorous, specialized roles, the spontaneous generation of harmless obscure purposes and mysterious designs—teeter on the precipice, about to fall, for the cultural space is not there to support them. All are non-quantifiable, and therefore vaguely suspect in the contemporary United States, and hence are relegated to a private sphere that is also, like yesterday’s news headlines, on the cusp of disappearing. Rather, everywhere the self is under threat, assailed by vocal demands from every quarter. The reasons for this set of circumstances are clear—and have been clear for some time. Philip Slater (1990:93), writing decades earlier, spelled the reasons out succinctly: Yet the structure of our society—the massive inequalities, overwhelming corporate power, and the chronic exploitation of the consumer by professions, industry, and government—has not changed. It will take more than [momentary] enthusiasm to bring that about. This acknowledgement by Slater is not merely a historical fact that can be discounted, nor a contemporary one that can continue to be ignored. Rather, it is the wellspring of the current dilemma because our national failure to

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successfully grapple with it makes all other proposed efforts ineffectual. Slater (1990:95, 101, 107) knew this too: culture and structure are interrelated in a way that requires coordinated, wholesale realignment of the two realms simultaneously in order to constitute actual ‘social change;’ tinkering at the margins simply allows the status quo to swallow up and devour any new proscription for social policy that would alleviate the specific social ill targeted. The upshot, as Slater (1990:97) predicted, is what we started with at the outset of our exploration of a divided America and the divided self in this book: “No matter how much we try to change things they somehow end up just a more intricate version of what existed before.” Meanwhile, set adrift, many Americans beset by loss of self metaphorically (but also literally in the global commuter traffic nightmare) clog the nation’s streets, as London pedestrians did in the autumn of 1842 when Frederick Engels first spent time there prior to taking up his two-year assignment to run the family firm’s cotton mill in Manchester. As Marcus (2017:121) observed regarding Engels’ description of nineteenth-century Londoners, Self-realization, then, had taken on the normative shape of the pursuit of self-interest. And the universal human search for the self—literally self-seeking—stood revealed in its current historical embodiment as a competitive activity in which one’s personal quest was achieved by means of the defeat, sometimes relative, sometimes absolute, of the same quest in others. Today’s quest has likewise been shorn of any civilizing or social influences within American culture. There is, as Marx and Engels (1972:337) remarked, “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest.” Seeking self in the twenty-first century United States condemns the seeker to mill about, a small speck in the gathering throng, looking here and there, but seldom finding. Immersed in a sea of professional do-gooders whose enthusiasm for social change wanes as the grants expire and other, better opportunities for themselves beckon, the lost, displaced, under-employed, culturally disadvantaged, and socially discarded, huddle, yearning to be—anything but what they are—merely a person with the means and desire to live.

References Baumann, Zygmunt. 2009. “Identity in the Globalizing World.” In Anthony Elliot and Paul du Gay, Eds., Identity in Question. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

220  Conclusion Baumann, Zygmunt. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. BBC News. 2017. “Who Was Texas Church Gunman Devin Patrick Kelley?” BBC News (November 7, 2017). Retrieved March 8, 2018. www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada41884342. Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 2009. “Losing the Traditional: Individualization and Precarious Freedoms.” In Anthony Elliot and Paul du Gay, Eds., Identity in Question. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bennetts, Leslie. 1985. “James Baldwin Reflects on ‘Got Tell It’ PBS Film.” New York Times. Retrieved May 5, 2018. www.nytimes.com/1985/01/10/books/james-baldwin-reflectson-go-tell-it-pbs-film.html. Bettie, Julie. 2014. Women Without Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blinder, Alan, Dave Phillips and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. 2017. “In 2012 Assault, Texas Gunman Broke Skull of Infant Stepson.” New York Times. (November 6, 2017). Retrieved March 8, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/us/devin-patrick-kelley-texas.html. Callero, Peter L. 2017. The Myth of Individualism. Lanham: Rowman and Littleflield. Chakravorty, Sanjoy, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh. 2017. The Other One Percent: Indians in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved April 22, 2018. www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190648749.001.0001/ acprof-9780190648749-miscMatter-1. Chen, Victor Tan. 2015. Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cowan, Allison Leigh. 2014. “Adam Lanza’s Mental Problems ‘Completely Untreated’ Before Newtown Shootings, Report Says.” New York Times. (November 21, 2014). Retrieved March 21, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/nyregion/before-newtown-shootingsadam-lanzas-mental-problems-completely-untreated-report-says.html. Dhingra, Pawan. 2012. Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fausett, Richard and Serge R. Kovaleski. 2018. “Nikolas Cruz, Florida Shooting Suspect, ‘Showed Every Red Flag’.” New York Times. (February 15, 2018). Retrieved March 7, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/us/nikolas-cruz-florida-shooting.html. Frosh, Stephen and Lisa Baraitser. 2009. “Goodbye to Identity.” In Anthony Elliot and Paul du Gay, Eds., Identity in Question. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Henry, Jules. 1965. Culture Against Man. New York: Vintage Books. Hesse, Herman. 2000. Demian. Mineola, NY: Dover. Isenberg, Nancy. 2016. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking. Jillson, Cal. 2004. Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1902. “What Is to Be Done?” In Henry M. Christman, Ed., Essential Works of Lenin, 53–175. New York: Dover. Lilly, J. Robert, Francis T. Cullen, and Richard A. Ball. 2015. Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Luttwak, Edward. 1999. Turbo-Capitalism. New York: HarperCollins. Marcus, Steven. 2017. Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. New York: Routledge. Retrieved April 22, 2018. www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351311755.

Conclusion  221 Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1972 (Original Publication Date: 1848). “The Communist Manifesto.” In Tucker, Robert C. The Marx-Engels Reader, 331–362. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. McNamee, Stephen J. and Robert K. Miller, Jr. 2014. The Myth of Meritocracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Milner, Murray, Jr. 1994. Status and Sacredness. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morris, Bonnie J. 2016. The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press. National Public Radio. 2017. “Before His Military Trial, Texas Shooter Escaped Mental Health Facility.” National Public Radio. (November 7, 2017). Retrieved March 8, 2018. www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/07/562607996/before-his-military-trialtexas-shooter-escaped-mental-health-facility. Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rank, Mark Robert, Thomas A. Hirschl and Kirk A. Foster. 2014. Chasing the American Dream. New York: Oxford University Press. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. 1961. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Robles, Frances and Nikita Stewart. 2015. “Dylann Roof ’s Past Reveals Trouble at Home and School.” New York Times. ( July 16, 2015). Retrieved March 7, 2018. www.nytimes. com/2015/07/17/us/charleston-shooting-dylann-roof-troubled-past.html. Rosenberg, Eli, Derek Hawkins and Julie Tate. 2017. “Who Is Devin Patrick Kelley, the Gunman Officials Say Killed Churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas?” The Washington Post. (November 6, 2017). Retrieved March 8, 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/news/ morning-mix/wp/2017/11/06/who-is-devin-patrick-kelley-gunman-who-officialssay-killed-churchgoers-in-sutherland-springs/?utm_term=.e2ce47b4675b. Salam, Maya. 2017. “Adam Lanza Threatened Sandy Hook Killings Years Earlier, Records Show.” New York Times. (October 26, 2017). Retrieved March 21, 2018. www.nytimes. com/2017/10/26/us/adam-lanza-sandy-hook.html. Slater, Philip. 1990. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon Press. Szasz, Thomas. 1961. The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Harper and Row. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1961. Democracy in America. New York: Schocken Books. Tȯibin, Colm. 2016. “Introduction.” In James Baldwin, Ed., Giovanni’s Room. New York: Everyman’s Library/ Alfred A. Knopf. Vance, J.D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy. New York: HarperCollins.

Index

9/11 terrorist attack 39 abortion 3 accumulation of capital 70 adaptability 196 adaptive corporate strategies 129 adjustment problems 203 advanced capitalism 130 adversity 199 African American solidarity 32 aggrieved entitlement 42 agrarian societies 7 alcohol consumption 96 American family values 43 – 47 American optimism 208 American sociological theories 59 – 93 ancient virtues 2 anger and revenge 204 antidiscrimination laws 218 anti-intellectualism 80 anti-social online absorption 204 AP-GIK poll 46 approximation 45, 67, 176 aristocracies 24 – 25 Aristotle 2, 141 artificial cultural standard 63 artificial intelligence 105 ‘asset building’ policies 213 asylum inmate 90 authentic self 67 authoritarianism 92 autonomous self 95 autonomy 199 Baldwin, James 217 Balkanization 31

baronial chieftain 7 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother 157 Baumann, Zygmunt 174 Baumeister, Roy F. 95 Beck, Ulrich 135 behavioral outbursts 201 behavioral qualities 84 belief system 199 Bell, Daniel 27 Bellah, Robert N. 46 Bell Jar, The 63 Bettie, Julie 131 Blauner, Robert 5, 169 blue-collar workers 150 bourgeoisie 11, 15, 18 bourgeois individualism 26 Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community 46 Brahman values 209 bureaucratic administration 22 burgeoning population 70 by-passings 91 Callero, Peter L. 53 callous cash payment 17 capital accumulation 71, 213 capitalism 15, 16, 59, 130, 196, 204 capitalist economy 196, 206 capital speed-up 204 caste boundaries 210 Castoriadis, Cornelius 130, 166, 167 Catcher in the Rye 63 centrality of work 159 – 166 character 195 Chen, Victor Tan 173, 175, 190 child interaction 75

I n d e x   223 children 139 – 141 Chua, Amy 157 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 1, 2 classism 200 classless society 204 – 205 class separation 205 Clinton, Hilary 33 Cohen, Albert K. 161 coherence 196 collective youth movement 208 college degree 133 – 134 colonization 70, 130 Coming up Short 132 communist manifesto 9 – 10 communist society 12 ‘companionate’ style of marriage 138 competitive individualism 60 competitive meritocracy 207 competitors 11 complex societies 5 computer-controlled programs 135 conformances 91 conformity 210 congenial family life 64 congruence of circumstances 6 constant bombardment 73 contemporary capitalism 196 context of chaos 44 Cooley, Charles Horton 60 – 64 Cooley’s conception of self 60 – 63 corporate headquarter 80 Council of Conservative Citizens 201 counter-reformation 68 courage 2 creative destruction 196 criminal justice system 50 “crisis of the soul” 32 cultural adaptations 3, 6 cultural capital 152, 206; speed-up 151 – 159 cultural climate 30 cultural ideology 199 cultural legacies 3 cultural limitations 199 cultural manifestations 208 cultural obligations 208 cultural pressures 73 cultural snares 199 cultural specificity 2 cultural superiority 200 cultural traditions 3 culture against man 167 cumulative self-interest 79 Cut Loose 173, 175 Days of our Lives 109, 153 decision-making 97

degree of polarization 36 degree of stability 136 DeLillo, Don 92 delinquency 123, 161 Democracy in America 46 Democratic-Republican political divide 30 – 35 Denney, Reuel 67 Department of Homeland Security 53 Deresiewicz, William 152, 153, 154, 155 Descartes, Rene 61 Desmond, Matthew 16, 17 despondent self 185 – 187 de-traditionalism 92 Dewey, Susan 17 dharma 209 Dionne, Jr., E. J. 32 disappointment 20 discarded self 184 – 185 discrimination 206 disillusionment 20 Disintegration 32 dissatisfaction with war 54 dissonant cognitions 98 diverse social functions 67 division of labor 18 – 21 doing and being 141 do-it-yourself biography 197 do-it-yourself identity-building 105 drug use 48 Durkheim, Emile 59; and division of labor 18 – 21 dynamic self 63 dysfunctional self 131 economic disruption and hardship 40 – 43 economic meltdown 47 editing 216 education crisis 47 – 49 efficacious self 200 – 205 egoistic accumulation 11 elective biography 196 – 197 Elliot, Anthony 92, 115 Elliot’s “new individualism” theory 105, 107 Elmira model 51 Elmira Reformatory 51 emotional problems 201 emotional tie 144 empathy 204 Engels, Frederick 9 – 10, 14, 16 – 18 English Civil War (1642–1651) 10 enhancement effect 200 enthusiasm 218 environmental factors 6 equal interdependence 176 eventual institutionalization 216 examinations, being successful in 26

224  I n d e x excusable infractions 91 executive function 95, 96 face-to-face expression 85 face-to-face interaction 88 failed identity 200 – 205 failure, organizations 54 failure of government and union assistance 180 – 183 false self 158 family 9 family support 206 family unit 139 Federal Emergency Management Agency 53 (female) infanticide 3 fertile environments 3 Festinger, Leon 98 Festinger’s theory 99 feudal fealty 10 feudalism 7 – 8, 9 feudal society 8 financial crisis 177 financial dependence 147 financial recession 162 Fitzsimmons, William 153 flagrant violations 91 forced rebellion 158 foundation-sponsored think tank 80 fragile families 44 fragmentation 65 Frank, Thomas 30 – 31, 32 free individual 13 free wage workers 8, 10 Fromm, Erich 68 full-time religious specialists 4 Gallup 38 games 91 gamesmanship 91 generalized anger 203 General Motors 78 German Ideology, The 12 geronticide 3 Giddens, Anthony 92, 143, 144 Giovanni’s Room 217 ‘girl culture’ 123 Glazer, Nathan 67 global capitalism 129, 176 – 177 globalization 122, 149 – 151, 204 global trade 69 Glorious Revolution (1688) 10 goal-directed behavior 96 goal-setting behavior 96 God and religion 49 – 50 Goffman, Erving 6, 82, 83, 87 Goffman’s theory 91 Going Solo 45

Go Tell It on the Mountain 217 Graduate, The (Nichols) 156 Graham, Carol 35 grass-roots populism 30 gravy train/foregoing education 179 – 180 Great Depression 130 “great existential consumers” 31 Great Recession (2009–2010) 41, 175, 177 – 178 Greenwood, Esther 63 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life 46 habituation 216 Hallway Hangers 105, 110 hard-earned disenchantment 170 harmonious equilibrium 78 Harvard-Harris poll 51 – 52 heightened sensitivity 73 helping institutions 142 – 143 Henry, Jules 5, 167 Hillbilly Elegy 197 Hinduism 209 – 210 historical social formations 3 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 40, 42, 131 homosexual sexuality 145 horticultural societies 6, 7 human consciousness 15 human organization 22 human self-estrangement 15, 17 human selfhood 95 human societies 2 – 3; categorization 3 hunting and gathering societies 3 hurricane Katrina 53, 174 hyper-accelerated demands of modern life 92 ‘I’ (source of independence) 66 id, ego, and superego 95 identity: national culture 211; protection 211 identity and personality, psychological theories of 95 illusory communal life 15 Imaginary Institution of Society, The 166 imperialism 70 incipient population decline 69 incoherent society 130 independence 199 Indian Hindu-based caste system 210 Indian Hindu society 212 individual coping strategies 212 – 213 individual craftsmen 8 individual fates 196 individual in modern era 8 – 9 individualism 20, 33, 46, 104, 197, 199, 200, 204, 206 – 208; bourgeois 26; competitive 60; conducive to 63; defined 60; ideology 207; influence of 60; isolated 10; manipulated 92; myth of 199; privatized

I n d e x   225 130; privatized isolation 133; social systems 8 – 9; U.S. culture of 199 individuality 18, 64 individualization 122, 196 – 197 individuals 9 – 10 individual self interest, primacy of 11 – 16 industrial capitalism 9 – 10, 13, 15 industrial revolution 68, 75 inequality 174 – 176, 212 information-seeking behavior inner-directed child 75 inner-directed individual 71, 72, 73, 76 inner-directedness 71 inner-directed social character 72 institutional crisis and self-investment 52 – 55 institutional racism 200 institutional society 36 – 38 institutions 37 integrated self 98 integration 98, 201 integrity 196 internalized mental health problems 203 interpersonal membership 95 interpersonal relationship 96 intimacy, disappearance of 143 – 149 irreconcilability 81 irritated disgust with life 20 isolated individualism 10 isolated privatism 93 job, steady 134 – 135 Johnson, Lyndon 54 Kansas politics 30 karma 215 Kelley, Devin Patrick 201 – 202 Kerr, Clark 79 Klinenberg, Eric 45 – 56 labor, division of 3 – 5, 12 labor market 135, 176 labor unrest 30 laid-off worker 178 landed property 8 landlord-tenant experience 17 Lasch, Christopher 43 lasting commitment 139 law and legal system 50 – 51 Lee, Joseph 64 left-wing populist 31 legal-rational model 52 lesbian feminism 218 liberal American intellectuals 215 Liberal-Conservative political divide 30 life projects 173; despondent self 185 – 187; discarded self 184 – 185; failure of government and union assistance

180 – 183; global capitalism 176 – 177; gravy train/foregoing education 179 – 180; Great Recession and job loss 177 – 178; inequality 174 – 176; self/society 189 – 192; suicidal self 187 – 189; twenty-first century meritocracy 183 Lonely Crowd, The 67, 68, 75, 76, 77 lower-income working class 149 – 150 low-income culture 123 MacLeod, Jay 99, 100, 101, 103, 131 macro-structural forces 43 manipulated individualism 92 mankind 61 mantras 215 manual labor jobs 101 maritime exploration 70 market capitalism 31 marriage 137 – 139 Marx, Karl 8, 10, 18, 59, 175 Marxian analysis 9 – 10; on bourgeoisie 11; division of labor 12 Marx’s theory of modern societies: criticism of 16 – 18 mass incarceration 51 mass media 51 mass shootings 207 – 208 Mead, George H. 65 Mead’s ideal society 66 Mead’s theory 65 – 66 media, distrust 51 – 52 memory and cultural predisposition 200 mental illness 203 meritocracy 204, 206 – 208 meritocratic race 214 – 215 Messner, Steven F. 176 Meyer, Dick 31, 32 middle-class American society 86, 149 – 151 Mills, C. Wright 72 Milner, Murray, Jr. 3 ‘mixed race’ inheritance 32 modern individual 9, 74, 109, 115, 116 modern industrial societies 5 modern society 22 modus vivendi 82 momentary stabilities 195 moral unity 64 Motor Carrier Act 161 muted sensitivity 73 myth of individualism 199 neo-liberal capitalism 16, 17, 212 neo-liberal government 175 neo-liberalism 150, 177 New York Times 217 Nichols, Mike 156 Nixon, Richard 54

226  I n d e x normal biography 196 – 197 normalization of deviance 53 normal unhappiness 166 Occupy, social reform movements 213 On the Road 63 Organization Man, The 67, 72 organizations 37 other-directed person 73 Our Kids 48 outsourcing 150 over-identification 157 overlapping symbolic mutuality 208 pain 207 parenthood 140, 141 Pareto, Vilfredo 25 Pareto’s analysis of society 26 Pareto’s sociology 25 Parsons, Talcott 78 pastoral societies 6 – 7 Penn, Mark 52 personal expression 199 personal instability 204 personal reinvention 199 personal traits 199 Pew Research Center 43 plastic sexuality 144 plutocrats 25 polarization 65 polite society 82 political divide 30 political leader 9 political processes 93 political revolutions 68 politics 38 – 40 post-industrial societies 5 post-industrial society 27 power sharing 209 predisposition, memory and cultural 200 pre-industrial society 9 primitive societies 18 primitive society 6 privatized individualism 130 privatized isolation 133 probity 2 production-employment-and-consumption 71 proletarian revolution 13 pro-social skills 204 psychic satisfaction 136 psychological discomfort 98 psychological gyroscope 70 public agenda 47 public cultural space 217 – 219 Pursuit of Loneliness, The 46 Putnam, Robert 46, 48, 213 – 215

quasi-socialist movements 30 racial barriers 67 radicalism 30 rational production processes 169 reconfigured self 96 reflexive biography 196 – 197 reflexive consciousness 95 reflexivity 95 reformation 68 regressive tribalism 31 relationships 135 – 137 religious-based ritual performances 210 religious justifications 208 religious specialists 7 renaissance 68 reproducibility 207 – 208 resource inequality 67 responsive ‘selves’ 132 resume arms race 152 revitalization 38 rhetorical exaggeration 14 Riesman, David 67, 68 right-wing populist 31 ritual purity and impurity 210 Robinson, Eugene 32 robotics 105 Rockefeller, John D. 78 role conflict 6 role enterprise 87, 88, 89 role performance 6 Roof, Dylann 201 Rosenfeld, Richard 176 Rothman, Barbara Katz 140, 141 Rubin, Lillian 40, 43, 144 rural poverty 10 scarcity psychology 71 scientism 78 secret deviations 91 segregation 201 self 2, 82; dysfunctional 131; formation of 95 – 126; and society 82; see also specific self  entries self-absorption 207 self-assertion 13 self-centeredness 204 self-concept 98 self-conception 87 self-consciousness 61 self-consistency 99 ‘self ’ controls initiative 96 self-defeating selves 123 self-definition 13 self-determination 67, 199 self-esteem 99 self-focus 207

I n d e x   227 self-fulfillment 136 self-gratification 75 self-identity 2, 109, 173, 208; flawed 146; formation 2 self identity in field studies 129 – 133; centrality of work 159 – 166; children 139 – 141; college degree 133 – 134; cultural capital speed-up 151 – 159; globalization 149 – 151; helping institutions 142 – 143; intimacy, disappearance of 143 – 149; marriage 137 – 139; relationships 135 – 137; stable, living wage job 134 – 135 self-interest 65, 219 self-investment 52 – 55 self-knowledge 96 self-realization 174, 219 self-reflexivity 144 self-regarding isolation 207 self-regulation 97, 98 self-reliance 199 self-seeking 219 self/society 189 – 192 self ’s regulating willpower 97 self-worth 139 semi-sedentary groups 6 separate system 88 service to humanity 83 sexual conquest and ardor 145 sexuality 143 sexual license 145 shaman 4 silliness 207 Silva, Jennifer 131, 132, 145 skill acquisition 4 skills mismatch 213 Skinner, B. F. 78 Slater, Philip 46, 218 – 219 social adjustment problems 203 social arrangements 87 social behavior 85 social capital 206 social categorization 89 social consequences 72 social degradation 211 social demotion 85 social division 30 – 36; American family values 43 – 47; economic disruption and hardship 40 – 43; education crisis 47 – 49; God and religion 49 – 50; institutional crisis and self-investment 52 – 55; institutional society 36 – 38; law and legal system 50 – 51; media, distrust 51 – 52; politics 38 – 40; U.S. society in twenty-first century 36 social equality 210 – 211 Social Ethic 77 social experience 199

social identity 195; problem, over-coming 205 – 206; see also identity social instability 195, 204 social integration 139 social isolation 204 socialization 4 social life 63 socially class-based competitiveness 206 socially counter-productive 88 social maladjustments 204 social nature of society 72 social order 8 – 9 Social Organization 60 – 62 social psychology 84 social reality 86 social reform movements 213 social relations 96 social roles 96 social stability 209 social standing 87 social structure 129 social structure and values 208 – 212 social structure coalesce 206 social systems: feudalism 7 – 8; individualism 8 – 9; individual self interest 11 – 16; industrial capitalism 9 – 10; labor, division of 18 – 21; Marx and Engels theories, criticism 16 – 18; Weberian self 21 – 25 socioeconomic mobility 17 socio-legal environment 84 sociological solution machine 212 – 217 sociology 60 socio-religious caste system 209 soothsayer 9 speed 196 Spencer, Herbert 59 splintering of Black America 32 spoiled identity 89 spontaneity 207 stable, living wage job 134 – 135 stable targets 195 Status and Sacredness 212 status exclusion 216 Strangers in Their Own Land 159 strategic performances 6 structuralism 208 subjugation 88 subsistence economies 3 – 4 subsistence societies 3 substantial material resources 206 suicidal self 187 – 189 suicide 20 taken-for-granted cultures 6 Tea Party movement 31, 32 teacher-pupil relationship 76 tears 207

228  I n d e x terra firma 91 therapeutic self-healing 133 Thrift, Nigel 175, 196 Tocqueville, Alexis de 46, 60, 92 total institutions 87 Torlina, Jeff 121 – 122 tradition-bound society 69 transcendence of private property 17 transitional population growth 68 transnational capitalism 130 tribalism 31 Trump, Donald 33 twenty-first century meritocracy 183 uncontrollable temper 201 underdeveloped self 66 undifferentiated self 6 unemployment 48 unemployment compensation 181 unhappiness 30, 43, 44, 166 uniqueness 136 unrestrained bare-knuckled capitalism 16 untreated mental illness 203 upward mobility 199 U.S. culture of individualism 199 U.S. society in twenty-first century 36 U.S. socio-economic system 206 values of American society 122 values of society 86 Vance, J. D. 197 – 198

Vaughan, Diane 53 Vietnam War 54 Viscelli, Steve 160 – 165 vitality 196 volatility 196 vulnerability 207 Watergate political scandal 54 Webber, Max 21 – 25, 52, 71 Weberian self and the routines of everyday life 21 – 25 Weber’s verstehen approach 62 What’s the Matter with Kansas 30 White, William Allen 30 Whitebeck, Caroline 141 White Collar: The American Middle Classes 72 white-collar workers 101, 150 Whyte, Jr., William H. 67, 72, 77 – 80 working-class adults 131, 132 working-class culture 136 working-class family relations 139 working-class girls 126 working-class women 136 working-class youth 131 World War II 68 wretchedness of worker 13 Yoakum, Dwight 197 ‘youth culture’ 93 Zogby Analytics 39