Sad Men
Pity the poor Organization Man. Once upon a time, he ruled the American Century with his natty fedora and his quest for “belongingness.” Sure, everyone loves him in “Mad Men,” but these days his wife makes more money than he does, his kids take more meetings and the senior v.p. next door has started wearing age-inappropriate indie rock T-shirts. Even his shrink finds his preoccupation with the authentic self passé. And the sociologists can’t stop writing his obituary.
ELSEWHERE, U.S.A
By Dalton Conley
By 221 pp. Pantheon Books. $24
Dalton Conley is the latest. “A new breed of American has arrived on the scene,” Conley, a professor at New York University, declares in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” his compact guidebook to our nervous new world. Instead of individuals searching for authenticity, we are “intraviduals” defined by shifting personas and really cool electronics, which help us manage “the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.” The denizens of our “Elsewhere Society,” Conley argues, “are only convinced they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they’re on their way to the next destination. Constant motion is a balm to a culture in which the very notion of authenticity . . . has been shattered into a thousand e-mails.”
But that constant motion doesn’t quite take the form we might think. Americans, Conley argues, are no longer the geographically rootless nomads of our national mythology. These days, once we have children we change partners — in a pattern he calls “dynamic polygamy” (basically serial monogamy, but kinkier) — more often than we change locations. (Or jobs: the percentage of long-term workers at large firms has actually increased.) And for all our sense of rising insecurity, individual incomes are not more volatile than they used to be. It just feels that way, thanks to the two-earner household in which women enter and exit the work force according to shifting child-rearing demands.
What has changed, Conley argues, is our sense of time and value. In an “economic red shift,” the merely affluent feel themselves falling behind the superrich even as they pull ahead of the average worker. And so they clock endless hours in the online “portable workshop,” mindful of the opportunity cost of not working. Finally, the new “price culture” puts a dollar figure on everything while undermining confidence in our ability to know the value of anything, including ourselves. “The division between price and value has increasingly collapsed under the weight of economic rationality that spreads like wildfire across sectors of our existence,” Conley writes. “In today’s economy, many are dogged by the question ‘What was my value added?’ ”
The “constant fear of being exposed, cut out or outsourced,” he argues, “is the principal pathos of the era.” But he’s not talking about assembly-line workers looking anxiously toward China. Instead, he cites the competition between ophthalmologists and “community-college-educated technicians” over Lasik surgery and a Harvard Business Review article about “fraud anxiety” among C.E.O.’s that was “voted third best for 2005.” And then there’s the vanishing airline snack. Instead of complimentary peanuts, Conley laments, passengers are now given a sales pitch, capped with the announcement that “American Airlines is happy to accept American Express or other major credit cards.” How many billable hours were spent developing that cross-marketing deal, he wonders, and what was it worth? As with Amex, so with all of us. “Value is elusive” in our “symbolic economy,” he writes. “So our own worth is therefore elusive, too.”
For a big-picture guy, Conley seems strangely preoccupied with free food. Making the obligatory visit to Google headquarters, he’s “stunned” by the no-charge cafeteria, not to mention the valet dry cleaning, roving massage therapists and giant employee sandbox (but no on-site childcare). Google “epitomizes the Elsewhere Ethic better than any other company,” except that the Googlers happily riding the Wi-Fi-enabled shuttle to their “(n)office” (as Conley hopes we’ll start calling it) aren’t anxious, fragmented or bitter about their leaders’ private 767. “I tried my best to foment discontent,” Conley writes, “but there was none lurking there. . . . I must admit it freaked me out, in the same way that zombies in a horror movie might.”
Conley frets about the “psychic violence” of our increasingly unequal service economy, but his class-consciousness translates mostly into an acute sensitivity to embarrassment. Like an episode of “Seinfeld,” “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” tends to move from one baroquely awkward social experience to the next. At an upscale restaurant, Conley is mortified to discover that the waiter is an old dorm mate from his “elite public university.” He cringes when his sister gets bossed by the nanny. Recalling the time he went to see “Do the Right Thing,” he confesses to not joining the people who walked out in protest when the theater showed a commercial. “I knew they were ‘doing the right thing,’ ” he writes. “But I didn’t want to miss the . . . movie. . . . I resolved the dispute between my multiple selves by giving in to the desire to see the film.” In the Elsewhere Society, he explains, “guilt is often the moral ax that serves to split our selfhood into intravidualistic fragments.”
Conley is a lively if sometimes overheated writer, and his book usefully summarizes all sorts of far-flung academic research while repurposing the latest pop-sociological idea entrepreneurship, from Chris Anderson’s “long tail” to Richard Florida’s “creative class.” But what’s Conley’s value added? The parts of the book that feel true also feel very familiar, while the rest feels less like a coherent argument than a series of disconnected riffs on The Way We Live Now. Call it stand-up sociology: Conley is much exercised about T-shirts, bottled water, personal trainers, “the proliferation of eating options at sports stadiums,” and people who bus their own tables at McDonalds. Tip jars, he argues, threaten democracy and “cheapen smiles in general.” And “the rise of Skymall” is evidence that “the very concept of public space is collapsing before our eyes.” (He really must spend a lot of time on airplanes.)
Refreshingly, Conley doesn’t tell us to smash our BlackBerrys, shred the takeout sushi menu and get back to the family dinner table. “Do not hold yourself to a mythologized standard of the past,” he writes in his conclusion, before falling prey to the same confirmation bias he mocked earlier in the book, when he chided social science research for “magically” confirming that middle-class child-rearing practices are best. “The successful professional parents,” he boldly predicts, “will be the ones who manage to blend their child-rearing duties with their professional ones, making their children comfortable in high-pressure, high-status work environments.” Follow the citation to some intriguing research conducted in the Conley home (n)office. “Here I must confess to years of screaming at my wife for trying to involve the kids in her work life as well as yelling at her to turn off her cellphone during ‘family time.’ I was wrong, and she was right. . . . But I can’t bring myself to apologize in the main text, so I am relegating this to an endnote.” h
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