PAST IMPERFECT!

PAST IMPERFECT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006


The more economists have tampered with economic conditions, the worse they have become; the more political scientists have reformed governments, the more are governments in need of reform; the more sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and lawyers have tampered with the family, the more the family has disintegrated; the more “scientific” solutions are offered for crime, the more numerous become the crimes. Despite all the natural and social sciences at our disposal, we are unable either to control the socio-cultural process or to avoid the historical catastrophes.

Pitrim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937)

As far as techno-art goes, Dick Tracy had video watches and videophones in the 1930s. In that same period, Brick Bradford was riding giant electronic robots in intergalactic space. Flash Gordon was powered with rocket propulsion spaceships. Buck Rogers leaped ahead to the twenty-fifth century maneuvering in space in nuclear phantom machines.

Long before television and computers were common fare they were very much the menu of daily and Sunday comics. Science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard were waging war in space sixty years ago with many inventions still only figments of the military’s imagination, but now hard-wired products.

Leonardo Da Vinci anticipated airplanes in the fifteenth century, while Jules Verne and H.G. Wells anticipated submarine travel and time-space machines in the 19th. Indeed, long before cellular phones, digital cameras, invasive sensory electronics, comic strip artists and science fiction writers were playing with these ideas.

Comic strips and science fiction in the twenty-first century have lost their edge as their creators have apparently run out of gas. Like art in general, there seems to be a state of creative regression. Counter intuitive thinking has been tabled for replication, duplication and reification of what already exists.

There is a scarcity of ideas across the board in this age of electronic splendor, which is most dramatically felt by the lovers of the comics. Everyone seems to be piggybacking on a creative Past Imperfect to vegetate in the Present Ridiculous.

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Sorokin’s analysis of the crisis of our age was written three-quarters of a century ago. Little has changed. In the PAST IMPERFECT, we seemed stuck in the metaphysical sand, praying it was not quick sand. There was political rancor, economic insecurity, artistic anarchy, intellectual confusion, religious uncertainty, fear of the future, loss of hope and a sense of permanence, and a strange attraction-revulsion for the beastly, burden-bearing bourgeoisie. People lacked psychological moorings, and felt victimized by uncontrollable historical forces. Personal relationships were unstable, morals were fluid, social foundations were shaky, and increasingly the mad monarchs of the madhouse prevailed, as The Self became the new god.

Fulton J. Sheen wrote a book Footprints in a Darkened Forest (1967), which aptly describes the Past Imperfect twentieth century. It was a time when war erupted more frequently than natural volcanoes, when the cultural framework of Western civilization became splintered, revealing footprints in a darkened forest. Sheen takes note of fragmented contemporary art, a dearth of inspired projects, a lack of overarching vision, and vulgarity of crass commercialism, bankruptcy of love, and the spiraling loneliness of spiritual isolation.

For social scientist Sorokin, it was simply the end of a 600-year sensate day. He writes:

Its (Western society’s) body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, nor any fiber which functions soundly . . . We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year Sensate day.

We have the rare privilege of living during this conflagration. Before we stop to put out the fire, though, we might first pause to understand its cause, starting with the recent past (PAST IMPERFECT), moving on to the current folly (PRESENT RIDICULOUS), then proceeding in another work through Western culture’s entropic patterns (FUTURE PERFECT), concluding with some thoughts on how to turn it all to our advantage.

Otto Rank once wrote a letter to a friend confessing, “For the time being I gave up writing – there is already too much truth in the world – an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed! I can relate to that sentiment as I attempt to balance this time continuum in this short book.

Perhaps the single dread feeding the “cut and control” hysteria is denial of death, as if once something is created it need never die. Death is part of life; life is part of death. It is a holy connection. Ernest Becker in Denial of Death (1973) sees dread written across the face of the twentieth century in its hurry-hurry, never-get-old-never-grow up, cosmetic, face lifting lifestyle. This dread still lingers in the twenty-first century in the Viagra culture. Becker writes:

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or, alternately, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared social heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will, dedication to a vision.

Becker, while taking note of the blunted quest for heroes, reveals the seeds of “cut and control” excess. He finds people no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe in anything yet would deny it being so. This touches every aspect of social life: family heroism, university heroism, business and career heroism, political-action heroism, and volunteer heroism. Nothing is done without a return. No one paints or writes without a sense of mandate, laments Jean Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) in Situations (1965). Anti-heroes surface and lash out at the system, which they deny exists chasing fads to fill spiritual voids. Hero seekers and anti-heroes merge into seamless bedfellows as they rush toward journey’s end. Becker writes:

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

Such “cut and control” whimsy persists until there is nothing left to divide. This is nourished with the belief that money and material relics and their supportive bounce ensure that man counts more than any other planetary animal. It is in praise of folly, which endangers man becoming fictitious and fallible instead of immortal.

Sorokin takes a broader view of PAST IMPERFECT. We exist, he argues, in the dying Sensate culture and its only reality is sensory. We act the way we do because only what we see, hear, smell, touch and otherwise perceive is real. Beyond that, either there is nothing, or, if there is something, and we cannot sense it, then it is nonexistent, unreal and may be ignored.

The modern form of our culture materializes in the sensory, empirical, secular and “this worldly.” There is little room for either the sacred or the divine. The sensate is articulated in the arts and sciences, philosophy and religion, ethics and law; in social, economic and political organization; in the dominant lifestyles and attitudes of people. We are products of modernism, which has shown itself to be a very good patient but not a very good doctor.

The most palpable evidence of the sensate is in the arts. Sensate art moves entirely in the empirical world of the senses. Its aim is to afford a refined sensual enjoyment: relaxation, escape, and excitation of tired nerves, amusement, pleasure and entertainment. For this reason, sensate art must be shocking, surprising, sensational, prurient, passionate, pathetic, sensual, and incessantly new. It stretches the limits of taboo and is often marked by nudity, violence, profanity, and earthiness.

Taboo is no longer sex as it was in the Victorian days of the nineteenth century. Taboo today is death. Nobody plans on dying. Death is buried in an obsessive concern with health and aging in quest of immortality. Now physicians shrink from telling people they are dying. People are kept alive on machines with a network of tubes, oxygen tanks that they lug along like suitcases on wheels, or are committed to nursing homes long after quality consciousness has departed. Meanwhile, medical science congratulates itself on this suspect achievement.

The sensate art is divorced from the divine, from religion, morals and tradition. Since it must amuse, it makes wide use of caricature, satire, sexual comedy, situational farce, vanity, schadenfreude, pratfall, and gossip. Its style is naturalistic, visual, and impressionistic. It reproduces and misdirects our senses to register surprise. Its passion and action are contrived and cant.

The sensate constantly introduces a new succession of fads, as its greatest dread is boredom. Its art is artificial, superficial, disposable and forgettable. Success rises and falls on managed perceptions of farce and beauty. To retain its viewers it has to be stunning as it caters to a passive-forever-in-a- hurry audience. This forces a constant return to the negative empirical world of the vulgar, ugly, crass, and demonic.

It was not always so. Western sensate art at its apogee in the seventeenth through nineteenth century, while still empirical, was wholly different. There were Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; Wagner, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky in music. In letters there were Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller; Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Balzac; Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky; the great builders of our mighty cathedrals; prominent actors, painters, and sculptors from the Renaissance on. They were the great when genius was common, and the 600-year Sensate day was at its midpoint and not yet declining toward collapse.

Creative forces in our culture are today near that collapse. It is as if we are standing petrified in the headlights of the future unable or uncertain to move. Like all living matter, culture and society grow and mature and then turn to rot if not virulently watchful. Evidence of spoilage is apparent when virtue turns to vice infecting ideas with their venom and malice.

There is a growing sterility of bold ideas. Ideas have become a commodity to sell like coffee, gasoline or produce. If they don’t sell, they go stale and perish.

This in turn infects perceived reality, which is likely portrayed more in illusory terms making it superficial, puerile, empty, and misleading. We see this in surface psychology (self-esteem), surface events (promoter creations), and surface personages (celebrities).

With a lack of ideas, the pathological becomes more compelling than the normal. Preoccupation with pathology in the twentieth century created its own Mad Monarch Museum.

Writers of 1920s were called members of the “Lost Generation.” Many moved to Europe “to find themselves” and write, often with painful realism of a world gone mad, including James Joyce (Exiles and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Ezra Pound (Cantos), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bells Toll), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men), and John Dos Passo (Three Soldiers and U.S.A.). The Lost Generation was moody for change with a self-conscious desire to be taken seriously without having to grow up.

These writers were followed by the “Beat Generation,” which was not interested in finding itself, or growing up, but in looking for a way out or a place to hide. Beats saw themselves as martyrs of the world. “I saw the best of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” When Allen Ginsberg wrote these opening lines to his book “Howl!” (1956), he understood the development of a theme with the mood of which every frustrated, self-pitying egotist in the land could readily identify. Other Beat poets and writers including William Burroughs (The Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine) and Jack Kerouac (On the Road and The Dharma Bums) made the theme theirs as well.

J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey) is of the same generation, but not a Beat. Burroughs was a WASP, Ginsberg a Jew, and Kerouac a Roman Catholic. Each echoed the pathology of the times. What we have to reckon with the Beats is an age of self-pity and an enormous waste of talent who worked hard to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), before Ginsberg, created the classical model of self-pity in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). It might be useful to share the essence of this book.

Young Werther has a naïve and fatuous egotism: “I do not know what there is about me that attracts people, so many like me and become attached to me.” In spite of his natural popularity, he is alone in spirit: “It is the fate of a man like me to be misunderstood.” He nurses his feelings with tender solicitude: It treat my heart like a sick child and gratify its every whim.” It is in the more intimate relations that the real quality of the man is revealed: “Was not our intercourse an endless weaving of the most delicate feeling, the keenest wit, whose variations were all stamped, even to the extent of extravagance, with the impress of genius?” He takes pleasure in simple things – playing with children, raising cabbages, and making love to the wife of a friend. At the end, since life is cruel to him, he commits – after the appropriate rhetorical gestures – suicide.

Werther’s story, incidentally, based partly on Goethe’s own life, struck a deep horrifying cord among Europeans disillusioned with the sterile culture and orderly philosophy of the Enlightenment. It set off a wave of suicides, especially among young men who felt that their emotions were stunted by an unsympathetic society.

The Beat Generation couldn’t imitate Goethe, but it could imitate Werther. It even improved on Werther making a fetish of poverty while actually being quite middle class. When St. Francis in an economy of scarcity embraced Lady Poverty, he linked himself with the lot of common man. When the Beats in an age of affluence rejected money they set themselves against the common man. But it is only in an affluent society that one can make a game of courting poverty without experiencing it in the real. The beatnik, who despises work, can be content to have a working wife, live off a widowed mother, or live off a working live-in girlfriend, or bum cigarettes, drinks and drugs off casual buddies, or play the artist gigolo to sex-starved but affluent women who are unembarrassed to play the role of groupies. For example, Joyce Johnson in Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957 – 1958 (2000) is an unconvincing apologist to Jack Kerouac’s caddishness, revealing instead his self-indulgent behavior in time with him.

Their collective disenchantment was with the post World War II acquisitive society and culture, in which they didn’t fit, lapsing into drugs, self-indulgence and “howls of joy.” The Beats would have sex orgies in a spirit of “metaphysical impersonalism,” using four-letter words that would “come out clean.” They played with Eastern piety as revealed in the Vedanta, Zen Buddhism and the Tao, creating a bumptious bohemian version, especially Kerouac in The Dharma Bums (1958). The book filled a need of underdone adolescent minds of the time that wanted to feel “with it,” but was probably more comfortable in the vernacular of the “Rover Boys” series popular a few generations before. Robert Fitch in the Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self (1969) likens this blind searching to “The Rover Boys Get Religion.” What is so weird about this is that Zen Buddhism is quite ascetic in Japan, austere in its discipline, has found favor with the military caste, and exhibit a pattern of responsible social relationships. Aldous Huxley, D. T. Suzuki, and Allan W. Watts have written quite persuasively about Eastern religions.18 But in the hands of the Beats, it is a blend of asceticism and hedonism, and is inclined to pacifism and social irresponsibility.

The Beat Generation was a spiritual nudist, like Shakespeare’s mad Lear on the heath, and would tear off all his clothing in order, perchance, to find beneath it the thing-itself – Off, off, you lendings! Come; unbutton here.”

The Beats professed a desire to get beneath the multi-layer traditional culture in which man sought to hide himself. In an attempt to rid themselves of “me,” the Beats stripped away reason with logical positivism, emotion with existentialism, morals with relativism, truth with skepticism, sex with impersonalism, and the self with Zen Buddhism. Beats stood before all naked having divested themselves of their inherited culture, but also of their humanity.

Salinger’s writing echoed the anxiety of upwardly mobile youth who considered adulthood enemy territory. He had his own way of annihilating the self as a kind of safe rebel. Salinger demonstrated the pathos of rebellion when there was nothing to rebel against and nothing to rebel for. He identified with young people who were rebels without a cause because it is impossible to rebel against a society that has become naked and characterless after a devastating war (WWII). That is why his books resonated with young readers. He understood their frustration in attacking something that wasn’t there.

Institutional society was already on its way to nihilism and welcomed enemies. We saw it with the “Red Scare” of Communism in the U.S. Senate. We saw it with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Un-American Activities Hearings.” We saw it, too, with the “Police Action” in Korea, an undeclared war, in which 55,000 American military personnel died. We saw it again with similar casualties and outcome in Viet Nam. Here the U.S. State Department misread a possible Chinese “Domino Effect” in South East Asia, failing to recognize the Vietnamese were an indigenous people, and not Chinese stooges.

The Beats were metaphor for the times, behaving like the scrawny kid in school throwing spitballs at the teacher’s back, while Salinger was like the kid sneakily writing dirty notes to girls and hiding them in their books. Both the Beats and Salinger were on to something, and that is why it is important to understanding the culture and society of the times. They introduced the new rebel.

The new rebel didn’t have to have a cause. He rebelled simply for the sake of rebelling. If there was a hidden cause, the cause was the rebel’s own self, the self stripped naked with nothing left to hide. Behind this nakedness there is no character, no pattern, no purpose, no meaning, no heart. He rebelled because he could. Moreover, this rebel was not diabolical, not even evil in the context that we understand evil. He was just lost. He was not going to hell, he was going nowhere, and he is, at this writing, still with us.

The narcissistic loner is not confined only to the Beats, but is part of our long twisted history. As narcissism is present in extreme hedonism, so also it is present in extreme asceticism. In the most extreme form, the narcissistic loner is a rebel with an attitude. He is not only anti-authoritarian; he is antisocial. The hero is willfully solitary. Yet even at the far limits of unsociability there remains a need to send back signals, messages in a bottle directed back to the disdained society. This is curiously apparent in the many “lives” of the saints. After a lifetime of the most extreme asceticism and desolation, spent among beasts in the desert of life, the saint becomes half animal and half angel. Invariably, the saint happens on a wanderer to whom he tells his story. Just before his solitude is extinguished in bodily death, the saint sends back a signal across the ocean of history. Even this most unsocial of adventures, lived or imaged as far from men and companionship as any desert could allow, the life, had, by some trick of fate, to become public if it were to have any meaning at all. The saint is not only with his phantoms; he appeals out of a thousand Western paintings for us all to know him. His extreme ordeal, and the victory he eventually wins, has, in the end, to become part of the way in which we consider our own experience, part of our own location in the world. In this strange way, the hero and anti-hero meet as one and walk off into the sunset with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

It took Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 – 1963), a British essayist turned novelist, from a family of world-class scholars, to nail the times and capture the essence of the century. Huxley had the misfortune of dying the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated resulting in his passing being largely ignored. His prophetic 1932 novel Brave New World (1932) is a futuristic cautionary fable six hundred years from our time and it is still compelling reading today.

Huxley satirizes twentieth century Western civilization by describing the conditions in which it might find itself some six hundred years from our time. A brief review of Brave New World may give you pause. Contemporary trends in culture are carried to shocking extremes that don’t seem too far a field from today:

One day in the year 632 AF (After Ford), as time was reckoned in this brave new world, Mustapha Mond, Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, takes a group of new students on a tour of the plant where human beings are turned out by mass production. Trained workers and machines carry out the entire process, from the fertilization of the egg to the birth of the baby. Each fertilized egg is placed in a solution in a large bottle for scientific development into whatever class in society the human is intended. The students are told that scientists of the period have developed a Bokanovsky Process by means of which a fertilized egg is arrested in its growth. The egg responds by budding, and instead of one human being resulting, there could be from eight to ninety-six humans, all-identical. Individuality is a thing of the past; the new society bends every effort to make completely true its motto, Community, Identity, Stability. After birth, the babies are further conditioned during their childhood for their predestined class in society. Alpha Plus Intellectuals and Epsilon Minus Morons are the two extremes of this scientific utopia.

Brave New World was a novel, an entertainment, but Huxley’s larger target was modern society in general in which spiritual instincts were being substituted for “cut and control” managerial efficiency, which in turn continued to generate new desires that had to be satisfied at all cost.

“Nothing threatens prosperity more than an anti-consumption ascetic,” states World Controller Mustapha Mond, “Industrial civilization is only possible when there is no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.”

In the twenty-first century climate of stem cell research and cloning, it would appear Huxley’s 600 years is shrinking into the PRESENT RIDICULOUS.

Less radical ideas today are often cloaked in the mystery novels of Dan Brown, Val McDermid, John Case, Robert Wilson, John Le Carre, Ted Allbeury, Don Delillo, James Ellroy, Robert Littell, Gerald Seymour, and Donna Leon, to name a few. Ideas are more palatable with today’s readers when they are served as dessert rather than the main course. Television writer Rod Serling found that out. He created the science fiction series “The Twilight Zone” because it was the only way he could get his controversial ideas on the tube.

Notice in literature today there is no tragic victim of fate such as Oedipus, no heroes such as Prometheus, Achilles, Hector, or King Arthur. Yet the mystery novelists have learned they can weave controversial aspects of religion, psychology, genetics, neuropsychiatry, philosophy, politics, and geopolitics into their works along with providing gripping entertainment. In fact, Dan Brown ignited renewed research into the Jesus story with his The Da Vinci Code (2004).

Contemporary science and philosophy strip ideas of the divine mortalizing the immortal. Science declares it must get beyond the subjective to value-free analysis. Philosophy says it must put aside “essence,” which cannot be found, and probe language for meaning. Social philosopher Erich Fromm reminds us in Heart of Man (1964) that we cannot help but be subjective, and that essence is part of our paradoxical nature of being half animal and half symbolic.

There seems a noticeable disinterest in the divine at the professional level, but a pathological preoccupation with the profane at the pedestrian level. Popular books, magazines, films and television series cannot seem to get above our animal instincts. Even in music and literature, painting and sculpture, theater and drama, “heroes” are more frequently the fallen than the redeemed. The “anti-hero” is the face we see in the mirror.

Consequently, what writers are more likely to profile is the cruel not the compassionate, the betrayer not the faithful, the disloyal not the dedicated, the deserter not the defender, the lost not the leader, the hypocrite not the honest, the prostitute not the Puritan, the clown not the clever, the scumbag not the saint, the taker not the thankful. Noble laureates Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway won the prize with such “anti-heroes.” It is only the affluent that has the leisure to aim low. The more this target is fed the greater it grows. In time we learn to take delight in this disease, to call it health rather than sickness, and to give special rewards to artists and doctors, priests and politicians who best articulate its symptoms. Upon the most talented, we bestow a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer Prize or some other prize.

God, saints and heroes are conspicuous in their absence from modern literature. Mythologist Joseph Campbell explains why in terms of the Charkas System of ancient India yoga in his Transformation of Myth Through Time (1990). He speaks of the six Yoga energy centers of the Charkas: feet, sex organs, navel, heart, throat and head. He sees us situated at the navel level, which expresses the “will-to-power,” or Adlerian individual psychology. This is the “animal level” of the Charkas System, and thus the reason for the label, “waist high culture.”

This is also evident when technology becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end. We see this with cell phones. Designed as a convenient emergency tool, it has become a necessity, not as a tool but as a pacifier, like the constant company of the cigarette, something never to feel alone.

There is craziness in the world thanks to specialization. With specialization, there can be no wise men because no one is programmed to see the big picture. As Zen master Lao-tse observes, “Wise men are never scholars, and scholars are never wise men. Yet specialists drive this “waist high” culture, fine-tuning techniques but giving little attention to patterns created or consequences of such patterns, the topic of FUTURE PERFECT.

The American culture has created the narcissistic loner. Western societies appear to be adopting it as their own. At a time when the world is becoming global with a mix of races and ethnicities, there is a competing passion for national purity and identity. We see it in Europe as the Islam population grows and European Judaic Christian national identity blurs. Great Britain, Spain, France, Germany and Italy, among other Western nations, are becoming melting pots of diversity not unlike the United States. It has caught them as if by surprise. Diversity has always existed in the West, but now the numbers are exponential and threatening what had once been narcissistic certainty.

Americans cannot trace their origins to a legendary founder or an ancestral tribe as Europeans can. Americans have never been identified as a people of blood or mythology but of one of shared idea, the nobility of freedom and equality for all. Historically, this has not been without its challenges as the American Civil War attests.

Alexis de Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America (1835) notes how the American personality swings between excessive individualism and suffocating conformity, how it displays a passion for voluntarism but an equal zeal for privacy. This zeal is tied to the nation’s Puritan heritage, but also to Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated individualism. Jefferson envisioned a pastoral republic of independent farmers, and opposed an urban, commercial society, with a strong federal government as advocated by Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson feared an oligarchy of wealth and privilege. He feared America might come to resemble the European aristocracy, which he detested.

Individualism was embodied in the frontiersman who had the bold gumption to face a hostile environment, stake a claim, work the land, defend it to the death, or with a certain ambivalence, move on if the mood struck him. John Wayne popularized this image. Author Garry Wills labels Wayne the “American Adam”:

He (John Wayne) embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer but cleansing the world of things that “need killing,” loving but not bound down by love, rootless, but carrying the Center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.

Other cultures, Wills points out, begin with a fixed social hearth, a holy city. American life begins when that enclosure is escaped. One becomes American by going out. Americans are a people of departure, not arrival. To reach one’s place is to catch sight of a new Beyond. The American myth is that of the frontier, its hero the frontiersman. To become urban is to break that spirit. Freedom is out on the plains under endless skies. A pent-in American ceases to be an American. Wills pictures the American Adam as a young man out on the horizon with an easy gait and long John Wayne stride.

Despite Tocqueville’s insight and Jefferson’s warning, twentieth century America, and other leading nations of the Western world became urban and commercial with mega corporations and mass media obsessively intruding on this open country mind. People worked for wages now controlled by office clocks or punch card clocks, performed specialized tasks, requiring special skills and specific education and training or menial rote repetitive labor. Gone was the footloose and fancy-free jack-of-all-trades independent individualistic contractor beholden to no one; gone was the American Adam.

While European workers enjoyed close to job security with Work Councils after World War II, Americans were treated to a series of socio-economic reforms that took the snap out of their stride and made them passengers in their own lives. Democratic administrations increased the size of government, but improved the lot of rank and file workers. These commenced with the New Deal (Roosevelt Administration), continued with the Fair Deal (Truman Administration), stalled with the New Frontier (Kennedy Administration) and regained momentum with the Great Society (Johnson Administration). The Social Security System and Civil Rights reforms are their legacy, and close to sacrosanct today, but still no match for European Work Council benefits.

Roosevelt’s progressive administration encouraged unionization of workers, and restricted laissez-faire capitalism. Unions, over time, won better working conditions, better worker pay, and improved worker benefits, while surrendering worker power or control of work itself. The adage “the more you do for a person the less he will do for himself” was proving only too true and setting off alarms. An army of writers responded to the growing regimentation of work and society, seeing the process squeezing out its humanity.

William H. Whyte wrote The Organization Man (1958) about bureaucratic sycophants; Sloan Wilson The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) about the prohibitive price of corporate career; and John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society (1959) about the consumer monster prosperity had created.

The twentieth century mass-market economy needed mass tastes derived from standardized products. To achieve this manufacturing had to transform workers into obedient docile predictable drones in a corporate machine. Then marketing had to program tastes to match these products. Marketers were assisted in this design by the social sciences (status seeking products), medicine (beauty and life enhancing products), behavioral sciences (self-esteem products), technology (fun and fad or anti-boring products) and science (miraculous solution products). This cornucopia of products anesthetized buyers from the worry of being narcissistic loners. Consumerism became the principal narcotic to fill this formless bottomless void. Historian Christopher Lasch labels this therapeutic consumption in his book The Culture of Narcissism (1978). He writes:

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It “educates” the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but also for new experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age.

President Jimmy Carter was so taken with this book that it became the basis of his 1979 national television “malaise” speech in which he criticized Americans for their “self-indulgent consumption” and warned “piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives.” He added, “America has a crisis in confidence.” Oh boy, did that ever aggravate the rank and file! The moralist-as-president learned a powerful lesson: you don’t tell Americans what is wrong, only what is right with them. Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan who didn’t make the same mistake. Reagan preached a cinematography utopia for eight years as if he was still an actor in film, and what’s more, got away with it.

Sociologist Vance Packard also examines these trends in a breezy style in a series of books: The Hidden Persuaders (1958) shows how advertisers use subliminal stimuli to control buying decisions; The Status Seekers (1960) deals with the obsessive need of high achievers to belong; The Waste Makers (1961) gives shocking evidence of planned obsolescence of products that could otherwise be expected to last a lifetime; A Nation of Strangers (1973) assesses the emotional costs of a mobile society. Like many other social thinkers, Packard strikes a prophetic cord:

Rootlessness seems clearly to be associated with a decline in companionship, a decline in satisfying group activities, a decline in mutual trust, and a decline in psychological security. It encourages shallowness in personal relationships and a relative indifference to community problems. It produces a loss in one’s sense of personal well-being along with an increase in both personal and social malaise. And it contributes to a personal sense of powerlessness and insignificance . . . Personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time . . . The phrase “home town” may well fade from our language . . . The individual needs a sense of community. He needs it for the shaping of his own sense of identity . . . He needs it if he is to achieve a sense of self-esteem and well-being. The challenge is to achieve a congenial balance between the individual’s yearning for freedom and his urgent need for community and continuity.

What Packard and Lasch have observed was a character shift from nineteenth century “inner-directedness” to twentieth century “other-directedness.” Before WWI, the morals canons of the Victorian era found most Americans and Europeans “inner-directed.” These canons were instilled primarily by parents, and enforced by society. They gave people internal stability, a reference code to choose their actions, what David Riesman calls in The Lonely Crowd (1969) a psychological gyroscope for coping on an even keel.

The crucial standard was the Protestant work ethic. It justified wealth accumulation and gave rise in the nineteenth century to “Robber Barons” such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. We are appalled at some of the shenanigans of corporate CEOs in the recent past, but their mischief is nothing compared to the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie. Such men stood atop the economic tree of nineteenth century society and weren’t above a Darwinian brawl to prove their mettle. If chicanery failed, they would use strong-armed tactics without apology to protect their monopoly interests in oil, railroads, coal, iron and steel, real estate and manufacturing.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) branded the times the “Gilded Age,” for when the gilt wore off one found only base brass. Everyone was trying to make a “fast buck.” The Civil War broke down morals, and although Puritan standards for women held fast, men were out of control. Poet James Russell Lowell wrote a sarcastic ode to the times directed at a particular offender:

Show your State Legislatures; show your Rings;
And challenge Europe to produce such things
As high officials sitting half in sight
To share the plunder and to fix things right;
If that don’t fetch her, why you only need
To show your latest style in martyrs – Tweed!

Tweed is in reference to William Marcy Tweed (1823 – 1878), the corrupt politician and notorious “boss” of Tammany Hall. Among his many crimes, he stole $100 million from New York City throwing its Civil War Reconstruction efforts into chaos. Tweed is one of the reasons President U. S. Grant’s presidency is held in such low regard. Some think this is an unfair charge. Historian Samuel Eliot Morrison writes:

But for all the corruption and pitiful politics of the Gilded Age, it was a robust, fearless, generous era, full of gusto and joy of living, affording wide scope to individual energy and material creation. And although not one of the greatest eras in American arts and letters, it was far from barren in these, or spiritual forces.

That would change after WWI. With more than ten million dead, cities in ruin, the world running on empty, economically and emotionally, it justified the spike of exuberance of the “Roaring 20s” and “The Jazz Age” with artificial gayety, and contrived decadence and detachment, which segued to the bankrupt Great Depression, and then on to the devastating nightmare of WWII.

The Robber Barons were inner-directed personalities who led the capitalistic expansion to produce the iron, extract the coal, and forge the steel to create the modern industrialized economy. They weren’t easy men, and could best be described as being of a singular focus, emotional hardness and of little self-understanding. The press called them “tycoons,” but they paid it little mind as they thrived on brutal competition with little concern for external criticism. Their actions were a law unto themselves governed by their own internal moral standards.

But as the twentieth century turned from a natural-resource-based economy involving heavy metal manufacturing to a consumer driven, credit-card society, a new personality emerged, what David Riesman calls “other-directed” individuals. These people would aim to please rather than please themselves, react to orders rather than be interested in giving them, look for answers in others rather than in themselves, consume their energy in passive complaining rather than active risk taking. Individual creativity was subsumed under teamwork and rule following. Here conformist behavior was expected and groupthink “brain storming“ was preferred to individual creative initiative. Gone was the multi-skilled nineteenth-century artisan; gone too was the free-spirited worker. Work, which was once so vital to identity, became peripheral to existence. People still went to work but brought their duplicitous minds to the job and left their passionate spirits at home. This impacted not only workers but their managers and leaders as well. The spirit of give was replaced by the mind to take. It would become the nightmare of the late twentieth century and has leaked into the twenty-first, a situation far more devastating than the insensitivity of the Robber Barons. What has thus far rescued productivity from disaster, while continuing to mask the problem, was and remains technology as leadership and workers became and again remain practically non-factors and non-events. These are themes of my books Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) and Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2000).

Mass advertising through television of the 1960s started a mass-market appeal and common trend in dress, home furnishings and entertainment in the new consumer society. As if overnight, the smallest and previously most unique of communities took on a sameness. Metro centers sprung up everywhere with similar skylines, similar blends of commerce, government, cultural centers, parks, sports arenas and recreational areas. All aspects of individualism receded into advanced uniformity.

Other directed people don’t stand out in a crowd. They are the crowd, as Riesman puts it, “the lonely crowd.” They worry what their peers think of them rather than what they think of themselves. They have little motivation to move beyond society’s expectations, what Lasch sees as “diminishing expectations.” In a disposable, uncertain, draconian climate, they choose the safety of passivity, convincing themselves they can’t be hurt if they don’t make waves. They let experts tell them how to dress, what to eat, what restaurants to frequent, what films to watch, books to read, places to live, schools to attend, careers to pursue, ideas to cherish, beliefs to hold, sports to follow, cars to drive, vacations to take, relationships to seek, health rituals to follow, diets to adhere to, tolerances to have, and so on. Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre dubs this ritualistic committed “other-directedness” as the making of the modern “inauthentic man.”

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, while agreeing with Sartre, explains that the inauthentic self is a product of capitalistic society:

It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished “thing,” dependent on powers outside of himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.

Baby boomers, those born between 1945 and 1960, have fulfilled Sartre and Fromm’s prophecy. They hold strong group identity views, which differ widely with previous generations. There is a sameness of baby boomers throughout the Western world. You see this when they cavort on television, or hear it when they express opinions. They don’t exercise alone, they have personal trainers. They don’t punish you with their affluence; they simply retrogress to being eternally kid to enjoy it. It is like hearing an echo bouncing off mountaintops when they frolic together with the same consistent amplified shrill. They express similar sentiments about age, education, aspirations, friends, family, politics, religion, health, and wealth creation as if they all attended the same conforming school. American baby boomers in particular parody Tocqueville’s words utter more than one hundred years before. He writes:

In America, I have seen the freest and best educated of men in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. (This uneasiness was because) Americans are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess.

In fact, the words of Gordon Gekko, the conniving financier in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie starring Michael Douglas Wall Street became the mantra of the 1980s when slicked down hair dude Gekko declared, “Greed is good.” Fueled by a huge national debt and baby boomers lust for designer labels, Americans went on a buying spree unmatched since the 1920s in conspicuous consumption. Corporations went on a frenetic pace of merging and leveraging operations at a tempo not seen since the giant trusts of the late nineteenth century, only these weren’t Robber Barons. These were kids born after WWII with Ivy League degrees in their pockets and the gleam of dollar sign in their eyes.

What Tocqueville saw in 1834 gives a clue to this development. He saw new families rising out of obscurity, others falling back, and those remaining out to break connection with past generations. He noted in a so-called classless society that each class moves closer to the others and mixes with them, then its members become indifferent and like strangers to each other. Democracy, he saw, breaks the long chain climbing from peasant to king, setting links apart from the others:

Thus not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.

Once again, Christopher Lasch captures the essence of this in his 1984 book The Minimal Self. He describes psychic survival in troubled times where all frames of reference have disintegrated, except preoccupation with self. It is no longer a matter of what you are capable of doing but how you are perceived. He writes:

The repeated experience of uneasy self-scrutiny, of submission to expert judgment, of distrust of their own capacity to make intelligent decisions, either as producers or as consumers, colors people’s perceptions both of themselves and of the world around them. It encourages a new kind of self-consciousness that has little in common with introspection or vanity. Both as a worker and as a consumer, the individual learns not merely to measure himself against others but to see himself through others’ eyes. He learns that the self-image he projects counts for more than accumulated skills and experience.

This describes a nihilistic culture that gives the individual permission to change identities, to discard and adopt new ones as frequently as a change of clothes. It has become “cool” the last quarter of the twentieth century to change values, beliefs, principles, and affiliations as frequently as one might change breakfast cereals.

Baby boomers like to see themselves as individualistic, creative, innovative, and in charge, but of what? This may be accompanied by a sort of theatrical self-assertion in which the commandment is “be yourself!” But the person would seem to have little notion of what kind of self it wants to be. It is all well to reject mediocrity, conformity and mendacity, but the rejection becomes a mere pose when there are similar tastes, similar takes on beauty, lifestyle and permissions. New Age is written across this generation’s brow, as there seems a neo- to everything, which gives it all a kind of absurdity. Roger Shinn writes in The Existentialist Posture (1959):

The person of profound conviction often lives in heroic nonconformity; but the person who sets out to be a nonconformist is less a hero than a clown.

It is this PAST IMPERFECT world that has put baby boomers on camera as we move into the PRESENT RIDICULOUS. Their lost self is in need of being buoyed up to make an impression as opposed to make a difference; to have it together and appear in charge when neither is likely. Theatrical assertion has taken center stage, and what you see is unlikely to be what you get. Still, baby boomers should take heart in that Folly has accompanied every age. There was the eighteenth century Enlightenment’s belief in the reign of reason. It fell short of the mark, as did the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century’s liberal ideal that education and science would lead to endless progress. The American Twentieth century convinced the world there were no restrictions or limits and the world ran into both.

The pendulum of the American character swung a full 180 degrees late in the twentieth century, from locked tight conformity to unlatched individuality as it experienced double-digit inflation and double digit unemployment in the 1970s, to huge deficits and mass military build-up in the 1980s, to seemingly unimaginable prosperity and federal surpluses in the 1990s, to schizophrenic paranoia against ghostly terrorism today. Literary critic Roger Shattuck sums it up:

The West appears to consider itself capable of surviving in a condition of unrestricted knowledge and unbridled imagination. We presume to welcome Prometheus while overlooking Pandora.”

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