Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
Chapter Four: Flatland
The idea of this chapter, I think is that The Market flattens out the natural, Platonic hierarchy of character, and pushes as its heroes only people who succeed in The Market, that is, people who make money.
This is crap.
Oh, yes, it was much better when our heroes were Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, Benito Mussolini and Haile Selassie. Sure, there was no celebrity culture in the thirties, when Walter Winchell ruled the airwaves. Sure, there was no celebrity culture in the fifties, when gay movie stars married starlets for the publicity. Yep, before this degenerate generation, we all revered philosopher-kings, just like Plato wanted us to.
Look, I agree that we have this celebrity problem. I understand that a society takes its celebrities as role models, and that we are making problems for ourselves by elevating people to celebrity status who have no actual achievements. On the other hand, the difference over the last few generations is pretty clearly one of degree, rather than kind. And, you know, for all that Mr. Stiles takes Plato (of all people) for his cultural dictates, the actual Classical Greek culture that Plato lived in was celebrity-mad in its own way, with not only popular actors and whores invited to dine with the aristocracy but fads for exotics and freaks that don’t really compare favorably with our own fads for Hiltons and Richies. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem, or that we shouldn’t address the problem, it just means that in order to address the problem, we need to understand it historically.
But he’s right. We do tend to use wealth as a marker for admirability, or at least we use the trappings of wealth. I have no idea how wealthy the various celebrities actually are, but there is a clear sense that market success is worthy of celebration, and that market failure ends that. His example is one that I have used a lot: why are we assumed to care whether a movie makes $20 million or $100 million? Why are the box office returns news, other than in trade journals? For that matter, why are two minutes of the miniscule amount of news we watch or listen to taken up with the daily ups and downs of the Dow Jones Average and the NASDAQ? Sure, there are a few people who have index funds, but even they shouldn’t need to follow the daily points. Sure, if there’s a big event, that’s news, but then that’s covered in the news part of the news, anyway? So why report the Dow every hour?
And yet ... when Mr. Stiles picks an example of how the transaction-maximizing Market trumps other values, he comes up with ... male cosmetics. “here we see the power of the Market in spades, because it has managed to overcome even sexual identity.” This outrage is placed after (and by implication is more outrageous than) the increase in plastic surgery for women. Now, if you accept the idea that the Market is to blame for not only a sense of decreased self-worth and an accompanying Bubble-created idea that self-worth can be increased by looking like a television stars, and that therefore people are conned into spending money they should not on cosmetic enhancements, then shows like The Swan should really be the epitome of awful. And they are. They are. To go from that, though, to whining that the market for male cosmetics grew 3.5 percent in 2003, and that therefore male cosmetics signal the downfall of western civilization, well, Your Humble Blogger stared open-mouthed at the book for a while trying to see if it was a joke. I mean, yes, run riot, Gentle Readers, at the Market (or the patriarchy) duping women into voluntarily having their bodies cut into with knives in order to imitate an image that is decided on by Marketeers. But I will shed no tears at the fellows buying blush. Either of them.
Bye the bye, my frustrated conversations about this stupidity made me think about the issue of cosmetics a bit. Of course, Mr. Stiles is just ignorant if he thinks that there is something intrinsically female about the use of cosmetics. The Egyptians kohled their eyes, our Founding Fathers wore makeup (and wigs, which were essentially cosmetic), and the indigenous peoples of this continent beautified themselves without confusing their sexual identity. But I would guess that in most cultures, it is the upper crust that uses cosmetics daily. No, I don’t really know enough comp soc to make this kind of statement, but I would think that the working-class rarely wears cosmetics to work. I think one of the things the Market has done is expand the cosmetics requirement down and out, maximizing transactions by making secretaries and waitresses paint their faces. Of course, it did that in the fifties, so Mr. Stiles can’t see it. And, of course, it isn’t a bad thing for the Market to make women spend money on makeup, because of their sexual identity. Prat.
The other thing Mr. Stiles complains about in this chapter is the dumbing-down of the humanities in the American University system. Despite his references to Bloom and Bloom, who both (in my opinion) take a reductive view of what an emphasis on the humanities should mean, Mr. Stiles does point out that the humanities, and in particular literature, offer an alternative to the Market. As such, the more the Market dominates our choices, the less value a study of art appears to have. Further, the more the Market eats up our hours with transactions (both making and spending money), the less time and energy we can spend on reading, and so the humanities background gives less payoff in the long term. Of course, here as well, Mr. Stiles appears to be wearing blinders; anybody who has done serious manual labor for a day will appreciate that even a good background in Great Books will not yield much energy to tackle Homer at the end of the day. This was always the case, it was just that blue-collar workers were assumed not to have the capacity to make use of the education they were denied, rather than just being too damn tired. My own experience of factory work was in my youth, when I was young and strong and had seemingly inexhaustible energy; I can’t imagine now working in a factory forty hours a week and reading anything other than children’s books, and falling asleep over those, too. If white-collar workers now share that experience more frequently (and I’m sure they do), then I sympathize, but I can’t help pointing out that just as the pressure to spend money on cosmetics becomes a problem when it applies to men, so the draining workplace becomes a problem when it applies to the affluent.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.