The Corrosion of Character

The setting of this model factory—so pretty to our eyes—in fact dramatizes a great transformation of labor beginning in Diderot’s time: here home was separated from workplace. Up to the mid-eighteenth century, the household served as the physical center of the economy. In the countryside, families made most of the things they consumed; in cities like Paris or London, trades also were practiced in the family dwelling. In a baker’s house, for instance, journeymen, apprentices, and the baker’s biological family all “took their meals together, and food was provided for all, together, since all were expected to sleep and live in the house,” as the historian Herbert Applebaum points out; “the cost of making bread…included the housing, feeding, and clothing of all the people who worked for the master. Money wages was a fraction of the cost.”11 The anthropologist Daniel Defert calls this an economy of the domus; instead of wage slavery, there reigned an inseparable combination of shelter and subordination to the will of a master

What is missing between the polar opposites of drifting experience and static assertion is a narrative which could organize his conduct. Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative which made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux; this world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative. Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction, Schumpeter said, thinking about entrepreneurs, requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next. Most people, though, are not at ease with change in this nonchalant, negligent way.

Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Out of the confusion of sentiments in which we all dwell at any particular moment, we seek to save and sustain some; these sustainable sentiments will serve our characters. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others.
How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment? How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term? How can mutual loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned? These are the questions about character posed by the new, flexible capitalism.

THE SYSTEM OF POWER which lurks in modern forms of flexibility consists of three elements: discontinuous reinvention of institutions; flexible specialization of production; and concentration of without centralization of power.

The anthropologist Edmund Leach has sought to divide the experience of changing time into two sorts. In one, we know things change, but they seem to have a continuity with what came before. In the other, there is rupture because of acts which have irreversibly altered our lives.

flexible change, of the sort which takes aim today at bureaucratic routine, seeks to reinvent institutions decisively and irrevocably, so that the present becomes discontinuous from the past.

Philosophical thinking about character struggled thereafter to find principles of inner regulation and recovery which would rescue the sense of oneself from sensory flux.

Revulsion against bureaucratic routine and pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control, rather than created the conditions which set us free.

Routinized time had become an arena in which workers could assert their own demands, an arena of empowerment.

Today we stand at a historical divide on the issue of routine.