The Corrosion of Character

As a boy, I already knew, Rico had chafed under Enrico’s authority; he had told me then he felt smothered by the small-minded rules which governed the janitor’s life. Now that he is a father himself, the fear of a lack of ethical discipline haunts him, particularly the fear that his children will become “mall rats,” hanging out aimlessly in the parking lots of shopping centers in the afternoons while the parents remain out of touch at their offices.
He therefore wants to set for his son and daughters an example of resolution and purpose, “but you can’t just tell kids to be like that” he has to set an example. The objective example he could set, his upward mobility, is something they take for granted, a history that belongs to a past not their own, a story which is over. But his deepest worry is that he cannot offer the substance of his work life as an example to his children of how they should conduct themselves ethically. The qualities of good work are not the qualities of good character.

classic American suburb was a bedroom community; in the last generation a different kind of suburb has arisen, more economically independent of the urban core, but not really town or village either; a place springs into life with the wave of a developer’s wand, flourishes, and begins to decay all within a generation. Such communities are not empty of sociability or neighborliness, but no one in them becomes a long-term witness to another person’s life.
The fugitive quality of friendship and local community form the background to the most important of Rico’s inner worries, his family. Like Enrico, Rico views work as his service to the family; unlike Enrico, Rico finds that the demands of the job interfere with achieving the end. At first I thought he was talking about the all too familiar conflict between work time and time for family. “We get home at seven, do dinner, try to find an hour for the kids’ homework, and then deal with our own paperwork.” When things get tough for months at a time in his consulting firm, “it’s like I don’t know who my kids are.”

As I say, at first I was not prepared to shed many tears for this American Dream couple. Yet as dinner was served to Rico and me on our flight, and he began to talk more personally, my sympathies increased. His fear of losing control, it developed, went much deeper than worry about losing power in his job. He feared that the actions he needs to take and the way he has to live in order to survive in the modern economy have set his emotional, inner life adrift.
Rico told me that he and Jeannette have made friends mostly with the people they see at work, and have lost many of these friendships during the moves of the last twelve years, “though we stay ‘netted.’” Rico looks to electronic communications for the sense of community which Enrico most enjoyed when he attended meetings of the janitors’ union, but the son finds communications on-line short and hurried. “It’s like with your kids—when you’re not there, all you get is news later.”

Prosperous as they are, the very acme of an adaptable, mutually supportive couple, both husband and wife often fear they are on the edge of losing control over their lives. This fear is built into their work histories.
In Rico’s case, the fear of lacking control is straightforward: it concerns managing time. When Rico told his peers he was going to start his own consulting firm, most approved; consulting seems the road to independence. But in getting started he found himself plunged into many menial tasks, like doing his own photocopying, which before he’d taken for granted. He found himself plunged into the sheer flux of networking; every call had to be answered, the slightest acquaintance pursued. To find work, he has fallen subservient to the schedules of people who are in no way obliged to respond to him. Like other consultants, he wants to work in accordance with contracts setting out just what the consultant will do. But these contracts, he says, are largely fictions. A consultant usually has to tack one way and another in response to the changing whims or thoughts of those who pay; Rico has no fixed role that allows him to say to others, “This is what I do, this is what I am responsible for.”

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.