-- By Tom Phillips
Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now." Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.
There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt. In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s. But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.
 |
| Steven Pinker |
In my view, the overall decline has taken place in a category difficult to measure with numbers.
Humanity is expressed in the quality of human relationships, and over the last half-century, we have seen key human relationships in America systemically degraded and dehumanized, to the point that some of them barely exist. Among them are relations between employers and employees, businesses and customers, teachers and students -- daily interactions that form a large part of nearly everyone's lives.
Every curmudgeon needs his own timeline of when things began to decay. Bill Moyers points to a 1971 memo written by Lewis Powell, later a justice of the US Supreme Court. Powell claimed to see a broad-based attack on the US economic system, and called for businessmen to lead a broad-based counterattack -- in politics and the media, colleges and high schools, business schools and corporate boardrooms. The memo presaged a relentless campaign ever since to roll back the economic and social reforms that began with Roosevelt's New Deal.
My "uh-oh" moment came in the early 1980s, when I first heard the term "maximizing profits." It came via my oldest son, who was attending a high school that suddenly switched its focus from science and humanities to business and money. Swept up in the free-market enthusiasm of the Reagan years, the school was now urging practically every student to prepare for a career as an accountant, to ride the tide of maximized profits.
The phrase had ominous implications. When a company makes "maximizing profits" its goal, everything else goes on the chopping block: employees' wages and benefits, customer service, product quality, worker and consumer safety, the environment, and corporate culture itself. When I first went to work for CBS in the 1960s, I remember chairman William Paley defending the idea of "corporate citizenship" to a disgruntled stockholder, who was complaining about the company's civic contributions. Sure enough, when "maximizing profits" became the mantra, the company was sold to Laurence Tisch, who imported a team of accountants to test every expenditure for its economic value. All they wanted to know was how much profit could be wrung from each and every transaction -- whether with employees, advertisers, or the public. At CBS News, journalism was transformed from a public trust to just another commodity, to be produced as cheaply as possible. I wince to say it, but "fake news" isn't entirely a myth -- it's cheap stuff that looks like news, but can't be trusted. A common example is the use of free-lance video from opportunistic vendors all over the world. This cheap stuff may be biased or even staged -- but it is routinely narrated by stay-at-home reporters to make it look like the network is on the scene, covering the story.
Over fifty years in journalism, my own job as a writer was transformed -- from a known and valued staff employee to an anonymous free-lancer. In the 1980s and 90s, I took part in labor negotiations with CBS and became familiar with their long-range strategy for degrading their relations with workers. An executive let us in on the concept of the "eroding core," i.e. the reduction of permanent staff jobs and the rise of casual labor, essentially a beggar class competing against each other for work. This was supposed to be OK with us, because it would only harm those coming after. But some of us wound up in that beggar class - let go, then taken back as day laborers.
Over fifty years in journalism, my own job as a writer was transformed -- from a known and valued staff employee to an anonymous free-lancer. In the 1980s and 90s, I took part in labor negotiations with CBS and became familiar with their long-range strategy for degrading their relations with workers. An executive let us in on the concept of the "eroding core," i.e. the reduction of permanent staff jobs and the rise of casual labor, essentially a beggar class competing against each other for work. This was supposed to be OK with us, because it would only harm those coming after. But some of us wound up in that beggar class - let go, then taken back as day laborers.
Today, highly skilled union writers work at CBS and other networks with no set hours, no vacations, no company benefits, no real relation with the company they work for. If one were to die on the job, the company would feel no obligation to send flowers.
**************
Consumer relations are also high on the corporate hitlist. Customer service has been widely replaced with self-service, and this trend is accelerating. The idea is for the company to do as little as possible for customers, turning them into unpaid gas jockeys, ushers and floorwalkers, waiters and busboys, garbage collectors. The decline in service employees has been matched by the rise in security guards -- to make sure the unpaid help doesn't steal. (I'm tempted to write: why shouldn't they?)
Nearly gone are the days when salesmen and women formed actual relationships with customers, and profited from the trust implicit in those relationships. These connections benefited all concerned, including the owners, by giving capitalism a human face. Faces are anathema to a new generation of owners -- often private equity firms far removed from the business itself, concerned only with streamlining an acquisition until they can flip it at a profit. Each human service eliminated means more unpaid labor, more dollars squeezed down to the bottom line.
In education, the emphasis on business and money has changed the role of teachers -- from mentors in loco parentis to something more like career coaches, simply loco. In some high-end suburban schools, teachers are required to pressure children as young as 13 to choose a college major, and map out an academic path toward a specific profession or job. Of course, there's no guarantee that job or profession will even exist when the students finish their schooling. But a career is now the goal of education -- the product, a worker who fills a supposed need, rather than a human being with the freedom to choose. The student-teacher relationship is just another transaction; a transfer of supposedly practical knowledge, often near or past its expiry date.
**************
Consumer relations are also high on the corporate hitlist. Customer service has been widely replaced with self-service, and this trend is accelerating. The idea is for the company to do as little as possible for customers, turning them into unpaid gas jockeys, ushers and floorwalkers, waiters and busboys, garbage collectors. The decline in service employees has been matched by the rise in security guards -- to make sure the unpaid help doesn't steal. (I'm tempted to write: why shouldn't they?)
Nearly gone are the days when salesmen and women formed actual relationships with customers, and profited from the trust implicit in those relationships. These connections benefited all concerned, including the owners, by giving capitalism a human face. Faces are anathema to a new generation of owners -- often private equity firms far removed from the business itself, concerned only with streamlining an acquisition until they can flip it at a profit. Each human service eliminated means more unpaid labor, more dollars squeezed down to the bottom line.
In education, the emphasis on business and money has changed the role of teachers -- from mentors in loco parentis to something more like career coaches, simply loco. In some high-end suburban schools, teachers are required to pressure children as young as 13 to choose a college major, and map out an academic path toward a specific profession or job. Of course, there's no guarantee that job or profession will even exist when the students finish their schooling. But a career is now the goal of education -- the product, a worker who fills a supposed need, rather than a human being with the freedom to choose. The student-teacher relationship is just another transaction; a transfer of supposedly practical knowledge, often near or past its expiry date.
One hopeful note in Pinker's Paradise is that Millennials are for some reason happier than the rest of us. I've noticed their sly expressions, and have a hint of what they're thinking and feeling.
Just one area of education still exists largely free of careerism --- one where the product by its nature has no practical value -- and that is the arts. Music, visual art, dance, even language are being starved at every level of education, but they are not endangered species. On the contrary, the more you starve them the stronger they grow. Resistance is the mother of art, and art the mother of resistance.
When the last Art class is turned into a computer lab, look to the subway walls. Then, Mr. Business Man, get out of the way.
-- Copyright 2018 by Tom Phillips
-- Copyright 2018 by Tom Phillips
No comments:
Post a Comment