Becker—Birth (iv)

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Chapter Eight

CULTURE AND PERSONALITY

The Standardization of the Self-Esteem

"We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and
guiding action has power over us from the first."
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

". . . mankind's common instinct for reality . . . has always held the
world to be essentially a theatre for heroism."
WILLIAM JAMES

If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down. And this is exactly what we learn from clinical data, from the theory of the psychoses, as well as from anthropology. ...

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... Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish:...

... It is wrong to say that man is a peacock, if we mean thereby to belittle his urge to self-glorification, and make it seem a mere matter of vanity and self-display. ...when we tally the sum of these efforts, the excruciating earnestness of them, the eternal grinding-out of the inner-newsreel, we can see that something really big is going on—...

This is the uniquely human need,... each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—... This seems to be the logical and inevitable result of the symbolic constitution of self-worth in an unbelievably complex animal with exquisitely sensitive

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and effusive emotions. ... Self-preservation, physio-chemical identity, pulsating body warmth, a sense of power and satisfaction in activity—all these tally up in symbolic man to the emergence of the heroic urge. ... Freud saw the universality of narcissism, and revealed the invertedness and the clinical liabilities of it. Adler too studied the neurotic overemphasis on the "Will to Power," and made the idea a central part of his formulations. But it was Nietzsche, earlier, who saw the healthy expression of the "Will to Power" and glory, the inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man.

... If you are a psychiatrist or social worker, and want to understand directly what is driving your patient, ask yourself simply how he thinks of himself as a hero, what constitutes the framework of reference for his heroic strivings—... If you are a student of society, and want to understand why youth opts out of the system, find out why it fails to offer them the possibility of real heroism. If you are a child psychologist you already understand the

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deeper meaning of what we casually and often scornfully term "sibling rivalry." ... The child needs to be an object of primary value, and by definition only one person can be primary;... Children are not vicious animals struggling to dominate rivals, but culture-heroes in the making, desperately trying to stand out.

Millennial Ambivalence: Sports

Sports have never been more fully integrated with the wider entertainment industry than they are right now, and neither have I, but I find, as I always did before, that sports fandom is the exception among artists and entertainers, not the rule. I for one quickly lost all interest in TV and movies as an adult, but sports have held on to an irreducible sliver of my attention where most all other artifacts of "entertainment" proper have failed. For market research purposes I suppose this puts me in an ever smaller sub-minority of entertainment consumers; truthfully, though, in my world sports are less entertainment than art, and this puts me quite at odds not only with the lowest common denominator but with virtually everything sports have become. Allow me to unpack that confession just a bit.

Like the rest of the entertainment landscape, the sports world has become increasingly ruled by "off-the-field" matters, both for better and for worse I think. Social media has given the athletes themselves greater agency in this new reality, but it is a reality which has been in the works for a while, since long before Twitter. If the proverbial aliens landed, they might conclude from the sports media's overwrought examination of every tabloid-worthy detail of the athletes' off-the-field lives that the games themselves must not be all that interesting to spectators, that the real action was in the human drama. Certainly most all sports media executives seem to have concluded this. This invites much the same question as do efforts to "humanize" orchestra musicians by shifting the focus off-the-field: Who TF cares about human dramas that are a dime a dozen? Is this really what the audience wants? Is it what the suits only think they want? Is this supposed to manufacture crossover appeal to other entertainment consumers by endowing sports with a tabloid sector? I don't know the answer, but I hate all of the choices.

On the plus side, I do think this Total Access has been constructive in greatly inhibiting the suspension of disbelief on which all entertainment makes its nut. People feel differently about the concussion issue in football, for example, but however they feel they are not allowed to ignore it, and that is, if not a happy condition in which to find ourselves, then at least the necessary first step toward happier times. This is just one of what seems like a dozen or so utterly delectable sports world nuggets for the dime store metaphysician to savor: everything contains the seeds of its own destruction, and sports fans alive today are getting to watch a generous handful of those seeds sprout and run amok both on and off the field. The money finally got so huge that the full weight of the human intellect was brought to bear on these primitive games, such that rule changes are now endemic to pro sports as the leagues desperately try to plug procedural holes that almost no one was even aware of 20 years ago. Social media has enabled smart athletes to make even more money on themselves, and dumb ones to find new and better ways to piss it away with each tweet. Teams are hardly identifiable by their uniforms anymore, because they have a dozen alternate uniforms and must keep them all in game circulation so as to keep all of them flying off the shelves at once.

Indeed, even I find myself perversely enjoying the spectacle of all of this and occasionally, as today, attempting to unpack it as if it mattered as deeply to me as music does, as deeply as in my weaker moments the outcome of a Big Game seems like it does. Ultimately though, both music and sports are things to do, not just things to contemplate. I consider the receptive end of the transaction to be active rather than passive in both cases, especially when done in person: crowds affect the outcomes of both concerts and matches in very similar ways, excepting of course (usually) the absence of zero-sum winning and losing in musical performance. I'm not really sure how knowing that the pitcher and the hitter have recently had a Twitter spat, or that the oboist has three children and two French bulldogs at home, figures into this equation for most people. I know that for me these are sideshows without which I would still enjoy listening to music and watching sports, and probably enjoy it more that I currently do precisely for not having to hear about all of this. Most every person-to-person interaction I can recall indicates that I am indeed part of a silent majority on this point; the towering piece of anecdotal evidence to the contrary is the wider thrust of all formal art and entertainment production towards tabloidism, oversharing, and backstory. I consume a certain amount of this residually, because I don't have a choice. I am not happy about it.

The process which was set in motion the first time a local pro sports team imported players from a neighboring town has now found its apotheosis in the holier-than-thous who "root for players, not for teams." Neither M.O. is any more or less rational than the other, but a player-centered fandom certainly represents the ultimate triumph of backstory over forestory. Formally at least, sports teams still win or lose "as a team," as the saying would have it, not as individuals or brands. So far this is one rule which has not been changed with an eye toward wider appeal; instead it is concertedly elided by an ever-growing sideshow of player-focused media content, most especially fantasy sports. I have had to resort to speaking of "material football" around my fantasy-playing co-workers in order to differentiate my interest in the games from theirs. Ironically, much like the nametags we wear at work, this twisted rooting interest doesn't actually allow fans to get to know the players as individuals but rather enables them to bypass this altogether to arrive at a false intimacy; instead of bringing fans closer to players, players literally become numbers, interchangeable chess pieces without human qualities, just as the team owners are so often accused of viewing them. (NFL = "not for long.") This is hardly more rational than rooting for the team from the place you grew up. What it is is more permissive of self-styling. When I was a teenager, self-stylers were known as "frontrunners" and roundly mocked. This was not that long ago.

There are exceedingly few players who are equally valuable in fantasy and material football, except perhaps for those who are equally worthless because they don't play at all. There are just as few whose aesthetic qualities and winning qualities are commensurate. Peyton Manning has been posited as among the most aesthetically unappealing great players. Mike Trout is not exactly unappealing, but his style lags well behind his substance. Kemba Walker just looks good in Celtics green and is, incidentally, also performing quite well in it. It just had to be a city like San Diego that brought Wil Myers and Manny Machado together, though some observers think the Padres are, whether because or in spite of this, finally headed for better times. Indeed, since I can walk to Dodger Stadium, and because the Dodgers and Padres play there 9 or 10 times a year, this is bound to be something I think twice about the next time I have a chance to go. There is a remote corner of my brain where there lives a standard-issue entertainment consumer, who is rationalistically put off by the idea of consuming the same entertainment product more than a couple of times. Happily for me, the artist who has the run of the remaining neural pathways is there to remind me that players evolve, stakes change, crowds affect outcomes, and that baseball is, like all great sports, just quirky and high-variance enough in its formal dynamics and material realities alike so as to preclude any two games between the same teams in the same building at the same time of day being remotely the same experience. High art can compete with that; tabloid journalism can't.

Millennial Ambivalence: The Road

If you're from the future and you're reading this blog from start to finish, it probably comes as a surprise that this weekend brings another junket and another Scrabble indulgence. The ascetic image I like to cultivate here is more cultivated than real. I have always worked on projects in bursts and then floundered for days, weeks or even months. I take lots of breaks which can last for lots of different durations. I seem to have a fixed quantity of creative energy which, like semen, is best spent in large bursts rather than constant emissions. My old roommate in The Valley claims that Asians can work more steadily and that this is why they excel. (He voted for Trump.) Blog Month itself was partially conceived as an experiment in working against what seems to be my ineluctable nature. It is informative that I have several times failed to adhere to its strictures.

Poring over lists of arbitrary words in solitude and then venturing out to mediocre hotels and senior centers to sit across the table from other socially stunted word grinders is not everyone's idea of a vacation. It's not really my idea of a vacation either, because I'm allergic to the word "vacation," and to the middle-class obsession with leisure travel generally, and to all of the specious rationalizations for leisure travel as a means of personal growth. It's the intellectual and creative challenges, and the competition, which draw me to Scrabble; the temptation to bankrupt myself traveling to more and more tournaments is a serious drawback.

I have been a core member of two bands which have toured on a scale of weeks rather than days. I learned that when a musician claims to "love touring," either they are lying or they are really saying that they love the things that touring gets you, like money (maybe), looking busy (always), an intensification of focus/interplay in an ensemble which can only come from performing a lot on a compressed schedule (probably), being received by new people/communities (depends on where you are), and group bonding in transit (temporarily). I am not ignorant of the benefits other people see in these things, but four of the five of them hold no interest for me and have no relevance to my work. And because touring is even less conducive to keeping up with other projects in "spare" time, I dislike it even more than the idea of travel for its own sake. I must confess, though, that the ensemble sharpening aspect is real: a short tour is ideal for getting a band in peak form, especially on difficult music, and as long as you are not already a mere short tour away from strangling each other. Touring is the new rehearsal, because actual rehearsal sounds like a lot less fun than traveling.

Millennial Ambivalence: Work

I remember an evening sometime in my early twenties, at band practice (not rehearsal) with a group of mostly much older people, when I said something I immediately regretted about never wanting to retire. In that moment, conceiving of my profession as playing tuba in public, it seemed like a fair statement. What I really meant was that I hate being idle and I hope never to stop doing the work that I care about. A decade and a half later, it seems like no one in any profession cares about work, period, not even those whom many others envy. Work is, definitionally, unimportant, usually involving offering up something others don’t really care about either and convincing them that, in a moment of weakness, they could take it or leave it and don’t want to miss out. A great many people are idle at work in precisely the way I can’t stand being idle anywhere. If I was stuck in that bind and couldn’t ever retire from it, things would be dark indeed.

So, as of the precise moment that I am clicking the “Post” button, I do not like idleness and I do hope to retire someday. But I also self-identify as part of the silent majority who likes work, not just activity; who finds the structure helpful, even if it is minimal; and who is mildly to moderately unhappy being totally unemployed. Because there is so little dignified work, this seemingly adaptive and salutary characteristic is functionally the reverse: however much you dislike idleness, you can always find a job that you hate even more. Slowly but surely, pre-millennial generations are having to admit that millennial altruism only looks idle and destructive because the structures these generations bequeathed to us are insidiously designed to punish initiative, shame creativity, and enforce idleness as a defense mechanism. The scholars who foresaw this almost perfectly were dismissed as extremists, so the realization has had to proceed literally block by block, industry by industry, until enough scattered individuals have become upset enough at the meaninglessness of work that they actually start to relate to us a little bit more. Some have long since accepted that money can’t buy happiness while insisting that consumption is good for the economy. But now, production is not good for the worker, and no rate of growth will make it any more possible to buy our way out of that abyss.

Millennial Ambivalence: The Hot Food Bar

When Whole Foods became Whole Paycheck, we could at least rationalize this by reciting the old adage, "You get what you pay for." ("Cheap gets expensive" is the polka singer version. Is this of German origin?) But when Whole Paycheck became Whole Economy, everything became much harder to rationalize.

For me, today was a gift, an unexpected day off from work which happened to coincide with a local Scrabble tournament. Unusually for me, I went looking for a restaurant afterwards rather than rushing home to cook for myself. After much Yelping and some wandering, I did what I told myself at the outset I would not do: I ended up at the Whole Foods downtown, where I shop for (a few) groceries most weeks.

When you live in LA, surrounded by culinary excellence and excess in equal measure, the idea of landing at the Hot Food Bar on a day like this feels so pointless and deflating. The abstract reality is that it is the best thing ever. I got to eat a pile of roasted vegetables out of a cardboard box, sip a stiff local IPA, and gorge on sports. I walked in with a backpack and a Scrabble bag and nobody looked at me sideways. The volume level in the room was reasonable. I'm not sure where else you can have all of these things together. I feel much better about this decision now than I did two hours ago.

Marcuse, Fromm, Adorno, Debord, among others, would have a discursive field day unpacking the Amazon phenomenon. Among the corporate powers which threaten to overtake and supersede state power, this is the only one I am truly ambivalent about. I would love to read these theorists attempting to predict the shape of the incremental drift from seeming benevolence to pure evil that we all expect. Until then, repressive desublimation sure feels good.