Josiah Bounderby and the Aspirational Society

I have in the past remarked how while Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge became so familiar a figure culturally that "Scrooge" is a byword for selfish callousness, Josiah Bounderby from Hard Times never got anywhere near so much attention--and indeed reference to him so scarce that the only recent ones I found were in an Indian Express blog post discussing one specimen of the type, and the comparison a South Korean judge drew between the Samsung executives in their recent high-profile trial and Dickens' creation.

It seemed to me that this is because the cult of the "self-made man," if probably universal today (the Indian item specifically attacked this) is so particularly strong in America today--and if discredited over and over again by those sociologists who actually attend to the facts, challenging it a cultural taboo, so much so that few dare do anything that could be construed as doing so.

Thinking about that in the past I have tended to focus on the ways in which this taboo is used to defend the validity of extreme differences in wealth, but that mainly in terms of how it does so by helping defend the claims to great wealth on the grounds that it is the product of great contributions to society. Factoring into this is what this is supposed to mean to the rest of the public--not only that the extreme difference in outcome is valid, but one way in which they and their house intellectuals deflect calls for egalitarianism, telling "the poors" that "You can do it too!"

Admitting to the reality of Josiah Bounderby would be to admit "No, you very likely can't, and certainly shouldn't pin your hopes on it"--and make it a good deal harder to avoid engaging with all to which such an outlook can lead.

Are the Poor Lonelier Than the Rich?

The images of the lonely rich man and the poor who at least have each other are horribly worn cultural cliché.

And besides being well-worn, probably false, more loneliness likely to be found among the poor than the rich.

"How can that be?" one may wonder.

The plain and simple truth is that society is attentive to the problems of the haves--and brushes off the problems of the have-nots. ("Be grateful for what you have!" is ever the answer to the latter as the former are coddled after their every temper tantrum.) And so the loneliness of the rich, just like all the other problems of the rich, get infinitely more press.

But alongside this there is what leaves people lonely. In David Foster Wallace's meandering (and wildly overrated) but not wholly valueless essay "E Pluribus Unum" there is an insight here and there, with one that caught my eye his remark that "[l]onely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans."

Those costs are not the same for everyone.

When you have money and status and are sought after, when people show you deference because they cannot afford to show you offense, you are in a very different position to the person who lacks those things, whose company is not sought after, who no one has to treat well with the result that no one does treat them well, and the "emotional costs" of being around others are that much higher accordingly. When you feel safe and protected by your standing in the world, you are in a very different position than the one who is unprotected--who gets brutalized, and as a result find themselves warier of others generally, and is much more likely to have to repress themselves rather than speak freely, with all the alienations that go with that (the "emotional" economy of which Freud wrote strongly paralleling the monetary one).

Indeed, when we look at such realities as social isolation we tend to find that it is not the children of wealth and privilege who turn hikikomori, but the children of much more socioeconomically marginal families that do so. When we look at social retreat in less extreme ways than that--those who eschew relationships, marriage, starting a family, with all these mean for the potential of being with others in a society which leaves few alternatives for robust personal connections--there is a robust statistical correlation between income and involvement, validating not such stupid presumptions as that "Family men work harder" (as if hard work had anything to do with income!), but the fact that people are less likely to have a chance, let alone act on it, in the absence of the conditions that make it possible. And so on and so forth.

But, as one is reminded by the covers of the magazines that most people actually seem to read, celebrities who have everything else will whine about having no one, and people who have nothing will think "Those rich folk sure have it tough."

"It's Only a Hobby"

We all know the cliché of the recipient of a prestigious award in the arts tearfully thanking everyone they have ever met in their life for their "support."

This is, of course, likely to be pure (to use a less fitting but more polite word than the one I originally had in mind) nonsense.

The reality is that the artiste (as Balzac and London," who both knew what they were talking about, each make clear) is unlikely to find support even among their nearest and dearest, who will not understand the need of an artist to create, or his way of fulfilling it. In London's Martin Eden the protagonist's sister was, if incapable of comprehending it, at least sympathetic to Eden, but her husband, Eden's vulgar oaf of a brother-in-law, was not, never missing a chance to sneer.

One of the clichés of such sneering is that what the artist does is "only a hobby."

To anyone who has sweated and sacrificed for their career such remark is insulting in the extreme--and obtuse as they are the speaker not only likely to know this, but delight in saying so.

Perhaps even after suffering all that it is easy to be gracious in the moment in which one is handed a reward.

But that should never make us forget the reality--especially for the far, far greater number of people for whom the prospect of any such awards night is remote in the extreme.

"Sending Everyone to College," Hard Reality, and the Aspirational Mentality

It has long been conventional wisdom among a significant portion of the country's policymakers and commentariat that a plausible response to problems like industrial difficulties and poverty and inequality is "Send more people to college," all while never entertaining any thought of making college more affordable.

No reasonable person would deny that society derives enough benefit from having a system of higher education that one can consider it a modern necessity, and that in an industrialized country (or any country endeavoring to be industrialized) there is a need for a significant portion of the work force to get at least some post-secondary education.

Still, the "Send more people to college"--at its most extreme, the "Send everyone to college" mentality--has worked out to their, rather than arguing for a living wage, encouraging the young to . . . take on student debt as they train for jobs the market does not provide (as with the extreme disproportion between those who pursue arts degrees and those who find jobs requiring them, and even an arguable overproduction of STEM graduates), or if they do find jobs in them, work in them for only a short time, such that one can question the value of the degree to them as individuals who have to make a living (as with many of those STEM graduates who do land jobs in their fields, but soon find themselves replaced by fresher graduates as they are compelled to go and do something else).

One can take the "Send more people to college" mentality for well-intentioned muddle-headedness--or a cynical dodge. However, in either case it contributed to an avoidance of more meaningful efforts to deal with the country's economic difficulties and help the disadvantaged, while greatly benefiting assorted interests (like those collecting all those student loan payments). Alas, that aspirationalism triumphs so completely over egalitarianism in American political culture, and the way in which it has made a sort of respect for "education" a hollow piety but a piety nonetheless, has made it very difficult for those who are neither muddle-headed nor cynical to call it out.

"Not Everything's About You!"

Far be it from me to deny that there are self-absorbed narcissists in the world--and perhaps more of them these days than before.

Yet barring someone's being really, really oblivious to the world around them, being really self-absorbed and narcissistic for very long is something a person is unlikely to manage without having a certain minimum of power--enough so that people do not fling moralizing accusations in their faces, and certainly not the ones who will have seen their self-absorption and narcissism up close, and actually suffered from it.

That is why when we hear the charge it is at least fairly common, and maybe more likely than not, that the self-absorbed narcissist in the conversation is not the one being accused--but the accuser.

"Not everything's about you!" they snarl.

Because you expressing any concern for anything but what I am concerned with is an attempt to diminish from how "Everything's about me! Me! MEEEEEEEE!"

Is the Cult of Celebrity in Decline?

The title of this post may seem an odd question to ask these days, looking at, for example, the extreme heights to which the pop cultural status of Taylor Swift has ascended. Still, I think that even if there are extraordinary outliers, when we look at the bigger picture this is exactly what is happening these days.

Part of it, I think, is the extreme fragmentation of contemporary culture, the more pronounced because of how online life has fragmented. But I also think that the decline of many particular types of celebrity has been relevant, partly as a matter of that fragmentation but not just because of it. There is, for instance, the decline of the movie star over the course of the century (where such factors as the ascent of the film franchise have played their part). There is the decline of the sports star (a function of a declining interest in sports, in which economic factors may be playing their part). There is the decline of the supermodel (which, contrary to the conventional wisdom, seems to me to have by no means run its course in the 1990s, but continued into our time, partly as advertising has changed). And so on and so forth.

Yet that does not seem all of it, a certain "cheapening" of celebrity having also occurred. Overexposure, which seemed a factor years ago as the tabloidization of everything proceeded apace, has likely played its part, removing the sense of distance that was part of celebrity's mystique (as one notices if they have not come to completely filter out of their minds the contents of the clickbait with which we are barraged wherever we go online). Factoring into this is the way in which the category of celebrity has been broadened. Certainly people of conventional mind look at entertainment, sports, fashion and the rest as frivolous, but when those were the foundation of celebrity of that kind the celebrity was at least supposed to be distinguished by some superlative achievement (artistic or athletic skill, for example), or perhaps just exceptional quality (the special something that made somebody "a star!")--as opposed to the idiots we see on all of these online videos, who are famous in spite of being distinguished by nothing at all (or at least nothing good), and inexplicably get millions of views in spite of that.

All that said, is this decline of celebrity I am talking about a bad thing? I find myself remembering that I have written here about the cult of celebrity as having gone insane in the past, and reflected a good deal that was unfortunate and unhappy in our social life. However, the way in which that cult may be passing, if it is passing, does not seem to be suggestive of things getting much better that way, and maybe even their getting worse.

The Ephemeralism of What Passes for Mainstream Social Thought: The Supposed Demise of Celebrity Culture in 2020

Amid major shocks the commentariat tells us that great and profound cultural changes are at hand.

A little while later nothing changes--and the silly pronouncements are forgotten.

Exemplary of this is the claptrap we heard during the early months of the pandemic about the "end of celebrity" (in the New York Times and New York Post, at the BBC and in the Guardian, etc., etc., etc.) back when there was at least some acknowledgment of the severity of the crisis, and the reality that "We're not all in this together," that such catastrophe is one thing for the pampered and protected elite, a very different thing for the rest of humanity.

Today it is forgotten as if it never was (just as the pandemic, the Great Recession and much else are talked about as past when they are nothing of the kind). For my part I do think that the cult of celebrity may well be in decline--but for quite other reasons than the shift of social attitudes in a more egalitarian, socially aware, direction.

Then again, changes in social attitudes of that kind are something we would probably find acknowledged last by that mainstream media, given the ideological and personal blinkers of that apparatus' staff, and especially the portion of it that attends to celebrity culture--a rather revolting pack of courtiers and claqueurs for whom sucking up and punching down are not second nature, but first.

Narcissism as a Privilege, Not a Right, and the Cult of Celebrity

Some time ago I had occasion to write about "narcissism." What seemed to me to distinguish narcissism from milder forms of selfishness and self-absorption is that the narcissist does not only put themselves first, but expects others to put them first as well at all times.

This is, of course, an unreasonable attitude for anyone to take toward others. However, as with much that is unreasonable in this endlessly moralizing society we live in with its double and triple and quintuple standards, it is treated as perfectly acceptable in those of high status, whose narcissism is given free rein, while any self-love at all in the less privileged might be unfairly accused of being narcissism of this kind.

As I have remarked, we see narcissism indulged in this way in royalty--every stupid detail of their life given breathless treatment by an unhinged media which treats anyone who finds this foolish as a low and unworthy person, and by no means in just those particular royals' countries. (As Joseph Scalice quipped, Elizabeth Windsor was monarch of Britain, "[b]ut anyone watching TV or reading a newspaper could be forgiven for thinking she was . . . queen of the world" from the attention accorded her in the United States.)

However, there are other sorts of "royalty," as figures from the entertainment world, for example, never cease to remind us. ("I'm still the King!" rants one unhinged example of the type on the track "King" from his latest album.) Their insanity may be less widely and deeply supported than that of crowned heads of state--but it nonetheless finds a measure of backing such as would be inconceivable for even far slighter self-assertion on the part of a "nobody." And in that, I suppose, one can find a measure by which to judge whether or not a person who has for some reason or other ceased to be obscure can really be regarded as a celebrity--the extent to which the media Establishment is prepared to indulge, even to promote, insane narcissism on their part.

Who is Allowed to Love Themselves?

Kurt Vonnegut's classic Slaughter-house Five is a tale (or, given its postmodernist character, anti-tale) about the bombing of Dresden and the relation of time, space, causality and volition--as revealed to its protagonist by the extraterrestrials from Tralfamador who abduct him for display in their zoo. However, it may well be that the most oft-quoted passage in the book has to do not with these but rather Americans' attitude toward wealth and its possession, and particularly the attitude of those who do not have wealth toward themselves as a result of the lack. Believing the "destructive untruth that it is very easy for any American to make money" those Americans who have not done so "blame and blame and blame themselves," and end up loving neither themselves nor each other--an attitude of course urged on them relentlessly, not least by the "rich and powerful" for whom such "inward blame has been a treasure," letting them "do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class" in centuries.

The passage, which has clearly struck a chord with many in the half century since Vonnegut published it (and perhaps done so with more people as the years went by, given the turn of America's political culture), is a reminder that society--hierarchical, exploitative, unequal--does not treat "self-love" as equally the right of all its members, and never lets them forget it. Rather self-love is a privilege of the privileged, with the most extreme example of this monarchy--whose claimed prerogatives the ever-quotable Thorstein Veblen summed up as "inferiority complex with benefit of clergy." Those occupying such strata of privilege are treated not only as having the right to love themselves, but to narcissistically demand the love of everyone.

Quite naturally those of the less privileged strata who violate this rule by simply loving themselves are attacked for it. They are accused of "acting entitled," and should they give evidences of thinking that, in line with their love for themselves, they have not been treated as they think they ought to have been treated, they are accused of the grave sin and crime of "self-pity."

Those who fling about such accusations may think they are upholding morality. Instead they are likely doing the opposite, engaging in the highly immoral practice of moralizing. For after all, those quick to harangue others for their supposed failings in the manner described here tend to be too conventional, too conformist and too cowardly to ever accuse those whose behavior is truly entitled, truly a display of privilege, truly self-pitying, and in feeling so far more likely to be dangerous and harmful to others, because the feeling is combined with power and so inimical to the responsibility supposed to go with it.

On "Self-Pity," Again

As I remarked not long ago contemporary English is saturated with expressions for conveying one's indifference, or outright contempt, for other people in a way that seems none too flattering of the historical moment in which we have found ourselves.

Many such words and phrases are actually words repurposed from their original meanings--with reflective of this the way we have turned a vocabulary of moral criticism into a vocabulary of moralizing, with exemplary of this the use of the word "self-pity." As I have stated before I do not deny the validity of the concept--that people do indeed feel self-pity--but society being what it is people make the accusation far more lightly than they ought; and usually against those least deserving, precisely because of their cowardice in the face of those who really do feel self-pity, and really do hurt others through it; and that it is often more about those speaking than those spoken to.

Think of it this way: if I accuse you of self-pity, I give myself permission to not only not care about your problem, but tell you so to your face as you sit there suffering. I give myself an excuse to be callous.

Not exactly uplifting, that--but in a society always offering excuses for "tough love," people of conventional mind eat it up.

Of Moralizing

In hearing the word "moralizing" I suppose most unfamiliar with the term fixate on the root word "moral" and think that moralizing must be an essentially moral thing to do. However, a closer look at that calls the assumption into question. As the Oxford Languages definition of the term indicates, one does not merely make a judgment, but makes it with an "unfounded air of superiority" as they set about being "overly critical" of the object of their judgment (emphasis added).

The combination of unfounded superiority and excessiveness of criticism makes clear that something beyond calling out a genuine and genuinely troubling moral failing is usually going on. In practice I tend to find that those who moralize at others are interested mainly in suppressing them, and specifically suppressing their protests over something unfair or exploitative.

Considering this John Kenneth Galbraith's concept of "convenient social virtue" comes to mind. The moralizer tends to demand such virtue from others--either obliviously failing, or cynically refusing, to distinguish what is merely convenient for them and people like them from what is actually virtuous in others, and treating a just objection to their own unvirtuous attitude as a want of virtue in that other person. In the process their moralizing proves not a moral judgment but a perverse inversion of morality for what are typically very immoral ends.

The Wearisomeness of Advice About "Your Health"

Looking at the bestseller lists is a dreary experience--a reminder of how, in an age in which reading may be so uncommon that anyone who reads any sort of book at all may be thought at least a cut about the rest intellectually, even those who read have an exceedingly limited, narrow, range of interest, and a susceptibility to old scams. This goes for nonfiction as well as fiction, where books purporting to offer advice about improving one's health are always evident.

It is entirely right that people be interested in the subject. But for a long time it has been rare indeed that the books available justified their interest in their specific content.

In spite of the impression we are always given that medical researchers are "making new discoveries every day," the reality seems to be that the vast bulk of the research is garbage, and what discoveries they make are not being translated into actionable advice that people can hypothetically apply in their own lives. Comparative minutiae apart (during which the medical community frustratingly goes back and forth, as they have recently done in regard to red wine, in a manner all but designed to feed the impulse to medical nihilism), the medical professionals who write these books give the same advice over and over again.

Exercise. Get your sleep. Don't smoke. Don't drink, or if you do drink drink very little. Avoid stress, and manage what you can't avoid.

And of course, "Abandon all hope of culinary pleasure ye who enter here." (Because no matter how many times they tell you otherwise a carrot stick is just not as satisfying a snack as a potato chip or a candy bar.)

Much of the advice isn't particularly pleasant. Not exercising and eating what you actually want is a lot more fun than the other way around, and there is no doubt that people are sick of being told to do the opposite.

And anyway, the really hard part is actually implementing it in an active, harried life with many demands and limited means. The plain and simple fact is that few have much control over their lives, and a very limited range of options with regard to any changes in their lives (with the fact that they have tried and failed to do what they ought, perhaps repeatedly, making the prescriptions the more depressing). Indeed, writing in The Road to Wigan Pier it seems to me that the non-doctor George Orwell displayed a better understanding of what we might today think of as the problem of obesity than a hundred of our health book writers put together--precisely because he was not so remote from the realities of the daily lives of the general public as they, fixated as they are on their Platonic images of unwell persons ready to make a new beginning, like sinners who have been born again.

The Las Vegas Story: A Few Thoughts

The 1952 Howard Hughes-produced, Robert Stevenson-directed RKO production The Las Vegas Story was apparently not much regarded at the time of the release, and subsequently slipped into obscurity rather than gaining esteem with time. This is not wholly without reason, the film a far cry from what such noir is like at the crafted, gritty, taut, biting best an Orson Welles, for example, could deliver.

Still, The Last Vegas Story (whose behind-the-camera goings-on really do assure it a place in cinematic history by way of its place in the ugly history of the Hollywood blacklist) does have its points of interest as a movie. Among them is the titular setting--Las Vegas in its early days, for which the film would seem an ad years before Ocean's Eleven came along (1960) (Hughes, who would be so famously identified with the city in later years, having already taken an interest in the place years before).

Likely reflecting another Hughes interest, aviation, there is an ahead-of-its-time and still quite effective set piece involving the then-novelty of a helicopter in a chase through the desert at the story's climax. Seemingly reflective of the slowness of critics to catch on to the use of such set pieces as anything other than slapstick, Bosley Crowther called it "Keystone"--while the more general audience proved more responsive to the kinds of thrills they offered. (Or French audiences were, at least. In his own review of the film soon-to-be-legendary filmmaker Francois Truffaut remarked that "[e]veryone in Paris" was "talking about" the chase scene, to his apparent annoyance.)

And of course there is the film's cast, above all longtime Hughes star Jane Russell, as memorable a presence as ever in a film in which one is reminded of the many reasons why old-fashioned cinematic stardom no longer exists. Not the least of these is that movies have to have room for a movie and its star to breathe for that to happen, something films that were even less than perfectly crafted back then, but which is a lot less likely to be found in our high concept era with its relentless, frenzied, cutting among close shots that are so often its only kind. ( As Andrew Sarris put it "There was always a technical floor under movies . . . a kind of restraint," which vanished in that "blind worship of 'energy" that has "[a]lmost any old movie look[ing] classical today.")

Notable too in a very, very different way there is a bit part for Hoagy Carmichael, playing piano in a hotel lobby.

I suspect no one then imagined that Carmichael's would be the face accorded the character who was to become the most famous of fictional secret agents when Ian Fleming started cranking out a novel also set in a town notable principally for its casino scarcely a year after the film's release. ("He reminds me of Hoagy Carmichael" the Vesper Lynd of the novel said in a line that, of course, was like a great deal else not part of the 2006 film version of Casino Royale.) Did this movie play any part in that? Perhaps not. Still, Vegas did feature prominently in Fleming's fourth James Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever (just the beginning of a long tendency to associate Bond and Bond-type spies generally with that town and its casinos), while the same book not incidentally featured a set piece involving a helicopter as its big action finale . . .

What TV Show Gets Referenced Most in Our Online Discussion Today?

If I had to guess I would say The Simpsons, with Seinfeld perhaps in second place.

That may seem odd, given the age of both shows, but I think it has to do with their arriving at the right time--their being around, and indeed at their peak, just before television viewership began to fragment, but after the dawn of the Internet, while going on to have a good long life through the earlier years of the Web's development by way of fond memories sustained by intensive reruns.

By contrast shows like Bewitched, MASH and even Cheers (the last episode of which aired in early 1993) were already receding into the past by that point--all as later shows such as The Office arrived in that more thoroughly web-connected but pop culturally fragmented world. (Some 76 million people watched the finale of Seinfeld, over a quarter of the country. By contrast about 5.7 million people watched the last episode of The Office--not quite 2 percent of the country's population at the time.) And of course later, non-network, prestige TV, with its streaming and cable outlets, its tendency to short runs, and toward idiosyncrasy and pretension rather than broad appeal and certainly the kind of light entertainment appeal that makes a show easy to watch over and over and over again, has been even less promising that way. The result is that if some of the content of these shows has proven memeworthy, none of them compare with those giants of '90s pop culture for plain and simple ubiquity.

Why is "The End of Science Fiction" Such a Tough Idea for People to Grasp?

Over the years I have again and again found John Barnes' theory about the life cycle of literary and other genres useful, but I have also noticed how a great many persons treat such theories in a very dismissive way--by which I mean not their considering them and rejecting them on their merits, but just giving the suggestion a brush-off.

There are many reasons for that. After all, what fan of something wants to hear that the thing they enjoy is in some kind of terminal decline? And certainly those whose living is in some way tied up with the health of a genre (like writers and editors) have no desire to hear such a claim either--indeed, the attitude of far too many of these a boosterism as intolerant as it is self-satisfied and vulgar. Indeed, those dubious about such talk can and do quite easily claim that it is a matter of someone simply not liking the "new stuff."

Yet there is also what it takes to even evaluate such an argument. One would have to think about what the term "genre" means, and how a genre develops--of genres as bodies of work united by shared themes and elements and techniques, by the familiarity of the creators and consumers of work in that genre with particular "classics" that serve as touchstones for them, by the tradition and discourse and community that all of this produces. They would have to be able to think about how a genre is not a constant thing over time, and how particular works and artists fit into that constancy and inconstancy. They would also have to be able to think about the difference between what is merely new, and what is original in a genre. And as all this implies, to get any use from the concepts discussed here they would have to know a good deal of the facts of the genre's history--the works that appeared over time, what was innovative at a certain point and what was not, how people reacted to it, and so forth.

In short, they would have to set aside the view of genre as a mere "commercial category," and simplistic, individualistic images of how artists work, and instead think theoretically, historically, systematically within a broad and deep knowledge of their genre.

The ability to think theoretically, historically, systematically, is not exactly something many people get from even an exceptionally advanced education--as the "elite" constantly demonstrates. Much of this is just too subtle for them, while only those who have been old, longtime, fans of exceptional alertness, and those who deliberately sought out such knowledge, are likely to amass the kind of knowledge of a genre that lets them weigh a genre's history according to such a standard. They are fewer still. The more open-minded may confess that such discussion is a bit above their heads--but the more common, conventional, attitude is to simply dismiss the argument as not worth the consideration they are incapable of offering it even if they could.