Category: Economics and Inequality

Mobility

Boltanski and Chiapello argue—fairly convincingly—that is the key source of profit—and the privileged site of exploitation—in the new form of capitalism. Plenty to think about in this formulation.

To explain: the “winner” in post 1975 capitalism, or what they call “network” and “project oriented” capitalism, is the person who can extend her networks, moving successfully from one project to the next, acquiring contacts and skills in each encounter. Thus, the successful person “accumulates” contacts and work experiences/knowledge—and does do precisely by never staying in one place too long. Only by being in circulation through a variety of locales can one’s network expand.

The person who is exploited in such a system is anyone who—for whatever reason (family situation, loyalty, lack of requisite ambition or social skills)—is not mobile, is tied to one place and one job. Such people are needed by the mobile winner—because it is the people who stay in place who secure that he still has a contact in the place that he has left. And that necessary work is not compensated in proper proportion to its necessity. Hence the exploitation of the stationary person. You might say that, luckily for businesses, many people, for various reasons, are stationary, are even loyal, despite the monetary penalty paid for being so. Businesses (and other work places such as universities) are parasitic on kinds of loyalty and non-mobility that they do everything to discourage.

Certainly, in the growing individuation of incomes (i.e. the decline of unions negotiating the same wage for everyone doing the same work in favor of each worker negotiating his or her own salary for his or her own self), it is the worker who can credibly say “I am leaving” who gets the raise or the bigger bonus. This is called letting the market set wages. And certainly being able to leave is, to a large extent, based on having established networks that enable mobility.

But—and this is the first big but—having the networks is necessary, but not sufficient. I think B&C underestimate productivity. That is, to move on to another job or project, one must have some evidence of success, some record of having delivered in the past. In other words, it is not just the accumulation of contacts that matters. Also required is the accumulation of skills. B&C don’t pay any attention to the resume, to the CV. Yet the CV is precisely a document of accumulation, a site of gathering. And it is precisely its function as a “site” that counterbalances mobility. What is accumulated is the opposite of what is scattered; what is banked takes a form quite distinct from a network, which is dispersed. For all the talk of postmodern selves (a talk, I hasten to add, that B&C don’t indulge in), the CV is testimony to the ways in which the bourgeois self is still the dominant form. The self is the product of its experiences—and its experiences are meant to be educative. Return of investment during a lifetime is based on turning experience to account. That’s the essence of all the fancy talk of “human capital.” I can’t see it as much more than old wine in new bottles.

I needn’t be entirely cynical about this. There is a difference between people who efficiently and successfully produce things—and those who do not. No doubt, I am speaking from the winner’s circle in saying so. I am someone who epitomizes mobility and networking. I have worked the system extremely well—having been a good boy who does what the system sets out as the things that will be most rewarded. I have even internalized much of that system, since I did the work with enthusiasm and voluntarily. My labor was, for the most part, not alienated since I found the game intricate and difficult enough to hold my interest, to call forth my most strenuous efforts. (Yeats: “the shoulder that has not pushed against an immovable fence has not experienced its full strength” or William James on the “strenuous mode.”) Even while (as I have written about before) I maintained a somewhat (and protective) ironic sense that it was a game, with low stakes and laughably low impact, even as I pursued it ardently. I often thought of Eugene McCarthy’s comment about politics being like coaching basketball. You have to be smart enough to play the game, but dumb enough to think it important.

The game came fairly easily to me—which is why I could on another level) afford the irony. I sat easy in my chains. But—and here is the uncynical part—I did produce the work. My mobility was based on temperament (I couldn’t stick to a discipline or a topic; I roamed the academic field, even as I roamed my home institution, not sticking to my department, which led to various administrative posts), but also based on the track record, on the books I had written. There was an objective measure, not just personal contacts. And, yes, that objective measure could often be laughably disconnected from quality (when it comes to academic publication, as my friend Hans Kellner was fond of saying, quantity doesn’t count, quantity is everything.) I got offers based on the titles of my publications—books that few on the hiring committees (or those asking me to write for this or that) had actually read. Still and all, the work had to be done.

And, as I say, I enjoyed doing the work. Just as I now enjoy writing a blog that cannot have any return on investment—and which has never landed on my CV.

All of which, I guess, is to say that a “career” must be built—and as a building is more stationary and table than “mobility” would suggest. But if one wants the biggest rewards, one must prove that one is willing and able to move, and thus career building is undertaken in relation to mobility. Which leads to another way of characterizing the stationary: they don’t think in terms of a career, in terms of building toward the “next thing.” They want to stay where they are. And in this new world of post-1970s capitalism one pays a fearful price for that, since it is the stationary (the one a firm doesn’t have to worry about their leaving) who are pushed onto contract work and made redundant at the drop of a hat.

Because, at a level below the stationary, the expendable, are “the excluded.” It is the return of high unemployment since 1975 that, in many ways, drives the whole system. If you don’t keep up your contacts, don’t keep adding to your skills, don’t exist within an extended network, you risk falling off the map altogether, so isolated and unconnected that you become unemployable. You bring nothing to the table. The long-term unemployed are a, if not permanent, at least constant feature of capitalism since 1975. Publish or perish, becomes “keep moving or perish.”

The State

If, as yesterday’s post argued, trade unions are no longer in a position to effectively counter-balance the power of capitalism, then some other site of power, some other institution, must play that role. The contemporary right (the neoliberals, if we are going to use that terminology) demonizes trade unions at every turn. The moral fury they direct against even the slightest hint of collective action on the part of workers has always baffled me. Just what is morally wrong here? Why is such collective action so reprehensible? Other forms of collective action—political parties, lobbyists, trade and professional associations, the NRA and the AARP—are not anathematized, but trade unions are somehow beyond the pale. I refuse to reduce this to sheer economic interest and bad faith; their moral outrage would be unsustainable if it didn’t somehow resonate beyond the quarters in which it directly serves economic interest.

Of course, the primary rhetorical move is to claim trade unions are an infringement on freedom. Even workers who don’t endorse the union must pay their union dues. A similar argument, of course, is made against the state—with taxes standing in as tyrannical in the way that union dues are. The union and that state are both robbers.

The right’s commitment to undermining unions (which has a long and continuous history dating back to the 1870s) goes hand-in-hand with it more recent commitment to undermining the state. And I think the right is absolutely correct to see the state, like the unions, as a potential danger to its deep commitment to economic inequality. The state is a threat to profit insofar as everyone of its regulations—from labor law to environmental and public health measures—makes doing business more costly.

Despite the right’s (or neoliberalism’s) obvious desire to decrease the power of the state, the left has been much more lukewarm in its embrace of the state. [A side-note: yes, the American right wants to increase the power of the state when it comes to regulating private conduct and in matters relating to “national security.” Capitalism—as the Marriott response to socially conservative legislation shows—has no particular sympathy for the issues that motivate conservative moralists. But the right is still the “party of order”; it does want a strong police force and military; it just doesn’t want any of that state power directed toward reining in money-making practices.)

While you would be very hard pressed to find a leftist who does not think unions are a good thing, attitudes toward the state are more ambivalent. I don’t think the right is wrong when it identifies the state as a potential problem for the achievement of its ends. The state is the only plausible (it seems to me) site of a power strong enough to combat capitalist power. So why don’t leftists rally to the state’s support?

Let me try to count the ways.

The insistence that the state has been entirely captured by the capitalists—and only serves their interests. This morphs into a necessitarian doctrine that such must always be the case. The state will always be in cahoots with capitalism. (The fallacy here is turning a contingency into a necessity. Plus it would seem to encourage a fatalistic quietism; we are doubly screwed because political and economic power work hand-in-hand and it is useless to try to pry them apart. My argument, finally, is that the chances of grabbing political power are, at the moment, better than the chances of grabbing economic power. We have at least a fighting chance on the political battlefront, whereas the legal—and moral and habitual—protections afforded private property make wresting economic power away from the corporations and the wealthy much less likely. It will take a political victory to begin to undermine the sources, structures, and institutions of economic power.)

If #1 is a version of the left’s time-worn critique of “liberalism” and the “liberal state,” now we can entertain the anarchist suspicion of the state, most recently given voice in James Scott’s Against the Grain (Yale UP, 2017). The notion here is that all concentrations of power are inevitably bad. My riposte is that, yes, power tends to accumulate—and that accumulations of power are generally not conducive to the general welfare. But I don’t think there is any wishing away of power—or of its tendency to accumulate. Thus, one needs to find ways to counterbalance powers (in the plural). In a world in which economic power has concentrated on a scale perhaps unprecedented (the “perhaps” because, arguably, the Dutch and English East India companies of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were more powerful than Google and Apple today), to abandon the state as a possible counterweight seems suicidal. There is certainly no reason to think Google is going to be more beneficent than a state—or more accountable. To dismantle political power unilaterally in the face of economic power is to refuse to engage in the contest that we wish to win. It is certainly deeply concerning that, as economic centers of power get larger and larger, political units get smaller and smaller (the break-up of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the possible break-ups of Britain and Spain).

A harder to characterize, but no less real, general disillusionment with politics as dirty, corrupt, and indirect (taking so much time to effect such imperfect pieces of legislation and the cumbersome bureaucratic state action that follows legislative victories). I feel this way myself some 75% of the time. One result of this sentiment is to turn one’s back on the state and get involved in “service” work. We have seen a huge proliferation of “humanitarian organizations.” These seem “clean” in a way politics is not—and also go out into the field and actually do the work of helping people. The results—even if limited to a fairly small number of beneficiaries—are at least visible in the way that the beneficiaries of state policies rarely are. (We see that the number of uninsured has gone down after the enactment of ObamaCare, but those are numbers not visible people). Despairing of the state’s ability to deliver the goods, many leftists (especially among the young) have turned to non-state charity operations. Letting the political, the state, off the hook in this way, not pressuring it to provide for its citizens, is a bad idea in my view—even though, as a personal choice about where to put one’s efforts, it seems to me more than easy to understand, to be a more appealing course to follow.

The final position, which seems that of Hardt/Negri and some other recent writers, is that the state is a spent force, that it actually no longer has sufficient power to hem in economic power. We must mobilize another kind of power altogether if we are to bring neoliberalism to its knees—or even mitigate some of the suffering it inflicts. Conspicuously absent from such views is any plausible agent of this force that will stop neoliberalism in its tracks. Now, of course, an analysis of the state’s deficiencies need not present something to take the state’s place. If I cannot walk with a broken leg, it does nothing to undermine the truth of my statement that I cannot walk if I do not consider alternatives to walking. The argument that the state is powerless usually point to three factors: 1) capital flight in the age of globalization means the state cannot impose terms/regulations on capital because it will just move to jurisdictions that give it a better deal. We are in a race to the bottom that the state is helpless to stop. 2) Even though the multinational and international organizations—like the GHO and GATT—and the international trade agreements—like the EU and NAFTA—are not particularly effective, they are constraining upon state actions, so power is leaking away from the national state; and 3) the blackmail and direct power of capital is such that most countries are now democracies in name only. There is no path toward citizens getting the state to serve their interests as opposed to the interests of capital. [This last point is a new version of the classic complaint that the state is just an agent of the capitalists. It tends to come accompanied with the notion that the state, therefore, is at best useless and at worst another enemy that must be overcome in the larger fight against capitalism. And the solution offered is usually the direct action of the populace, bypassing the state as its instrument, against the forces of capital. Hence the recurrent dream of the general strike. Refusal, non-compliance, civil disobedience on a grand scale.]

The main burden of this post, then, is that the left abandons the battle to capture the state—and to put its power to work advancing the left’s agenda and curtailing economic power—only at the risk of making a bad situation worse. Despair about the state is really despair about the very possibility of democracy. It can never be a government of, by, and for the people. It will always be the instrument of the economic royalists.

To be concrete: what the state can do to rein in (at the very least) economic power is not a mystery. Three strategies (all of which, I believe, are necessary) are in play.

Interference (regulation and establishing the rules of the game) in productive and money-making operations themselves. This strategy covers everything from setting conditions of work, guarantees of employment and minimum compensation, worker’s rights, unemployment insurance, etc. That is, various laws that alter distribution of effort, risk, and profit internal to capitalist procedures. Protection of—nay, promotion of—union creation and activity. These are all mechanisms to shift the distribution of market inputs and outcomes.

Interference external (or after the fact) of market processes and outcomes. In a word, taxes. Progressive taxation–including income, wealth and estate taxes—that work against the tendency of capital to accumulate in a few hands. Similarly, stringent anti-trust laws to combat the tendency toward monopoly.

Regulation of “externalities”(notably pollution) in the name of the public good, along with the positive provision of certain goods (transportation, health, parks, sanitation, public utilities, and education—I would add housing) that are not well handled by market processes. Here we get environmental regulations and public health measures, plus transit systems, municipal water and electricity, parks, libraries, schools etc.

All of this provides a suitably ambitious agenda for a left that intends to capture the state to serve its vision of the public good—a good that necessarily entails limiting the power of markets to determine either public or individual fates.

Two issues remain.

Must we reconcile ourselves to the existence of markets? Not only are there factions on the left that want to ignore or dismantle the state, there are also factions who declare any tolerance for markets apostasy. I think a regulated market is preferable to any of the alternatives currently on offer (and I mean on offer theoretically as well as in reality.) I would love to be convinced otherwise, to be shown a model of a non-market society that seemed to me both plausible and desirable. Until then, I am going with regulated markets.

The big question. Can the state actually counterbalance the power of capital? If capital is mobile precisely where the state it tied to a territory and most citizens are immobile due to legalities of citizenship and the realities of economic means, then what can the state leverage against capitalism? As I have argued in previous posts, the only place capitalism is vulnerable is the bottom line. You must hold some power over profits, have some way to damage profits, if you want to bring capitalism to heel. Yet it is exactly when the state interferes in profit-making, that capital flees to a new jurisdiction. What can possibly halt capital flight? The answer, it seems to me, is stability. Despite all the rhetoric, lots of capital (hardly all, but hardly an insignificant amount either) hates risk. There wouldn’t be so much money invested in US Treasury bonds (at a paltry return) if safety wasn’t the highest priority for lots of capital. What the rich Western countries have to offer capital are stable political and social orders, along with proximity to rich consumers. This isn’t a pretty answer. It means the West has a market advantage because of its contrast to more turbulent and more impoverished parts of the world. But, at this moment at least, the West needs to trade on this strength by making capital pay for the privilege of investment in the West. It just means the cost of doing business in the West will be higher (because of taxes and regulations) and, in addition (this is where the state needs to start throwing its weight around) there will also be a cost exacted for whatever functions capital exports in order to get around those higher costs. Call this protectionism or whatever you will. But—just as we need a transaction tax to raise the costs to financial capital of its various speculative moves—we need a “flight tax” that does not allow capital to move seamlessly across borders. And if a corporation retaliates by moving wholesale to the Bahamas, then there needs to be an “access tax” to gain entry to the US or UK or French market. These things are not impossible. States have been way too timid in the face of capital flight—especially when those states have jurisdiction over very large markets and enjoy political and social stability.

Enough for today. Plenty to chew on and follow up about.

On Unions

Boltanski and Chiapello (B&C hereafter) devote a whole chapter to the decline of labor unions. Contrary to what I believed, labor unions are, in fact, very weak in France and have been getting weaker steadily since the 1960s. Their weakness is measured in the steep decline of the number of strike days imposed on capitalist enterprises each year and in rapidly declining membership.

Of course, strikes have become almost non-existent in the US. France, at least, has a tradition of “general strikes,” i.e. of people taking to the street to protest various government policies. The French demonstrations have some bite because, unlike American demonstrations, they do not take place on weekends and thus actually—and sometimes seriously—disrupt business as usual. At the very least, I’d say, you have to have a significant number of workers not showing up for work for a demonstration to have any leverage on either the economic or political powers that be.

In short, only actions that impact the bottom line will garner a response. Witness the power of a firm like Marriott when it weighs in against discriminatory legislation against gays. Making such legislation carry an economic cost—as happened in both Arizona and North Carolina—has been just about the only effective strategy against right-wing legislation over the past ten years.

B&C’s question is why the transition to neoliberalism occurred without very much being mounted in the way of resistance. “Changes in the world of work during this period continued to prompt complaints or indignation. But the institutions traditionally responsible for transforming complaint—a way of expressing discontent that remains attached to people in their particularity—into a general condemnation and public protest were widely discredited and/or paralysed at the time” (273).

The particular institution that had been dismantled was the union. I want to dwell for a moment on the general point—and it is my disagreement with Occupy and Hardt/Negri. Getting people out onto the street via Twitter cannot substitute for having the institutions that will translate that expressed discontent into power that can be brought to bear against the opposing powers that are exploiting people.

It is, of course, an old story in the US, one that dates back to the 1950s (but not to the 1930s): the quiescence of the workers. Why do they let themselves be mistreated? It is certainly not that they don’t see the mistreatment. It is because they don’t see an alternative, a truly effective way to force a change in the conditions of work.

In the 1950s were pretty bad, the 2000s are much worse. Now there are no strikes at all, and just about no collective bargaining. Each worker is on his or her own, negotiating for herself in terms of salary, and subject to workplace rules that are simply imposed from above and against which she waives all rights of appeal upon signing the work contract. In the state employment system in which I oversaw a staff of seven, it was the worst of both worlds for my staff members. They were constrained by the salary ranges within a job “band” (hence a collectively designated wage), but got none of the benefits of being part of a collective because all of the details of working conditions, as well as the established salaries for each band, were not a product of or subject to collective bargaining. It was take it or leave it.

B&C give a meticulous account of the multiple causes of deunionization. The economic causes—subcontracting, the movement to part-time or short-term contracts, rising unemployment, smaller, integrated (i.e. mixing levels of workers) work teams that had the effect of isolating workers from one another, individualized performance reviews and bonuses that differentiate among workers doing the same jobs—are many and powerful. Some of them were deliberately adopted to weaken the strength of unions. Others were driven more by the new management ideas about how to increase productivity. Others still (like rising unemployment and the downward pressure on wages) could be linked to macro-economic factors beyond any firm’s or even any state’s (simple or obvious) control.

But they also insist on the affective dimension. Here’s what I take to be the most plausible case to be made along those lines; I am inspired here by B&C but not following them exactly. My account is more my way of making sense of the transformation. And here academia seems pretty much in line with the rest of the economic world. The key is the fairly rigid distinction between permanent employees and those who are non-permanent. On the one hand, the insiders (those with tenure in the academy, or the essential workers who are central to a firm’s “core mission”) are given a ladder to climb—one that makes it imperative to manage one’s career, to enhance (at every turn) one’s “human capital.” In the business world, this becomes in B&C’s terms, the “projective” model. One attaches oneself to successive projects—and networks out from them to the next project. The workers who show an ability to bring projects to successful completion become highly prized—and efforts are made to “retain” them. The winners in this contest are those who develop—and show off—rare and valuable skills.

The losers, on the other hand, are those who do something that lots of other people can also do. They are easily replaceable (given high rates of unemployment) and, thus, need not be retained on long-term contracts. The firm gains much needed “flexibility” by having workers it can easily let go when economic conditions demand, while it can also save money by outsourcing non-core functions to subcontractors, who (inevitably) pay workers less and offer little to nothing in the way of benefits. (Of course, the benefits debacle is fairly unique to the US. Health benefits are not tied to employment elsewhere.)

How does this connect to the decline of unions? Pretty straightforwardly. The winners have nothing that the want or could get from a union. Their leverage against an employer is entirely individual. They can threaten to take their skills elsewhere—the infamous “outside offer” of academia. They are their own best advocates—and they are negotiating with the employer for something for themselves, not for any collective, not for colleagues and fellow workers.

Once shorn of these highly prized workers, the winners that the enterprise sees as vital to its success, the union loses much power. And when the firm outsources to subcontractors (who are, invariably, nonunion shops), the union even loses the workers who would find a union crucial to their interests. For the lower level workers still left in the firm, their loyalty to the union is undermined by the union’s impotence. The union has done—and seems incapable of doing—anything for them; it cannot prevent outsourcing and it hasn’t the strength to either win significant wage increases or improved working conditions in negotiations in which management seems to hold all the trump cards. Instead, the union (where it still exists) negotiates a set of “concessions” that make working conditions and wages worse in order to protect the existence of what jobs still remain. And going on strike is off the table because the union isn’t strong enough to make a strike actually effective.

No wonder, then, that any affective connection to the union is lost. All the union has ever done is to agree to “concessions” and it is taking my money while proving spectacularly ineffective in promoting or protecting my interests.

Thus, the decline of unions is easy to understand. But that decline has had disastrous consequences. It has left workers utterly naked in the face of neoliberalism. The obvious question, then, is what institution can provide that crucial transition (that B&C identify) from randomized complaints/discontent to effective transformation of the causes of those complaints?

Frankly, I don’t see any alternative to the state as that institution. So that’s where I will go in subsequent posts.

Despair

“This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.”

This is the opening paragraph of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Elementary Particles (1998). Let me pair it with a passage from John Berger’s Portraits, from a short piece he wrote about the Fayum portraits in 2000.

“The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive.”

I just don’t see it. Do I live in a bubble? I read about the ravages Facebook is causing for adolescents, or the booming market in plastic surgery, or the frantic search for status and wealth among various social sub-groups. And I don’t see it in the world I inhabit. Kiernan and Siobhan’s friends and contemporaries certainly suffer the ills—and anxieties—of economic precariousness and over indebtedness. But they aren’t unstable consumers, with lives dictated by social (or any other) media.

Yes, the future has been downsized and a sense of impotence about society’s general dysfunction and sheer nastiness reigns. But the people I know feel very much alive; the scariness of a world out of control is more than enough to keep the nerve ends jangling.

And in their personal lives—their relations to family and friends and colleagues—they are not indifferent and cruel. Even out in the public spaces of the city, the vibe is infinitely better than it was in the 1970s. Conviviality is palpable—and can pretty much be counted on in most interactions with strangers. It is the disjunct between this face-to-face decency and the nastiness of our politics and the on-line shit that is most striking to me. For the most part, it seems to me people are remarkably resistant to the poison seeping through the system.

But maybe it’s the bubble I occupy, the world of the professional upper middle class. A word with very few divorces, very little domestic abuse, very little drug and alcohol abuse. Maybe under the polite veneer, chaos, anger, and horrors lurk. It would speak of an unbelievable cover-up if such were the case. I am hardly denying that the opioid epidemic or domestic violence or homophobia or racism exist.

I think what I am trying to say comes down to four claims, all of which I only advance tentatively because I am not by any means convinced I understand what is going on. Here are the claims

Our economics and our politics have become more nasty, but there are strong counter-vailing forces. Those forces widen the gap between public life (the structure of the imagined, non-face-to-face worlds of commerce and politics and the media) and the concrete face-to-face interactions of everyday life (including in the workplace to a large extent). That the strain of this gap has not, thus far, led to serious disruptions is surprising to me. By which, I guess I mean, that the disruptions have only been manifested on the personal level—in domestic violence or drug/alcohol abuse—not in much serious push-back against the inhumanity of corporations treating employees as replaceable parts and subjecting them to increasingly demeaning surveillance.
The impact of the increased nastiness has been felt very unequally. No surprise there since the increased nastiness has been accompanied by huge upsurges in economic inequality. Where people are doing quite well—as they are in Chapel Hill—the social ills of our time are not very manifest. But those class differences do not explain the convivial vibe in America’s cities or the declining crime rates. The “losers” in the next economic regime are, for the most part, still “nice” to others. It is sort of like Charlie Kruzman’s work on the “missing’ Muslim terrorists; given the hordes of losers, it is striking how few of them adopt the kind of indifference or cruelty toward others that Houellebecq claims is general.
So, one the one hand, I incline to an almost economic determinist viewpoint when it comes to domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse, thus explaining why certain classes are more afflicted with these ills than others. (Of course, I am only talking general trends here. The economically fortunate can still be alcoholics, and domestic abusers.) But when it comes to homophobia and racism, I am inclined to say that values other than the economic remain incredibly strong—and perhaps even stronger than—economically driven beliefs and behaviors. This works both ways. Residual decency, the considerate ways we interact with others, prove resistant to the prevailing economic modes of relationship. The economic—for better and for worse—does not carry all before it.
Similarly, let’s no overestimate the effectiveness of media. People have developed all kinds of ways to shut media messages off. The overload of which Berger speaks is itself a disabling factor. Everyone has to create a filter against such bombardment. Confirmation bias suggests that we only hear the messages we are predisposed to hear—which is one way of saying that most messages don’t get through and that the power of messages to change our basic beliefs is severely limited. Conversion is an astoundingly rare experience.

In sum, I just don’t see that generalizations about the despair of our times—and how they have changed basic behaviors tout court—are credible. There is more variety out there than such pronouncements credit. And, frankly, just much more good behavior than they are willing to admit.