Fire and Knowledge

Christine Rosen wrote a good article about The Overpraised American a couple weeks ago. Here are some excerpts:

These and other factors produced the “narcissistic personality of our time,” he said, someone who “depends on others to validate his self-esteem” and who “cannot live without an admiring audience.” Lasch contrasted this narcissist, who viewed the world as a mirror, with the rugged individualist of earlier times, who saw the world “as an empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design.” In the narcissist’s world, he argued, confession and self-absorption become “the moral climate.”

In 1979, Lasch noted, “modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions — and our own — were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time.” Today, there is no “as if” involved; many more of our mundane interactions are recorded — or have the potential to be so. A contributor to the op-ed page of the New York Times recently wrote about enduring an emergency airplane landing. When the plane put down safely, the first people to come aboard were not emergency workers, but a television crew eager to turn the passengers’ harrowing experience into reality television gold. For this passenger, more disturbing than the emergency landing was the speed with which the passengers’ fears were transformed into a surreal form of entertainment for the masses. Indeed, Lasch’s delineation of the secondary characteristics of narcissism perfectly describes the tenor of most contemporary reality tv: pseudo–self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor. Today, tv is itself a form of therapy, and not merely for those who tune into Dr. Phil or Oprah. Television offers 24-hour-a-day reassurance that our “reality” can be interesting — interesting enough, even, to broadcast to millions. It is not a surprise, in this climate, to find that the ability to win praise and attention has become the marker of success in the culture.

Celebrity begets pseudo–celebrity, which begets reality tv celebrity, and the world has become so full of attention-seeking potential stars and starlets that we must grade them like beef: a-list, b-list, c-list, and so on. At the same time, as the demand for attention has increased, it has become more acceptable to be the object of unflattering attention, as witness the antics of celebutante Paris Hilton, who has, among other things, had a pornographic tape of herself widely circulated over the Internet. Websites such as Gawker and Wonkette skewer the rich, famous, and intellectually pretentious, as do, daily, thousands of personal bloggers. Talking heads on television offer cutting remarks about political leaders and other public figures. The underlying theme of much of this commentary is contempt for genuine achievement. Writing in the Guardian recently, Dylan Evans noted, “Nowadays, if someone is vastly more talented than us, we don’t congratulate them — we envy them and resent their success. It seems we don’t want heroes we can admire, so much as heroes we can identify with.” “If Achilles were around today,” he added ruefully, “the headline would all be about his heel.”

Today, two other types prevail: the porn star, who has taken the prostitute’s art, broadcast it, and in the process become a celebrity, and the reality television star, whose only achievement is his supposed normalcy, which exists only if it is televised. Unlike some other forms of celebrity, pornography and reality television offer the average American the tantalizing idea that he, too, can partake of the glamorous life. In succumbing to this fantasy, however, we fulfill the worst of Lasch’s predictions about the extremes of narcissism.

Spending time with one’s family is clearly the ideal situation if one hopes to raise healthy, well-adjusted children. A Harvard Medical School study whose results were reported in the Wall Street Journal recently found that “the odds of being overweight were 15 percent lower among those who ate dinner with their family on ‘most days’ or ‘every day’ compared with those who ate with their family ‘never’ or on ‘some days.’” Similarly, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that “teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are 72 percent more likely to use illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol than the average teen.” A 2002 article in the journal Pediatrics found a “strong relationship” between the amounts of time young men and women were left unsupervised in their homes and sexual activity.

It is not only the time pressure of dual-career families that encourages isolation and a dwindling connection among family members. The architecture of the middle and upper-middle class home has also contributed to the problem. As D. Stanley Eitzen has observed, “These huge houses, built, ironically, at the very time that family size is declining, tend to isolate their inhabitants from outsiders and from other family members. They provide all of the necessities for comfort and recreation, thus glorifying the private sphere over public places. Moreover, the number and size of the rooms encourages each family member to have their own space rather than shared spaces.”