The Corrosion of Character

...The new, "post-Fordist" regime lauds all things unpredictable, lightweight, and "flexible...

...His book, All Things New: Christianity, Social Thought, and Cultural Criticism in Modern America, will be published in spring, 2000, by Cornell University Press...

...With its imperious bosses, its overworked employees, and its benediction of uncomplaining servility to the prerogatives of money and power, the "new capitalism" emerges as the same old monster it always was, just larger, faster, and colder at heart than ever...

...Though rightly bemoaned as constricting and "conformist," the Fordist world of the blue-collar stiff and the gray-flannel suit preserved a predictable connection between labors and rewards...

...Though this is a vintage piece of Newspeak, Richard Sen-nett argues in his short but compelling new book that the dictum is also a genuine mite of wisdom about the nature of work in contemporary America...

...A professor of sociology at New York University and the London School of Economics, Sennett has long been a provocative but not always lucid student of the impact of capitalism on personal identity...

...By way of contrast, Sennett looks back unsentimentally to the regime of work and production that reigned in corporate America for three decades after World War II: "Fordism," in the terminology Sennett borrows from historians and sociologists...

...Moreover, Fordist rules and rhythms, while they could numb the mind and body, also enabled workers to "beget narratives" that lifted their routinized labor from drudgery into coherence, dignity, and community...

...Instead, he explained happily, they now have "projects" or "fields of work...

...Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Sennett implies that since "in order to be reliable, we must feel needed," and since "for us to feel needed, this Other must be needy," we must create a political economy of genuinely democratic interdependence, one that enables workers to achieve character in a new regime of predictability...

...It also featured hierarchies which, however rigid, defined power relations, responsibilities, and obligations...

...Ready to turn on a dime in response to new markets and technologies, contemporary capitalism demolishes the social and cultural foundations of "character," and upholds instead the punishing ideal of incessant metamorphosis...

...but because the new system of disposability "radiates indifference" so baldly, it cannot continue to claim that its contributions to material wealth "make up" for what are charitably referred to as its "faults...

...As a result, instead of the strong-willed people who picketed factories and supported progressive social and political movements, the new capitalism spawns battalions of diffident helots who lack the will and imagination to break their gossamer shackles...

...Of course, he concedes, capitalism always was such...

...At the same time, smaller, flexible, and mobile workforces, while they require employees to cultivate valuable interpersonal skills, also inhibit the establishment of durable bonds...

...User-friendly" technology, for instance (when it isn't surveilling workers more closely than ever before), Commonweal 2 2 February 26,1999 erodes the dedication, workmanship, and identity acquired through mastering difficult tasks...

...Purporting to value individual judgment and initiative, it strikes those indomitably libertarian chords in American culture which are indispensable to any vibrant democracy...

...Moreover, its ideal of mobility encourages a cosmopolitanism which, at its best, promotes disdain for bigotry...

...Deflecting or denying all resistance and confrontation, the manager (excuse me, "facilitator" or "team leader") strengthens elite control by mastering "the art of wielding power without being held accountable...

...Eugene McCarraher teaches American history at the University of Delaware...

...As one button-pushing young worker in a computerized bakery sums it up for Sennett, "I'm not really a baker"—leaving himself and Sennett unclear as to who or what he is...

...The new capitalism is the just-in-time world of temp work, flextime, user-friendly technologies, and small, infinitely rearrangeable workforces...

...Clearly, the "new capitalism" possesses what many regard as attractive features...

...This characterless ideal filters down to the cubicles...

...The new entrepreneur (embodied most clearly for Sennett in the geeky mendacity of Bill Gates) espouses a "willingness to destroy what he has made, given the demands of the immediate moment," and idealizes "the ability to let go, if not to give...

...Eugene HcCarraher orkers no longer have W "jobs," an ATT executive re- cently told the New York Times...

...Still, Sennett might remind the upbeat among us that this seasoned self-direction, when it is not spurious, remains the privilege of a professional and managerial elite...

...Once we appreciate the historical anomaly of the postwar moment, we might see the capitalism of our own day in a proper light...

...In Sennett's view, the "new capitalism"— the world of "flexibility" and "reinvention" in labor markets, work schedules, institutions, and technology—renders "character" impossible...

...Sennett also deftly dissects the specious locutions of the managerial elite...

...Despite his contention that the new capitalism is an "illegible regime of power," Sennett proves an adept reader and translator of its ideological lexicon: "flexibility/' "facilitation," "empowerment," and "teamwork...

...Yet much of Sennett's work after Injuries, while more ambitious in scope, also suffered from conceptual and literary muddle...

...Ironically, Sennett notes, these routines marked out "an arena of empowerment" in which workers forged bonds of solidarity, resisted managerial fiat, and asserted their own demands...

...These days, "Wobbly" denotes the new worker's backbone, not his politics...

...Indeed, the mellow but pervasive bleakness of the picture Sennett paints overwhelms his lame political conclusion...

...Moreover, the prosperity and stability of American capitalism in the three decades after 1945 rested on conditions that are either badly eroded, gone forever, or dubious: a formidable labor movement, uncontested military and economic preeminence, and high military spending, to cite a few...

...For Sennett, "character" is the capacity to make and keep commitments— not just in marriage, but in friendships, communities, and workplaces—and the ability to provide continuous, coherent narratives of personal experience...

...His first book, The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972), was a memorable examination of the psychic and moral tolls exacted by the work ethic...

...By his own description, postin-dustrial itineracy weakens or prevents Commonweal 2 3 February 26,1999 those bonds necessary, not only for character, but for movements that could stay the whirlwinds of capital...

...This/awx-democratic discourse camouflages power, Sennett argues, with a phony and demeaning egalitarianism...

...As Sennett demonstrates, the Kingdom of Customer Service begets not the bonds and narratives of "character," but rather indifference, lassitude, and personal decomposition...

...Now, returning to the personal interviews that made Injuries so powerful, a cogent and readable Sennett tells us more about the degeneration of "character" in America than all the flatulent moralizing of William Bennett...

...Sennett concludes with an indictment of the new capitalism as an unprecedented assault on the dignity of the human person...