Public Men and Private Lives

...Particularly when he makes his way up to the present day, The Fall of Public Man is valuable not as a logical argument but as a series of observations...

...These experts have done great harm to the family by appropriating many of its functions unto themselves...

...Another 1977 book, Edmund Wilson’s Letters on Literature and Politics [ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux] contains rich evidence of this strange policyWilson is forever fulminating about editors and warning them in the strictest terms not to try changing his writing at all, while at the same time the happy editorial influence he has on the work of his friends is plain...

...Their private lives were kept entirely separate...

...To have them talk to you like a stranger, like all of what you’ve lived together didn’t happen, that all the past is nothing to them...

...In interpersonal dealings, we’re apt to be reserved most of the time, but exceedingly self-revelatory when we want to make contact with someone else...

...Public life as Sennett defines it flourished in London and Paris in the latter half of the 18th century...

...Couldn’t Sennett be more sympathetic to what people want from life than to advise them to be as aggressively impersonal as possible...

...He is wholly unsympathetic not only to suburbs but also to neighborhood groups, a return to small towns, anything that would attempt to make society more “personal,” because he sees that as counterproductive...

...His Dense Web of Theory Sennett’s book is the more complicated and broader of the two, and for that reason both the more admirable and the more confusing...

...You’re not old enough...

...Sayles is willing just to show, where Sennett and Lasch aren’t, but he’s completely unwilling to tell...

...Sennett’s book has to do with the increasing separation of “private” and “public” life, from the 18th century to the present...

...The story of 100 years of misguided experts is told with that knife-sharpening nastiness that careers in academia so often nurture in people...

...The activities of the helping professionals that he condemns are portrayed as an elaborate plot hatched by boardroom plutocrats and carried out with extreme precision over the years...

...In a time when everybody else’s solutions involve making institutions smaller and more responsive to individuals, Sennett’s is an admirably original view, but it asks a lot of us...

...As a result, however, Sennett does fall on his face fairly often...

...Both end with strong condemnations of society’s present narcissism...

...and if he underwent some misfortune as the plot of the play twisted, the audience would start to cry out of sympathy...

...That’s the price of a large scope...

...This is a scene that’s been played in a dozen movies, and the temptation is to paint the parents as boorish, bumbling materialists...

...In our quest for intimacy, in other words, we lose a lot...

...On the other, Americans are becoming more and more narcissistic, spending their increasing amounts of free time and money on an endless series of dubious self-improvement programs...

...To concoct a theory so new and containing so much truth as Lasch’s is admirable...

...Implying that all social workers, for example, are willing agents of the big corporations strains credulity...

...they have inflicted on family life a never-ending series of rules and theories, all of them based on something other than the love and discipline that are the family’s real glue...

...Two things mar Haven in a Heartless World...

...What’s impressive about Sayles is that he can get inside the heads of such a broad range of people...

...First, like The Fall of Public Man, it attempts to explain too much in its opening and closing sections, and as a result is to mere mortals diffuse and complicated to the point of occasional incomprehensibility...

...Theaters became larger and audiences much more silent and respectful...

...To get the real explanation without having to wait 50 years for it, we need a Sennett or Lasch who is willing to go out and meet people and try to understand them the way Sayles obviously has, or a Sayles who will also hit the books and try to explain the forces behind the troubles he describes so well...

...Audiences were small, and sat close to the stage-even on the stage, in some cases...

...So despite some progress, we’re still left short of understanding what it all means in depersonalized, overpersonalized America...

...Most people are more bashful than Sennett about trying to explain what it all means, and he must be given some credit for his boldness-in these cautious times, writers are usually too afraid of falling on their face to try what Sennett tries...

...With the passing decades and the rise of capitalism, people in cities began to feel much less certain of their identities, and somewhat shellshocked as a result of the uncertainty...

...to then try to shoehorn all of contemporary life neatly into it is not...

...The streets were no longer a stage and people no longer actors-so that the theater was now dramatically different from everyday life...

...A Never-Ending Search’ Like Sennett, Lasch has his moments, like this one: “As the world takes on a more and more menacing appearance, life becomes a neverending search for health and wellbeing through exercise, dieting, drugs, spiritual regimens of various kinds, psychic self-help, and psychiatry...

...In this society of roles, the distinction between the stage and life was not a vivid one: audiences saw actors as people like themselves, and they were no less afraid than actors are to express themselves in public...

...In order to prevent that from happening, it’s important to know how it is, exactly, that our nation can be turning both excessivelv imperNicholas Lemann is managing editor of The Washington Monthly.sonal and excessively personal at the same time-to be able to see our own times with the clarity that, thanks to historians, we can see the past...

...Although he’s gone to some lengths earlier to explain convincingly why the daughter joined the commune, when the parents come on stage he understands their pain perfectly as well: Theory and Empathy “Mr...

...Sennett has an intriguing answer...

...Of course, historians have an advantage over people who try to figure out the present, like journalists, which is that they begin already knowing how the story turned out...

...if he said them well, the audience would make him repeat them...

...Seldom are so many tools and so much learning brought to bear in the effort to understand our times as in two books published in 1977, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (Alfred A. Knopf) and Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World (Basic Books...

...On one hand, we’re coming increasingly under the dominance of large institutions that are depersonalized, don’t work, and promote caution and unimaginativeness...

...First, writes Lasch, “capitalists took production out of the household and collectivized it, under their own supervision, in the factory...

...People were “impersonal,” but they were secure and able to participate in an active urban social and political life...

...In complex situation after complex situation Sayles’ feel for each person’s position is exact...

...People spent a great deal of time in the streets and in public squares and parks...

...Good Old Impersonality The solution Sennett proposes is a revival of the big cities and of good old “impersonal,” richly interactive urban life...

...If an actor flubbed his lines, the audience would loudly boo...

...So it’s hope-inspiring to see two respected academics come out with books that seek to tackle the present, through protean use of history, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and social theory...

...Jumping that Hurdle Lasch holds out the promise of jumping that hurdle-he supports the family, after all, and believes that there is such a thing as true love...

...He is capable, for instance, of starting one paragraph with this clarion call for clear lanFuage: “The phrases ‘social values’ and value systems’ are barbarisms that social sciences have inflicted on ordithe very next paragraph with this sentence: “SQ a belief will be taken as an activation of the logical cognition of social life (ideology...

...Otherwise we’ll be stuck with attempts that, even at their best, fall slightly to either side of the target...

...Most immediately, there’s the constant procession of woes you’re likely to see on the evening news-crime, inflation, foreign entanglements, declining schools, business greed, government incompetence, discrimination, reverse discrimination...

...Therefore promotions and raises are the product not of your skills so much as of your worth as a person...

...There was a stable and particularized class system, and when they went out in public people dressed in a way that precisely indicated their station...

...As Sennett puts it, “manners, conventions, and ritual gestures [are] the very stuff out of which public relations are formed...

...As a result, Union Dues is as frustrating in its own way as The Fall of Public Man and Haven in a Heartless World: it is empathy without theory, as opposed to theory without empathy...

...Also, he says, these theories tend to run in cycles, so that today’s ethic of “open m a rr i age,” “non-binding commitment,” and so on, besides being abhorrent, is also a replay of the ethic of the 1920s...

...and most businessmen are equally suspicious of social workers...

...Sorrows and Dislocations Union Dues is the story of a 17-year-old coal miner’s son from West Virginia, Hobie McNatt, who runs away to Boston in the fall of 1969, and his widowed father, Hunter, who takes off in search of him...

...As Thomas Massey points out elsewhere in this issue, these two developments -bureaucracy and self-absorption-are present in other countries even more than in our own, which is a frightening signal to us that things can get even worse here...

...Lasch’s is about the fall of the family over the last century...

...Success in a bureaucracy depends on your ability to move with ease from job to job...

...A Society of Roles Sennett uses the theater as a mirror of this world and of the world that has replaced it...

...We expend great effort in trying to “be ourselves...

...The extremes of self-absorption aside, isn’t it perfectly legitimate, even noble, to seek out the company of family and close friends, with whom contact seems to hold the promise of more riches than even the best public life could offer...

...Stepping back a little to get a look at the big picture, we can see that the nation is in the grip of two apparently contradictory if equally unfortunate, trends...

...this activation occurs outside the linguistic rules for coherence...

...For instance, in one scene an affluent couple from the Boston suburbs comes by the radical commune where Hobie’s living, to try to communicate with their daughter, who’s also there...

...Lasch spends most of his book recounting in spiteful detail the procession of theories about the family that have been in vogue at one time or another in the past century...

...Sennett is a sociologist, Lasch a historian, but neither of their books fits any one category-both (especially Sennett’s) are instead ambitious attempts to bring together many lines of inquiry and much evidence from the past and the present in order to present a sweeping theory of the current malaise...

...Which goes to show that part of being a big thinker is the right to have one’s writing untouched by even the best editorial hands...

...Both see the rise and flowering of capitalism as the cause of the events they are describing...

...Sayles doesn’t fall into this trap...

...In the 18th century, actors dressed in contemporary clothing, whether they were playing Julius Caesar or Tartuffe...

...He agrees with Sennett that the family grew in importance in response to the dislocations that accompanied the rise of capitalism-it was the “haven in a heartless world” of his title...

...Which means that workers in bureaucracies, 4s they’re preockupied with success, are preoccupied with their own personalities...

...that accomplished, we don’t care much about specific positions...

...people define themselves and others much more in terms of individual personalities than in terms of roles...

...Even in these troubled times, not all of us are evil and not all of us march obediently to the drumbeat of Larger Social Forces, but Sennett doesn’t have much instinctive understanding of that...

...As Lasch tells it, a better collection of hooey it would be hard to assemble...

...the term ‘value’ is abandoned as unclear.’’ Time and again the wondrous hopes raised by an insightful and promising paragraph will be dashed by the incomprehensible one that follows...

...They spoke to strangers...

...What they had come to see was clearly a thing apart from their lives, and actors began as a result to dress in a historically accurate way Today, there is almost no public life in the 18th-century sense...

...and most recently, the clever bastards have “extended their control over the worker’s private life as well, as . . . specialists began to supervise child-rearing, formerly the business of the family...

...How does this preoccupation with personality and intimacy square with the increasing impersonality of our society...

...In the old days, just as you had a firm social class, you also plied a well-defined trade-all that was part of the role that made it easy for you to go out in public...

...The large bureaucratic organizations that most people work in now, says Sennett, may provide their employees with an institutional identity, but they strip them of identity of another sort by forcing them to be jacks-of-all-trades, rather than artisans...

...The obvious self-confidence that let Sennett write a book like this also seems to have kept him at a distance from a strict editor...

...As a result, privacy is important to us, and we find crowded cities oppressive...

...But they also, presumably, have an array of intellectual tools that most of us lack, which might make them better able than most of us to figure out what it all means...

...His every character is presented thinking, talking, and acting in a way that seems exactly accurate...

...For those who have withdrawn interest from the outside world except insofar as it remains a source of gratification and frustration, the state of their own health becomes an all-absorbing concern...

...Like there’s no feeling left.’ He shook his head.’’ The trouble with Union Dues as an explanation of our troubles is that in the end it leaves the reader thinking that life is tough and complicated and sad, but not being able to pinpoint why...

...Thus did the bosses push their direction of us past the world of work, into our very homes...

...But for a century, he says, it has been imperiled, by the very people who claim to be its chief defenders: psychologists, marriage counselors, doctors, ministers, teachers, social workers, and other members of the “helping professions...

...Most social workers in America are and have always been liberals, instinctively suspicious of businessmen...

...Hunter and Hobie move through a world populated by miners, cops, drifters, hippies, radicals, rich kids, poor kids, and students-a world that contains most of the sorrows and dislocations Sennett and Lasch write about...

...The gaping hole of human understanding that Lasch (and, less so, Sennett) leaves brings to mind a 1977 book that is astonishingly lacking in that flaw: John Sayles’ second novel, Union Dues (AtlanticLittle, Brown...

...A public man is someone who can spend a lot of time in the streets and other public places of a large city, dealing constantly with other people, without as a result feeling his privacy assaulted...

...Ellenbogen sat by Hobie on a stack of leaflets.’You don’t know,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘you have no idea, what it is to hear from someone you’ve held in your arms, from someone you love, that they want you out of their life...

...They began to dress drably, to find urban crowds oppressive, to relish the chance to retreat into the seclusion of the family or the neighborhood...

...I found myself, reading The Fall of Public Man, resenting Sennett as I admired him...

...The bulk of both books is fairly conventional history, but both begin and end with sections about life right now...

...He can do this because in public he’s playing a well-defined role, and so doesn’t have to worry about how his public behavior reflects on his identity or his personality...

...This is a failure of empathy, and it makes Lasch’s explanation of the present ring false, to businessmen and social workers alike...

...And both, alas, leave the reader only slightly less in the dark about the nature of the mess we’re in-much less so than the authors clearly hoped...

...Time in the Streets “Public man,” in Sennett’s terms, does not especially mean people like Hubert Humphrey, or people who serve on their hometown charity boards, or people whose lives are chronicled in the pages of People magazine...

...We engage in casual sex whose aim is self-fulfillment...

...Into his dense web of theory and evidence Sennett weaves and seeks to explain, among other things: the Dreyfus Affair, the housing crisis in Forest Hills, New York, the rise of rock music, the rise of the suburbs, trends in urban architecture, the sexual revolution, Balzac’s fiction, and the changing nature of the theater, 1750-1 970...

...what isn’t is Lasch’s tendency to be as unsubtle in attempting to describe human motivation as he is complex in his intellectual argument...

...The editor of record for The Fall of Public Man is Robert Gottleib of Knopf, widely reputed to be the most brilliant and sensitive editor in all of New York publishing...

...From our politicians, we demand above all open and admirable personalities...