The Hidden Injuries of Class

...But while no one feels the discontent would vanish with these problems, it’s hazardous to venture beyond the simple issues because the field is boundless, taking in the most basic questions of human needs, psychology, and happiness, and because so often the soluble problems are entangled with plain, tough, unalterable facts of life...

...Outside of elite circles, on the other hand, obscurity is not a defeat at all...

...it is the final demonstration of virtue when all else fails...

...In her review of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, in the January 25 New York Review of Books, Mary McCarthy accused Halberstam of being excessively interested in “career terms’, because he refers to people who did perfectly well, though not exceptionally, as either having failed or having been brutally stifled (usually for a good deed such as telling the government an unpleasant truth...

...Rissarro is stuck in a job where he really has little choice but to rely utterly on the badge, on what people think...

...Just so, they are stuck with a set of patently unworkable and high-priority values, such as the “prestige” attached to the finely gradated job niches, or dubious concepts of what is the most important thing they have to give their children or expect of them...

...are political questions, questions about which the ruling class in any age sets the standards...

...Others, like Patrick Flanagan, son of a shipping clerk, pick up the structure of values with a vengeance...

...Richard Sennett...

...Flanagan, a college student, is interested in computers...

...I have no criticism of Halberstam’s approach: I think it is absolutely valid, though perhaps of limited interest, because I don’t think people outside the elite feel quite the Same Sense of dumbfounded, painful astonishment that such high-class characters would make such a mess...

...The villain, Sennett believes, is “the system...

...Within a field, however, real evaluation of individual work is absolutely essential...

...In the end, real evaluation can only be made by oneself, but for almost every kind of work, it has to be made in comparison to others’ work, according to standards based on the best that human beings can do in whatever field...

...On the contrary, the ordinary is highly valued: a desire to merge with the white-collar world is not what one would call a craving for distinction...

...This book is about class as much as it is about work, and for that the authors should be congratulated...

...I felt,” said Mary, “he was so involved in showing how good he was, in proving himself, he wasn’t really noticing me...

...While extending hope where before there was only resignation, this new “equality” has had a cruel twist, namely that if you hold a lowly position, you have to blame yourself...

...As one of them, Halberstam questions what went wrong when the creaim of his peers rose to power...

...She discovered that State Department officer David Nes, another supposedly outcast truth-teller, was promoted and served as Minister in Cairo from 1965 on and had, in fact, “already been raised to the rank of Minister in Saigon (where he served until 1965) at a time when Halberstam places him back in Washington being given ‘the strong feeling that no one wanted to touch anyone who angered the military, that if the military turned on you, you were dead.’ ” “It is true,” McCarthy goes on to write, that when my Who’s Who went to press, he had not reached the rank of Ambassador, although he was 51 or 52 years old...

...But the tragedy for York and Nes personally is less clear...

...A person’s value is judged almost exclusively in terms of comparison to others...

...In career terms, which in my view interest Halberstam excessively, how dead is ‘dead’ ?” Is Fort Bragg Death...

...Their excellent book, The Hidden Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...In fact, his working-class habits are in a way the only redeeming quality for his self-image...

...The Hidden Injuries of Class’ by Suzannah Lessard There has been a lot written about work in America in the last year, and much of the literature circles around an unanswered question: what is the real cause of the discontent which plagues work life...

...in any event, belief in prestige/ability labels is a disease which flourishes in all classes...

...Injuries of Class,* comes closer to grasping the heart of the problem than any other attempt I’ve seen...

...Jonathan Cobb...

...Culture is a kind of knowing how to live, knowing how to be at ease with oneself, others, life in general, and perhaps most of all, having a clear, workable set of values...

...but more complete, more realized, in every sense “better” people...

...Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have ventured directly and courageously into this uncharted area...

...Since the differences between categories of skills-surgeon vs...

...But on the other hand, they are not unworthy posts...

...There isn’t anything else in what he does to rely on...

...To be caught in a scheme of particular values, to live under the terms set only by others, is to feel inadequate in relation to those others...

...Our culture not only fails to encourage this distinction, but actuallly lures people into believing totally in the phony badges...

...The tendency to link intelligence (in the I. Q. sense) to innate worth, for instance, seems to me to get stronger as you go up the income scale (with the possible exception of the very rich), as does careerism-the burning need to “distinguish” oneself, and the counterpart feeling that anything short of distinction is failure...

...For the moment the odds are against all of us, from Frank Rissarro to David Halberstam, developing any clarity or certainty about ability aind the distinction between ability and human worth, because the bedrock worth is lost in a huge mountain of garbagebadges, labels, celebrityism, snobbery -with the Gabor sisters dancing on top...

...Secondly, anyone who is really interested in what he is doing wants it evaluated for quality against what other people can do...

...While the wildly varying degrees of respect which some occupations enjoy in different countries reveals how arbitrarily we choose some of our most favored professions, it remains that some abilities are more essential or more difficult to develop than others, and that some people within the same profession are more able, by any objective standard, than others...

...Intelligence rating is based on a comparative scale, forming an elaborate inter-occupational social hierarchy which is extremely demeaning to those on the “bottom...

...There is no room for failure in this context because there is no separation between a person’s innate worth and his occupation-ability rank...

...I see startling evidence of a failing, a collapse, a cultural dilemmanot a system exploiting some for the benefit of others...

...The Kennedy Administration was de finitely a class -and classy - administration, drawing its talent not just from the intellectual cream, but the social cream as well...

...To show “what happens to people when they wear badges of ability,” he draws on a study of courtship: He tried to validate his self to Mary by showing he had abiliiies and qualities that marked him off as am individual from the crowd-his taste in records, his opinions about politics, his skill at tennis...

...Nes and York would hardly be regarded as pitiable, fallen stars there...

...The concrete problems, like job safety or monotony on the assembly line, have been plainly identified, and practicable ways of dealing with them are beginning to take shape...

...The terrible consequence of this way of perceiving yourself (through other people’s eyes), particularly if you are a man, is that you come to believe that “what you have to give the people you love depends on how the world sees YOU...

...In general, the person:ification of the system as antagonist has reached the point of limited value, the point at which it is more likely to block the mind than to enlighten...

...The Halberstam example is also apt because the book is a class book about a class administration...

...The children, however, do not ask for these sacrifices, yet are expected to give something in return-to “make something of themselves...

...Once I get into a position like that, I can really be me, really do some good, because whatever I think should happen, it’ll at least be all on my own shoulders to make it happen...

...There is tragedy in the York-Nes stories, which is that government is afraid of the people it needs most and doesn’t promote them to positions of power...

...The nefarious little influences and indulgences of badgism strike practically everyone’s self-image, we a kening the foundation of self-esteem and making evaluation threatening...

...Sennett points, for instance, to the glorification of intelligence as the supreme human virtue and the commonly accepted picture of humanity as bell-shaped in terms of intelligence, with only a few at the top...

...No matter how appalled you might be by Vietnam, probably when all is weighed, it is better, according to this set of values, to have suffered McGeorge Elundy’s tragedy than David Nes’s...

...For one thing, it defies reality...

...McCarthy writes: It occurred to me finally to wonder what had happened to the one-star General York [who angered authorities with pessimistic reports about Vietnam...

...I will touch on some of the most important ideas here, though without trying to draw the intricate connections between them...

...6.95...

...Again, I disagree that this is a matter of oppression of one class by another, but disregarding that difference, I don’t think that saying all abilities are equal solves the problem...

...I quote this at Such length because it Pinpoints SO clearly the exaggerated notions, automatically accepted by most of US, of the value of “making it to the top,” the interpretation of success so Clearly in terms of career niches, and worst of all perhaps, the disdain for the perfectly good, hardworking career on middle ground...

...You can point to the disadvantages with which you were burdened, but you cannot dispel the final sense that if you had “it” in you, you would have done better, that compared to you, the people who have “done well” are not just richer *The Hidden Injuries of Class...

...They behaved with integrity...

...The other fellows, because they got an education, sneaks out early and comes in late...

...The shocking idea in this book is how garbled the concepts of human worth have become, and how debilitating this is for the people affected...

...The impression Sennett leaves is of people stuck in a limbo, having abandoned viable foundations for a very vaguely defined, middle-class dream which they don’t much like when they touch it, but with which, as far as dreams go, they are stuck...

...In terms of objective worth, a day of meatcutting is probably a more substantial contribution than a month of the bank job...

...Sennett considered this the ultimate undermining of self-esteem...

...That is what these people do not have...

...How one relates to what one does, and how one looks at oneself in relation to what one does, are matters of character, habit, values, but also culture...

...On a broad scale, the real work has to be sorted out from the nonsense according to its bedrock worth...

...History has borne out the truth for which they risked their careers, and they have, for all we know, lived fairly normal, well-off lives ever since...

...As far as problems of self-esteem, in the most personal sense, go, the point is not that all abilities are equal in value, but that such skills don’t tell us much about the personal quality of the surgeon, or the street sweeper, or the bank clerk...

...One of their subjects, Frank Rissarro, ex-meatcutter, presently classifying loan applications in a bank, is dejected for precisely this reason: he knows his hard-won position is actually worthless...

...This interest isn’t necessarily competitive-it’s just a need for information in straining to develop one’s ability to its highest potential...

...Because of their monopoly in this regard, because their particular values appear as universal, it becomes a matter of having “ability” or not having it, rather than of having...

...Class is a major factor in American life which has been avoided in most recent social literature, and they deal with it accurately, honestly, and without condescension...

...that he is serving-or was four years ago-as commanding general of the XVIII Airborne at Fort Bragg, with the rank of lieutenant general...

...the need to draw back the veils of credentials, praise, success-or the opposite-which get in the way of one’s own perception of the value of what one is doing...

...But there is a line and most people are on one side or the other-set principally either on “making it” or on “doing it...

...They can tell their grandchildren about themselves with a great deal more pride-self-esteemone would think, than the officials who didn’t listen to them...

...The obsession with the bell-shaped graph and the terror of vanishing into the center of the bell is far more characteristic of the upper classes than the lower...

...There is an ideal state of mind in which one concentrates only on doing whatever’s at hand without the distraction of badges...

...Tne craving for distinction about which Sennett and Cobb write is actually far more characteristic of the upper classes than working-class people...

...One picks up which side a person falls on pretty quickly, intuitively, but there is no surer way to test it than to watch how he reacts to questions which lead in the direction of genuine evaluation...

...As far as a healthy attitude towards work is concerned, I think Cobb’s solution is also misconceived...

...Alfred A. Knovf...

...Tearing Badges From Our Minds Few of us would not shudder, at least a little, at the thought of genuine evaluation of our work...

...Making a difference between esteeming yourself amd esteeming your work is also a matter of something learned, drawn from the society and its ways of esteeming human beings in general...

...This is the point at which the problem becomes “the system” because so many of the white-collar, esteem-associated job:$ are mostly nonsense, leaving their occupants no choice but to rely on the badge...

...Dead” to Halberstam means anything short of the big time...

...bricklayer-are very clear, there is little point in grading them comparatively...

...In other words, he not only had not been destroyed, but had had a promotion...

...So I looked him up in the 1968-69 Who’s Who and found...

...But none of this means that there is no such thing as grades of competence...

...Most of us crack from time to time and cast our self-image in terms of the badge that’s been pinned to us, or we look into other people’s faces to see how they react to the badge...

...True, regardless of the promotions, Fort Bragg and Cairo are greater letdowns as assignments than McCarthy admits here...

...Making Zsa Zsa Run Sennett and Cobb write about badges of ability, those arbitrary labels people acquire which signal, mystically, the “level” to which that person belongs (the level of workand also the level of human being...

...One point to start attacking this problem is from within oneself-with one’s own work and values, and principles of self-esteem-but the other, the opposite pole, is the work field itself...

...In other words, the linkage of worthiness with badges of ability goes far beyond the economic or even social sphere to worth in the sense of what one has to give one’s spouse and children and closest friends...

...This will always be a self-evident, unquellable truth...

...The authors’ thesis is that the problem these people have is a deep wound society has inflicted on their self-esteem...

...The portraits serve as cornerstones for an analysis which ranges far beyond the supports of documentation but which is careful and honest and convincing...

...Nothing would make the Gabor sisters run faster...

...The differences are plain enough...

...Perhaps more drab, but in the same category are the hordes in ephemeral jobs in the white-collar world...

...The book’s documentation, which is based on conversations with 150 working-class Bostonians, rests heavily on 11 intimate portraits...

...Their focus is primarily on the blue-collar, or “working-class” person, his low self-image, and the sources of that image...

...Half the middle-class jobs Sennett and Cobb’s people so eagerly reach for are useless, although the jobs possess a badge of status supposedly representing ability...

...Phony credentialism is a deeply corrupting disease, and a vicious one, too, particularly for the Frank Rissarros who were led to believe that with the badges would come spiritual growth and well-being as well as prestige...

...Investment of intense hope in one’s children is the genesis of another insidious pattern...

...But it seems particularly unhelpful when applied to these psychological subtleties in the work life of an affluent, modern age...

...Jonathan Cobb, in an afterword, suggests that the way to eliminate this attitude is to eliminate all gradings, or comparative measurements : The uses of ability, of development...

...These “casualties” to honor actually lead productive, not to mention affluent, lives in positions most of us would have to call prestigious compared to our own...

...The Culture...

...First, nothing is more inimical to the cult of phony badges than real evaluation...

...Though the actual injuries to self-esteem may not be so direct or acutely felt on other levels, many of the misperceptions (of self and others), coercions, divisive factors, and states of helpless dependence on phony values are at least as much if not more influential in the classes above...

...different abilities...

...The boss knows I’m there, a reliable worker...

...So total is the inculcated belief for someone like Frank Rissarro that he sees no alternative-just an empty label-which he knows is meaningless but cannot let go of because the other option (going back to meatcutting) is sociadly repellent to him, associated as it is with low esteem...

...And not only are they lacking, but so is the middle class, the supposedly “united” and “autonomous” people whose lives they wish to emulate...

...Otherwise, you retreat into a fantasy world as divorced from reality as the badge game...

...With the passing of the aristocracy, they point out, ability has replaced birth (as well as station) as the measure of worthiness...

...But Sennett narrows and distorts the book, not by limiting himself to analyzing one class of people, but by doing so in a context of class warfare of some sort, without acknowledging it...

...I don’t see a crime perpetrated in this book...

...Security, Not Stardom But if the people in The Hidden Injuries of Class do not crave stardom, they unquestionably believe in the gradations of job positions and the badges of ability which go with them, and they share with the upper classes a propensity to substitute those badges for genuine self-estimation, or evaluation of the work to which the badge is attached...

...The exaggerated craving for distinction is perhaps just an outgrowth of this more profound imbalance...

...Rissarro has acquired a badge of ability, but he is uncomfortable because he doesn’t feel there is anything behind it...

...I don’t mean that Halberstam is a snob, just that the perspective from which he writes is as a member of the elite, familiar with its particular tastes, standards, and images of worthiness and esteem...

...The illusion of superiority with no substance is an everyday fact of our society...

...The state is ideal not only because the best work is likely to be produced in it, but because people are likely to be happiest in it, most assured, solidfeeling, relaxed about themselves...

...The Gabor sisters probably take the prize, and we have all known people who have somehow made themselves into important, glamorous people, though when you look for accomplishments, you are hard put to find them...

...The Bell-Shaped Curve Many of Sennett’s ideas (he wrote most of the book, while Cobb contributed through research) have had considerable exposure, but they gain new force in the context of his thesis about injuries to self-esteem...

...This burden not only to gain esteem for themselves but to rescue it for their parents breeds “a malaise among these kids greater, though more inarticulate, than the discontent of the glamor children of the 1960s...

...The MisDlaced Meatcutter The most insidious tendency of grading-whether it be of jobs or school assignments-is that much of it has no relation to the real value of the work...

...Not the System My quarrel with this book is not with any of these points, but with an overall cast the authors give to the subject which I find at odds with the best of the material...

...Sacrifice is the last resource for individualism, the last demonstration of competence...

...Some of them balk, and the parents feel mortally betrayed...

...These jobs aren’t work where you make something-it’s just pushing papers...

...Therefore, one values oneself according to what others see-what they read in one’s badge...

...If limiting one’s horizons to an “ordinary” but worthwhile job is considered too high a price to pay for honor, then our values have failed us worse than we thought...

...With the former, the value or desirability of the badges of ability and distinction, is an absolute diehard belief, equated almost with having a soul, since anything short of distinc tion is looked upon as a kind of nonexistence...