the pastiche personality

What does dramaturgical consciousness tell us about the psyche of the millennial generation? Many psychologists--perhaps most--agree that in a diverse, complex, interconnected world of increasing novelty and fast-changing contexts, with children growing growing up in both cyberspace and real space, and in both a parallel and linear temporality, multiple role-playing and myriad identities are becoming the norm. They disagree as to whether dramaturgical consciousness is necessarily leading to an advance in consciousness or possibly a disintegration.

Kenneth J. Gergen acknowledges that in a globalizing world that is connected at the speed of light, “we engage in greater numbers of relationships, in a greater variety of forms, and with greater intensities than ever before.” We are awash in relationships, some virtual, others real. Where privacy was the coveted value of a bourgeois generation which defined freedom in terms of autonomy and exclusivity, access is the most sought after value of the Millennial Generation, which defines freedom in terms of the depth and scope of one’s relationships. Exclusivity has become less important than inclusivity, and the competitive ethos is beginning to be challenged—albeit tentatively—by an ethos of collaboration.

In the era of dramaturgical consciousness, where one’s very identity is relational and exists only to the extent one is embedded in a plethora of relationships, to be denied access is to be isolated and to cease to exist. Alone time—as distinguished from being lonely –continues to shrink and is already approaching near zero in a 24/7 interconnected world. In a time society, every spare nanosecond becomes an opportunity to make “another connection.”

We live in a world in which getting and holding one another’s attention becomes paramount, and relationships of all kinds become central to our existence. The old idea of “mine versus thine,” which fostered the sense of a predictable “one-dimensional self,” is giving way to the new idea of inclusivity and a “multidimensional self.’’ Gergen observes:

The relatively coherent and unified sense of self inherent in a traditional culture gives way to manifold and competing potenials. A multiphrenic condiction emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being.

Like improv artists caught up in ever-changing contexts and fast-moving story lines, each vying for our attention, we are forced to shift into new roles and switch back and forth between different sets and scripts so quickly that we risk slowly losing ourselves in the labyrinthine network of short-lived and ever-changing connections and experiences in which we find ourselves embedded. Gergen warns that:

This fragmentation of self-conceptions corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relationships. These relationships pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an “authentic self” with knowable characteristics recedes from view. The fully saturated self becomes no self at all.

Gergen worries that in the new world unfolding,

the self vanishes fully into a stage of relatedness…One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relationships in which he or she is embedded…thus placing relationships in the central position occupied by the individual self for the last several hundred years of Western history.

Most postmodern thinkers welcome the new sense of a relational self, suggesting that by breaking down the barriers of “mine versus thine,” we open up the possibility of a more tolerant, multicultural approach to socialization in the twenty-first century. Jean Baudrillard, for one, sees an unfolding globalized society in which “our private sphere has ceased to be the stage where the drama of the subject at odds with his objects is played out.”We no longer exist as subjects at all, argues Baudrillard, but, rather, “as terminals of multiple networks.”

Robert J. Lifton has another take on the shift in consciousness. Lifton believes that dramaturgical consciousness–having multiple personas is a coping mechanism, a way for the psyche to accommodate the escalating demands being placed on it in the emerging hyper-real global society. Lifton argues that playing roles and having multiple personas, far from representing the disappearance of self, is really a more plastic and mature stage of consciousness in which a person is able to live with ambiguities and complex and often competing priorities. Being able to live and experience as many potential realities as possible, sometimes even at the same time, says Lifton, requires a protean consciousness.

Gergen seems to share some common ground with Lifton, but with reservations. It’s not that Gergen is pessimistic about where human consciousness is heading. He would agree with the philosopher Martin Buber’s analysis of human nature. Buber believed that “in the beginning is the relationship.” Gergen sees a complex globalizing world in which human beings are becoming increasingly embedded in relationships of every style and kind. His concern is that the relational demands on our attention and psyche could overwhelm our individual and collective consciousness and plunge identity into chaos.

Gergen raises an important qualification that dramaturgical theorists often ignore or skirt. That is, that the dramaturgical way of thinking is unique to the modern age. He notes that,

The sense of “playing a role” depends for its palpability on the contrasting sense of a “real self.” If there is no consciousness of what it is to be “true to self” there is no meaning to “playing a role.”

By the time Shakespeare wrote that “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players,” the self was already developed enough to understand when it was playing a role—the mind could separate itself sufficiently from its behavior to consciously take on a persona or mask and know that it was doing so. Today the self has to take on so many new roles and continually shift from role to role so quickly that it runs the risk of withering away altogether.

As the dramaturgical self becomes even more plastic and thespian, and such behavior comes to be thought of as normal, the very idea of authenticity recedes in importance. To be “authentic” presupposes an immutable core self, an autonomous psyche. In the era of dramaturgical consciousness, however,

the pastiche personality is a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation.

The dramaturgical self, then, is open to two very different interpretations. Sociologist Louis Zurcher suggests that if we abandon the idea of the self as “an object” and think of it more as “a process,” then the self is open “to the widest possible experience” and becomes truly cosmopolitan.

But Zurcher also warns that the mutable self can just as easily lead to a more pronounced narcissism, as individuals lose a sense of an authentic self to which they are beholden and accountable and become mired in deceit after deceit—a Machiavellian existence—where role-playing becomes instrumental to advancing endless self-gratification.

Gergen, in the final analysis, appears guardedly optimistic about the future of human consciousness. He holds out hope that in an increasingly interconnected and collaborative world, made up of ever more embedded relationships that transcend traditional boundaries that separate “mine from thine,” that “we can move from a self-centered system of beliefs to consciousness of an inseparable relatedness with others”—I and thou. That’s possible, but only if we retain a sufficient sense of self as an “I” to allow the empathic impulse to grow.

While each of us is a composite of the relationships that makes us up, it is the unique constellation of relational experiences that separate one person from another. There is no in inherent contradiction in believing that the self is made up of the sum total of experiences that an indivdual is embedded in over a lifetime, and the idea that those same embedded relationships and experiences make one a unique being, different from all others. It is only by keeping that distinction in mind that empathic consciousness can continue to grow and become the psychic and social glue for a global consciousness.

If the sense of self as a unique ensemble of relationships is lost, and one becomes only a “we,” empathy is lost and the historical progression toward global consciousness dies. That’s because empathic awareness is born out of the sense that others, like ourselves, are unique, mortal beings. When we empathize with another, it’s because we recognize her fragile finite nature, her vulnerability, and her one and only life. We experience her existential aloneness and her personal plight and her struggle to be and succeed as if it were our own. Our empathic embrace is our way of rooting for her and celebrating her life.

If we fall prey to an undifferentiated global “we,” we may find ourselves back to square one, when we lived in an undifferentiated mythological fog, with little sense of self and only a rudimentary sense of empathic distress built into our biology. Maintaining a dialectic balance between an ever more differentiated sense of self, embedded in an ever more integrated relational web that encompasses the world, is the critical test that might well determine the future prospects for our survival as a species.

- Jermey Rifkin

the self as performance

Dramaturgical consciousness becomes almost a necessity in a complex, interconnected, high-speed civilization. If life is the acting out of countless personal and collective social dramas, then the more complex the economic and social networks in which one is embedded, the more diverse roles each person is called on to play.

In the dramaturgical way of looking at human behavior, the self is no longer a private possession of an individual but, rather, a sense given to a person by the very people he wishes to share it with. The self then, is not an entity, but rather a kind of fictional, constructed, consensually validated quality that results from the interaction and communication between people. If so, then one’s very being in the world depends on acting out scripts onstage with other players, each of whom validates a part of one’s selfhood. This view is quite different from Hegel’s notion that each person’s unique self is both imprinted in and manifested by the possessions he or she acquires over a lifetime.

The dramaturgical perspective places communications at the heart of human activity, redefines the self in relational terms, makes experience itself a theatrical affair, and transforms property into symbols that help people act out their many dramatic roles as they flit in and out of networks of lived experiences, each representing a different aspect of their life story. The dramaturgical perspective is, in the final analysis a vivid description of the state of mind that accompanies a generation that is continually shifting identities, roles, scripts, and stage settings, as it toggles between social and commercial networks, both in virtual and real space.

Dramaturgical consciousness raises the troublesome question of authenticity. Whenever the question of performance comes up, it inevitably leads to the related question of pretending versus believing.

In the age of mythical consciousness, being heroic was the measure of a man, while in the age of theological consciousness, one was expected to be pious, and in the age of ideological consciousness, men of goodwill were expected to be sincere, rational, and of good character. In the age of psychological consciousness, being personable and open-minded became an obsession. For the generation growing up in a dramaturgical consciousness, however, being authentic becomes the test of a man or woman.

If human beings are, by their very nature, dramaturgical, then how do we establish the idea of authenticity? If everyone is always consciously, or even unconsciously, playing out multiple roles with different scripts and on different stages, how do we know who the authentic person is behind all of the masks?

The question of authenticity is brought up whenever the dramaturgical theory of conscious behavior is used to describe how people act in social situations. Quite simply, there is the disquieting feeling that human behavior, if it is truly dramaturgical, is not very honest. After all, in one sense, theater without deceit is an impossibility. In another sense, however, taking on different masks—personas—in different situations might be an authentic expression of one aspect of a person’s identity. That is, if each of us is in fact a composite of multiple personalities, then the question is if we were true to the specific role we played at the moment.

Again, the theater offers a way to distinguish between pure deceit, on the one hand, and active imagination on the other hand. While deceit is universally disparaged, active imagination is lauded as essential to creating a sense of self and world and forming mature bonds of empathy. Theater theorists like Constantine Stanislavski talk about surface acting versus deep acting. The first relies on the art of deceit, the second on the art of imagination. Surface acting is form over substance, while deep acting emanates from deep inside the performer’s subconscious.

With surface acting, the performer uses grand gestures, modulated tones, and exaggerated movements to “portray” a character, but puts nothing of his own life into the part…it’s all technique. Stanislavski says of surface acting,

[its] form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you…Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself.

In other words, with surface acting, the actor is acting as if he had feeling but not really feeling as he is acting. True deep acting, by contrast, which Stanislavski terms method acting, comes about when the actor reaches into his own subconscious and semiconscious memory and searches for an analogous past emotional experience that he might draw upon that would allow him to feel as if he were experiencing the emotional state of the character he is playing.

Stanislavski cautioned actors not to simply try to evoke a feeling de novo, saying that is not the way emotions are generated in real life. He writes,

On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake…Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer for its own sake.

Stanislavski points out that all feelings have a history—they are the result of past embodied experiences. Therefore, deep acting requires the actor to induce his own subconscious and remember how he felt and the emotions he conjured up in similar situations.

The aim of the actor’s preparation is to cross the threshold of the subconscious…Beforehand we have “true-seeming feeling,” afterwards “sincerity of emotion”.

Remembering experiences emotionally is important in calling them forth in the future. Stanisiavski asks his actors to train themselves to think of their feelings as an object as well as an experience, with the thought that they might be called up and used at a future time.

The memory of a past feeling, however, only becomes valuable to an actor if he can harness it with his imagination and act as if that feeling were happening again in the execution of his role. He must feel the role he is playing as if he were that person. With deep acting, an actor becomes transformed for a brief period of time and emotionally becomes what he is portraying. But when his performance ends, the part ends as well. In real life, we all engage in deep acting as well, but with a different modus operandi—affecting the reality of our relationships with others. In real life, deep acting has real-life real consequences.

In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild reports on her study of Delta Airlines flight attendant training courses, where personnel were instructed in the proper emotional engagement with passengers. While the flight attendant training was purely instructional and did not involve attendants in deep acting, the attendants themselves reported that they often did so, on their own, when on the job.

A flight attendant might psych herself up before putting on the “happy face” by conjuring up past experiences that made her feel happy and bring those feelings to the job. One flight attendant told Hochschild that conjuring up a happy feeling and taking on a happy demeanor invariably has a positive feedback effect.

If I pretend I’m feeling really up, sometimes I actually get into it. The passenger responds to me as though I were friendly, and then more of me responds back.

Another flight attendant said that when she’s dealing with a passenger who’s been drinking too much or getting obnoxious,

I try to remember that if he’s drinking too much, he’s probably scared of flying. I think to myself, “He’s like a little child.” Really, that’s what he is. And when I see him that way, I don’t get mad that he’s yelling at me. He’s like a child yelling at me then.

Hochschild raises the very legitimate concern that acting is increasingly being used as a training technique to prepare a service workforce on how to manage their feelings to optimize commercial relationships in an experiential economy. That’s true, but it is also true that deep acting provides a theory and technique to help train individuals to be more mindful of their own feelings, to keep a firm memory of them, and to improve their ability to conjure up those memories from their subconscious and to harness them to their imagination when the occasion arises, so that they might experience another’s plight as if it were their own. Deep acting, when used for the appropriate pro-social ends, is a powerful mental tool to stimulate empathic feelings. And empathy is the means by which we participate in deeper realms of reality, for reality is the shared understandings we create about the world by dint of the relationships into which we enter.

Deep acting, then, can prepare people to extend the empathic bond and, with it, deepen one’s sense of reality--a far cry from surface acting, which conjures up only facsimiles in form and deceit in execution.

Meryl Streep, arguably the world’s greatest living actress and a master of deep acting, once remarked that “the great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.”

- Jeremy Rifkin

multiperspectivism

Einstein put to rest the idea of a single, knowable, objective reality. Einstein rejected the notion of absolute time, arguing that tune itself was a perspectival effect determined by the relative motion between an observer and the object being observed.

It was the artists of the period, however, who had the biggest impact on changing the perspective on perspective. Recall that the invention of perspective in art was perhaps the single most important development of the Renaissance. The artists broke with medieval renderings of the world as a great chain of being ascending floating from the depths of earthly existence to the heavenly gates. The use of perspective took the human gaze away from the heavens toward the linear plane of an earthly world populated by subjects and objects. The gaze was no longer meant to conjure up the exultant expectation of ascending to the world above but, rather, an impartial ordering of the objective world below. Francis Bacon’s scientific method and, later on, the rationalism of Enlightenment philosophers flowed inexorably and, in no small part, from the reorientation of time and space rendered by Renaissance artists on their canvases.

Paul Cezanne was the first to break ranks with the long tradition of the single perspective in art. His Still Life with a Basket of Apples, depicts a table from different perspectives. The artist became obsessed with the multiperspective approach to the canvas. He wrote his son in 1906, conveying his sense of excitement:

Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are plentiful the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending more to the right or left.

Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon introduced the new idea of Cubism in art. In the painting, two figures are shown frontally, “but with noses in sharp profile. The seated figure has her back to the viewer but her head is seen from the front.”

Cubism was a highbrow artistic expression that appealed far more to the avant-garde elites in Paris, London, and New York. The masses, however, were introduced to changes in temporal and spatial orientation by way of a lowbrow artistic medium—the cinema. Movies played with temporal and spatial orientations in ways that more resembled what occur in the unconscious during dreams. The linearity of everyday experience gave way to scenes that cut effortlessly to the past and future and to other places and times, forcing the viewer to readjust the way he or she absorbed and integrated temporal and spatial information that was out of sequence. Splitting the screen allowed one to view two events unfolding simultaneously in different places. By freezing frames, the director could give the sense slowing time to a halt. Comedies often sped up the movement into a madcap romp or reversed movement: for example, showing a diver coming out of the water and up onto the diving board—to the howls of the audience.

The manipulation of temporal and spatial orientation took moviegoers out of their conscious reality of normal temporal and sequential order and into a fantasy world where all sorts of new realities are possible to imagine. It’s no accident that Hollywood came to be known as the “dream factory.” Like dreams, where temporal and spatial boundaries are nonexistent and one’s mind floats in and out of the past, future, and present, so too in the cinema. By the time Freud began articulating his theory about the importance of dreams and the workings of one’s unconscious, his ideas didn’t seem so far to a generation that had already spent countless hours viewing movies and reprogramming their brains to think in dreamlike ways.

James Joyce played with time and space and multiple perspectives in his literary works, with similar effect to what Cezanne, Picasso, and the Cubists were able to do on canvas. In Ulysses, Joyce’s protagonist, Bloom, jumps in and out of a dizzying array of places, times, and realities as his mind wanders through the universe over galaxies far away and the tiniest realm of the molecule the course of a very average day in Dublin. With Joyce we are introduced, for the first time, to stream of consciousness, the kind we all experience every waking and sleeping moment, as our own minds wander off into different time dimensions and distant spaces, of which we are not always in control. What Joyce is suggesting is that every individual is experiencing multiple perspectives and realities and occupying different places and times in his own mind throughout the day, just like Bloom. Our minds simply won’t let us settle on a single perspective or, for that matter, allow us to accommodate a seamless objective reality. Edmund Wilson caught the brilliance of Joyce’s accomplishment when he wrote:

Joyce is indeed really the great poet of a new phase of of human consciousness. Like Proust’s or Whitehead’s or Einstein’s world, Joyce’s world is always changing as it is perceived by different observers and by them at different times.

Although like the Romantics Joyce believed that consciousness is an embodied experience, and that the expression of love and compassion is a natural predisposition, his view of human vulnerability amid imperfection differs in an important respect. While Romantics like Whitman celebrate human vulnerability and pay homage to the importance of erotic sexuality as a way of getting in touch with one’s natural vitality, there is a tendency to romanticize human potential by creating an ideal transcendent self that no one can ever hope to live up to.

Joyce’s protagonists remind us far more of ourselves, it’s not that Leopold and Molly aren’t desirous of ascent. But, as Martha Nussbaum reminds us, life keeps interrupting in all of its unanticipated twists and turns. Life is messy, chaotic, and full of banality, some of it rising to comic levels of hysteria rather than cosmic levels of transcendence. We all soldier on—but in the midst of our desire for transcendence, we need to take time out for a stool or relieve our stress with five minutes of masturbation. In the real world, our lives are lived out like the puck of a yo-yo. We’re up--we’re down. We have moments of brilliant insight and moments of stupefying despair.

What Joyce and Nussbaum understand is that the ordinariness of our individual lives--with all of its imperfections and neediness--that we find our common humanity and the emotional wherewithal to empathize with others. By putting too much emphasis on transcendence, the Romantics risked leaving the subtle impression that the imperfections of human beings are intolerable, even disgusting Joyce put it best when he wrote, “Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery.”

When we emphatize with each other, we are acknowledging each other’s day-to-day struggle to be and celebrating each other’s desire to succeed and transcend ourselves. But more than that—we recognize in others’ struggles that they are human beings, like us, who are trying to ascend to new heights, even as they wrestle with imperfections, flaws, and demons that weigh them down. We don’t judge them for their weaknesses but, rather, extend our generosity. We know that it’s difficult overcoming all of the obstacles put in the way of our becoming what we’d like to be. Joyce’s characters are like the rest of us, real people, full of contradictions, allowing readers to empathize with them, without being maudlin.

It seems as if the entire period from 1882 to World War I was but a dress rehearsal for Freud’s entrance onto the world stage and the official raising of the curtain on the Age of Psychological Consciousness. Kern points out that in architecture, the stuffy Victorian sensibility, with its emphasis on walled-off, closed spaces tucked away from the outside world, gave way to the new architecture of openness and transparency. The new skyscrapers, the first to use steel girders, eliminated supporting walls. Glass was used to open up interiors and create the sense of boundless space between inside and outside. Whereas Victorian architecture accentuated the bourgeoisie’s sense of privacy, featuring buildings with so many nooks and crannies that one needed a detailed map not to get lost in the maze, the new architecture knocked down walls, opened up spaces to daylight, and even exposed internal structures, which traditionally were concealed with facades.

Frank Lloyd Wright best expressed the new sensibility, explaining that his architecture was designed with the goal of creating a seamless integration of the interior and exterior worlds he called “the inside” becoming “outside”.
In this snippet of time—less than a third of a century—human consciousness was irrevocably altered. The new technologies and modes of perception broke through barriers that had long separated people, partially leveling traditional social hierarchies while democratizing access to and control over time and space. The telephone, cinema, radio, the motor car, and other twentieth technologies gave the average man and woman the same access to speed, mobility, and different spatial realities as the well-to-do. Moreover, the new technologies also brought people into increasingly close proximity, exposed them to an increasing range of others, and fostered a range of relationships that could never have occurred before.

The leveling of social hierarchies, the introduction of multiperspectivism, the democratization of human experience, and the increasing exposure to diverse others laid the way for the great empathic surge that would flare up momentarily in the Roaring Twenties—with the flappers—and blow up into a full-bodied social phenomenon that would define a generation in the 1960’s.

- Jeremy Rifkin

plasticity of identity and cosmopolitanism

The shift from village life to urban life in the 1600’s in England, forced people to expand their sense of self and even to take on different personas in different circumstances and with different people. The homogeneity of village life, with its clear social distinctions and relatively simple status levels, did not require various “public faces.” You were simply who you were on all occasions. If you suddenly changed character, it would be immediately noticeable and the subject of concern for fear you were possessed.

City life not only called for plasticity in appearance but also encouraged it. Relative anonymity, amid the throng, allowed people to be different in different circumstances and with different people. With the appropriate change of attire, attitude, and demeanor, they could even escape their class backgrounds and hereditary stations in life, if just for a moment—something unheard of in previous times.

Urban dwellers in the sixteenth century, were preoccupied to an extreme degree with dissimulation, feigning, and pretence. Shakespeare’s characters were caught up in a farcical parodying of the new sentiment as they wrapped themselves up in various disguises and got caught up in plots involving mistaken identities.

While we normally hold the notion of sincerity in high regard, it is also true that the ability to adjust one’s persona to changing circumstances and diverse others can advance consciousness and extend empathy. While public masks can be used to deceive or hide from one’s true self, they can also allow one to try on other personas, walk in other shoes and be exposed to very different people than would be the case if still hemmed in by class and caste status.

The freedom to be someone else could allow one to experience another’s plight “as if” it were one’s own and deepen empathic extension. This is what cosmopolitan behavior is all about, at least in part being comfortable in different roles in different places under different circumstances. If entered into with the notion of broadening one’s exposure to and experiences with others, with the expectation of establishing new, meaningful relationships, the practice enriches one’s identity and becomes transcendent rather than deceitful.

- Jeremy Rifkin

confucianism

To the successful American, the sense of his own greatness is quite unrelated to the people surrounding him, and certainly he does not feel that it depends at all upon the community of his origin. The dream of the ambitious person is to have the world at his feet, not at his side.

- Francis Hsu

Egalitarianism

The United States is a country where the ordinary guy has a good life. This is what distinguishes America from so many other countries. Everywhere in the world, the rich person lives well. Indeed, a good case can be made that if you are rich, you live better in countries other than America. The reason is that you enjoy the pleasures of aristocracy. This is the pleasure of being treated as a superior person. Its gratification derives from subservience: in India, for example, the wealthy enjoy the satisfaction of seeing innumerable servants and toadies grovel before them and attend to their every need.

In the United States the social ethic is egalitarian, and this is unaffected by the inequalities of wealth in the country. Tocqueville noticed this egalitarianism a century and a half ago, but it is, if anything, more prevalent today. For all his riches, Bill Gates could not approach a homeless person and say, "Here's a $100 bill. I'll give it to you if you kiss my feet." Most likely the homeless guy would tell Gates to go to hell! The American view is that the rich guy may have more money, but he isn't in any fundamental sense better than you are. The American janitor or waiter sees himself as performing a service, but he doesn't see himself as inferior to those he serves. And neither do the customers see him that way: they are generally happy to show him respect and appreciation on a plane of equality. America is the only country in the world where we call the waiter "Sir," as if he were a knight.

- Dinesh D'Souza

Priceless

Even when advertisers tell us that something is priceless, they manage to put a price on it. In 1998 MasterCard had a campaign with the tagline, "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else there is MasterCard." One commercial shows a father and son at a baseball game. It places a dollar value on lots of things related to the game—tickets, snacks, an autographed baseball—but rates "real conversation with an 11-year old" as priceless. Other commercials in the campaign also link intangible emotions with activities that cost money. The ostensible message of the commercial is that you can't put a price on what is most valuable in life...but the underlying message is that sure you can. You can not only put a price on it, you can put it on a credit card.

- Jean Kilbourne

This is the issue with advertising in that it commodifies human relationships. One must buy something to express one's love. Simply having a conversation with a son doesn't suffice. You have to buy him a new Playstation or a new Lexus if you really want to show him you love him. 

On a related note, this is what capitalism does. It commodifies everything it touches. Traditions and religions are toss asundered. Market price becomes the main determinant of value. Ethics are disrupted as the market becomes the transcendental signifier. The market increasingly mediates relations between people and all things.


But you can't take this argument too far. Karl Marx:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 

The Marxist critique of capitalism is interesting to read in hindsight. We all know the wonders that communism did for the working class in countries such as the late Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Capitalism is net-net a good thing. It provided the wealth and foundation from which democracy could grow. Capitalism is a tool and one that needs to be used wisely. 

Christianity

According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being “like everyone else”—for “everyone else” is a category that embraces the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people, so this argument goes, should be to distinguish themselves from the crowd and “stand out” in whatever way their talents will allow.

But being like everyone else is not, if we follow Christian thought, any kind of calamity, for it was one of Jesus’ central claims that all human beings, including the slow-witted, the untalented and the obscure, were beloved creatures of God—and hence deserving of the honour owed to every example of his work. In the words of Saint Peter, each of us has the capacity to be a partaker “of the divine nature,” an idea that in and of itself audaciously challenges the assumption that some are born to mediocrity and others to glory. No one is outside the circle of God’s love, Christianity insists, attributing divine authority to the notion of mutual respect. What we have in common with others comprises what is most cherishable in ourselves.

Christianity bids us to look beyond our superficial differences in order to focus on what it considers to be a set of universal truths, on which a sense of community and kinship may be built. Whether we are cruel or impatient, dim or dull, we must recognise that we are all detained and bound together by shared vulnerabilities.

Beneath our flaws, there are always two driving forces: fear and the desire for love. To encourage fellow feeling, Jesus urged his followers to learn to look at other adults as they might at children. Few things can more quickly transform our sense of a person’s character than picturing him or her as a child; from this perspective we are better able to express the sympathy and generosity that we all but naturally display towards the young, whom we tend to describe as naughty rather than bad, cheeky rather than arrogant. This is the same sort of softening we may feel towards anyone whom we see sleeping: with eyes closed and features relaxed and defenseless, a sleeper invites a gentle regard that in itself is almost love—so much so, in fact, that it can be unsettling to gaze at length at a stranger asleep beside us on a train or plane. That unmasked face seems to prompt us towards an intimacy that calls into question the foundations of civilized indifference on which ordinary communal relations rest. But there is no such thing as a stranger a Christian would say; there is only the impression of strangeness born out of a failure to acknowledge that others share both our needs and our weaknesses. Nothing could be nobler, or more fully human, than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else.

The idea that other people might be at base neither incomprehensible nor distasteful carries weighty implications for our concern with status, given that the desire to achieve social distinction is to a great extent fuelled by a horror of being—or even being thought—”ordinary:’ The more humiliating, shallow, debased or ugly we take ordinariness to be, the stronger will be our desire to set ourselves apart. The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.

Since its beginnings, Christianity has attempted to enhance, both in practical and in theoretical terms, the value its adherents place on belonging to a community. One notable way it has achieved this is through the repetition of rituals, from the saying of the service to prayer to the singing of hymns—each an opportunity for a large number of unrelated celebrants to feel their suspicion of one another abate thanks to a transcendent intermediary.

Music in any form can be a great leveller. We might, for example, imagine joining an unfamiliar congregation within the walls of a cathedral to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor (“the greatest work of music of all ages and of all peoples,” in the view of Hans-Georg Nageli, writing in 1817). Much may separate us: age, income, clothes and background. We may never before have spoken to one another and may be wary of letting anyone catch our gaze. But as the Mass begins, so, too, does a process of social alchemy. The music conveys feelings that had hitherto seemed inchoate and private, and our eyes may fill with tears of relief and gratitude for the gift given us by the composer and musicians in making audible, and hence available to us and to others, the movements of our collective soul. Violins, voices, flutes, double basses, oboes, bassoons and trumpets combine to create sounds that evoke the most secret, most elusive aspects of our psyches. Moreover, the public nature of the performance helps us to realize that if others around us are responding as we are to the music, then they cannot be the indecipherable enigmas we imagined them to be. Their emotions run along the same tracks as ours, they are stirred by the very same things and so, whatever the differences in our appearance and manner, we possess a common core, out of which a connection can be forged and extended far beyond this one occasion. A group of strangers who initially seemed so foreign may thus in time, through the power of choral music, acquire some of the genuine intimacy of friends, slipping out from behind their stony facades to share, if only briefly, in a beguiling vision of humankind.

But of course, our sense of who other people are is seldom so flattering outside the cathedral. The public arena is usually more decrepit and threatening, sending us scurrying in search of physical and psychological cover.

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Then there are communities—far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage—whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland’s largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich’s superlative tram network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transportation from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christianity and applied to communal ethics is that, insofar as we can recover a sense of the preciousness of every human being and, even more important, legislate for spaces and manners that embody such a reverence in their makeup, then the notion of the ordinary will shed its darker associations, and, correspondingly the desires to triumph and to be insulated will weaken, to the psychological benefit of all.

In an ideal Christian community, the dread of “losers” having to live alongside the “winners” will be tempered and contained by basic equality of dignity and resources. And the dichotomy between succeeding/flourishing and failing/withering will lose some of its excruciating sharpness.

- Alain de Botton