Self-Makers and Making
As Christmas nears, one is prompted to engage in acts of charity and almsgiving which may have fallen by the wayside during the busy and distracting seasons of spring and fall, when there is much sowing and harvesting to be done, projects to be started and finished. The cold of the winter is the time where there is nothing to do except stay warm, read, study, and most importantly: pay attention to one another. It is fitting that the season where being poor is most difficult is also, traditionally, the season where there is the least to do; might as well spend it helping one’s neighbor. Charity and almsgiving to the poor prompts thoughts about the circumstances that create poverty. Each of these personal stories usually involves the same key element: a stroke of bad luck, some disaster or accident which takes someone from precariousness to a more oppressive form of poverty. These stories come into direct conflict with the powerful and uniquely American myth of the self-made man. Believers in this religion claim that the poor end up poor due primarily to their own irresponsibility and moral failure (which is also, in their view, market failure). “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” the disciples of self-making say. Never mind the fact, as the president of Donnelly College Monsignor Stuart Swetland pointed out to me, that this is physically impossible.
The self-made man has long been in crisis as Garry Wills reports in his masterful political book about Richard Nixon’s 1968 run for president, Nixon Agonistes. Wills’ thesis is elegant. The reigning ideology in the United States is a belief in liberalism, which Wills defines as a faith in markets. He sees these markets as the moral market, the economic market, the intellectual market, and finally the political market. According to the market ideology, one is purified by the market. By competing in the market one is made moral, made good. Only those who compete, who enter the arena, deserve honor and adulation. Those who succeed in the various market deserve success and those who fail in various markets deserve failure. Wills saw this market faith as coming to a head in the 1960’s. The last gasp of that market faith was Republican candidate for President, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Nixon is the consummate liberal, the self-made man. This self-making, as Wills reports has made Nixon a striver, a divided man, a resentful man, a man to be used. Wills hypothesized that Nixon, being the last self-made man, is left to defend the liberal establishment even as he resents it (the chapters on his college years in Whittier, CA and his relationship with Eisenhower are instructive). Wills sees the market faith crumbling in the social upheaval of the 1960’s. He sees “the kids” as representing a non-viable alternative to the market ideology. Their solution is to internalize the market. The kids sought authenticity through internal experimentation. “Just do what works for you.” Wills points out that this is just another form of market, except instead of failing to succeed in the economy, or to have the right idea, or win an election, one fails one’s very self.
Wills predicted that the turmoil of the late-sixties would finally break the country’s faith in market ideology. What Wills failed to predict was that the country would then double-down on its market faith one more time in the eighties and nineties. Instead of abandoning the self-made man, the culture would elevate him even higher. Wills thought that market ideology would create enough discontent to lead to its overthrow. Wills again failed to predict that discontent would lead to anomie and, enabled first by TV then by the internet and social media, a turning inward. This is the David Foster Wallace thesis. Those in the middle class fails to find meaning in their actual lives so they turn to pure entertainment: television, social media, internet pornography, sports betting. Yet, the self-making streak does not fall away in favor of entertainment. Instead, self-making becomes a form of entertainment characterized by influencers, health trends, gurus, weight lifting, and podcast hosts. Wallace does a good job pointing out that the turn to entertainment will not satisfy us, and may in fact lead to our own death, spiritual or otherwise.1 In the 21st century self-making turns into self-obsession.
A society or person which grasps more and more for self-control with the intent of self-making, actually gives up its freedom, enthralled to demagogues and gurus. One’s evident vulnerability is a tricky obstacle to the self-made man. The vulnerability of others is a sickening reminder to the self-made man. As such, it is best for the self-made man to either ignore or victimize the vulnerable. Best to clear the homeless from the streets, expel the stranger from the land, tell the sick it is their fault, and forget the elderly. The self-made man ought to avoid such shifty characters, lest he catch their failure. What the self-made man can never admit is that he could end up like them. In the myth of the self-made man, it is impossible to fall so long as one is striving. This is what must be done when one internalizes the idea of the market.
Wills obliterates the metaphor of the race:
“For where, when one gets down to it, is the starting line? Does a man begin the race at birth? When he enters the work force? When he attempts to start a business of his own? Or is the starting line at each of these points? And if so, then why not at all of the intermediate points at all? And how does one correlate this man’s starting line (or lines) with the staggered, endlessly multiplied starting lines of every other individual? How do we manage the endless stopping and starting it so often? One second after the gun has sounded, new athletes pop up all over the field, the field itself changes shape, and we must call everyone in, to line them up once more. We never even get to sunrise where, in this science-fiction world of continual starting and racing, the finish line might be. Or, rather, the staggered infinite finish lines for each summer.”
As with all metaphors of the market, Wills points out that the race makes no sense, much like pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Or, consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s instruction to be “born anew” each and every day. Ought one forget everything that has been learned and taught before every morning? Does this include manners and speech? Just ideologies? What about religious belief and tradition? According to the born again metaphor the self-made man must demolish his self every single. One must restart the internal race to find meaning every single day. Every day, the finish line changes positions. Even if one reaches the finish line one day and finds meaning, it will move the next and all progress will be lost. Once the market enters the psyche, it seeks to eliminate continuity. Entertainment then becomes an easy way to satisfy, or at least dull, the needs of the psychic market of the self-maker.
Having failed in an economic market which provides little opportunities for success or satisfaction, the self-maker turn within. They may turn to a weight lifting regimen or a strange new diet or online political engagement. Having failed to be the parasocial gurus they follow2 the self-maker will move to entertainment. Work becomes a means of acquiring more and more entertainment. The inward turn has been completed. The market has achieved the atomized self. The self-maker is doomed from the start because a self cannot be made. The market of the self is not real and thus cannot be satisfied. There is only one way to know one’s self, which is to get out of one’s self, to give it away. As Walker Percy points out in his strange self-help book, Lost in the Cosmos, the self is a particularly elusive phantom. Percy asserts, that the self is ultimately unknowable except through an encounter with an Other. It is only by engaging with someone else, with parents, siblings, friends, enemies, colleagues, teachers, students, spouses, kids etc. that one can begin to know one’s self.
The Christian tradition celebrates the Incarnation of the one who is totally Other into this world at Christmas. It is fitting then that this ought to be a season of giving. It is a reminder that Jesus makes himself known through the Other, especially the poor. By encountering them we encounter Him who is totally Other. By encountering the poor we also encounter our self. Sometimes they reveal to us our own ugliness, our lack of sympathy and love, our indifference and discomfort. They also reveal our capacity for love, sacrifice, and compassion. Three virtues in short order these days. If you feel so inclined I have three organizations that we are donating to this season which do phenomenal work. The first is Donnelly College in Kansas City, KS which has been on my mind a lot recently. They educate mostly first generation college students and do a lot of work with migrant kids who want a college education. The second is the Manhattan Emergency Shelter where my younger brother works and they do heroic work in a smaller community. Finally, the Catholic Charities Dorothy Day Center does just about everything on behalf of the homeless in Saint Paul, MN and does a good job of filling in the gaps during extremely difficult transition points for the homeless. Go and learn about some people doing good and have a blessed Advent.
Donate to Manhattan Emergency Shelter
Donate to the Dorothy Day Center
I recently watched the film At the End of the Tour about David Foster Wallace so he is on my mind despite not having had the gall to read Infinite Jest or his other work. Though, his This is Water speech is completely lovely.
Something very Girardian is afoot!
I think you'd like Byung-Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" and/or "Saving Beauty" both of which are working along these lines. I may have mentioned them before forgive me if so.