Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (3 page)

Lawyers aren’t the only highly-paid workers facing overwhelming hours. In an interview, Robert Devlin, former president, chairman and CEO of insurance giant American General Corporation, said: “I’m often working eighteen-hour days. I rarely get more than four or five hours a night of sleep. And the way I view it, and I tell the guys, my senior staff, you know, these are seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day jobs. I mean, now, obviously we have our time off and I encourage people to take it. But the fact of the matter is that if a situation pops up and we have to burn up a Saturday or a Sunday and go into, you know, the wee hours of the morning we do so — I mean, I’ve been in sessions — particularly when you get into mergers and acquisitions where we’ve walked out of a place at four-thirty in the morning. You kind of have to be prepared to do whatever it takes. If not, you should find something else to do with your time.”
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Still, working all the time makes it hard for people to keep up with things like childcare, eldercare, house maintenance, cooking, and relationships with friends, family, and significant others. When employees put family ahead of work, they hear about it at work, and when they put work ahead of family, they hear about it at home. Some people are no longer sure they even have time to start a family or add to it.

The economic story, though, says that time crunch, along with your non-work obligations, are your problem as an individual — not your company’s problem, or society’s problem. It’s something you need to solve yourself, however you can. That’s so even though, researchers say, the majority of families today are dual-career households and jobs are still being designed as though employees have uninterrupted decades to devote to a career and someone at home full time to look after the domestic side of life.
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Chances are, you don’t have that kind of time or that kind of life, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

That’s how the story goes.

In our extremely individualistic society we have come to see isolation and loneliness as akin to ‘the human condition,’ instead of as by-products of a certain kind of social arrangement.

—ROBERT SOLOMON

The leaves at the top, because they are water-stressed, are not doing as much photosynthesis per unit mass…In essence, the plant is investing a certain amount into those tissues but they’re not providing as much return on that investment.

—PHYSIOLOGICAL ECOLOGIST,
BBC NEWS

WHETHER YOU FEEL CONNECTED to the world or adrift in it, you can’t help but be tangled up with other people and the environment. You’re born into a family and maybe have one of your own — a significant other, children, parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews — people you’re connected to whether you like it or not. Your friends, as they say, are the family you choose for yourself. You’ve got neighbors too, whether you wave at them or pretend you don’t see them, people who live around you, or who you run into regularly at the post office, the grocery store, the gym, online. Then there are your colleagues, the people you work with directly and the people you know indirectly through work. You’re somehow tied to strangers too by virtue of your shared humanity, those unknown people on the bus or on the other side of the world. Past all of those relationships, you’re then related to your physical environment, to wind and water, sun and rain, in urban or rural settings, because wherever you are, you exist in physical space, shaping it and being shaped by it.

Let’s start with family. Your kin relationships were once the glue that held society together. Friendships were considered luxuries, but kin relationships were about survival in an uncertain world. Kin were the people who were obligated to help you and who you were obligated to help when catastrophe struck. Being a member of a family meant you had lifetime membership among that group of people, and legal and cultural rights and responsibilities that came with that membership.
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You were expected to be loyal to your family and they were expected to be loyal to you. Cooperation and trust among family members mattered. In the family, you were judged based on what you needed as a family member and in terms of your intrinsic value — your right to sit at the family table simply because you were a member of the family. You belonged.
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Though families and markets have been intertwined throughout history (unless families managed to be completely self-sufficient, which was rare), both were considered separate spheres of activity — so much so that in the 1950s, from a business perspective, family relationships were considered a hindrance to a market mentality and to corporate development.
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In the Western world, markets were based for the most part on the traditional breadwinner model of the family: a man was paid for working outside the home and a woman wasn’t paid for working inside the home. At one time, most families were breadwinner families; in 1900, 94 percent of married American women stayed out of the paid workforce.
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In the larger community, your relationships with people were based on values like respect, love, and a willingness to put others first — all of which kept your more self-oriented tendencies in check. Yes, you developed economic relationships through buying and selling with others, but those economic relationships were tempered by the fact that everyone involved in the transaction was considered part of civil society, and civil society was characterized by a basic level of trust and solidarity. Your community, as a group, helped people in need because those struggling were deemed to have inherent dignity and self-worth no matter what their economic situation was like. The goal of the community was to help the destitute become healthy and self-sufficient and to build and strengthen our relationships with each other so we could all function successfully in society together.
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That’s what gave families and communities a higher moral stature than markets.
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Nature enjoyed a high moral stature too. Some people valued their relationship with the physical world in terms of their own humanity, believing nature was worth caring for because it contributes to human health, is aesthetically beautiful, or plays a role in shaping their identity, since where people come from can shape who they are. Others valued nature for its own sake, believing they should care for it because other sentient species had a right to live too, or because they respected all life whether it was sentient or not, or for God’s sake, because nature represented God’s order, God’s creation.
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Then the story changed.

The economic story says that among your own kind, competition matters more than cooperation, and that you’re motivated to look after your own interests, constantly calculating what’s in it for you, just like everyone else. Being a member of a group no longer means that you are part of something bigger than yourself. You participate in different groups not for the sake of the group, but to further your own interests. In turn, the group you’re part of objectively judges you based on your performance and your worth to them, not on your needs or your intrinsic value as a human being.

Now you’re only as good as your last contribution to the team. Your performance or lack of it is what makes you relevant or irrelevant to others. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the phenomenon in terms of reality television: “More than anything else, the…most popular [reality] television shows are public rehearsals of the
disposability
of humans. They carry an indulgence and a warning rolled into one story. No one is indispensable, no one has the right to his or her share in the fruits of the joint effort just because she or he has added at some point to their growth, let alone because of being, simply, a member of the team. Life is a hard game for hard people. Each game starts from scratch, past merits do not count, you are worth only as much as the results of your most recent duel. Each player at the moment is for herself or himself, and to progress, not to mention to reach the top, one must first cooperate in excluding the many who block the way, only to outwit in the end those with whom one cooperated.”
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Remember, the economic story says you live in a world of markets. As a buyer or seller in those markets, your worth among others is based on your potential or actual ability to contribute to the economy by spending or making money. For the world of markets to operate effectively, you also have to be able to make choices, process information on which to base those choices, and be able to make a new choice if you want to; those hindered by something like a learning disability are therefore “deemed to be of only marginal economic value.”
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The more you drive the economy by making money or spending it, the more desirable you are to others. Your relational ties are primarily economic ties, and so your relationships are transactional. You learn to shun long-term commitments, no longer obligated to anyone past the transaction at hand.

By 2000, 61 percent of married American women worked outside the home for pay, turning the breadwinner model of the family on its head and making dual-earner couples the rule, not the exception.
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Today, whether you’re single or part of a couple, chances are there is no one at home to look after your domestic life, which means you’re almost certainly struggling to keep up with everything that’s involved in keeping a career and a home going as you work longer and longer hours.

In the meantime, markets keep developing for what used to happen at home for free. You realize you can hire people to cook your meals, care for your children, look after your aging relatives, clean your house, do your tax return, walk the dog, mow the lawn, and prune the shrubs. Outsourcing domestic life helps you cope with the time pressures you’re under. Researcher Arlie Russell Hochschild says, “As time becomes something to ‘save’ at home as much as or even more than at work, domestic life becomes quite literally a second shift; a cult of efficiency, once centered in the workplace, is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home. Efficiency has become both a means to an end — more home time — and a way of life, an end in itself.”
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As work and home demand more and more of your time and energy, you may find your significant relationships becoming secondary. It’s not that you want to drift away from your spouse, family and close friends, but without spending time and energy on those relationships, they’re in danger of fading.
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In the economic story, rewards in society are based on your performance in your paid job, after all — not on what’s going on in the rest of your life.

Even family obligations can weigh on you. Among all of the reasons people give for having fewer children, including religion, ideology, and lifestyle preference, one of them continues to be “time famine.”
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Many think twice about having children or having more of them. Researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett notes that the typical childless executive woman at midlife has been subject to a “creeping nonchoice” despite the fact that almost 90 percent of high-achieving women want a family. Hewlett explains, “Think of what a 55-hour week means in terms of work-life balance. If you assume an hour lunch and a 45-minute round-trip commute (the national average), the workday stretches to almost 13 hours. Even without ‘extras’ (out of town trips, client dinners, work functions), this kind of schedule makes it extremely difficult for any professional to maintain a relationship.”
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In the economic story, children in particular come to represent a real economic risk and cost. Choosing to have a family begins to look like choosing economic vulnerability.
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“It’s not just that people sacrifice their live relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers,” says philosopher Charles Taylor. “Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel
called
to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it.”
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“In a word,” says economist Stephen Marglin, “markets are the cutting edge of the loss of human connection.”
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Most economists, he adds, see that loss of human connection as a virtue; markets are more efficient than communities, which valued friendliness, community spirit, and a willingness to work on behalf of the community without expecting to be paid. As markets develop for what used to happen in families for free, the caring that happened at home is slowly transferred to larger, more impersonal institutions. The cost of care goes up, not least because it had nowhere to go but up since women working at home weren’t being paid for what they did. That rising cost of care is good news if you’re someone who wasn’t being paid for the care you were giving, but not so good if you’re someone who needs care and who can’t afford to pay for it. But even if you can afford to pay for it, money doesn’t guarantee that the care you get is going to be high quality.
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The economic story says that getting involved in your community is a constraint and an obligation. Your parents or grandparents might have stayed in one neighborhood — even one house — for thirty, forty, or fifty years, and known everyone within shouting distance. Psychologist Mary Pipher wrote: “There is pleasure in just acknowledging each other, in nodding on the street and chatting in the cafés and grocery stores. To move away from a true home is to move away from life. I don’t think we begin to acknowledge and understand how much we have lost.”
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But in the economic story, staying put is not ideal. Being mobile is preferred because mobility enables economic development. The more mobile you are, the story says, the more access you’ll have to jobs, education, services, and social activities.
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Even marriage doesn’t have to keep you in the same city as your spouse anymore. Couples in commuter marriages live apart during the week to pursue their individual careers in different cities and maintain their relationship over the phone or through weekend flights “home.” You need to stay loose, be ready to pick up and go, though that makes it harder for you to put down roots and develop close, long-term relationships.
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Those close, long-term relationships, though, aren’t what they once were either. In the economic story, friends, neighbors, people in your community, and even strangers, whether in person or online, are all potential members of the audience you’re building for whatever it is you do as you strive to develop your personal brand. As business author Tom Peters put it, “When you’re promoting brand You, everything you do — and everything you choose not to do — communicates the value and character of the brand. Everything from the way you handle phone conversations to the email messages you send to the way you conduct business in a meeting is part of the larger message you’re sending about your brand.”
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Your relationships are transactional — a means to an end, not an end in themselves. What matters is building a bigger audience. If you can connect with the right people, the people with the biggest audiences themselves, you never know what someone might be able to do for you or how you might be able to monetize those connections in the future. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called that type of association
Gesellschaft
, a connection created to promote the interests of its members, where people who are essentially separate come together for a period of togetherness because it is to their benefit to do so. Tönnies then contrasted that association with
Gemeinschaft,
on the other hand, which occurs when people are essentially united even though they may be occasionally separate, where the ties between them, like family ties, exist whether they are advantageous or not.
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In terms of your community, the economic story says that you can care for the needy and create social change by taking an entrepreneurial or business-based approach to social issues. That kind of activity, called social entrepreneurship, is about trying to make markets work for people. Social entrepreneurs add value (social value in this case) by offering new products and services that are supposed to ultimately meet social needs, or by developing social programs that produce some kind of significant social return.
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Not-for-profit organizations are told to develop revenue streams so they can make money and rely less on donations and public funding, even though critics warn that becoming business-oriented can be dangerous, that operating a not-for-profit organization as a business can undermine the organization’s social mission.
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Even so, a report from the Kellogg Foundation notes that nonprofits “are using entrepreneurial models and language to design their services, organizations, and partnerships…There are hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of examples throughout the United States of organizations that are experimenting with enterprise or market-based approaches for solving problems. Many of these are based within traditional organizations such as Goodwill, Salvation Army, Boy and Girl Scouts, community food banks, etc.”
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