The European Dream (20 page)

The American educational system was made over by the efficiency movement. The nation’s school administrators, principals, and teachers, not to mention students, were criticized for being inefficient and wasteful.
The Saturday Evening Post
charged that “there is inefficiency in the business management of many schools, such as would not be tolerated in the world of offices and shops.”
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In 1912, at the annual meeting of the nation’s school superintendents, the delegates were forewarned that “the call for efficiency is felt everywhere throughout the length and breadth of the land, and the demand is becoming more insistent every day.” They were told, in no uncertain terms, that “the schools as well as other business institutions must submit to the test of efficiency.”
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Behavior, post-Taylor, became focused almost exclusively on being efficient every waking moment of the day. Efficiency became the ultimate tool for exploiting both the Earth’s resources and human resources in order to advance material wealth and economic progress. Everything in the world became reduced to factors of production to speed output. Successive generations of Americans would come to subject virtually all aspects of human activity to rigorous efficiency standards, reconditioning themselves to behave exactly like machines. The machine was no longer viewed simply as metaphor as it was for Descartes, Newton, Smith, and many of the early modern philosophers. Efficiency experts and, later, human resource managers and management consultants transformed everything in their path to machine criteria. By doing so, Americans went far beyond the mechanistic and instrumental values of the European Enlightenment to become the most thoroughly “modern” people on the face of the Earth.

The efficiency juggernaut so captured the imagination of the American public that some social critics felt compelled to deliver a few well-placed barbs. H. L. Mencken mused that the whole country was suddenly becoming engineers. The mattress manufacturers were becoming “sleep engineers,” beauticians had reinvented themselves as “appearance engineers,” and garbage men were now referred to as “sanitation engineers.”
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Not surprisingly, the engineer became the new savior who would lead Americans to the promised land. Author Cecelia Tichi writes, “The engineer renewed the spiritual mission embedded for over two and a half centuries in the national experience. He promised, so it seemed, to lead industrial America directly into the millennium.”
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In 1922, a national survey of six thousand high school seniors reported that nearly one out of every three boys chose engineering as the profession they would most like to enter.
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Taylor, and others that followed, brought the efficiency movement over to Europe, where it played moderately well among businesspeople. But it enjoyed a less enthusiastic reception in other quarters of society. Europeans were willing to use the principles of scientific management in the factory and front office to increase productivity, although even there it was greeted with suspicion, especially in family-run business concerns, which still dominated Europe. There, the old-fashioned management practices, which combined benign paternalism, deference to craft tradition, and class antagonism, acted as an anchor to the unbridled enthusiasm that accompanied Taylorism in America. Europeans were even less willing to drag efficiency into the personal, social, and cultural spheres. This again gets to a central difference in the way Europeans approached the manipulation of space and time in the modern era, versus Americans.

If Europeans were more attracted to the town clock, perhaps it’s because they viewed it as a means of synchronizing relationships between people. It was a way to orchestrate the collective behavior of the community. If Americans were more drawn to the stopwatch, it’s because being constantly productive is afforded such high esteem. That isn’t to say that efficiency hasn’t been important in Europe. It has been and still is. Yet, while efficiency tends to define American behavior, in Europe, it is considered an important adjunct but not a prime characteristic of human motivation. Europeans have a bit of an aversion to employing efficiency in their personal lives because, at its core, efficiency is an instrumental value. All activities, machine and human alike, become factors to maximize output. Human beings cease to be considered an end, and instead become a means to facilitate production.

Europeans are likely to ask, Would one ever treat someone one really cared for efficiently? Would we say to a loved one, I’m going to show my love by maximizing my output, in the minimum time with the minimum expenditure of labor, energy, and capital? While Americans might say they find such a thought abhorrent, in practice, the concept of “quality time”—the idea of allocating a small, pre-planned segment of time during the day to have a meaningful encounter with one’s child—has seeped into the public psyche and become the operational guideline for overly busy parents attending to their children. Among European parents, there is no equivalent to quality time.

Europeans tend to be less expedient and driven in their personal relationships than Americans. They ask, Can one be empathetic or caring in an efficient way? Can one find joy or experience revelation or happiness in an efficient manner?

Americans are more likely to use space and time in a more purposeful manner. We are less laid-back, on the whole, than our European friends. Words like “meander,” “muse,” and “ponder” are highly regarded in Europe, much less so in America. Americans are happiest being constantly productive. For us, idleness still conjures up a lax morality. Europeans, on the other hand, covet idleness. They take the time to smell the roses. To really enjoy life, my European friends say to me, one must be willing to surrender to the moment and wait to see what might come one’s way. Americans are less willing to surrender their fortunes and happiness to fate. Most Americans believe that happiness isn’t something that comes to us, but something we must continually work toward. Europeans I know simply don’t think and feel the same way.

It all gets back to a basic difference in the American and European dreams. We strive for happiness by doing. Europeans strive for happiness by being. For us, happiness is bound up in personal accomplishments, not the least being our individual material success. For Europeans, happiness is bound up in the strength of their relationships and the bonds of their community. Close relationships and the deep feeling of solidarity, my European friends remind me, take time to nourish. They can’t be subject to the dictates of the clock or the requisites of efficiency.

Americans often lament that we are unable to enjoy a quality of life like our European peers. We never will, as long as efficiency remains our most important tool for organizing spatial and temporal relationships. If the promised land is, in fact, a good quality of life, one can’t get there if a stopwatch is the only guide.

M
ANY AMERICANS BELIEVE that the archetype of the strong, autonomous, self-reliant individual is an American creation. We pride ourselves on not being beholden to others and on being willing to take considerable personal risks to get what we want in the world. It’s all bound up with our sense of “rugged individualism.” For the most part, our self-perception is warranted. In an eye-opening study on entrepreneurial values, conducted in 2003, the European Commission found that while two out of every three Americans preferred to be self-employed, half of all EU citizens preferred to work as an employee for someone else. Even more interesting is how Americans handle personal risk, versus Europeans. While two out of three Americans say they would start a business even if there was a risk it may fail, nearly one in two Europeans say they would not take the risk, if the business might fail.
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When Americans, and for that matter, the rest of the world, think of what it means to be an American, the go-it-alone, risk-taking spirit is likely to be the first thing that comes to mind.

Despite the fact that “the individual” is more honored in American society than in any other part of the world, it didn’t take root here first. The modern individual is a European transplant whose beginnings date back to the waning years of the medieval age. Spatial and temporal changes, at the time, were effecting deep changes in the day-to-day behavior of European people. A new European man and woman were being born—one less religious and more scientific in outlook. By the nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois class had all but shed the medieval frame of mind and was thinking and acting in a thoroughly modern way. The radical new idea of the rational “individual” took shape slowly over a period of several hundred years and paralleled the deep changes in the worlds of philosophy, science, commerce, and politics.

The idea of the self was so revolutionary that, for a long time, there were insufficient metaphors to even explain its meaning. In previous times, people had some sense of their own individuality. Still, lives had been lived, for the most part, publicly and communally. In the medieval era, it was unusual to see a person strolling along outside city walls or on a country lane. Historian Georges Duby says that “in the medieval era, solitary wandering was a symptom of insanity. No one would run such a risk who was not deviant or mad.”
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Life had always been lived in close quarters; understandably so, since beyond the walls, fields, and pastures lay thick and impenetrable forests, wild animals in search of prey, and outlaws. Clustering was a survival strategy whose worth had proven itself time and again. By the nineteenth century, the forests had all been cleared, the wild tamed, and the bandits held at bay. People could now gaze out to the farthest point on the horizon, and what they saw was a world of new possibilities waiting to be exploited. More important, each person approached what Shakespeare called, in
The Tempest,
“this brave new world” alone, his only support being the property he had in his own labor and his worldly belongings.

Contrast the life of a medieval man and woman with their modern heirs. In less than fifteen generations, earth-shattering changes had taken place. Spiritual values had been largely replaced by material values. Theology gave way to ideology, and faith was dethroned and replaced by reason. Salvation became less important than progress. Tasks and daily rounds were replaced by jobs, and generativity became less important than productivity. Place was downgraded to location. Cyclical time, kept track of by the changing seasons, was marginalized, and linear time measured in hours, minutes, and seconds marked off lived experience. Personal relationships were no longer bound by fealty, but rather by contracts. Good works metamorphosed into the work ethic. The sacred lost ground to the utilitarian. Mythology was reduced to entertainment, while historical consciousness gained sway. Market price replaced just price. Deliverance became less important than destiny. Wisdom was narrowed to knowledge. And love of Christ was challenged by love of self. Caste was eclipsed by class, revelation by discovery, and prophesy by the scientific method. And everywhere, people became less servile and more industrious. Europeans remade themselves. In the new Europe, and even more so in the young America, possessing, not belonging, dictated the terms of human intercourse. These were heady changes.

The wrenching away of the person from the collective and the creation of the new self-consciousness came about in some very ordinary, almost banal ways. While Descartes, Newton, and Locke were busy philosophizing about the metaphysics of the new rational world being readied, a much more down-to-earth change in the habits and behavior of everyday people was taking place—one that would prepare successive generations of Europeans to think and act objectively, self-consciously, and autonomously.

Recall the emphasis Enlightenment philosophers put on detaching “man” from nature and transforming reality into a field of objects to be harnessed, exploited, and made into property. Nature, in the Enlightenment scheme, was wild and dangerous, a primal and often evil force that needed to be tamed, domesticated, made productive, and put to the service of man. In many ways, the taming of nature began with the taming of “man” himself. Separating human beings from nature required that they first be separated from their own animal instincts. People, too, had to be made over to make them more rational, calculating, and detached. Creating the self-aware autonomous individual proved to be a challenging task.

Today, we think of people as being progressive or conservative. Just a few generations ago, we would have characterized people as modern or old-fashioned. In the late medieval and early modern era, a different kind of categorization was used to differentiate the generations. People were either brutish or civilized. Brutish behavior was associated with a depraved nature. To be brutish was to be animal-like, and animal-like behavior was increasingly described as slothful, lustful, menacing, and soulless.

We have to remember that life in the medieval age was still lived among the animals—domesticated and wild—and close to the soil. Most peasant farmers lived in traditional “long-houses,” which combined both house and stable. Farmers and their cattle entered the house from the same entrance and were separated inside only by a lone wall.
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The flowering of urban life in the fifteenth century drew distance, for the first time, between city people and their rural surrounds and soon elicited disgust over the close relationship that rural kin still enjoyed with animals and nature. By the late Elizabethan era, the English had banished animals from the house altogether, sequestering them in stables and barns. The English were said to have “despised” the Irish, Welsh, and Scots because they still slept under a common roof with their animals.
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The emerging burgher class—which later became the bourgeoisie of the modern era—condemned what it regarded as bestial and brutish behavior that made its fellow human beings behave no better than the “dumb” beasts they cared for. In England, and soon thereafter in France and elsewhere on the continent, civilizing behavior became both mission and obsession of the rising merchant class, aided by the Church and, to a lesser extent, by the nobility. To be civilized was to be well mannered, properly groomed, in control of bodily functions, and, above all, rational and self-possessed. Only when each person could control his own animal nature would he be able to exercise control over the rest of nature. The civilizing process separated man not only from his own animal nature but also from his fellow human beings. He became an autonomous island, a detached free agent, in control of his own body and private space in the world. He became “an individual.”