The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  And so it happened that I joined a consciousness-raising group. A possible explanation for my psychic decline had suggested itself: the too-early marriage, the too-easy path, the phobias, and the weed. Had I wound up in this sorry state because I was a woman? This was the sort of question a women’s group was supposed to address as we compared our experiences with those of our newfound sisters.

  I don’t know what I expected. A new way of being, I guess. Once we identified and divested ourselves of the bogus values imposed on us by the patriarchy, everyone would be equal and helpful and nice to each other. Our consciousnesses would be raised!

  Half a dozen women, all in their twenties or early thirties, met in each other’s homes (I always tried to persuade them to meet in my apartment) to talk about feminism in general and our lives in particular, to discuss the books and essays that had become iconic, and to report on our successes or failures in teaching our boyfriends or husbands how to use a vacuum cleaner.

  Though I have hazy memories of some women in the group, I’m fairly sure that most were connected to the university or living with someone who was. Some were working or looking for the sort of young-people jobs (arts administrator, lab assistant) that suggest that adulthood will have some relation to one’s college major. As I recall, only one of us had a child: a sweet woman with a nice husband; they both seemed overwhelmed. I remember two slightly older married women with stable lives and nicer apartments and a maternal but slightly judgmental air that made the rest of us want to please them. Then there was the pretty one, who’d brought me into the group.

  The first disappointment was the rapidity with which we fell into roles that replicated junior high. As much as we critiqued the ways in which male culture had taught us to objectify our bodies, the same hierarchies applied: the plump deferred to the thin, the short to the tall, the homely to the handsome. The older women exerted a subtle maternal leadership, though the actual mother, the overburdened one, was considered slightly pitiful for having gotten herself into that situation. I also assumed a familiar role, a fallback position from grade school. Self-protective, watchful, stiff with social discomfort, at once too proud, too removed, and too lazy to mention the phobias, the cannabis, the TV, the forlorn marriage, the secret novel forever “in progress.”

  None of that rose to the surface as I joined my sisters in complaining about the patriarchal creepiness of the men I knew. I described how my husband used to torment me by staring theatrically and somewhat apishly at every beautiful woman we passed until he was sure I noticed, and then he would give me a horrible smile, like the rictus grin of the Kirkland Street flashers. I wondered why the other women so often rose to his defense and asked why I was being so hard on a guy who was tall, reasonably nice, intelligent, and so forth.

  If I’d imagined that the group would collectively generate a higher consciousness about ourselves in relation to other women and men, I soon realized we’d re-created in microcosm the Darwinian power relationships of the boardroom, the cabinet meeting, the office, the nursery school.

  We, too, had our outcast: the future social worker’s wife. Objectively, she was as smart and attractive as anyone else. But her mistake was being too honest and unguarded about her motivation for joining the group.

  She made the mistake of saying what no one else would admit. She was sick of her marriage. Her perfectly pleasant husband had been her first lover. And to quote John Berryman, she was heavy bored. My guess is that all of us were bored and erotically restless; my sense is that the madly-in-love didn’t rush to join women’s groups. But the obsessiveness and nakedness of this woman’s discontent allowed the rest of us to pity her, to condescend and patronize her for focusing on something trivial and self-indulgent. When conversation lagged, the meetings devolved into scenarios in which she bemoaned her romantic ennui while the rest of us rolled our eyes and smirked. Watching her, I was reminded of the schoolyard lesson about the risks of volunteering too much information. But secrecy has its drawbacks, too—it can make you feel cornered.

  Backed into a corner, I began to joke around—some of my jokes were funny, some not, some appropriate, some not. Some were probably hostile. No one else thought they were funny. I remember suggesting we read Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, a book I still think is hilariously weird. I especially loved Solanas’s fantastic suggestion (I might be getting this slightly wrong) that the only way for men to rehabilitate themselves was to gather in groups and ritually chant in unison, “I am a lowly abject turd!”

  I remember telling this to the group. I recall no one laughing. A current joke was: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: That’s not funny. But it wasn’t the women’s fault. None of them were stupid. Some had a sense of humor. They could tell that I wasn’t trying to amuse but to provoke.

  All this time, though sick with loathing and doubt, I was working on my novel. I wrote a first draft and put it away and rewrote it from scratch. Eventually, I got brave enough to show it to a former college professor.

  Then, an unexpected event occurred. An editor called from New York. My former professor had sent him my novel, and he wanted to publish it.

  A single phone call affected my brain like a jolt of ECT without the mouth guard, the electrodes, or the memory loss. It was a miracle cure. I moved to San Francisco.

  And so I returned a year later to collect my things. And that was when I found out that my husband had, so to speak, worked his way through the group. One of the women told me and excused herself; she wasn’t the only one! No wonder he’d always seemed so pleased when the group met at our house. No wonder they’d always taken his side.

  In fact, this was not how it happened. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my husband only slept with two of the women in the group.

  I don’t know why I tell this story, or tell it the way I do. Obviously, saying all the women in the group makes a better story than saying two of the women in the group. But under the circumstances, two seems like more than two; two seems like more than twice as much as one. It seems like a statement, which it was. I know he slept with the pretty one and (I think) one of the maternal know-it-alls and for good measure both of the girls who lived in the apartment upstairs in our weathered Cambridge three-decker.

  If our true desires and disappointments are buried deep in our dreams, they’re closer to the surface in the stories we tell and retell, in the mythologies we ourselves have come to believe. Does saying all the women express how betrayed I felt by my husband and my feminist sisters?

  Actually, I was surprised by how little it upset me. Though I hadn’t had the encyclopedic sexual experience that people of my generation are supposed to have had, I’d had enough to know: sex trumps politics, common sense, and better judgment. And my husband’s bad behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. One gift of a faltering marriage is a heightened sensitivity to the frequencies of flirtation. And however misused, the word liberation was very much in the air, often to mean having sex with someone because it was more trouble to say no.

  The truth is that when I think of that time, I feel neither outrage nor betrayal but gratitude: my consciousness was raised. Do I think that women are better than men and that the world would be a better place if women ran it? I can thank my Cambridge women’s group (along with Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi) for having cured me of the notion that women are no more or less likely than men to treat people well or badly. Perhaps the problem lies with institutions rather than people, and a group, no matter how small, is an institution.

  Yet somehow, in the process, I became a feminist. Almost forty years later, feminism is as basic to my sense of self as the fact that I have brown eyes, as integral to my sense of the world as the fact that gravity keeps us from flying off the planet.

  Do I think that women deserve equal pay for equal work? Do I think women are as smart and capable as men? Do I think that women are still being discriminated against in obvious and subtle ways? Does it disturb me to meet young w
omen who imagine that the playing field is level and that feminism is irrelevant to their domestic lives and careers? Do I think women need to help one another? Have I noticed that there are men who inevitably and consciously or unconsciously treat women like idiots, babies, or witches? Of course, the answer to these questions is an emphatic yes.

  No matter how much or how little happened in those consciousness-raising groups, they were part of a formative era that opened the eyes and changed the minds of women like myself. Living through that time persuaded me not to think that gender discrimination is the unavoidable product of boys being boys. Along with consciousness came the faint consolation of knowing that certain slights and omissions, certain unenlightened attitudes and intended or unintended insults are neither purely personal nor in our imaginations.

  I feel fortunate to have spent my adult life in the company of a (second) husband and two sons who actually like women—or, anyway, some women. But frequently when I venture beyond my domestic bubble, I’m reminded of the degree to which the weather is still chilly out there for the ladies.

  Recently, I participated in a reading tribute to an important (dead white male) American writer. A friend sent me a link to an online literary site in which the presumably young male blogger noted (inaccurately, but whatever) that I was taller than any of my fellow readers, all male. Even as I was persuading myself that a similar comment might have been made about a five-foot nine-inch man (Gee, Philip Roth is tall!), I read further, to find myself described as acting like a “socialite.” A socialite? Me? Don’t socialites organize charity balls and nibble low-cal salad lunches and make cameo appearances on Real Housewives of New York City? Did he mean sophisticate? Aristocrat? Was he trying to be nice and got the wrong word? No matter how I parsed it, I couldn’t imagine a male writer of my age with a similar publication record being described as a tall socialite. Or was it that the sight of a tall, reasonably competent woman inspired the blogger to think of Tom Wolfe’s social x-rays and lemon tarts—women asking the waiter to bring the dressing on the side?

  If I still belonged to my women’s group, I could tell them that story and perhaps be heartened by stories of similar things that happened to them. Who knows where they are now? If their problems were solved or not, if they found jobs or not, had kids or not, left their boring boyfriends or not? All are older, some may be grandmothers and some may be long dead.

  It makes for a better story to say that they all slept with my husband. But whatever symbolic or metaphoric truth the fictive version exhumes, I don’t much care if it happened that way or not. I learned more than I would have if my feminist sisters had loyally resisted my former husband’s advances. Gender doesn’t confer moral superiority, nor the opposite, needless to say.

  In retrospect, my women’s group provided a political education, though not exactly the one that the women’s movement intended. I learned not to follow a party line; I learned not to take things for granted or at face value; I learned to assume that situations may not be what they appear—all useful lessons for a novelist and a human being.

  I don’t know how much the group helped confirm my inconvenient determination to keep talking about the unpleasant or abysmal ways in which girls and women are treated. That inequalities and horrors continue to plague women is a fact, not my opinion. Though it is also true that many women’s lives are vast improvements over what they would have been in 1972.

  I remember asking my husband why he slept with all those women, and I remember him saying that he’d wanted to, all along. He gave me that wicked little smile, like the men in the cars.

  By all those women, we meant two women. For me to claim that he slept with them all is not only untrue but also unfair. But it’s the sort of embellishment that shines light on some deeper truth, in this case the peculiar truth of a long-ago skirmish in the ongoing, counterproductive war of men against women.

  RICHARD SENNETT

  Humanism1

  FROM The Hedgehog Review

  IN THIS ESSAY, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term humanism means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to consider the relation of displacement and humanism—a cultural ideal on the one hand, a social fact on the other. The two seem to have nothing in common. Yet I want to argue that they do; at the dawn of the modern era, a person’s capacity to manage and master displacement formed part of the humanist project, and, I argue, it continues to do so today, but on very different terms. In a world filled with mobile people—economic immigrants and political exiles in particular—an old humanist ideal might help them to give shape to their lives.

  Baruch Spinoza was the humanist philosopher whom we immediately think of as experiencing this connection firsthand. He was exiled from Amsterdam because he was accused of heresy, of violating Judaism. From the thirteenth century on, many Christians also began to be persecuted for the same supposed crime, that is, heresy. One of the greatest of Spinoza’s Christian brothers was the humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who lived from 1463 to 1494, the younger son of a minor aristocratic family driven first from Italy to France for heresy, then imprisoned in France for that crime, who then returned to Florence to die, thanks to the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  It was Pico who first made explicit the connection between displacement and the humanist project. His touchstone was the phrase, “Man is his own Maker,” which appeared in his brief essay “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” written, it is now thought, while Pico was in prison. Pico imagines God as “the master-builder [who] by the laws of his secret wisdom fabricated this house, this world which we see.”2 But God, whom Pico calls the “Master Artisan,” then created mankind as a “work of indeterminate form.” Pico imagines God the Master Artisan speaking to Adam, his unfinished creation, as follows: “In conformity with thy free judgement, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself.”3 These words had the personal meaning to Pico that, as a displaced person, he would have to make up a life for himself.

  Freedom, then, to do anything and to become anyone? Informality and spontaneity as the ends of life? Pico emphatically rejected this. Born indeterminate, he says, human beings have to find unity in their lives; a person must make him- or herself coherent. In Renaissance humanism, this quest meant uniting conflicting ancient ideals by bridging the Hellenic and the Christian mindset; in Pico’s own philosophy, it meant making the one and the many cohere, or as philosophers would put it today, discovering unity in the midst of difference. Spinoza, two centuries later, was grounded in just this humanist project.

  What does the humanist quest for unity in the midst of difference mean for us today? Here a contrast between Pico and Spinoza is all-important. Spinoza emphasized unities transcending time—timeless unities in mental space—whereas Pico dwelt on the fact of shifting time, and shifting time in everyday experience. Pico dwelt, we would now say, on the phenomenon of life narrative: can the events and accidents of life add up to a coherent story? That is every migrant’s question. And since these events and accidents are beyond an uprooted person’s control, the unity of a life story has to reside in the person telling it; unity, we would say, lies in the quality of the narrator’s voice. The narrator, following Pico’s precept, must learn how to tell about disorder and displacement in his or her own life in such a way that he or she does not become confused or deranged by the telling.

  Voice

  Pico’s humanism has mattered to me greatly in the work I do as a sociologist. When I began studying labor in the early 1970s, the life histories of the people I interviewed resembled well-made plots, determinate and constricted rather than experimental. The American manual laborers on whom I and Jonathan Cobb reported in The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972), for instance, served only a few employers during the course of their lives and hoped to better themselves by small, incremental gains in salary and status. White-collar employees higher up the job scale
even more orchestrated their lives in order to climb up a fixed corporate ladder. These real-life narratives were shaped by big, well-defined institutions: corporations with elaborate bureaucracies, powerful unions, an intrusive welfare state.

  In the last quarter century, modern capitalism has changed so that this determinate life narrative is weakening. Profound forces deregulate people’s experience of time: new technologies, global markets, new forms of bureaucratic organization. They orient economic activity to the short term rather than the long term; they challenge continuity and duration as institutional goals. One instance may suffice: in 1960 the “profit horizon” investors used for evaluating corporations was three years; in 1999 it was typically three months.

  How this changing frame of time affects work can be illuminated by two early usages in the English language. In Chaucer’s day, a “career” meant a well-laid, well-mapped roadway on which to travel; a “job” meant a lump of something, coal or wood, that could be moved around indiscriminately from place to place. Today, in the labor market, Chaucerian jobs rather than careers define work. The young, middle-level university graduate can expect to change employers at least twelve times in the course of a working life, and to change his or her “skills base” at least three times; the skills he or she must draw on at forty are not the skills learned in school. Job change no longer flows within the Chaucerian trajectory of a career; without a fixed corporate structure, job change follows a more erratic path.

  My studies of workers—both manual and white-collar—have led me to the conclusion that they are profoundly unhappy simply to narrate these erratic shifts as their own life stories. The flux of time is weakening their powers as narrators; they can see their working lives only in bits and pieces. Without a clear sense of how to structure work in time, people become confused, if not depressed, about what they should do. The flexible workplace itself seems illegible; the chameleon character of organizations, for instance, makes it hard for people to calculate what will happen if they change jobs.