Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  Obtuseness is the true measure of the asshole. We calibrate how much of a prick or bastard or fucker someone is by the amount of harm he’s willing to inflict. But we reckon the degree of someone’s assholeness not by the actual hurtfulness of his behavior but by the breadth of his self-delusion, the discrepancy between his perceptions and the reality before his eyes, the energy of his denials and rationalizations. The greater the gulf, the more of an asshole he is. We’re much more likely to describe somebody as a blatant asshole than as a blatant prick or bastard—it’s like talking about “blatant stupidity,” where blatant refers to the obviousness of what the asshole is pretending not to see. Donald Trump, Gordon Ramsay, Gene Simmons, Charlie Sheen—titans of assholism, all of them, but not because of the actual evil they do. Those are the assholes we describe as “flaming” or “outrageous” for their ease in discounting the feelings of others and their seeming obliviousness to how they’re coming off. And not incidentally, they’ve all done very well for themselves by it. If you have to be a flaming asshole, this is a good age to be born in.

  chapter seven

  The Allure of Assholes

  It is false, this teaching of decay.

  —James McNeill Whistler

  The Teaching of Decay

  Ask people whether this is an age of assholes, and they’ll very likely answer yes. Pollsters don’t put the question in exactly those terms, of course, but surveys consistently find more than three-quarters of Americans saying that people are less respectful than they once were, that the level of civility is declining, and that drivers are less courteous, among other things.34 And the idea of decline is implicit in the complaints about endemic plagues of narcissism and entitlement that have become a compulsory floor exercise for op-ed opinionators.

  But it isn’t that simple. For one thing, the answer to the question “Have we gotten ruder?” has always been yes. Since the early Victorian era, there has never been a moment when critics weren’t looking back wistfully on the decorum that prevailed a generation or two earlier. People have been bemoaning the disappearance of “old-fashioned courtesy” since Dickens’ day—indeed, the term “old-fashioned” itself reflects the universal assumption that true manners are a bygone virtue. (In the twenty-five billion or so web pages indexed by Google, no one has so much as a word of praise for “the very latest courtesy” or “up-to-the-moment politeness.”)

  Yet the very persistence of those complaints seems to undermine them. As Montesquieu said, looking back across an unbroken line of lamentations about the decline of virtue that stretched back to Horace and Aristotle: “If this all were true, men would be bears today.” As you take a longer historical view, the idea of decline seems increasingly implausible. Only someone with a defective literary education could maintain that there are more assholes in circulation now than there were cads, bounders, and blackguards running around in the age of Thackeray and Dickens, who hardly lacked for material in that line. And even looking just over the recent past, it isn’t all bad news. We might give ourselves a little credit for how far we’ve come since the era depicted in Mad Men and Revolutionary Road, at least by our own lights, and for all the forms of rude and offensive behavior we’ve driven to the social margins. Think how many of the comments about race, gender, and sexual orientation public figures have been forced to apologize for in recent years that wouldn’t have been considered gaffes if they had come to light a half century ago. It’s up for grabs whether we’ve actually become more tolerant than we used to be; there are times when our embrace of the rhetoric of tolerance serves only to make our exercises of intolerance subtler and more oblique. But we do acknowledge tolerance as a virtue to which everyone is obliged to pay conspicuous tribute, and what does civility come down to in the end but making a show of consideration and good intentions? Civility is a matter of appearances, not motives—a manner, as Hume put it, whereby “a mutual deference is affected [and] contempt of others disguised.”

  Still, the sense of decline is hard to shake. Hume thought it was baked into us: “To declaim against present times, and magnify the virtue of remote ancestors,” he wrote, “is a propensity almost inherent in human nature.” Montesquieu himself suggested that it stemmed from the memory of the criticisms of our shortcomings that we endured from our parents and teachers, so that each generation feels itself unequal to the previous one. Or maybe the explanation is purely cognitive: we simply react more acutely to novel forms of discourtesy than to the ones we’ve gotten used to. That’s no doubt why I find it more annoying to click on a link in an email that ostensibly comes from LinkedIn and find myself at the web page of a Canadian pharmacy than to open a letter that looks like an official notice and discover it’s from a mortgage broker. It isn’t as if the first is any harder to discard than the second, after all.

  Here’s another theory. In On Rude Democracy, Susan Herbst suggests that the perception of growing incivility reflects a heightened sensitivity to displays of rudeness: “The Oprah-like culture of therapy—feeling good about our human interactions, or at least not feeling bad—has led us to avoid, or at least be disturbed by, even minor feelings of discomfort in political discourse, whether televised, on the Web, or in person.” On the face of things, this is a bit hard to square with the popularity of political talk shows and the other boisterous formats of public life. But something rather like it may explain the sense of panic about the forms of incivility that seem to pervade everyday life: the bullying, the screaming Little League coaches and parents, the road rage and air rage, the snippy salespeople and pissy customers, the abusive bosses and querulous employees.

  The anecdotes and incidents can be chilling, but are any of these really a growing problem? There has been a spate of business books warning about the personal and economic costs of workplace incivility, but you could argue that rudeness has always been a feature of the workplace, and that the big difference is that now we’re concerned about it. You could make that point about bullying, too. Despite the headlines, the indications are that bullies are no more of a problem than they used to be, and quite possibly less of one. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1995 12 percent of students reported “being afraid of attack or harm at school”; in 2009 the number had dropped to 4 percent. That doesn’t mean bullying isn’t deserving of our attention, all the more since technology provides new outlets for it. But the real change is in our decreasing tolerance for it, not its increasing prevalence. And so on for other indignities of daily life. The long history of discourteous driving is documented in the appearance of words from road hogging (1906) to speedster (1918) to tailgating (1951). And there’s a line of complaints stretching back for more than a century about the ill-mannered people one encounters in department stores: the customers who pushed you out of the way at the sales racks and forced their way into elevators, and the “rudeness, stupidity, and indifference” of the clerks that a writer in Munsey’s Magazine deplored in 1900.

  If you looked only at the history of those complaints, you could easily conclude that nothing had really changed since Montesquieu’s time. But while grumbling about rude neighbors and mean bosses is an eternal diversion, that isn’t really the kind of incivility that’s behind the present sense of crisis. In surveys, people overwhelmingly say that incivility is not a major problem in their relations with co-workers or their friends or around the family dinner table. (Ironically, they also lay the blame for its rise on the failure of parents to instill a sense of proper behavior in their kids when by their own accounts the family is the one institution that seems to be doing its job here.35) The areas where people see civility breaking down tend to be ones that are remote from the face-to-face interactions of everyday life, like politics, the media, and the Internet. Those are the settings in which the most dramatic changes in behavior have taken place, and whether or not they’re really a cause for alarm, they do raise unprecedented questions. This isn’t an age of assholes—or at least there are no more of them walking
the earth than there used to be back when they went by other designations. But it’s fair to call it an age of assholism, one that has created a host of new occasions for acting like assholes and new ways of performing assholism, particularly among strangers and in public life.

  Technology has played a big role here, as it always has in the past. Since the nineteenth century, every new form of communication has multiplied the opportunities for unwelcomed intrusions on our persons and privacy. Henry James wrote of telegraphists who exploited the secrets they gleaned from their patrons’ communications. The telephone made the home accessible to unsought intrusions from strangers and left daughters prey to the allurements of undesirable suitors: “The serenading troubadour can now thrum his throbbing guitar before the transmitter undisturbed by apprehensions of shotguns and bulldogs,” one writer warned in 1884, adding that without an exchange of letters, there could be no grounds for a breach of promise action. Etiquette columnists of the 1950s took after people who blared their music in public over transistor radios. (“There’s No Escape,” Life magazine headed its article on the problem in 1961.) Nowadays the problem is the ones who retreat into a shell behind their earbuds or impose one-half of a cell phone conversation on bystanders.

  In their power and ubiquity, digital technologies introduce hitherto unimaginable possibilities for being uncivil and inconsiderate: cyber-bullying, tweeting or checking your mail in the middle of a meeting, posting anonymous defamations about an ex-boss or ex-girlfriend, spamming the subscribers to a mailing list, lurking and trolling on blogs and discussion lists, and all the other forms of misbehavior that new media have given rise to. The very ease of the technology can exacerbate matters; Michael Kinsley suggests that “banging out an e-mail is just so easy, compared with all the necessary elements of writing a letter, that the id can send out a half-dozen e-mails before the superego can stop it.” And it takes just a slip of the finger to broadcast an indiscretion to a vast audience: you write an email to a colleague describing someone as an asshole, mistakenly click on “reply to all” instead of just “reply,” and bingo, it’s on the screens of 260 other people on the recipient list.

  Add to that the automation of the service economy, which seems designed to draw our inner asshole to the surface. If we find ourselves being a little more peckish than we used to be when we call the cable company with a question about our bill, it’s because we’ve had to punch 4, then 3, then 1, then punch in our account number, and then wait on hold for ten minutes before being put through to an agent, who asks for our account number a second time and then has to patiently endure our remonstrances—it’s a tough way to make a living, dealing with assholes like us all day. You could put a positive spin on this by saying that the modern world provides us with more opportunities to make a display of forbearance, but not many of us are up to thinking about it that way.

  Three Assholes for the Age

  But this is also an age of assholism simply because we find the phenomenon and its practitioners so interesting—or provocative, or compelling, or compellingly repulsive, or sometimes all of those at once. I’m not thinking so much of assholes of opportunity like Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson, or of incidental assholes like James Cameron or Brett Favre, whose assholism only adds a colorful sidebar to an independently impressive career. There’s little about those people that’s particular to the age, save that in earlier periods the public probably would have been spared the details of the personal tics and twitches that qualify them for the asshole label. What’s unique to our time is the fixation with certain iconic assholes, who exemplify each in his way the problematic allure of the species.

  Steve Jobs, for example, was a modern personification of the asshole as achiever, someone whose assholism seems to be inextricable from his success as a leader. The traditional paragons of the type are the storied tough guys from military, business, and public life whose leadership styles are packaged in memoirs and advice books like What It Takes to Be #1: Lombardi on Leadership, Rudy Giuliani’s Leadership, 29 Leadership Secrets from Jack Welch, and above all a four—foot shelf of inspirational works on George S. Patton, the first general to have been explicitly designated an asshole by both his men and his superiors. From Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare, we learn: If he slapped a soldier, well, it was certainly wrong, but he thought it necessary for the morale of his troops. . . . It was often said that his troops would accomplish the impossible, then go out and do it all over again. “Patton’s men” may not have always truly appreciated the man’s leadership style at the time. Human nature is such that the discipline and the obedience required by a great leader are so often cause for griping and displeasure. But in retrospect, to have served under Patton was a red badge of courage to be worn forever.

  The passage is calculated to reassure even the most abusive manager that he’s on the right track; it’s for the good of the team, after all, and whatever his subordinates may say about him, they’ll be grateful later on.

  For some, Jobs fills an analogous role in the digital age. Shortly after his death and the publication of Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography, Tom McNichol wrote in the Atlantic:CEOs, middle managers and wannabe masters of the universe are currently devouring the Steve Jobs biography and thinking to themselves: “See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I’ll be successful like Steve.”

  And indeed, some observers depicted Jobs’ assholism as a deliberate management style. As Alan Deutschman put it in Newsweek, Jobs was a “master of psychological manipulation”: He found that by delivering brutal put downs of his co-workers he could test the strength of their conviction in their own ideas. . . . He found that many of the most brilliant engineers and creative types actually responded well to cruel criticism, since it reinforced their own secret belief that they weren’t living up to their vaunted potential.

  Not everyone agrees with that assessment of Jobs’ skills as a manager; Isaacson says that he was terrible at it, and that success came despite his being a colossal asshole, not because of it. But it isn’t as if there are no advantages to being an asshole, in business or elsewhere. Life rarely makes moral choices that easy for us. When he was preparing The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, Robert Sutton reports he was repeatedly challenged by Silicon Valley leaders who asked him, “What about Steve Jobs?” to the point where he reluctantly added a chapter called “The Virtues of Assholes.” He concedes that judicious displays of irrational anger have their uses—fear of humiliation can be a motivator for employees if it’s balanced with the hope of praise, and a well-timed tantrum can get you a boarding pass at the last minute from uncooperative airport staff. And there are fields where behaving like an asshole offers a clear career advantage, such as professional wrestling and the law. Certain law firms encourage a hardball style that can cross over into what Sandra Day O’Connor has called legal Ramboism. As a former federal judge who became a partner at a notoriously aggressive Wall Street law firm said, “At Skadden Arps . . . we pride ourselves on being assholes. It’s part of the firm’s culture.”

  Still, nobody would argue that being an asshole is essential to business success. The books on leadership that line the business sections of Barnes & Noble offer career models to suit every personality type. One can take one’s cues from successful leaders ranging from Bismarck and Golda Meir to Nelson Mandela and the apostle Paul, not to mention Generals Lee, Grant, Custer, and Attila the Hun. With that choice before them, the managers who make for the shelf that holds books on Patton and Jobs aren’t settling on assholism as a career expedient, they’re looking to justify their predilection for it. Few people become assholes reluctantly.

  In any event, few of the people who bought Isaacson’s biography were looking for tips on becoming masters of the universe or pretexts for rationalizing their own arrogance. And the stories Isaacson tells about Jobs’
assholism are different from the ones that hagiographic biographers tell about Patton. They often demonstrate a capacity for irrationality, spitefulness, and petulance that had little to do with any psychological jujitsu: firing a manager in front of an auditorium of people; short-changing Steve Wozniak on a bonus in the early days of their partnership; taking credit for the ideas of others; screaming, crying, and threatening when the color of the vans ordered at NeXT didn’t match the shade of white of the manufacturing facility; and launching savagely into anyone who aroused his displeasure. (I know of one person who says he quit his high-level job at Apple because he got tired of wiping Jobs’ spittle off his glasses.) True, the Patton of historical fact was by most accounts even worse: a full-blown prick, sadist, and suck-up detested by both his superiors and his subordinates. But most of that has been left out of the story that made Patton an epitome of brilliant leadership, whereas Jobs’ pathological behavior is an essential element in his myth.