Category Archives: Models

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When Recognition Counts More Than Integrity

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Our consumer culture focused on marketing comes with a shift in our attention toward the presentational image, and away from thoughtful character assessment.

We may be entering a time when it makes more sense to chronicle what has been lost rather than gained. This seems to be the case in the slow but persistent decline in the assessment of personal character and the concurrent rise in the culture’s devotion to celebrity. These features are of a somewhat different nature, but there are benefits to pairing them.

Traits of good character haven’t changed much. The values of honesty, integrity and empathy will not disappear. But they are not on the surface of the culture in our era of communication through imagery. In the case of our culture of celebrity, it is now so tangible it can overwhelm us, making the display of aspirational success a feature of everyday life. In simple terms, integrity as a value has been obscured by the quest for notoriety.

Our media has shifted to being more about the presentation than description, more about recognition than sustained and unpublicized accomplishment. We want images that display “success” rather than discursive content that invites assessment. The difference is evident in the awareness and acknowledgement of the basic decency one friend over the invitation for envy in the self-display another sends in the form of an image in an online post.  The first is more genuine and cerebral; the second carries characteristics of display that moves it closer to becoming a “brand.” These pathways are different, but the second is now a dominant narrative of validation tied to the American lexicon of marketing. What “looks good” can be better than being good.

                            Trump Men’s Cologne

By definition, a celebrity is someone who is known for being well known, even when the achievements of that person may be quite modest. The next step in this chain of public recognition is endowing a person with a public persona that can be branded, meaning widely recognized and probably monetized. Advertising frequently seeks to personalize things, turning anything from sunglasses to coffee machines into signifiers attached to a person to be emulated. In short, products are often sold as celebrity stand-ins. We see signature shoes, and athletic gear in the context of endorsements. A person “known for” their curated persona creates their own force field of attention. Branding depends on this tenuous association factor, attracting scores of emulators. Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous observation about the nature of a public self could be the mantra of a self-publicist: “Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.”  If nothing else, Donald Trump has nurtured a brand based on obvious memes of wealth and business acumen. Indeed, a person could fill a Dollar Store with his overpriced merch offering ersatz symbols of affluence: shoes, perfume, ties, steaks, lapel pins, bibles, etc. etc. They are enough to capture voters who want to demonstrate their allegiance by owning some of “his” totems of ersatz prestige. With more effort, a reader with a livelier mind can also discover his habit of stiffing contractors, off-loading debt and declaring bankruptcies in his casino businesses. But this record is obviously not part of the brand that he has successfully promoted to the public.

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The more one consumes impressions through the branding mechanisms of the marketplace, less attention is will be paid to character.

Here is the challenge our culture faces. Too often our distractions leave us with only enough time to carry away impressions rather than deeper understandings. What has changed over the generations is the ascendance of the imagery of marketing as a tool for shifting our attention away from personal merit and, with it, creating less space to exercise the language and critical applications of character assessment. A preoccupation with cultural products attached to public figures leaves diminished energy for the work of judging others on their authentic achievements.

                              Aristotle

Classically, the guiding principle for assessing a person’s value to society was in understanding these clearly roadsigned merits. What useful talents do they possess that furthers opportunities of others? How well can they distinguish between what is best for many rather than just oneself? Do they know what excellence looks like? Is there a solid moral core that shapes their efforts to achieve it? Do they have a level of judgment we would want for our own children? These are the kinds of foundational questions thought leaders like Plato and Aristotle, or John Locke and Thomas Jefferson pondered. All would have been comfortable assessing a person’s character in terms of their evident knowledge, generosity to others, and what we know today as “social intelligence.” Their understandings of human potential were far more subtle than our culture-wide retreat towards self-interested promotion.

In our current culture of appearances we have left most of these kinds of questions on the table, replacing them with impressions built more on recognition than merit. Branding mechanisms of the marketplace may conceal who is truly a figure worthy of emulation.

music stave

The Organ Transplant That Never Happened

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So what is a lifelong lover of music to do to proselytize for their passion?

Sometimes having a passion for something is not enough to win over others. I was reminded of this when a friend and fellow music lover recently sent along a link describing a Japanese Kissa, which is a bar serving coffee or drinks where the  main attraction is a first-class audio system playing jazz or classical music. The recordings are usually from a library curated by the owner. And the vibe is to focus on listening rather than socializing.

The idea is wonderful, and reminded me that my first year at Colorado State University where a room in the student center room was set up with the same goal. The space had comfortable couches, a reasonably good stereo system, acoustical separation from the rest of the building, and a free jukebox selector from which anyone could select a range of mostly classical recordings. The point was to quietly listen and read in a space much nicer than any dorm space. Granted, a visitor tended to hear Beethoven’s Fifth too many times; it was the only classical music some students recognized. But for some of us the atmosphere beat the beer halls on College Avenue that we visited too often.

    Listening Room at the University of the South

So what is a lifelong musicophile to do to proselytize to others for this kind of space? Since I became a friend of the Chairperson of the Music Department at my campus, it was only a matter of time until I was advocating for the same kind of room in a new addition to our own student center. I correctly sensed that I needed a professional ally with the credentials to make the pitch. My busy and productive colleague seemed to be the perfect ally. But this lover of opera and musicals was not interested, and began to avoid me. (To be fair, faculty in the performing arts get lots of off-the wall requests.) I also had no other easy pathway to influence campus building plans: a fact that is usually true for the faculty that will have to spend time dealing with the results. A humanities professor trying to persuade a college architect is a David and Goliath kind of thing. I should have enlisted a phalanx of performance majors to make some noise. In the end I never got close to getting our own version of a Kissa. Other campuses have probably been luckier.

I also made a second unsuccessful campaign that also fizzled, but had the right language.  Put simply, I thought we should push for an organ transplant. Many campuses are fortunate to have one of the most complex but also rewarding musical instruments within their performance spaces. The King of Instruments is enormously complex and expensive to maintain. Most contain several thousand parts. Their compensation is that an organ may be the ultimate tools for creating acoustic music. As it happens, many strapped churches are willing to give up their instruments in favor of synths and 50-dollar guitars. There is even a clearing house listing organs ready to be donated and hauled away.

The pipe organ is forever tied to church music and musty hymns. But pipe organs in the hands of a master are awesome. There is even a tradition in English and a few American universities to recruit “organ scholars,” some destined to be future choir directors. In addition, exotic pipe organs in concert spaces are now often considered essential. The repertoire is vast, and can include music such as the score from Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar (2014), which was mostly created by Hans Zimmer on an pipe organ in London. The music soars, with segments of it going viral on  YouTube and TikTok. British organist Anna Lapwood even has groupies growing out of collaborations with Zimmer and Banobo. 

Could I again enlist my wary music colleagues to the cause of an organ transplant for our new concert hall? I naively thought so. The wonderful circular 320-seat space in the Mayo Concert Hall at TCNJ would be perfect for a smaller baroque organ. It could be an acoustical asset set in the gallery at the rear and above the stage. Chamber groups often perform Bach or Handel on these instruments. We just needed to tap into the database of abandoned instruments to find the right one. I envisioned being part of a committee to help arrange a transfer and find the donors needed to pay for installing it.

You probably know where this is going. I was greeted with more stares by the busy music faculty, as if I had just proposed a ukulele major. They were also investing their energies in securing several new concert grand pianos. Those were expensive enough, and a sign the faculty might lock the doors if I showed up again in the Music Building conference room.

I had probably seen too many Andy Hardy movies (“I have an Idea! Let’s put on a show!”).  It was too much to believe I had a chance at saving some unloved instrument rotting away in a church. Then again, I taught Theories of Persuasion to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students over 47 years. Didn’t I have the power to make it happen? But professors often make the mistake of taking their subjects seriously.  And, at best, my attempts were half-hearted.

There’s a lesson in this. We often think it is enough to say what we want, as if our ideas were nuggets of gold free for the taking. But that is a fatal overestimation. What we count as our special insight may be dismissed by others as completely hairbrained. Persuasion benefits from having a target who is already halfway there. Then, the goal is to activate what may be latent but pre-existing interest. I just needed to take the time to find those folks.