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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.

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Is Basic Conversational Fluency Atrophying?

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524px Auguste Renoir Conversation

We are kidding ourselves if we believe “social media” substitutes for communication in a social world.

It seems that many of us are losing our will or abilities to sustain a genuine two-sided conversation. We now seem to be coaxed into being an audience for the rambles of acquaintances who are desperate for acknowledgment.  When did the idea of engaging in a true exchange with another become so problematic?   The experience is familiar: after an extended time with someone do we notice that we were little more than spectators to their thoughts and feelings.  Some have even mastered the kind of “no breath” ramble that discourages interruptions.

It has always been true that an evening with others might be hijacked by an acquaintance that needs to be heard. Whatever curiosity that could have once existed has been swamped by the conversational equivalent of a filibuster.

This kind of domination of what could be a genuine exchange can come from people in all age ranges. But my experience is that it is most pronounced among older adults who seem to exhibit of a person with fewer chances to have conversational partners. Dustin Hoffman gives us an example in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected )(2017).  His character, Harold, is a needy and aging sculptor, mostly in denial that he is no longer a hot in the fickle New York art scene. Baumbach has given Harold a bundle of declarations spoken into a void. Even his wife and adult children have tuned out.

It’s an old axiom in my field that opinion-giving is a common feature of the male communication style. But I see it more as becoming an equal-opportunity trait. With many exceptions, age seems to drain away interest in others. And so, conversations can devolve into long and unsolicited monologues: reports about what a person has been reading, commentaries or sermons offered but not invited, old stories retold, or the recitation of events in their extended families. Many seem to have forgotten how to share the conversational stage.  At the end of some of these longer performances it is easy to feel like a witness rather than a participant.

If it’s possible that advancing age makes us less willing to do the work of fully engaging with others, the other end of the life cycle poses its own challenges to the idea of genuine conversation. The primary cause seems to be increased self absorption, decreasing opportunities to listen to others with accuracy.

teens and cell phones

As noted here before, the most interesting research on this subject is from Sherry Turkle at M.I.T., who has been documenting the well-known drift of the young away from direct interaction to alternate channels that enlarge connectivity but diminish communication richness (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015). The platforms are well-known, including Instagram, Facebook, X, and other forms. Under the misnomer of “connectivity,” changes in technology and adjustments to them are slowly schooling younger generations to prefer communication that is mediated, self-contained and intentionally isolating. Many seem to be struggling to acquire the social intelligence needed to display empathy with others or exercise a degree of self-monitoring.

We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets texting or “social media” substitute for living in the social world.

Turkle documents a wholesale flight away from direct conversation and toward electronic messaging.  In the words of many of her interviewees, meeting directly with someone is “risky,” “too emotional,” “an interruption,” and “anxiety producing.” As a high school senior she interviewed observed, “What’s wrong with conversation?  I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation!  It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you are going to say.”

Responses like these suggest a desire to escape the burdens of acquiring the essential rudiments of what psychologists sometimes call “social intelligence,” meaning the ability to navigate through relationships that unfold in real time.

It has always been true that some conversations are difficult.  But this kind of face-work is also the essential work of a complex adult life. As Turkle notes,

Many of the things we all struggle with in love and work can be helped by conversation. Without conversation, studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled.  We are diminished, in retreat.  But to generations that grow up using their phones to text and messages, these studies may be describing losses they don't feel.

It’s worth remembering that forms of mediated communication are usually not additive, but reductive. Texts, e-mails, and even video games require various fundamentals of communication, but almost always take something away.  It may be immediacy.  It may be full interactivity or feedback. But the most consequential of all is a pale approximation of intimacy.

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