Christopher Lasch had it right. We live in a culture of narcissism. Thirty years after the publication of his landmark work of social criticism, Americans are more self-absorbed than ever. Consider, if you doubt it, Twitter and Facebook. (Among the items from my Facebook feed today: “Watching Charlie play his dad on Wii tennis!” and “Off to dim sum, it’s been too long.”) This way of moving through the world stands squarely in the way of progress towards sustainability.
Narcissism has been on my mind this week because of my experience at a health club that I joined nearly a year ago. I’m a runner, and so I’ve never been much of a health club guy, but I joined a new branch of Lifetime Fitness chain near my home in Bethesda about a year ago because Robert Sherman, who was brought on to lead the fitness program there, is a truly gifted teacher. So I followed him to Lifetime.
Lifetime’s a top-of-the-line gym. Rugs in the locker room. Plants in the lobby. High-tech exercise machines. Well-built. (The gym, I mean, not the patrons.) You can buy a smoothie or get a haircut there. People seemed to really appreciate it—and take care of it—for a while.
But not for long.
The other night, the men’s locker room was a mess. Wet towels had been scattered in front of the lockers and on the floor in a couple of shower stalls. This, in a locker room where you are never more than a few steps from a receptacle for used towels.
Why? What possesses someone to drop a wet towel on the floor, rather than walk a short distance to toss it where it belongs?
What possesses people to toss bottles and cans by the side of the road?
What possesses teenagers to enter a metro car and bus and treat it like their living room, talking in loud, disruptive voices?
What possesses people to talk loudly on cell phones on public?
Worse, what possesses people to talk on their cell phones or send text messages while driving? The Times has done some great reporting on this in the past couple of weeks. It’s truly reckless behavior.
I probably sound like an old crank here but the fact is, America is suffering from an epidemic of rudeness and it’s worth thinking about. I read Lasch’s sophisticated and erudite book many years ago, barely understood it then and so won’t try to summarize it here. But he wrote, among other things, about the declining influence of families, the reluctance of parents to impose discipline on their children, the medicalization of bad behavior, the decline of religion, the rise of the self-esteem movement, and the importance placed on personality, as opposed to character, in the business world.
All these forces are stronger today than they were back in what Tom Wolfe called The Me Decade of the 1970s.
In a 2005 essay called The Overpraised American, Christine Rosen re-examines Lasch and argues that Lasch’s narcissist has become “the overpraised, attention-seeking, technologically dependent American.” She relates this anecdote about suburban child-rearing:
The emphasis on self-esteem building and praise can be found creeping into many different aspects of children’s lives. As I witnessed at a child’s birthday party in a well-to-do Washington suburb recently, the reptile expert hired by the parents to entertain the assembled toddlers didn’t merely perform his routine. At the end of it, he had to present the lucky birthday boy with a large, official-looking certificate declaring him a bona fide junior herpetologist, which the assembled guests responded to by treating the boy to a vigorous round of applause. It’s no wonder the shelves of suburban recreation rooms nationwide groan under the weight of participation trophies, seventh-place medals, and ribbons congratulating kids for simply showing up.
I’m afraid that it is these parents and their kids, who have been told how wonderful they are, despite any evidence to the contrary, who fail to grasp that there’s something wrong with leaving a wet towel on the floor of a public locker room. Or driving while talking on the cellphone.
Rudeness matters not merely because of the inconvenience it causes the rest of us, but because it reflects a deeper indifference. People who are rude either don’t understand or don’t care about their impact on the world. But–the only way we are going to deal with the scary social and environmental problems we face is by become more consistently aware of the impact our actions have upon others, and that means not just the people around us right now, but also future generations. It takes real, sustained effort to think about the affect of our everyday choices—the cars we drive, the food we eat, the stuff we buy, the way we conduct ourselves at work, our obligations as citizens. But only as a result of that real, sustained effort will be get the changes we need.
So I can’t help but wonder: If we can’t take care of a locker room, how, for goodness sake, are we going to take care of the planet? Any thoughts?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
love this.we have traveled on small cruise lines, staffed with european staff to whom service is a family tradition and who the passengers treat with respect and dignity. We are a spoiled culture, so entrenched in a class system that we see workers as servants to us,not equals. and the world IS our locker room, or toilet as the case may be.We truly see ourselves as entitled and that the world will ‘take care of itself.” we put recyleables out on the correct day and buy sustainable type products and believe this is our part in healing the planet. Partly true. Every little bit helps, but if you are truly trying to stamp out a sickness, you can’t keep a few of its germs alive just for ‘laughs.’
thank you for ‘exposing’ this.
Part of the problem is that our Culture has compartmentalized us all, in that our professions and life roles begin to define us. The reason that person left towels all over the locker room was possibly because that person was thinking, “I’m not a locker room attendant, that’s someone else’s job”. I don’t think our Narcissism is in the forefront of our thinking, I think it comes from the subtle idea that we are entitled. We think that we deserve $45 an hour for what WE do, but the guy working on our lawns or fixing our food or assembling our furniture better not charge too much.
Rudeness comes from either hostility or ambivalence, and I think the majority of it comes from the latter. If we acknowledged that our clothes were made in a sweat shop where workers make pennies a day, we’d have to admit we are part of that abuse, or else pay more for our stuff, and who wants that? Rudeness is a shield, that protects us from having to bother reconciling what we want, and what we have to do to others to get it.
Oops, should have said great post! Waiting for your next post!
Darren, I think you are right that in part this is about the idea that we (meaning the privileged) can move blithely through the world and let others pick up after us. Well-to-do Americans “outsource” so much of their lives–others clean their house, mow their lawns, raise their kids, walk their dogs, cook, fix stuff and the like–that we do, as you say, feel a sense of entitlement.
I wonder: Is there really more rudeness & self-absorption today, or just more opportunity to witness it? After all, we didn’t used to have cellphones or Twitter as mechanisms by which people could publicly display their rudeness & self-absorption: people used to have to reserve it all for their families, I guess.
The anecdotes above “ring true,” but that’s not exactly evidence of a trend. I suppose it’s a pretty hard thing to measure, let alone to track across decades.
But even if there is more rudeness today (which I doubt), that might not be cause for despair. After all, it takes a certain amount of something very close to ‘rudeness’ to enforce progressive social norms (e.g., to ask strangers why they’re littering, or to tell them to pick up their own towel). Victorian politeness might not be the way to save the planet, either.
Chris.
I also agree with Darren. Compartmentalization is a curse… too many of us are thinking “It’s not my problem.” With towels on the floor, a swanky gym can hire someone to come through every 10 min and take care of it, and just raise the rates: a gym is not a closed system, so more resources can be brought in from outside to fix the problems we create inside.
Unfortunately, the Earth is a closed system (at least in this context.) We’re messing it up, and there’s no one outside the system we can hire to come in and clean up after us.
I’ve been outside of the US for 10 years. When I come back, I am always amazed that when I am bumped or jostled in a public place, more times than not, the person says excuse me. I had this same experience when traveling to Australia, and the same frequency in other countries.
Americans may be rude, but try coming to Italy. If someone says excuse me, if it’s not a foreigner, it’s rare. Romans walk into stores, take the free candy on offer, unwrap it, throw the wrapper on the floor and walk out. They throw their cigarette boxes out of moving cars, and their trash on the ground NEXT to trash cans. One woman walking down the street took several whole newspaper pages to collect her dog’s poop, made 6 steps (4 steps short of the garbage) and then threw the whole wad onto the sidewalk. (WHY BOTHER???)
In my small town of residence, junk disposal can be arranged by calling a *toll free* number and removal is FREE, 3 pieces at a time. Old sofas, refrigerators, washing machines, whatever. People STILL sneak out at night to go DUMP their home renovation refuse, old appliances, broken toys (broken child driven motorized cars) in the country side. I was waiting for a friend in front of the Pantheon one day and some woman came past a trash can and threw her trash on the ground. I picked it up ran after her and handed it to her. She looked shocked. I said in a very nice way, “You know, people are quick to blame tourists for the trash in this city, but you should realize that this is your city too. How would this place look if every person who walked past that trash can did what you did?” She took her trash back and put it IN the can. But can you really be that confrontational with people? I was nice, she was nice. It wasn’t an unpleasant exchange. But doing that is a full time job, here.
Rome is home to the UN food agencies. In one Executive Board meeting, the representative from Indonesia was making an intervention. We kept hearing interference, someone was talking. We all craned our heads to see that her direct neighbor, the representative from Italy, was talking at full lung capacity on her cell phone (despite the signs which instruct everyone to turn their cell phones off during the meeting) and when she was asked to leave the room, she scowled, shrugged her shoulders and finished her call, all the while, her poor neighbor was trying to finish her intervention. This happens ALL THE TIME.
Most all people I encounter who come through Italy, no matter what nationality, remark at how incredibly rude, disrespectful of the environment, and self-absorped people are here. Need I say that when I am in London and Paris and am shoved or my foot stomped on the subway, the offender is almost always droning on in Italian with friends or family??
OK, they could be Swiss.
But the point is that I really don’t think Americans are ruder than others. At least laws exist and are enforced on some level in the US, here, when there are laws, it’s law enforcement officers who flagrantly violate them first and foremost!
I think it’s fine to take note of all of this. The examples you speak of have their root in the home, yes. But since I spend so much time being, as you call it “inconvenienced” here by rudeness to the umpteenth degree, I have started to think that the best thing you can do is just make sure you don’t contribute to it. Because we aren’t going to change others by pointing out to them how feckless they are…