This is more a draft than a finished piece of writing. I hope to revise it.

now re-posting a very slightly revised version; original was posted a couple of days ago...

THE BRUTALITY OF THE U.S. SMILE-ON-DEMAND CULTURE

In his book “Punishing the Poor; The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity”, Loic Wacquant remarks that the Clinton reform of “welfare” included no provision to create jobs. The fundamental logic was either flawed or hypocritical. IT eliminated government help for the poor, but simultaneously while promising to change their (imaginary) refusal to cooperate with a broader society by working, it provided nothing concrete by way of job creation. instead, it provided a sort of system of psychological training, what the author of this blog would regard as propaganda. [imaginary? Well, Waquant points out that the people in question had to work because the money the government provided was woefully inadequate, and most people don't like to get money from the government, and get off welfare as soon as they can.--So there are a whole series of false assumptions behind the legislation.]

(And I must digress to say: I have seen this demeaning and degrading system at work in US institutions of education abroad….where adults who were allegedly professionals were forced to engage in public displays of submissiveness and exhibits of the right emotional attitude…. .nothing like an honest interchange between thought full adults…..)

Here is Wacquant on so-called reform:
No budget for job training and creation figured in it. State governments were given pecuniary incentives to devise plans to meet preset quotas of caseload reduction and work participation, but such plans would center entirely on the “personal reformation” of dispossessed single mothers through “readiness workshops” designed to teach them mainstream cultural norms and work submissiveness, as if poverty and joblessness were caused by “fear of failing, dependency, bad attitude, a sense of entitlement, the victim mentality, and low self esteem”. [Here Wacquant quotes Chad Broughton, “Reforming Poor women” Qualitative Sociology, 26, No. 1, March 2003)

--Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2009 (Original French edition 2004)



You might call that an emphasis on style over substance, but that would underestimate the sheer insanity and degrading character of what is described there. Insane because the mechanisms created do not suffice to achieve the stated goals. Degrading because the human targets of the so-called “reforms” were not only not helped by them, but insulted, treated with disrespect. Indeed, what is described is a sort of noxious attempt at mind control that, in the experience of the writer at this blog, is not unusual in the United States of America.


Recently I had a pleasant enough correspondence with a guy from the UK. He mentioned in passing that while Czechs were really nice, you could forget about “service” in restaurants or cafes.

Hmmm.

Yesterday I was in Starbucks, here in the desert, and I was brutalized by one of the women working there.

No she did not make physical contact with me. That would have been more personal than what she actually did.

What she actually did was demand from me that I perform a sort of ritual, and she rewarded me when I finally played the game.

((what ritual? You know how it goes: How are you? And there's only one
acceptable answer: "fine"... and so on....))

Usually I hesitate or say something "negative". Really I'd rather not play this
game, but for whatever reason, I just followed the rules and said "very good" or some equally throw-away collection of words. And this elicited a smile from her. Ahh the stupid man is finally learning how to behave correctly. ((Yeah. right. maybe if I continue to behave I too will, someday, be allowed to sell Skinnie Mocca bullshit drinks.))

As if I needed help in learning how to get along with
People.

This I find distasteful and demeaning. But, simultaneously I am frustrated because I know that this young woman does not know what she is doing. She is exhibiting her mastery of an insane demeaning and insincere ritual. I don’t care if the famous philosopher Thomas Nagel thinks it is harmless and would fault me for lack of understanding. I think he has failed to grasp the fundamental moral principle that every action has consequences, and if a people begin to trivialize something of importance, that too has consequences.

For relationships between human beings are simply too important to be banalized and degraded in this oh so USA way.

What we have here is a demand from above: nothing is allowed to interfere with the needs of business. It is not something to be celebrated or excused. The philosopher, Debra Satz, mentions a kind of celebratory attitude –as I’ve not finished her book, I can’t say if she endorses it. (I suspect not.) (This needs to be filled in.)

Keith Stanovich, someone for whom I have great respect, seems to blindly go along with the idea that we have to smile and suppress our actual emotions to get along.

More precisely, Stanovich says that people who work in the service industry have to suppress the automatic desire to think of it as a relationship with another person—and instead view it as a commercial transaction.

If you think about it, that’s frightening.

The only person I can think of right now who seems more inclined toward my view is Dacher Keltner, who in an interview somewhere on the web, once observed that we had these marvelous abilities for dealing with people face-to-face, and he worried that the internet might mean that they atrophy.

And what of me? Have I absorbed something of “Eastern” Europe?

Maybe, maybe not. Surely I can’t make such a claim about myself because none of us have privileged self-knowledge. I think I learned something from people in Slovakia, and other people I’ve met in other places. Am I just blindly going along with a different pattern? I think not. I think this phony friendliness is really very harmful to the quality of our relationships with other human beings. It's not just a "preference". It is my considered judgment.