Brian Williams on the Culture of the First Person

Brian Williams, NBC News anchor, was on Letterman's Late Show last night. They talked about a lot of things, principally the question of whether Letterman or his chief rival, Jay Leno, has more gravitas. That took a while, and it was quite funny; Letterman does a good Leno impression, and Williams has a decidedly non-newsy wit about him. But my fondness for David Letterman is not why I'm posting this.

News anchors are regularly asked--even expected--to decipher the zeitgeist, to assign a diagnosis to the current state of the culture. Their job is essentially to narrate the times we live in, and that requires a pressing problem. For Williams last night, that pressing problem is narcissism on a grand scale.

[I] still come back to this that says you're the star. It's about you. Listen to the commercials on all those channels and the message is all in the first person in ways we never ever used or would dream of in the time of say Mad Men, for a modern television reference. So I think it's that.

Admittedly, news anchors are notoriously nostalgic for more noble eras. The times they narrate are held up against older, seemingly better eras and found wanting. For Williams's predecessor, Tom Brokaw, that better era was during World War II, and he spoke in glowing terms to whoever would listen about "the Greatest Generation" who fought that war and recovered that economy. For Williams, it appears that era is the Camelot Age, when Kennedy was president and advertisers smoked and drank in their office. (They don't do that anymore, right?)

Of course, no era is without flaw, and usually, in the light of history, those flaws are pretty obvious. The Greatest Generation locked Japanese Americans (and others of Asian heritage) in internment camps; the Kennedy years were marked with racial violence. And those are just off the top of my head. No disrespect to either gilded age, but they both have their share of tarnish to contend with.

Nevertheless, the narcissism epidemic facing the current culture is well documented, far beyond my own Deliver Us from Me-Ville. I'm not sure it's the bogeyman Williams makes it out to be, but Me-Ville has a strong gravitational pull, one that in and of ourselves we don't have the strength to surmount. Fortunately, we're not left to languish in our self-absorption. In Christ God enters the culture of the first person and draws people to himself. Maybe Brian Williams and the rest of us, the next time we're tempted to look back, should spend a little more time looking up.

Uber-pious, I know. But I couldn't resist.

The Art of Demotivation

Years ago now, my friend Judi loaned me a book by E. L. Kersten, cofounder of Despair Inc., which produces those Demotivators posters ("Burnout: If attitude is contagious, mine could kill you"). The jacket of the book reads "Ethics, Integrity and Sacrifice in the Workplace," but that's just a cover, literally: under the jacket is the real book, The Art of Demotivation: A Visionary Guide for Transforming Your Company's Least Valuable Asset--Your Employees. Har har snort.

Anyway, Judi finally asked me if I could give it back to her, so I thought, before I do, that I'd finally read it. It does what all good satire does: takes an absurd system and treats it seriously, turning it on its head in an equally absurd way. Kersten's book--at least in the eleven pages I've read so far--indicts the twentieth-century infatuation with self-actualization as the reason for the mediocrity of so many companies. The solution he proposes, with tongue at least partially in cheek, is "demotivation," or the systematic humiliation and alienation of employees so that they'll quit looking for their jobs to fulfill them and instead concentrate on fulfilling their responsibilities at their jobs. It's horrific, it's distressing, it's brilliant.

Exhibit A is this long excerpt on the "motivational industry," or consultants who are hired by corporate executives for weekend employee pick-me-ups. It makes a far less sympathetic but otherwise similar diagnosis of the culture we find ourselves in to the one I made in Deliver Us from Me-Ville. Enjoy it, understanding that he's being provocative on purpose:

Much of what passes for motivation in the motivational industry is little more than egoistic, short-term enthusiasm, or warm feelings generated by the creative packaging of the "principles" of the human potential movement, which itself is little more than a curious amalgam of common sense, humanistic religion, sophistry, and psychological snake-oil. The primary objective of the motivational industry is to stoke the fires of your employees' narcissism so that they fall in love with themselves all over again, just like they did when they saw their own beauty in the distorted reflection of their mother's adoring gaze, prior to their exposure to any of the objective, real-world criteria that would define them otherwise. The insights peddled to your employees revolve around the ideas that they are uniquely equipped to do something special, that they have a proprietary configuration of underappreciated skills that they have yet to discover (or show any evidence of), that their weaknesses are really strengths, and that they are winners who have simply not had the chance to win. They are regaled with stories about people like Thomas Edison who regarded failed experiments as stepping-stones on the path to scientific discovery, and they end up concluding that their own personal histories of failure and non-achievement are signs that they are bound for greatness. In this systematic distortion of reality, they learn to label their stubbornness as conviction; their bad attitudes as a passion for justice; their willful subversion of the company's goals as a unique, underappreciated perspective on how the company should proceed; and their general surliness as a natural response to a global lack of appreciation for their supremely valuable uniqueness.

Kersten attributes the perpetuation of the motivational industry to the way it calculates its success rate: not consequent improvement in employee productivity, but comment cards filled out by the employees in attendance. In actuality, "the life-changing insights sold by the motivational industry are the source of their problems rather than the solution to them. The consultants . . . are like ice cream vendors at a fat farm, pimps at a treatment facility for sex addicts, or drug pushers at a methadone clinic. They pander to your employees' cravings, and in so doing they exacerbate the problems they are paid to solve."

You'll get your book back soon, Judi. I promise.

Julie, Julia and Everyone Else

Last night we finally saw Julie & Julia, the film version of the book about the blog about the cook. It was really good, surprisingly cheerful. I kept waiting for the crises, but they were so homey, so everyday, so manageable that they never raised my stress level. Julie & Julia wasn't exhilarating; it was merely joyful.

Interestingly, while everyone has been telling us not to see it hungry, the food was a secondary factor for us. My wife had just come home from a conference about marriage counseling (she's a therapist), so she was struck mostly by the overwhelmingly positive marital dynamics in both couples. I, on the other hand, am a blogger who's written on narcissism, and I found myself concentrating mostly on how Julie (and Julia, for that matter) processed and shared their experiences.

The film takes place early in the life of blogging as a practice; frustrated writer and amateur cook Julie decides to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook and blog her way through the experience. Her first problem is explaining to her mother what in the world she's doing, and why it's worth doing. Meanwhile she frets over, first, whether anyone is reading what she's writing, and later, how to make sense of her connection to an ever-growing pool of readers. She celebrates benchmark moments in numbers of comments, she processes the strange of experience of having her blog ranked on Salon.com, she fantasizes and strategizes over the media's interest in her unique project. She wrestles her way through the temptations and frustrations of self-centeredness and, we're left to presume and hope, out the other side.

Julia has a similar experience. Seeking a way of finding fulfillment as an expatriate wife and non-mother in post-WWII, pre-feminism France, she meanders through hobbies till she finds her sweet spot in the kitchen. She then embarks on a vision for reviving the art of cooking in American households by partnering with two French chefs on a cookbook, at which point she launches a frustrating but ultimately successful campaign to get published.

The understated story in the film is the role of direct personal friendships. Julia and her husband quickly find a core community in France and share their stories and their struggles openly. Julie's project is launched at a dinner table with friends who will later return to the table to celebrate her thirtieth birthday and the completion of the challenge. Both women are, for the purposes of the film, the center of these communities' world--they and their husbands always sit at the head and the foot of the table, their concerns are exclusively the concerns of the supporting characters--but it's easy to extrapolate from this portrayed narcissism to imagining these friends sharing all kinds of life together--knowing each others' interests and anxieties, passing each other potatoes, all those sorts of everyday things. Both women had relationships with faceless, faraway people, but it was these flesh-and-blood relationships that kept them grounded and propelled them forward.

Even the relationship of Julia to Julie, one that apparently never became direct either through correspondence or introduction, is put in proper context by the real-time relationships each has to her husband and friends. Julia may fantasize about the far-off American woman who will put her recipes to use, but she cooks for the people she sees every day. Julie may "talk" to Julia as she cooks, but she knows and takes comfort in the fact that while the Julia in her head will never take on flesh and sit down at table with her, she has real relationships with people she can reach out and touch.

So as much as Julie & Julia is about food and blogging, it's also about community--particularly community in circumstances that make community difficult. In that respect, Julie and Julia are just like everyone else.

Jean Vanier Is a Genius, Part Three

Community & Growth was published in 1979, the same year as Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism. Sociologist Lasch was pointing out the societal trends that reflected a turn inward and its deadening effect on culture. Vanier's Community & Growth had a different function, a sort of justification for his at that time twenty-five-year project of bringing together able-bodied and disabled people in committed relationships of mutuality and gratuity. Lasch was pointing out that we'd allowed "normal" to become something dysfunctional and self-defeating; Vanier was showing that what appears abnormal to the broader society offers a prophetic vision of what could be.

Thirty years later the gulf between Lasch's culture of narcissism and Vanier's vision for community has widened. Social psychologist Jean Twenge recently reported that contemporary college students today openly acknowledge that they're the most narcissistic generation ever. I think you could argue that some other generation still holds the title, but it is nevertheless interesting that (a) people would say such a thing about themselves and (b) not be moved to repentance by it.

Meanwhile Vanier's notion that people can commit to one another in healing relationships has been embraced and experimented with more and more broadly, to the point where one of the more interesting stories in contemporary religion is the New Monasticism, where young people commit to living together in consecrated relationships with each other and the neighborhood surrounding them. I don't know that all of them would point to Vanier as their spiritual fountainhead, but they're certainly all playing in similar waters.

The contrast between these two portraits, I think, hints at their interconnectedness: a big slide from what we were meant to be calls for a big vision of the same. Late in his book Vanier suggests the following shift in missional priorities for the church:

There are so many people who live alone, crushed by their loneliness. It is obvious that too much solitude can drive people off the rails, to depression or alcoholism. More and more people seem to have lost their balance because their family life has been unhappy. There are so many who are lost, taking drugs, turning to delinquency; there are so many who are looking for a family and a meaning to their lives. In the years to come, we are going to need so many small communities which welcome lost and lonely people, offering them a family and a sense of belonging. At other times, Christians who wanted to follow Jesus opened hospitals and schools. Now that there are so many of these, Christians must commit themselves to the new communities of welcome, to live with people who have no other family and to show them that they are loved.

It's occasionally interesting to me how much shame we assign to narcissism; when I've discussed Deliver Us from Me-Ville with people who are parents and grandparents, they almost to a person cluck their tongues and wish their children and grandchildren would read the book--even though in the book I argue that this narcissism is part of the human condition, something that we each contend with and are never entirely free of, which means that parents and grandparents have their own narcissism to face up to. I also contend, however--and I think Vanier would agree--that this plague is at its root a reflection of insecurity, that we are narcissistic at least in part because we feel alone and unprotected in the universe, and that one way of contending with inordinate self-love when we encounter it is to remind people that there is other love available to them, that the love of God for them is purer and more enduring than the self-absorption they've so often settled for. You don't cure a pandemic of narcissism by quarantine; you cure it with love, and lots of it.

I’m the Governor! I’m Important, Yo!

Pardon my long post, but I'm feeling a bit heady. Illinois is a heady place these days, after all: the Bears may make the playoffs, the junior U.S. senator is about to become president, and the governor is about to be impeached and imprisoned. The 2016 Olympics are a possibility here that is strengthened by our favorite son ascending to the presidency but weakened by our chief executive allegedly conducting a political crime spree.

I’m fascinated by the governor’s story. He’s been in view here far longer than President-Elect Obama, to be honest, and his own presidential aspirations have never been far below the surface. Senator John McCain, the “maverick” reformer cum failed presidential candidate, told David Letterman that Governor Blagojevich once told him that he considered himself a reformer like McCain, thanking him for being a political role model. McCain and Letterman shared a laugh over those comments, absurd as they sound alongside transcripts of foul-mouthed shakedowns from the governor’s office.

The conversation about Governor Blagojevich has shifted, at least temporarily, to the question of his mental health. People think he must have been crazy to conduct so brazen a campaign as the one to sell a senate seat and force the firing of critical journalists. The mental health community, however, is stopping short of calling the governor psychotic; instead, they’re calling him a narcissist.

Dr. Daniela Schreirer is a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and she does not see any sign of mental illness in the public Blagojevich, but believes he does have sociopathic traits.
"We're just talking about traits. We're not talking about full-blown diagnosis. But certainly, there's the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of thinking I am superior. I can do whatever I want. I am not going to be caught," Schreirer said.

Blagojevich was, at one time, a rising star. He achieved office initially by being charming and self-deprecating; an advertising campaign consisted of everyday Illinoisans struggling to pronounce his last name but admiring his qualifications and energy. He eventually became a U.S. Representative and made a name for himself by helping to negotiate the release of three American soldiers, who were being detained in Yugoslavia under dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Three years later he was running for governor, but the presidency was on his mind. In an ad that cemented his reputation in my mind as a twerp, he had grade-school students quiz him about American presidents: “Sixteenth president?” “Abraham Lincoln! . . .” Ostensibly about his commitment to education, the ad told me that he viewed the governorship as a stepping stone to his true destiny as president of the United States. And yet he spoke clearly, candidly and winsomely with interviewers, among other things stating with enthusiasm that he and his family “love Jesus.” This at the time was one of the most plainspoken, unambiguous comments on personal faith I'd heard from a candidate who wasn't in the pocket of the religious right. So while I didn’t vote for him (remember, I thought he was a twerp), I had hopes that his tenure as governor would be marked by policies that reflected his love for Jesus—just and compassionate programs, ethical policies and practices.

Blagojevich became governor in what might be considered the easiest campaign ever: the current Republican governor, George Ryan, was on notice that he’d be facing trial after his term ended, and the Republican candidate to replace him shared the same last name: Jim Ryan, no relation. For the second time in his career, Blagojevich’s last name carried him into office. Four years later the Illinois Republican party still couldn’t get its act together; State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka was the only Republican holding statewide office, and when she ran against the governor on the argument that he had failed both to manage the state’s economy and to fight corruption, one video of her dancing with former Governor Ryan put an end to her chances to unseat Blagojevich. He made Elvis jokes about being “All Shook Up” over his victory and settled into his second term.

The governor’s second term has been characterized mainly by gridlock. It seems that he’s systematically alienated everyone in state government, such that the legislature and the Chicago Transit Authority, among other institutions, faced near-implosion while he sat in the bleachers enjoying hockey games. Some tried to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of making it legal to recall his position; others spoke explicitly and frequently about his grandstanding and bullheadedness.

Barack Obama, it’s presumed, frustrated Blagojevich’s career plans by taking the national spotlight in 2004's Democratic National Convention and launching an ultimately successful presidential campaign in 2007. This was to be Blagojevich’s year, if you believe the scuttlebutt, but public and peer opinion had turned against him, so that by election day 2008 he had, among his liabilities, a federal investigation into his office and a devastatingly negative reputation among his constituents, and as almost his only asset, a recently vacated senate seat.

I feel bad for Rod Blagojevich. That’s a relatively new feeling for me; I’ve typically dismissed him as a mere worshiper of “the characteristically American bitch goddess of Success,” as Mark Stritcherz put it in America magazine. But Blagojevich is merely the most recent and most pronounced example of the pervasive streak of narcissism, with its attendant sense of entitlement and invulnerability, that runs through our culture and, I think, every human heart.

Blagojevich is, in that respect, this year’s Gary Hart, who dared reporters to follow him in their suspicions of his infidelity, and who resigned his own presidential campaign when they did exactly that and caught him in an affair. Blagojevich is this year’s Richard Nixon, who publicly told onlookers “I am not a crook” but who privately and obscenely violated the law on tape. He’s this year’s Ananias, who made a grand public gesture in donating his wealth to the early church but who was revealed to be just another poser with a wicked heart. He's this year’s Cain, who killed his brother and then stared down God with a brazen dismissal of the accusation: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He's this year's me, and all the mes here in Me-Ville.

Stritcherz goes on to lament the Me-Ville we find ourselves in, a world effectively incapable of policing itself or aspiring to self-sacrifice toward the greater good, by describing the world we've fallen short of:

In a morally and spiritually robust society, institutions identify such characters as rascals and discipline them accordingly; they can separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I paraphrase the apostle Paul: Who will rescue us from this city of death? Thanks be to God who, if we dare follow, will deliver us from Me-Ville, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Shameless Stocking Stuffer Solicitation

To be an author in the third millennium is to be a shameless self-promoter, a crass hawker of wares; consequently, I have selfliness* to promote and wares to hawk. So let me humbly remind you that Deliver Us from Me-Ville makes a fine, inexpensive Christmas gift!

Nothing says "Merry Christmas!" quite like a book in a decorative stocking, if I do say so myself; I have a Batman(tm) Christmas stocking hung on my office bulletin board with care, and the copy of Deliver Us from Me-Ville sticking out of it really adds to the ambiance. After all, nothing keeps Christ in Christmas quite like a book which presumes that all of society--including the people on your gift list--is hopelessly narcissistic.

To those of you who are even now muttering, "Put a sock in it, Dave!" I respond in true humility: put it in your sock.**

Happy holidays,
Dave Zimmerman,
author, Deliver Us from Me-Ville

*A word coined by a kid in my church. I like it; it's clever.
**The one hung by your chimney with care.

Tyranarchy

A kid from my church ditched school this week. He told me about it on Facebook. In his mind, for reasons I won't bother to go into, it was entirely justified; I, on the other hand, was dumbstruck. I never had such moxie when I was in high school.

We got to talking about rules and regimens and whatnot, and because this particular kid has a particularly sharp wit and thoughtful streak, we came up with a new system of government that honors both his fondness of anarchy--a state of no oppression, or something like that--and his and my and, let's face it, all our desires to reign supreme over our own existence. We each have this shadow streak in which we want to be in charge and yet we just want everyone to get along. I think our epiphany came when my friend said something like "If I were in charge, nobody would be in charge."

We named our new system tyranarchism and defined it as a paradoxical form of government accommodating a universal desire for tyrannical rule without consequence; an anarchy in which everyone, from a genius like Barack Obama to a weirdo like Tyra Banks, rules his or her own empire of one.

I recently rewatched the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which may, come to think of it, actually be an experiment in tyranarchy. And Ferris reminds me, and each one of us, even as he launches his own tyranarchistic campaign, that systems ultimately collapse on themselves in a paradoxical comment that does just that:

Isms in my opinion are not good. A person shouldn’t believe in an ism; he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: "I don’t believe in Beatles; I just believe in me." Good point there; after all, he was the Walrus.

Or we could read the second half of the book of Judges, which bookends tales of horrible, disastrous self-government with the simple, tyranarchist refrain: "In those days there was no king; everyone did as he saw fit." Good point there; after all, it's the Bible.

Me-Ville

My forthcoming book now has a title--Deliver Us from Me-Ville, which I like very much--and a cover, which I like very much and will post here when I get a final JPG from my publisher, Cook Communications. Suddenly it all feels real to me, and I am beset with a real anxiety. All my neuroses (or at least more neuroses than are appropriate for one person to have) come into play in the production of a book.

I have performance anxiety: what if my editor, Andrea Christian, whom I respect and feel a great debt toward, hates the draft? What if she writes back and tells me that the draft is so bad that she can't edit it into publishable form and thus demands that I (a) start from scratch or (b) give back the advance money (which I've [c] already spent).

I have social anxiety: I'm asking friends and colleagues to review and potentially endorse the book. What if they don't like it? How will our relationship be affected? I tell stories from my own experience in the book; what if friends or family misinterpret my meaning in how I tell a story? How will our relationship be affected? And eventually, I hope, the book will be reviewed in various media outlets. What if they don't like it? Then the book (and, by extension, I) am publicly and broadly known as that guy who wrote that bad book.

I have ethical anxiety: Am I overstepping professional boundaries by contacting people I've met through my work to support a book I'm not even publishing through my employer? Am I coercing people who want to maintain a good working relationship with me? Is it really OK that I'm publishing with Cook instead of with InterVarsity Press, or have I transgressed some boundary of loyalty in the minds of my coworkers?

I have evangelical anxiety: I talk about Jesus in this book a lot. I mean a lot. Is that going to make people uncomfortable? Have I inadvertently confessed heresies I'm not even aware of? Have I taken a "holier-than-thou" posture that I don't even recognize? Is this book a fair representation of the faith I profess?

I could go on, but my heart rate is way up. And it hasn't slipped past me that in declaring myself an expert on narcissism, I am showing myself to be highly vulnerable to narcissistic tendencies.

The final title of this book was not the first title: the first title was Escape from Superbia, a play on some language from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together and a reference to one of the seven deadly sins recognized by the church from antiquity. Apparently, Latin words in English book titles don't fly, so we went with Me-Ville. The new title is meant to evoke the Lord's Prayer--not, as some people have mentioned, Dr. Seuss. I like the final title more and more as I reflect on it, because more and more I see how every word tells.

"Me-Ville," I suggest, is the culture we inhabit, a contention common to many social psychologists. We live in an age and a context where looking out for number one is a virtue, and we are regularly exhorted to be so virtuous.

"Us" is a reminder that all of us are individually and collectively shaped by this culture, and that despite the privatizing, isolationist tendencies of the age, we're all in this together.

"Deliver" evokes one of the great glories of God, who delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, only to set them on a long and complicated journey of self-discovery to a promised destination. He similarly delivered individuals and families and cities and ethnic groups from wrongs being done to them, and drew them out of the traps of self-serving narcissism that they invariably got themselves into. Most emphatically, God delivered the world from evil by virtue of the death and resurrection of his Son, who called people to follow him into their own journey of self-discovery toward a promised destination.

"From" is a preposition. You have to have it.

I end the book as I'll end this post, with a brief reflection on the Lord's Prayer. The two stanzas are held in tension with one another. The first is a self-forgetting paeon of praise to our Father in Heaven, whose name is hallowed and whose kingdom is forthcoming, whose will is unflinchingly good. The second is self-absorbed, concerned with mundane, daily needs, emotional well-being and an ultimate sense of security. It ends in a reminder of the journey that God has us on:

Lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

The later imposition of another phrase swings the pendulum back and bookends the prayer in the goodness and power of God:

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours
Now and forever.

I take solace in the words of that prayer, and my anxieties are eased--not fully, not even finally, but enough to remind myself that God is king even over my narcissistic, anxious self, and he delivers me, and he leads me, and he restores my soul. Not bad.