How the Yes Man Learned to Say No
By ALAN EHRENHALT
Washington
MOST of us know what conformity is. We know what individualism is. We understand at some level that civilized society is based on a continuing tension between them. And many of us look back at the second half of the 20th century as a drama about that tension: the conformist, white-bread 1950s yielding to the individualist rebellion of the 1960s, and to the eccentricities of the baby boom generation that dominated the two decades after that.
These things are conventional wisdom now, but they didn’t always seem so obvious. Most Americans of the 1950s didn’t even think of themselves as conformists — until William H. Whyte Jr. came along, 50 years ago today, and explained it all to them in “The Organization Man.”
Whyte didn’t invent the terms he used — “organization man,” “yes man,” “togetherness” — but he assembled them into a hugely influential package that ended up not only defining a decade but framing a debate that has gone on ever since. “The Organization Man” is worth thinking about on its 50th birthday — both for the insights it provided about its time and for a lesson into the pitfalls of predicting the future.
Whyte’s book wasn’t an instant sensation. The sociologist C. Wright Mills panned it in The Times. But within six months, the book’s ideas were embedded in the intellectual currency of academia, journalism and the day-to-day conversation of educated people.
By the following spring, it was hard to find a college commencement speaker who didn’t devote his remarks to the conformity crisis and its implications. “We hope for nonconformists among you,” the theologian Paul Tillich told one audience of graduates, “for your sake, for the sake of the nation, and for the sake of humanity.” The president of Yale, A. Whitney Griswold, talked about a “nightmare picture of a whole nation of yes men.” One way or another, virtually every social critic in America in that season of peace and prosperity felt compelled to refer to the troubling diagnosis of William H. Whyte.
The ideas themselves grew out of reporting projects that Whyte had undertaken in the previous two years for Fortune magazine. One of them was an examination of the values of middle and senior managers in major corporations. The other was a prolonged period of field work in Park Forest, Ill., a brand-new, split-level suburb in which some of those managers were raising their families.
Wherever he looked, Whyte found what he called the “social ethic,” a set of values that “makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual.” In the boardroom, in the office cubicles, in the Park Forest cul-de-sacs, in the schools and churches, the young adults of the 1950s were being trained to think and act in unison, to absorb the values of the team, to suppress any truly innovative ideas in the interest of harmony. “In our attention to making organization work,” he complained, “we have come close to deifying it.”
Not only that, but the American middle class was transmitting the ethic of mindless conformity to the children it was raising. When parents in Park Forest were asked what they thought the schools there should emphasize, most responded that schools should teach children “how to get along with other people.”
One might spend an interesting evening debating whether Whyte really captured midcentury American culture with the precision that most critics applauded — or whether he simply defined it in terms so vivid that they achieved a status as intellectual dogma impervious to challenge.
What we can say with confidence half a century later is that Whyte got the future almost entirely wrong. He saw conformity and the social ethic as the values that would shape America — much to its detriment — for the remainder of the century. He urged his readers to fight the good fight against them, one by one — but without much hope that they would succeed.
At the time “The Organization Man” was published, the first wave of baby boomers was still in elementary school. A decade later, instead of absorbing the conformist lessons of their education, members of the youthful intellectual elite were beginning an individualist rebellion on almost every social front — against parents, against professors, against sexual restriction, against the idea of authority in general.
What seems clearest about “The Organization Man,” half a century after publication, is that it mistook the end of something for the beginning of something. If the “social ethic” really did dominate mid-’50s America — and there is plenty of evidence besides Whyte’s book to testify that it did — it was the last act in a long period of national cohesion. As the historian Warren Susman characterized it, Americans stuck together to fight the Depression; then to fight the Nazis; then simply because they were used to it; eventually they just got tired of sticking together. That is as succinct and persuasive an explanation of the social upheaval of the 1960s as I have ever heard. Whyte didn’t see it coming; but then it’s hard to imagine any way he could have seen it coming.
The first decade of the 21st century is now more than two-thirds over, and we are still waiting for a convincing explanation of what it is all about. It is the decade of terrorism, one might say — but really it isn’t: Except when we travel on airplanes, the threat of terrorism doesn’t determine the way we live our daily lives. It is the era of cellphones, BlackBerries and iPods, and we sense that these technologies are changing the nature of social interaction — but it seems too early to say exactly how.
It is a safe bet, though, that before too long, someone will write a book or an article or a novel, place a label on the time we are living in, and give us a debate topic for many years to come. If it is as sharp and eloquent as “The Organization Man,” it will tell us a great deal about where we are. It just won’t tell us much about where we are going.
Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine, is the author of “The United States of Ambition” and “The Lost City.”
Sunday, November 26, 2006
The Education of Robert Kennedy
By DAVID BROOKS
Emilio Estevez’s movie, “Bobby,” introduces the martyrdom of Robert Kennedy to another generation of Americans, but it was Robert’s reaction to his brother’s death that is really most instructive to the young.
Robert Kennedy was dining at home on Nov. 22, 1963, when J. Edgar Hoover called. “I have news for you,” Hoover began coldly. “The president’s been shot.” Kennedy turned away from his lunch companions, his hand to his mouth and his face twisted in pain.
In the ensuing months, he was devoured by grief. One of his biographers, Evan Thomas, writes: “He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt. His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother’s old clothes — an old blue topcoat, a tuxedo, a leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal — which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame.”
But during March 1964, he visited Bunny Mellon’s estate in Antigua, and spent the vacation in his room, reading a book Jackie Kennedy had given him, “The Greek Way,” by Edith Hamilton.
“The Greek Way” contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him. “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view,” Hamilton writes, “then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”
Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless “all the glory that was Greece” mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy’s life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls “a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.”
Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.
Hamilton is at her best describing the tragic sensibility, the strange mixture of doom and exaltation that marks Greek drama. It was based on the conviction that good grows out of bad, virtue out of hardship, and that wisdom is born in suffering. Kennedy memorized a passage from Aeschylus, which Hamilton quotes twice in her book:
“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy, recovering from his brother’s murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.
Kennedy underlined a passage of Hamilton’s book in which she summarizes the rippled nature of Greek optimism: “Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.” If they were doctors of the spirit, the Greeks’ specialty was to take grief and turn it into resolution.
The story of Kennedy’s grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the ’60s. He promoted many liberal policies but was never a member of a team since he drew strength from somewhere else.
And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today’s students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.
By DAVID BROOKS
Emilio Estevez’s movie, “Bobby,” introduces the martyrdom of Robert Kennedy to another generation of Americans, but it was Robert’s reaction to his brother’s death that is really most instructive to the young.
Robert Kennedy was dining at home on Nov. 22, 1963, when J. Edgar Hoover called. “I have news for you,” Hoover began coldly. “The president’s been shot.” Kennedy turned away from his lunch companions, his hand to his mouth and his face twisted in pain.
In the ensuing months, he was devoured by grief. One of his biographers, Evan Thomas, writes: “He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt. His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother’s old clothes — an old blue topcoat, a tuxedo, a leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal — which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame.”
But during March 1964, he visited Bunny Mellon’s estate in Antigua, and spent the vacation in his room, reading a book Jackie Kennedy had given him, “The Greek Way,” by Edith Hamilton.
“The Greek Way” contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him. “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view,” Hamilton writes, “then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”
Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless “all the glory that was Greece” mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy’s life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls “a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.”
Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.
Hamilton is at her best describing the tragic sensibility, the strange mixture of doom and exaltation that marks Greek drama. It was based on the conviction that good grows out of bad, virtue out of hardship, and that wisdom is born in suffering. Kennedy memorized a passage from Aeschylus, which Hamilton quotes twice in her book:
“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy, recovering from his brother’s murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.
Kennedy underlined a passage of Hamilton’s book in which she summarizes the rippled nature of Greek optimism: “Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.” If they were doctors of the spirit, the Greeks’ specialty was to take grief and turn it into resolution.
The story of Kennedy’s grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the ’60s. He promoted many liberal policies but was never a member of a team since he drew strength from somewhere else.
And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today’s students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
The Smile of Reason
By DAVID BROOKS
I’ve always blamed the University of Hawaii women’s volleyball team, though perhaps that’s not fair.
As I was finishing college, I was invited to Stanford with a small group of young people to discuss economics with Milton Friedman for a PBS series called “Tyranny of the Status Quo.” I was a socialist then and spent several weeks studying left-wing economic doctrine in order to rebut the great man.
On the afternoon of my final cram session, I found a chair by the hotel pool, but as I was mastering the high points of the Swedish regulatory regime, the Hawaii women’s volleyball team settled around me, sunning themselves and cavorting in the water. Distracted for some reason, I did not go on to crush Friedman in debate that afternoon.
The show consisted of me making some left-wing argument, Friedman demolishing it in roughly six to eight words, and then me sitting there with my mouth agape trying to think of what to say.
That night Friedman and his wife, Rose, took us out to dinner, and Milton pushed aside his plate of sweetbreads (which appalled me) and smilingly, clearly and engagingly, gave me a lesson in free market economics.
They say Voltaire glowed with the smile of reason, and Friedman did too. And while I never became a libertarian as he was, the encounter was one of the turning points in my life. It opened new ways of seeing the world and was an exhilarating demonstration of the power of ideas.
I don’t care what you think of his philosophy, Friedman’s trek from the intellectual wilderness to global influence is one of the most exhilarating exodus stories of our time. The man who was once scorned as a free market crank ended up delivering rapturously attended lectures in China.
He was proudest of his contributions to technical economics, but he also possessed that rarest of gifts, a practical imagination, and was a fountain of concrete policy ideas. During World War II, he helped draw up plans to withhold people’s income tax and then worked with mathematicians like Jack Wolfowitz (Paul’s father) to calculate how many pieces artillery shells should burst into to produce maximum damage.
In the ensuing years, he developed ideas like the volunteer army, the negative income tax (which evolved into the earned income tax credit), post office deregulation (which gave us FedEx), the flat tax and floating exchange rates.
He promoted these ideas with relentless clarity and brevity. In the mid-80s I had a fellowship at the Hoover Institution and I used to listen to the economists around Friedman as they talked over coffee. One afternoon I foolishly tried to make a point and one of the other economists stomped on me with a long, jargon-filled lecture. When he asked me to respond, my face turned red and I finally blurted out, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t understand what you said.”
Friedman roared with approving laughter. He believed in clear language, and as Samuel Brittan has noted, preferred the spoken to the written word.
His passing is sad for many reasons. One is that from the 1940s to the mid-1990s, American political life was shaped by a series of landmark books: “Witness,” “The Vital Center,” “Capitalism and Freedom,” “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” “Losing Ground,” “The Closing of the American Mind.” Then in the 1990s, those big books stopped coming. Now instead of books, we have blogs.
The big books stopped coming partly because the distinction between intellectual movements and political parties broke down. Friedman was never interested in partisan politics but was deeply engaged in policy. Today, team loyalty has taken over the wonk’s world, so there are invisible boundaries that mark politically useful, and therefore socially acceptable, thought.
His death is sad, too, because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete remedies to address this problem, if it is one.
I saw Friedman a few times over the past decade, and he would always bring up school vouchers, his unrealized idea. He still brimmed with his faith — which must have been there when he was a young boy — in average people, making their own decisions, running their own lives, and doing it pretty well.
By DAVID BROOKS
I’ve always blamed the University of Hawaii women’s volleyball team, though perhaps that’s not fair.
As I was finishing college, I was invited to Stanford with a small group of young people to discuss economics with Milton Friedman for a PBS series called “Tyranny of the Status Quo.” I was a socialist then and spent several weeks studying left-wing economic doctrine in order to rebut the great man.
On the afternoon of my final cram session, I found a chair by the hotel pool, but as I was mastering the high points of the Swedish regulatory regime, the Hawaii women’s volleyball team settled around me, sunning themselves and cavorting in the water. Distracted for some reason, I did not go on to crush Friedman in debate that afternoon.
The show consisted of me making some left-wing argument, Friedman demolishing it in roughly six to eight words, and then me sitting there with my mouth agape trying to think of what to say.
That night Friedman and his wife, Rose, took us out to dinner, and Milton pushed aside his plate of sweetbreads (which appalled me) and smilingly, clearly and engagingly, gave me a lesson in free market economics.
They say Voltaire glowed with the smile of reason, and Friedman did too. And while I never became a libertarian as he was, the encounter was one of the turning points in my life. It opened new ways of seeing the world and was an exhilarating demonstration of the power of ideas.
I don’t care what you think of his philosophy, Friedman’s trek from the intellectual wilderness to global influence is one of the most exhilarating exodus stories of our time. The man who was once scorned as a free market crank ended up delivering rapturously attended lectures in China.
He was proudest of his contributions to technical economics, but he also possessed that rarest of gifts, a practical imagination, and was a fountain of concrete policy ideas. During World War II, he helped draw up plans to withhold people’s income tax and then worked with mathematicians like Jack Wolfowitz (Paul’s father) to calculate how many pieces artillery shells should burst into to produce maximum damage.
In the ensuing years, he developed ideas like the volunteer army, the negative income tax (which evolved into the earned income tax credit), post office deregulation (which gave us FedEx), the flat tax and floating exchange rates.
He promoted these ideas with relentless clarity and brevity. In the mid-80s I had a fellowship at the Hoover Institution and I used to listen to the economists around Friedman as they talked over coffee. One afternoon I foolishly tried to make a point and one of the other economists stomped on me with a long, jargon-filled lecture. When he asked me to respond, my face turned red and I finally blurted out, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t understand what you said.”
Friedman roared with approving laughter. He believed in clear language, and as Samuel Brittan has noted, preferred the spoken to the written word.
His passing is sad for many reasons. One is that from the 1940s to the mid-1990s, American political life was shaped by a series of landmark books: “Witness,” “The Vital Center,” “Capitalism and Freedom,” “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” “Losing Ground,” “The Closing of the American Mind.” Then in the 1990s, those big books stopped coming. Now instead of books, we have blogs.
The big books stopped coming partly because the distinction between intellectual movements and political parties broke down. Friedman was never interested in partisan politics but was deeply engaged in policy. Today, team loyalty has taken over the wonk’s world, so there are invisible boundaries that mark politically useful, and therefore socially acceptable, thought.
His death is sad, too, because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete remedies to address this problem, if it is one.
I saw Friedman a few times over the past decade, and he would always bring up school vouchers, his unrealized idea. He still brimmed with his faith — which must have been there when he was a young boy — in average people, making their own decisions, running their own lives, and doing it pretty well.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
ProfTom’s Recent Favorite Readings
1. John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker
2. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life by Robert Kegan
3. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman
4. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Dan Goleman.
5. What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain
6. The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer
7. On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now in the Future Tense by David Brooks
8. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
9. The Future of Work by Thomas Malone
10. The Boundaryless Organization by Dave Ulrich
http://www.amazon.com/John-Kenneth-Galbraith-Politics-Economics/dp/0374281688/sr=8-1/qid=1163608399/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Over-Our-Heads-Mental-Demands/dp/0674445880/sr=8-1/qid=1163608556/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884/sr=1-3/qid=1163608639/ref=sr_1_3/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Intelligence-Science-Human-Relationships/dp/0553803522/sr=1-1/qid=1163608732/ref=sr_1_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/What-Best-College-Teachers-Do/dp/0674013255/sr=1-1/qid=1163608818/ref=sr_1_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/McDonaldization-Society-George-Ritzer/dp/0761988122/sr=1-1/qid=1163609074/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Drive-Always-Future-Tense/dp/0743227395/sr=1-1/qid=1163609145/ref=sr_1_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Assassination-Vacation-Sarah-Vowell/dp/0743260031/sr=1-1/qid=1163609270/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Work-Business-Organization-Management/dp/1591391253/sr=1-1/qid=1163609404/ref=sr_1_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Boundaryless-Organization-Breaking-Structure-Revised/dp/078795943X/sr=1-1/qid=1163609511/ref=sr_1_1/002-6590812-5212802?ie=UTF8&s=books
Bring in the Green Cat
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Chongming, China
I’ve been a regular visitor to China since 1990, and here’s what strikes me most: Each year that I’ve come here, China’s people seem to speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty.
Yes, you can now have amazingly frank talks with officials and journalists here. But when I walked out of my room the morning after I arrived in Shanghai, the air was so smoky — from the burning of farm fields after the harvest — that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire.
And that’s why, for the first time, it’s starting to feel to me like China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn’t radically change to greener, more sustainable modes of design, transport, production and power generation, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.
For some three decades now, China’s economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for the waste it pumps into its rivers and the air. When a country grows that fast, year after year, it can start to think that the laws of nature don’t apply to it.
Guess again. China has been doing the environmental equivalent of jumping from an airplane and thinking that it’s flying, argued Rob Watson, an expert on China’s environment who heads the green building services firm EcoTech International. “After you jump out of a plane, for about five miles you can actually feel like you’re flying,” he added. But then reality hits. “It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end, and China may be approaching that sudden stop. ... When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.”
China’s top leaders understand the crisis. But their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. In their view, political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth, and growth depends on China continuing to be the low-cost producer of everything — environment be damned.
But China can’t do what the West did: grow now, clean up later. Because the unprecedented pace and scale of its growth are going to make later too late. The China Daily reported this week that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land in China — one-tenth of the country’s total arable land — is now polluted, posing a “grave threat” to China’s food safety. More than half its rivers are also polluted, which is why less than 9 percent of “drinkable water” met government standards for bacteria in 243 rural supply stations recently tested. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage. No wonder some high-tech workers are starting to avoid China, because they don’t want to live in a dirty cloud.
Chinese officials fear that if they move to U.S.-level green production and environmental cleanup, “China will not be such a low-cost producer anymore, and that will affect jobs,” noted Dan Rosen, an expert on China’s economy and head of China Strategic Advisory. But what they are missing is that going green is not just a problem, but an opportunity. Pollution represents waste and inefficiency. Green companies are always more efficient, adds Mr. Watson, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. When U.S. companies went green, they consistently overestimated the costs and underestimated the savings.
The other day, I sailed with Mr. Rosen from Shanghai up the Yangtze Delta to Chongming Island, the world’s largest alluvial island. There, Shanghai is trying to expand, by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. When you see the parklands created there, or when you stand in the protected wetlands and watch the water buffalo lounging in the mud, while peasants collect crabs, you can almost believe that China can change course.
But then, off in the distance, you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and you wonder what will happen to all the green plans here when all the overloaded trucks and consumers start rushing in. If Chongming is just a green ornament attached to Shanghai, it will never survive. If it is a model for a whole new kind of development, it, and China, have a chance.
Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China’s economy: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice” — i.e., forget about communist ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore, said Mr. Rosen. “Now the cat better be green, otherwise it is going to die before it catches the mouse.”
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Chongming, China
I’ve been a regular visitor to China since 1990, and here’s what strikes me most: Each year that I’ve come here, China’s people seem to speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty.
Yes, you can now have amazingly frank talks with officials and journalists here. But when I walked out of my room the morning after I arrived in Shanghai, the air was so smoky — from the burning of farm fields after the harvest — that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire.
And that’s why, for the first time, it’s starting to feel to me like China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn’t radically change to greener, more sustainable modes of design, transport, production and power generation, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.
For some three decades now, China’s economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for the waste it pumps into its rivers and the air. When a country grows that fast, year after year, it can start to think that the laws of nature don’t apply to it.
Guess again. China has been doing the environmental equivalent of jumping from an airplane and thinking that it’s flying, argued Rob Watson, an expert on China’s environment who heads the green building services firm EcoTech International. “After you jump out of a plane, for about five miles you can actually feel like you’re flying,” he added. But then reality hits. “It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end, and China may be approaching that sudden stop. ... When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.”
China’s top leaders understand the crisis. But their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. In their view, political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth, and growth depends on China continuing to be the low-cost producer of everything — environment be damned.
But China can’t do what the West did: grow now, clean up later. Because the unprecedented pace and scale of its growth are going to make later too late. The China Daily reported this week that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land in China — one-tenth of the country’s total arable land — is now polluted, posing a “grave threat” to China’s food safety. More than half its rivers are also polluted, which is why less than 9 percent of “drinkable water” met government standards for bacteria in 243 rural supply stations recently tested. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage. No wonder some high-tech workers are starting to avoid China, because they don’t want to live in a dirty cloud.
Chinese officials fear that if they move to U.S.-level green production and environmental cleanup, “China will not be such a low-cost producer anymore, and that will affect jobs,” noted Dan Rosen, an expert on China’s economy and head of China Strategic Advisory. But what they are missing is that going green is not just a problem, but an opportunity. Pollution represents waste and inefficiency. Green companies are always more efficient, adds Mr. Watson, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. When U.S. companies went green, they consistently overestimated the costs and underestimated the savings.
The other day, I sailed with Mr. Rosen from Shanghai up the Yangtze Delta to Chongming Island, the world’s largest alluvial island. There, Shanghai is trying to expand, by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. When you see the parklands created there, or when you stand in the protected wetlands and watch the water buffalo lounging in the mud, while peasants collect crabs, you can almost believe that China can change course.
But then, off in the distance, you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and you wonder what will happen to all the green plans here when all the overloaded trucks and consumers start rushing in. If Chongming is just a green ornament attached to Shanghai, it will never survive. If it is a model for a whole new kind of development, it, and China, have a chance.
Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China’s economy: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice” — i.e., forget about communist ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore, said Mr. Rosen. “Now the cat better be green, otherwise it is going to die before it catches the mouse.”
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Too Close for Comfort
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Olympia, Wash.
EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”
I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.
A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.
In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.
The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.
St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”
From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.
The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.
By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.
The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.
But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.
“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”
And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.
Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.
As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.
The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.
Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedi- gree.
Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Olympia, Wash.
EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”
I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.
A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.
In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.
The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.
St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”
From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.
The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.
By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.
The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.
But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.
“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”
And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.
Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.
As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.
The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.
Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedi- gree.
Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Same Old Demons
By DAVID BROOKS
Policy makers are again considering fundamental changes in our Iraq policy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Kedourie’s essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.”
Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.
“Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine,” Kedourie wrote.
And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution.
Kedourie described “a country riven by obscure and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath.” He observed, “The collapse of the old order had awakened vast cupidities and revived venomous hatreds.”
In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”
The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”
At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.
The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option.
Today Iraq is in much worse shape. The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration. This latest descent was initiated by American blunders, but is exacerbated by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise for the common good, even in the face of self-immolation.
The core problem is the same one Kedourie identified decades ago. Iraq is teetering on the edge of futility. Perhaps a competent occupation could have preserved it as a coherent entity, but now the Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion.
Partitioning the country would be traumatic, so after the election it probably makes sense to make one last effort to hold the place together. Fire Donald Rumsfeld to signal a break with the past. Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad.
But if that does not restore order, if Iraqi ministries remain dysfunctional and the national institutions remain sectarian institutions in disguise, then surely it will be time to accede to reality. It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable — the clan, tribe or sect.
A muscular U.S. military presence will be more necessary than ever, to deter neighboring powers and contain bloodshed. And the goals will remain the same: to nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.
But the boundaries may have to change. The war was an attempt to lift a unified Iraq out of its awful history, but history has proved stubborn. It’s time to adjust the plans to reality.
By DAVID BROOKS
Policy makers are again considering fundamental changes in our Iraq policy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Kedourie’s essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.”
Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.
“Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine,” Kedourie wrote.
And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution.
Kedourie described “a country riven by obscure and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath.” He observed, “The collapse of the old order had awakened vast cupidities and revived venomous hatreds.”
In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”
The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”
At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.
The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option.
Today Iraq is in much worse shape. The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration. This latest descent was initiated by American blunders, but is exacerbated by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise for the common good, even in the face of self-immolation.
The core problem is the same one Kedourie identified decades ago. Iraq is teetering on the edge of futility. Perhaps a competent occupation could have preserved it as a coherent entity, but now the Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion.
Partitioning the country would be traumatic, so after the election it probably makes sense to make one last effort to hold the place together. Fire Donald Rumsfeld to signal a break with the past. Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad.
But if that does not restore order, if Iraqi ministries remain dysfunctional and the national institutions remain sectarian institutions in disguise, then surely it will be time to accede to reality. It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable — the clan, tribe or sect.
A muscular U.S. military presence will be more necessary than ever, to deter neighboring powers and contain bloodshed. And the goals will remain the same: to nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.
But the boundaries may have to change. The war was an attempt to lift a unified Iraq out of its awful history, but history has proved stubborn. It’s time to adjust the plans to reality.
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