Sociology

anomie as relative to social strata
Anomies are a relative concept. Different groups in society will have different limits, different goals and different expectations. The group with the greatest immunity to anomie is impoverished people, especially for people who have been poor all of their lives. This is because poverty teaches one to live within their means. Wealthy people, on the other hand, are more prone to anomie because as Durkheim puts it, wealthy people have nothing above them no limits, no standards and no ceiling.

Durkheim also mentions that the less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears. These limits, in the form of norm and expectations, vary by social strata. People are assigned different expectations. Age, for instance, is an important social strata. When youre younger, you have more limits over yourself. Anomie can be a chronic condition among younger people because the youth are extremely enthusiastic, extremely desirous and yet society puts greater limit on that population.

Social limits are neither rigid nor absolute. Overtime, they can change dramatically. For instance, in the 1950s, sexual inequality created very low expectations for women. Society imposed very strict limits over what women were able to achieve in society. Most had to settle for being happy staying at home and raising children. So women were confined to the domestic route by society. These were the limits imposed over womens desires and expectations. Today, most women would suffer extreme anomie if society would impose those limits.

Most groups demanding equal rights and privileges or demanding social change are suffering from anomie because their expectations and desires are greater than their opportunity to fulfill these expectations. At one time a group might have been content with their inequality or used to it and are able to live with it but overtime their expectations grow and they demand more. For instance, in 1920, many African-Americans have resigned themselves to the Jim Crow system but by 1940 and 1950, they were not going to take it anymore. Another example can be seen in the labor movement of the United States. Workers came to believe they deserved more a living wage and a larger license supply. They were suffering from anomie. They were frustrated at their treatment and their low wages because they had higher expectations. Today, workers are frustrated because they are not able to live up to the American standard of living.

economic sources
There are two ways to alleviate anomie. If youre suffering because you think youre falling short of your goals and expectations then you need to bring those goals down and bring them more in alignment with your needs. Or you need to change the system so that you can have new opportunities to meet those expectations. But when you resign yourself to lower standards, that is called fatalism. In any case, to avoid anomie people should not desire more than they could legitimately hope for. This hierarchy of expectations and rewards operates most clearly in the economic level of occupations. For each occupation, society assigns a certain reward and a level of compensation. For those occupations that perform the most vital functions of society the rewards are the greatest. These individuals can form high expectations because society affords them the opportunity to achieve those career aspirations. There could be a considerable disappointment when everybody rushes to these occupations because of the reward.

An obvious source of anomie is sudden downward mobility when individuals are no longer able to afford their customary standard of living and refuse to suffer the shame of downward mobility. For example, any setback in our career, like a demotion, can be devastating because we place a lot of value on career in our society. The less obvious source of anomie is sudden upward mobility. With wealth, economic expectations find no limits because youre able to use your money to overcome social limits. This sense of unlimited aspirations and appetites can leave a person aimless and out of control. The rich can become lost in their endless desires and ambitions. They become accustomed to lavish lifestyle and extravagant spending and can actually develop a sense of relative deprivation if they have to suffer any setback in their lifestyle. For Durkheim, life loses its purpose without limits and wealth destroys purpose by removing all limits. This can become a crisis for a lot of rich people. Theyve reached the top, they have all the money in the world, they have all the success in the world and nothings left. So they have to find a way to create new meaning. That is why a lot of these rich people become philanthropists.

Now Durkheim, like Marx, was concerned about the rise of industrial capitalism and all these wealth it was creating. The laissez faire free market is removing social limits. The deregulation of business and industry from their traditional religious and government constraints has unleashed the desires of capitalists. With the church and the state subordinated, capitalists now find no limits to the maximization of their profits or their private wealth. There is no longer any moral prohibition on wealth accumulation. Gross economic inequality is no longer seen as a moral problem. Those social regulations and moral prohibitions have been removed for the wealthy in the modern age. The moral prohibitions against unbridled greed have been removed. Greed is no longer a sin. Its no longer seen as obscene or decadent.

Marx felt that growing exploitation and economic inequality will necessarily lead to growing resembling hostility among workers. It is unavoidable. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer and the poor would rise up as a result of this exploitation. Durkheim said that thats not necessarily true. The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer and the poor will just accept it. They will just resign themselves and can get used to it.

In Durkheims point of view, perhaps the most revolutionary group is the middle class. As large segments of the middle class are not able to achieve their expectations, they will be disappointed and this disappointment will lead to some sort of movement or revolutionary situation. History shows that the middle class moves to the right wing and follows more of a Fascist route when they get upset or frustrated and will likely scapegoat other groups in society for their own woes.

Bellah et al. on the therapeutic personality
American character types Biblical, Republican, Utilitarian, Expressive

Robert Bellah and his co-authors claim that the early American character was a mix of four different types biblical, republican, utilitarian and expressive traditions.

The biblical character is the oldest and descends from the colonial times. The biblical tradition values the individuals obligation to the community. An individual has a collective spirit that makes him willing to sacrifice his own self-interest for the greater good of the community. For instance, volunteerism would be a reflection of biblical values. Your religious commitment to God will be expressed in your moral commitment to each other. Religious commitment to God is express in ones moral commitment to others. So thats one dimension of the biblical character.

The second dimension is the Republican tradition. This is not the Republican party, this is the Republican ethos. This tradition stems from the Enlightenment. It was embodied by our founding fathers who valued liberty, equality, individual freedom and democracy. One person that could personify this principle is Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes, this Republican tradition is also called the Jeffersonian tradition. But this Jefferson tradition or Republican tradition, even though it valued individual freedom, it did recognize there were limits. Freedom is not free. That with rights come responsibilities. What Jefferson meant by freedom was not your freedom to withdraw from society but your freedom to participate or to become engaged in government. Thats why the constitution does not have any guarantee or proxy. Theres nothing in the constitution about the freedom to be left alone or any protection of your privacy. The Republicans would think that thinking of liberty as being synonymous to privacy is a perversion of liberty.

Utilitarianism or utilitarian individualism has roots in Europe but it was personified in America by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, like Jefferson realized that this calculating and enterprising individual could only pursue his self-interests in a society where individuals practiced self-control. Utilitarianism values the maximization of individual interests but not at the expense of others.

The most individualistic approach to life is expressive individualism. Expressive individualism was born in the transcendental philosophy of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and to some extent Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalism elevates the individual above all constraints. This is why its the most individualistic. Whitmans poetry and Thoreaus essays on civil disobedience celebrate the individual and Bellah argues that this individualistic tradition is actually compatible with Republicanism. It doesnt necessarily reject community. Its just that the individual should be free to participate according to their own free will. Thoreau and Emerson only opposed authority when it forced individuals to conform. They were against mindless or coerced conformity.

Triumph of utilitarian and expressive types embodied  by corporate manager and therapist

While none of these four streams of thought advocate an attitude of unlimited self-interest, the idea of rational, isolated self-interested individual nevertheless became the dominant theme of the 19th century. Bellah identified Alexis de Tocqueville as the most important critic of his radical individualism. In many ways, Tocqueville was very impressed by American culture and American government and personality but he was a critic of American radical individualism. He feared that the narrow-minded pursuit of private wealth was destroying the collective mores on which American democracy was built. He saw that these four types were increasingly coming into conflict with each other and that utilitarian individualism was starting to undermine American biblical and Republican traditions. He worried that the growth of the industry and prosperity encouraged people to surrender their civic responsibilities. And as they became wealthier and became more comfortable, they would lose their Republican vigilance or their spirit of engagement and community participation. Bellah believes that Tocquevilles darkest prophecies have come to pass. Americans by the late 20th century have lost a good deal of their biblical and republican tradition. With the development of industrial and corporate capitalism in the 19th and 20th century, the local community institutions that sustained self-government were displaced by large anonymous cities. Urbanization has also contributed to the decline of these republican and biblical traditions. The mores that attach these people to moral commitments are the habits of the heart. These habits were most valued by the republican and biblical traditions and Bellah fears that were losing them as Americans. Not only do we have fewer of these ties in this contemporary society but the few we do have are weak. In terms of culture, the contemporary individual finds less and less meaning and purpose in communal life. The individual is no longer anchored in the community or defines him or herself by social roles. Biblical and republican moral traditions are unsuited to life in large, anonymous, multicultural urban settings. These traditions havent survived industrialization and urbanization. There was a balance in the 19th century between all four of these but as biblical and republican traditions weaken and fade away, expressive and utilitarian traditions become dominant. The individual is now free to make money and maximize his or her pleasure without countervailing civic responsibilities or moral obligations. Our individualism today is no longer grounded in the community. People have more freedom but with less purpose.

The modern character type that embodies utilitarian individualism in the public realm is the corporate manager. Within the bureaucratic organization of the corporation, the manager has been the most zealot disciple of utilitarian individualism. Managers need to maximize profitability of the firm by maximizing the efficiency of workers. To the managerial perspective, workers are merely costs of production that are subject to the impersonal laws of supply and demand. Managers are retained by the board of directors only as long as they increase profits and they only agree to stay as long as they receive sufficient monetary compensation.

Expressive individualism is personified or embodied by the therapist. Both utilitarian and expressive individualism are concerned with maximizing self-interest. But the measure of self-interest for the manager is quantified as money. The therapist measure of self-interest is the more subjective criterion of personal happiness. From the therapeutic view, the goal of relationships is always self-interest. The individual comes first in a relationship and the individuals happiness always takes precedence over the welfare of the relationship. Being too giving, too dependent or too committed to someone else can threaten the freedom and identity of the self. Needing others to feel okay is the fundamental malady that therapy seeks to cure. Sacrifice and dependency are dirty words in therapy. If youre sacrificing in a relationship, if youre becoming dependent in a relationship then you have risk of losing yourself. Thats a bad thing from this therapeutic point of view. From the therapeutic perspective, mutual selfishness is essential to love. Therapeutic marriage rejects all cultural traditions because culture is a one side fits all. A reflection of this therapeutic approach would be people who for instance could not accept the traditional vows of marriage. They wrote their own vows, thus making their own standards for their own relationship.

Finding Oneself by leaving home  church
The object of family is to fulfill personal needs. If your family life does not personally satisfy and does not allow you to be yourself then you can opt out. Bellah and his co-authors are worried about the family becoming less of a moral community, and more of a lifestyle enclave. According to the authors, the therapeutic attitude deprives the individual of the belief that their love and marriage is part of something greater than each partners personal interests and desires. For the therapeutic point of view, love and marriage have no higher moral authority that commands the couple loyalty. The relationship is not grounded in any transcendent moral order. Love and marriage are essentially just contractual obligations based on negotiation between individuals acting on their own self-interest. Feeling becomes more important than belief. Feelings are a weak basis of a relationship because theyre self-leading and capricious. Belief is an enduring, strong basis of a relationship. Even when your feelings for somebody are not strong and they change, your belief can sustain your relationship when your feelings are hurt. The authors are getting concerned that more and more people are basing their relationships exclusively on feelings and that is why so many relationships fail. Our modern obsession of sex and money are manifestations of this therapeutic attitude. Sex is all about feeling, about a needy gratification. The authors dont believe you could sustain a relationship on sex because sex and money allow us to quantify the cost and benefit in a relationship. Judging the worth of a relationship with the cost-benefit analysis equation tends to cheapen the relationship when you try to quantify it or reduce it to something like a market equation or a contract.

Bellah and his co-authors think that its this therapeutic mentality that is pushing up the divorce rate. You dont even have to believe in God to accept the biblical tradition. You just have to think that your relationship has some moral basis to it. That the two of you are more important than each of you. That this union of two people is more important than the personal happiness of each person. And that you can derive deep important meaning more from that union than you can from your own individual interest.

Personality Types
The Therapeutic Personality (Habits of the Heart)
Ascendancy of utilitarian  expressive individualism (the manager therapist)
The authors recognized that the US has four cultural traditions biblical, republican, expressive and utilitarian. The community traditions are the republican and biblical. The expressive and utilitarian traditions represent our individualistic traditions. In the early part of our history, these traditions were balanced. Any time the individual traditions become too greedy or selfish, the community traditions would bring them back in. The community traditions were not totalitarian or too oppressive because we have these offsetting individualistic traditions. However in the 20th century, they argue that the balance has been tilted in the favor of expressive and utilitarian individualism. Our community traditions are weakening. The embodiment of the 20th century utilitarianism is seen in a corporate manager. The goal of the utilitarian individual is to express his self-interest. The other side of individualism is expressive individualism which is studied in the context of therapy. The therapist epitomizes expressive individualism which is not precisely quantified in terms of money but is measured in terms of personal happiness. The goal of the expressive individual is to maximize his happiness. But all happiness is based on feeling and the authors are critical of feeling. They dont think feeling is a strong basis of relationships because feeling is shallow, superficial and ever-changing. And yet therapists always advise to follow your feelings. There had been an ascendancy of feeling over belief. Strong, deeply held beliefs are what community is grounded in. You have conviction with belief but with feelings, theyre fickle and unstable. A marriage based on feeling is a weak marriage and therefore explains the rising divorce rates. From a community perspective, married individuals should be seen as one or as a union. Their destiny and faith have enjoined. This is an old-fashioned view of marriage.

Sacrifice and commitment are dirty words from the therapists point of view. If youre going to sacrifice, you will lose yourself in the relationship. Therapy warns you against losing yourself in a relationship.

Finding Oneself
Leaving Home
The quest of finding ones self in America is predicated on the value of self-reliance. The first and most significant phase of this quest is leaving home. Leaving home is a uniquely American preoccupation that reflects our cultural value on separation and individualism. American teenagers cant wait to get out on their own and make their own way or living. Part of adolescence is an urgency to break away from parental dependency and supervision. Separation from home, while desired, can be difficult because people still get homesick. But the really frightening prospect for both the parent and the child is the child never leaving home. The conception and expectation of self-reliance actually ties us together with our families. Leaving the home is a common understanding that you have with your parents. Much of the socialization process is about preparing kids to live on their own. So as children age, parents are supposed to teach them to have increasing responsibility or to have so-called life skills. If children continue to live at home past their twenties, the parents are regarded as failures in parenting. Our very notion of adulthood and maturity are defined by self-reliance. If you cant live on your own and take care of yourself, youre immature. It is an indication that youre not taking responsibility.

Leaving Church
Finding oneself in America has also meant leaving church. Whats important from this concept of self-reliance is to arrive at your own sect of Christianity or spirituality along your own path. Under expressive individualism, belief is not a question of belonging or serving. Belief is a question of discovering the self outside of community. The struggle of self-reliance and self-meaning is guided by the myth that our deepest and most genuine beliefs are formed in the isolation of our private selves. Old religions are weakening and the fastest growing faith is the one which celebrates individualism. People are turning away from authoritarian religions and turning to egalitarian religions where they can have a say over their own destiny and salvation.

Work as self-realization therapy or profit
Work has become an extension of the self. Through work, you can make something of yourself. The notion that your work is a calling is more in line with the biblical tradition that youve been called to serve others. Thats not the meaning of work today. People no longer understand the meaning of their work in the context of the larger community, let alone in the religious context. Work is about self-interest and the maximization of personal wealth, status and calling. Success in the career today is completely demised from community service.

Lifestyle enclaves v. community
Lifestyle enclaves are cult-like groups of people that share similar personalities and would come together periodically to share something of similar interest to all of them. Theyre not communities because they dont share enough. In lifestyle enclaves, you can drop out of at anytime but in communities you have deeper roots. Commitment in lifestyle enclaves is weak. Lifestyle enclave is actually changing traditional communities. For instance, marriage is becoming more of a lifestyle enclave when you find your mate somebody you can relate to only in terms of lifestyle. You share common leisure activities, tastes, preferences, etc.

Narcissistic Personality
Social Influence on Narcissism
Narcissistic traits are well-suited to modern institutional life-narcissism has become the favored personality

The shallow values of narcissists and their fear of intimate personal relations suit him or her well to the impersonal relations of corporate and government bureaucracies. The narcissist can become a very effective and successful bureaucrat because the bureaucracy requires impersonality or detachment or shallowness. The increasing size of organizations like universities and corporations create greater anonymity and reduce individuals to self-interest and competition. The narcissist is receiving positive feedback from the social order yet he feels empty. You see a lot of successful people in therapy. The problem is that therapy becomes less and less effective since most of the therapeutic methods employed by therapists are hyper-individualistic. They only exacerbate narcissistic tendencies. The appearance of normalcy and success overshadows the symptoms of pathology. Narcissists seem like regular people. They are not crazed nor do they dont appear to be sick or insane. They dont appear to be antisocial and can be very charming and sociable. They function well in society.

Corporate gamesmanship
Todays successful corporate leader is no longer a company man or woman who shows loyalty to the firm. Corporate success is now a game that requires the individual to play other people in the organization against each other. The institutional setting that extols individual career success over team work and cooperation is a fertile ground for the narcissistic personality. The narcissist is very political, very shrewd and knows how to play work politics very well. They have the ability to manipulate people and play the role of the corporate gamesman very well. The corporate gamesman is ready to sell the company down the river if another company gives him or her a better offer. And they would already be scheming to take their clients with them in their new job. Of course the corporation will only have its self to blame. It developed this corporate culture that encourages narcissism. The corporation has furthered this culture of individual opportunism by constant outsourcing and downsizing, by making job security a thing of the past. In the end, its not the worker job performance that counts for the corporate manager, what matters is style, panache and the skill of manipulating others.

The cultures of psychiatry and self-help
The social construction of endless diagnoses means that there are more ways for us to deviate from normal physical and mental health. With all these new diagnoses and the medicalisation of behavior, there are so many more ways to deviate from normal mental health. This feeds into the narcissist hypochondria. Theyre very sensitive to their mental health. They can think about new ways to be sick. Every bad sensation that they have, the hypochondriac would want to put a label on it and want a specific definition. They want a diagnosis for this. They need it. Theres an irrational preoccupation with health. This is a symptom of narcissism.

Bourgeois and Bohemian personality types converge into Bobos (Boboism)
The author of Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks looks at two cultural traditions in the United States, the bourgeois cultural tradition and a bohemian cultural tradition. For most of our history, the two remain depart. You couldnt be both. But only in the late 20th century did they merge and become this sort of high-breed culture known as Boboism. Its only with the ascendancy of a class of educated elites in the 1960s that these rival cultures have become consolidated into a single Bobo culture. The baby boomers, the largest generation in American history by far, are these people born between 1946 and 1960.

The Bourgeois strain in American culture is materialistic and pragmatic. It values refined taste and genteel manners. The snobby elite of the ruling class or the ruling elite comes to mind. They were very status-oriented. In contrast, Bohemian culture is artistic, romantic, earthy, spontaneous and anti-establishment. This is somewhat synonymous with expressive individualism.

The boomers themselves were raised mostly by Bourgeois parents in the post war era but in the 1960s, they embraced this sort of hippie culture which had a lot of Bohemian aspects to it. It borrowed a lot from the beat generation from the fifties. They preceded the hippies. Whereas the Bourgeois conspired to differentiate themselves through conspicuous consumption, the Bohemians strived to differentiate themselves to conspicuous consumption of material goods. Non-conformity to conventional norms. Bohemians do whatever comes natural, whatever feels right. Theyre more spontaneous. The bohemian rejects pay materialism and mindless social climbing. Its a blatant, explicit rejection of the Bourgeois lifestyle. But as a concrete culture, Bohemian lifestyle didnt really take root in the United States until after World War I. Ernest Hemingway is considered one of the young Bohemians in the 1920s. Artists, authors, dancers are the Bohemians of the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them left the United States to go live in France, because they thought the United States middle class Bourgeois culture was so stifling that they had to go somewhere else where they could express themselves more freely. The next incarnation of the Bohemian culture would be the beats in the 1950s. The final and most famous or infamous wave of Bohemians were the hippies of the 1960s. Sex, drugs, rock and roll became their slogan.