Just how casual can our culture become? Very, it appears. And it seems to say something about aspirations--personal and social--as much as it does about social cohesiveness and national stability. I was reminded of this issue recently after returning to Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives. In a day and age in which you enter a classroom and cannot tell the difference between a college professor and his students, it is striking to look back a century or more and observe how desperately people strove for dignity and respect, most often through their attire.
Filthy and grimy as they might be, the subjects of Riis' photo history of the inhabitants of New York's tenements in the late 1880s clearly are looking upwards for their cultural markers and direction. That is, even at the lowest levels of society, the gentleman, in all his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class glory, remained the ideal. Simply look at this picture of "Jewtown", this blind beggar, or this family of artificial flower makers.
Perhaps the blind beggar is the most interesting of the three photographs. A blind man who nonetheless seeks the dignity and self respect of being considered an aspiring gentleman. It is rather reminiscent of another figure who would appear in American popular culture around thirty years later. For who else does that blind beggar resemble if not Charlie Chaplin's famous Tramp (pictured at the beginning of this entry). The Tramp's desperate attempt to acquire self respect and personal dignity, after all, is what provides the engine for much of Chaplin's comedy. And no doubt more than a few members of the working class audiences watching the Tramp could feel a direct relationship with that character.
Residents of those tenements and Chaplin's Tramp knew and felt the necessity for formality, whether in clothes, rules, or social order. All the appeals to anarchy or European style socialism eventually fell on deaf ears because inherent in these lower classes was a respect for hierarchy. How ironic that Chaplin, who often played with notions of revolution, would have within the very structure of his comedy a mechanism that worked against overthrowing the social order. And thus is it any wonder that most of the offspring of those who first watched and identified with the Tramp would assimilate so thoroughly into American social order?
But how different today it all is. Chaplin's Tramp seems like some uptight neurotic who just needs to be taught a little tolerance from Dr. Phil or Oprah. The one-time denizens of Jewtown, Little Italy, or Chinatown of a century ago are now treated like race-traitors or, alternatively, victims of cultural genocide. The opposite is in vogue. Not only are our workers' wages engaged in a "race to the bottom" with outsourced labor in China and India but so is our culture engaged in the lionizing of that element Marx and Engels would have dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat.
Friends and colleagues assure me that this is all the work of the 1960s. But I'm not so sure. The late 70s and almost the entire 1980s saw a renaissance of formality in life. But it was all undermined and ultimately annihilated in the late 1990s and, I suppose, the arrival of Thomas Friedman's "Flat World". Flat Worlders have no need for hierarchy, order, or, even, the nation-state. It's "economic man" only and above all. Or is it only Americans who were silly enough to buy into Friedman's assertion?
Maybe. I don't see a lack of formality in China, India, Russia, or other rising economic powers. Rather, it's the opposite. And the fact that we refer to these power centers as nation-states also seems to vitiate the Friedman view of the world. It's Americans who deride authority--even in their educational institutions--while the rest of the world rushes to accept it and employ it. In casual America, however, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
