March 15, 2024
Is it a virtue to be driven? At times, it seems our greatest admiration is reserved for those whose past is a staggering list of accomplishments, who keep up a life so filled with activities that it seems impossible that one person could maintain them all, yet who make it look easy. Where does this ideal of super-achievement come from? For Nietzsche, the greatest virtue was self-overcoming, embodied in his figure of the Overman or Superman, the one who surpasses himself. Nietzsche despised Christianity, and his Overman is an aristocratic elitist, but it was Christianity who gave us the Protestant work ethic, in which endless work and accomplishment became a religious virtue. Eventually, the ideal disconnected from its religious origins and simply became the work ethic.
Jeff Bezos admits, admirably enough, that he needs 8 hours of sleep a night in order to be clear-headed, but other capitalists are impatient with all those hours lost that could be used to get things done, an attitude satirized by Nancy Kress in her classic science fiction story “Beggars in Spain,” in which an elitist entrepreneur hires a scientific genius to invent a surgery that will eliminate the need for sleep. However, the children of the elite who undergo this treatment are already primed for superior achievement, as the children of the rich always are: this part is not science fiction. The real children of the elite go to the best schools, have tutors to ensure they compete well on achievement tests, have daily schedules filled with extracurricular activities from music lessons to martial arts. Their achievements, even without an extra 8 hours to devote to them, are already far beyond those of middle-class children, let alone the underprivileged. These are not the “idle rich,” the useless social parasites decried by Victorian writers, the remnants of a dying aristocracy. And because of their accomplishments, it is easy for them to feel that they are indeed a superior race, who owe little to the envious rabble who are in every way beneath them. They may not be quick to acknowledge how much their achievements owe to the advantages they have had, but there is no denying the achievements themselves.
Moreover, there is a new version of the American Dream. The new achievers are not just the children of the rich. It is the economic story of our time that the working and middle classes, recognizing that the disappearance of blue collar work due to automation and globalization meant that their children would not be able to follow in their footsteps, but would have to reach for a higher-level achievement, began sending their children to college to become, instead of blue collar workers, what Robert Reich used to call “symbolic analysts,” those higher-level professionals whose jobs demand higher education because they involve the manipulation of verbal and mathematical symbols. Thus, the children became doctors, lawyers, tenured professors, information technologists of various sorts, movers and shakers in the entertainment and public relations industries, and so on. The more the Democratic Party was dominated by such educated professionals, the more the less educated left to become Trump voters. The latter’s resentment of liberal “elites” is as wrongheaded as it can be, and the educated professionals are usually not at all snobbish, but the contrast is stark, and the Trump voters are aware of it. The families of some educated professionals are becoming dynasties in which, down through as many as three generations, every single one is accomplished. This one went to Harvard, this one to a top-flight medical school. This one is a dancer in New York, this one a judge, this one a consultant of some sort, this one a TV producer. Not all of them are rich, but all of them are impressive. I am not implying for one moment that there is anything wrong with what they have done, or that they are not nice people, only that their lives have been dominated from birth by higher aspirations and the type of dedicated striving that such aspirations demand. Achievement is not exceptional, but simply the norm.
Meanwhile, those who do not become educated professionals are of two groups. The truly left behind are those who lack college educations and are often trapped in dying rural areas—and most rural areas are dying, because the old manual-labor jobs have disappeared, never to return. With them go the stores, even the hospitals. These are the MAGA base, angry, resentful, looking for scapegoats for their humiliation and finding them among immigrants and people of color. On a somewhat higher economic level are those who have at least “some college,” as the dating sites put it, but are struggling, some of them working two or three jobs because the jobs, often service jobs, do not pay well and, because they are not unionized, have deplorable working conditions. These are the bulk of “independents,” and “swing voters.” These are the people who still think that a booming economy is bad, because their own situation is precarious, and, unlike the educated professionals, they have no safety margin that could absorb 10-15% increases in prices across the board due to inflation.
All this is well known. What is not often considered, though, is the total change in values and lifestyle that has occurred within my lifetime. When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the problem with American youth was often said to be underachievement and lack of ambition. The ideal was to be average, and unusually accomplished students risked being ostracized because “you think you’re better than us.” Not just youth: social critics decried a cult of mediocrity and anti-intellectualism in American life in general. Adalai Stevenson lost the presidency partly because he was characterized as an “egghead.” However, underlying attitudes were more ambivalent. On the one hand, comic strips featured slackers like Archie and Jughead; like Beetle Bailey, who began as a lazy college student and enlisted to become a lazy private in the Army; like Dagwood Bumstead, who is always getting kicked by his boss Mr. Dithers because he is always sleeping on the job or hanging around the water cooler.
On the other hand, there was the cult of the genius, which really meant the practical genius, the inventor. Real inventors like Edison became icons, but fictional inventors dominated early science fiction. The first science fiction pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, was founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, who had previously been the editor of a magazine significantly titled The Electrical Experimenter. Amazing published the Skylark stories of E.E. Smith, called “Doc” Smith even though his degree was in food science. The hero of the Skylark series singlehandedly invents a faster-than-light spaceship along with other technological miracles, and has adventures all over the galaxy. For boys, there was Tom Swift, who created a new invention in each book of a long-running series, the invention giving the book its title. I own Tom Swift and His Sky Racer, or, The Speediest Flight on Record, from 1911. The meaning of the title is that Tom’s craft can achieve speeds in excess of 100 mph, which would be quite a feat only 8 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight. However, I really grew up with the Tom Swift, Jr. series featuring the son of the original Tom Swift, of which I avidly read 35 volumes. The Tom Swift books were formative in the creation of the sub-genre that critic John Clute calls the “edisonade,” the hero myth of the individual inventor. It survived in the early superhero comics. The Fantastic Four gained their powers by being bombarded by gamma rays on a flight in the spaceship invented singlehandedly by genius Reed Richards. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, but it helped that he was a gifted high school science student—and outcast nerd—so that he could invent web shooters. Tony Stark invented his Iron Man suit and all the gadgets that went with it.
The cult of the lone inventor may have encouraged kids to major in the sciences—or at least to become science fiction writers—but it was understood that such an inventor was the possessor of a rare gift and in that way not a model for the average person. That changed with the next wave of inventors, because the economy changed. When the U.S. economy tanked beginning in the late 70’s, it was the end of slacker mentality and the beginning of a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that is still with us. For years, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were held up as by-your-bootstraps success stories, arguments against any kind of control over laissez-faire capitalism and any kind of social safety net. Just go off and invent Microsoft in your garage and stop asking for handouts. The present generation of “geniuses” does not appear to consist of real inventors at all, but rather clever and cut-throat businessmen. Although he denies it, Elon Musk seems to have played a minor role in designing an actual car: what he invented was “Tesla,” a marketing ploy. Jeff Bezos is entirely a businessman. What counts as “innovation” now, as “genius” and achievement, is ruthless capitalism. Both men work hard to build up an image as “visionaries,” as people with a prophetic gift that inspires other people, and it is indicative that both men feel the need to return to the roots of the edisonade formula by “inventing” rockets, which in practice means funding them, not actually designing them.
Technological invention is a manifestation of the creative drive in the particular Promethean way that Americans are likely to respect. But true invention, whether technological or cultural, is not just one light-bulb moment. Rather, those moments are the products of a way of life, a way that demands dedication and endless work. “Work-life balance” is a cliché, but buried in the cliché is a real question about the price of creative achievement, or any achievement. Our myth is that the truly accomplished people should be able to do it all, have it all—otherwise they are not truly accomplished. Our ideal is the person who is a success professionally by putting in more effort and hours than any three average people, yet who is also a devoted and successful parent, lover, and friend, and who makes it all seem effortless. The last part is the most important of all. If a figure skater or guitarist shows any sign of strain, it is an inferior performance. We prefer our heroes to be more godlike, never to be exhausted or unable to perform on demand, and the slightest complaint from them is derided as self-pity. No sympathy for those who tire, who struggle.
This is our attitude towards popular entertainers, who court burnout, who court damaged vocal cords, who court drug problems caused in at least some cases by the effort to deal with the strain of the performing life. Right now, Taylor Swift seems to be handling it all—effortlessly. It is hard to imagine the amount of energy needed to sustain her tour schedule. To perform for hours, singing and dancing, then to move on to another city and do it again, and again, in addition to cope with the organizational problems and decisions arising from the small army of people she has to employ to make it all work. When not on tour, there are the demands of writing new songs, arranging, recording, dealing with business issues, doing interviews. All this while, she has had a series of relationships. It is unfair to ascribe the lack of stability of her love life to the fact that it has to be reconciled to the demands of her intensely busy career—but surely that lifestyle does not make relationships easy, especially since she dates people who are also caught up in the performing life rhythm, whether as artists themselves or, as now, a high-level athlete. A pro football player observes a rigorous discipline of practice and physical conditioning. Even the college football players I have as students do what they can to fit school into a life that is dominated by football, and their grades often suffer for it. The same is true of my performing arts students—the musical performance, dance, theatre, and musical theatre students. When a theatre or musical theatre student is involved in a production, it seems inevitable that assignments will have to wait. And what is true in popular entertainment is even more true in the realm of high culture. I have devoted a previous newsletter to what seem to me the insane demands put upon concert musicians, especially soloists such as violinists. And those demands have to begin around the age of 2—otherwise it is too late.
Part of the pressure on achievers is external. There is a feeling that you must catch the wave and ride it, that if you impose any limit short of total commitment, you will be left behind. But it is too easy just to condemn our frenetic society, for many people are driven from within by the creative drive itself, which sometimes includes a compulsion to perform. The pandemic lockdown was very hard on those who thrive on a life of performing. The folk and blues musicians I mostly follow, whose audiences might number only a few hundred, if that, are often addicted to being on the road, keeping up a grueling tour schedule without Taylor Swift’s helpful army, driving themselves to gigs around the country, sleeping in strange places a single night before moving on. Whatever is true of the superstars, it is hard on the small-scale performers. A relatively new folk singer-songwriter, Willi Carlisle, has a song titled “The Higher Lonesome,” playing on the famous phrase about the “high lonesome sound” of bluegrass. The song is about the loneliness of the performing life. One of my folk heroes, Tom Rush, who started in the 60’s and is still performing at 83, nevertheless in conversation with other musicians on his Patreon show “Rockport Sundays,” has quietly said that he regrets being on the road for hundreds of days without a break while his children were growing up. When I was in a songwriting class with another singer-songwriter hero, Darrell Scott (who produced Willi Carlisle’s album), it was Father’s Day, and here he was, hundreds of miles away from his small kids—so he made us write songs about having a father or being a father.
But people like Tom Rush thrive on performing, and I understand this because I thrive on teaching. Like all vocations, it is a type of addiction. I said something about being addicted to teaching to my mentor Northrop Frye, who taught for over 50 years, up to his death, and he perked right up and said, “It is an addiction, isn’t it?” So we are talking about the interplay of exploitation and vocation, of outer and inner pressures. I once wrote a newsletter on vocation, taking off from Abraham Maslow’s repeated statement that all self-actualized people have one, a calling to which they are devoted. Maslow’s public writing makes having a vocation seem like the best of all possible fates: to someone with a calling, their work is their play, so they do not need vacations as a respite from alienated labor. Indeed, they may be forced to take vacations at all. Maslow was clearly speaking in part of himself, and yet Maslow’s private journals, published after his death, were a revelation of the hidden cost of being driven. He had anxiety attacks before delivering papers, chronic psychosomatic problems, insomnia, and died of a heart attack at 60.
Some professions are, at least by reputation, vocation-driven. People go into them not just for the money but because they want to “make a difference,” an idea no less noble because the phrase itself is something of a cliché. It is interesting to compare the two sides of the fence, the medical profession on the one hand and teaching on the other, especially teaching in the humanities. The following statistics should be taken with a grain of salt. Although I have tried to use reputable sources, numbers vary from study to study because of complex factors. A physician, for example, is assumed to work long hours, but the number depends upon specialization, upon how high-profile the career, and upon the individual doctor’s desire for greater income. An orthopedic surgeon, for example, is said to work an average of 52.9 hours a week according to Medscape. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) says 40-60 hours, but adds that 25% of all physicians work 61-80 hours—not in residency but in regular practice. The AAMC’s numbers are cited the context of its concern with the increasing problem of physician burnout and suicide. The suicide rate of doctors is twice that of the general population. Surgeons in particular are not able to seek therapy, because knowledge that they were suffering from depression could end their career.
How many hours does a college English professor work? Here we come up against prejudice and misinformation. People outside of academia claim with some regularity that professors only work 9-12 hours a week, the time that they are in the classroom. They have no idea of the other demands, starting with actually preparing for those 9-12 hours. There is also advising, informal meetings with students, committee work and meetings, traveling to conferences, and, for an English professor, hours and hours of essay grading. But we get summers off, right? True—to do research, write books and articles (necessary to get tenure), develop new courses and engage in other forms of professional development. Non-academics don’t often know what is implied in the term “publish or perish.” Students are expected to seek publication of articles while they are still in grad school, and because there are far too many Ph.D.’s chasing too few jobs, the demand for publication keeps escalating: the more competitive schools may demand at least one book already published by a major university press simply to be hired as an assistant professor. That is what summers are for. Baldwin Wallace is a “teaching college” rather than a “research university”: the latter, which are the big institutions, have a reduced teaching load but a greater demand for publication.
How many hours does an English full-time English professor work during the academic year? The website www.timeshighered.com cites a figure of 50-60 hours a week, the www.insidehighered.com site 61 hours. As someone who has been an English professor for 40 years, most of it full time, I will say that these figures strike me as plausible. I am working from memory, but a workload survey about 15 years ago at Baldwin Wallace University came up with an average professorial workload, as I recall, in excess of 60 hours. Mind you, this was based on a survey, so it was self-reporting, and in the interests of professors, no doubt, to produce as high an estimate as possible. But my own experience corroborated it. English, as everyone agrees, is particularly labor intensive because of all the essay grading.
So an English professor works perhaps as much as an orthopedic surgeon, for about one quarter of the pay. Believe me, you have to be vocation-driven to do that. But, then, we are. Most English professors will tell you that they are incredibly lucky to be paid for the thing that they love to do. But while they are sincere when they say that, they are for the moment ignoring the other side of the picture. A 50-hour week means 10-hour days with weekends free. My own experience, trying to be honest, has been more like the 60-hour scenario: 10-hour days plus 10 hours on the weekends, usually grading.
This is not a complaint on my part. It is a meditation on the culture of drivenness and achievement, and the price that is paid for it. I am well aware that it is an elite privilege even to speak of work-life balance issues. Orthopedic surgeons and English professors are part of the educated professional class who are allowed, within limits, to choose to be more driven or less, and whose drivenness is adequately compensated, even if sometimes more than others. Much if not most of America is just as driven as I am—but for them it is not a matter of achievement but of survival. Here again, however, the picture is complicated. Anyone trying to understand what is going on in the average working world in the United States runs into an apparent discrepancy. On the one hand, official reports agree that the 40-hour work week, which has been declared the norm for a century, is misleading. It turns out that most Americans actually work “only” something like 36 hours a week. Yet at the same time, the official reports agree that the Americans work more than any people in the modernized world, and this has been true for a long time. In The Overworked American in 1992, sociologist Juliet Schor showed that Americans worked an entire month a year more than their counterparts in Japan, with whom we were then competing. Recent reports claim that Americans work 400 hours a year more than German workers—ten 40-hour weeks! Moreover, how are we to square the 36-hour statistic with the vociferous complaints on discussion boards of people have to work two or three jobs? There is one obvious inference. The jobs such people hold are typically not just low-pay, low-benefits—they are limited in number of hours. People have to put together two or three of them merely to come up with 36 hours. This is a deliberate tactic on the part of many companies: if you keep workers part time, you do not have to pay them benefits. They will also be in a state of permanent insecurity and so less likely to take whatever is offered without arguing. In the absence of unions, most workers can be fired arbitrarily. And the pay for such jobs is low, another reason that people need several of them.
Thus, when we speak of the overworked American, it can be misleading, for we do not generally work 80-hour weeks as factory workers did in the 19th and early 20th centuries. So has there been an improvement? In a century, we moved from a lifestyle of long, hard hours of manual labor that broke people’s bodies down so much over time that the retirement age had to be set at 65 to what is now called the “gig economy,” in which the work is less strenuous but provides little security. The people trapped in this situation have no time to be talking about “quality of life.” Quality of life would be freedom from constant debt and financial insecurity. These people are angry, and talk about how the Biden economy is booming just makes them angrier, because the boom does not benefit them. They will vote for Trump, not because Trump will fix anything but because he expresses their rage, which becomes a desire to smash the system, which is of course exactly what Trump will do, given the chance. Since 2016, pundits have been debating whether the MAGA movement is motivated by economic hardship or hatred and paranoia. The real answer is, both. The key is that the two things reinforce each other in a negative feedback loop. Hatred and paranoia are permanently latent in human nature—we have been shocked to learn in the last decade how much hidden shadow really lurks in the human heart. But it has erupted now because of economic conditions caused by untrammeled capitalism and income inequality. We hope to get rid of the cult leader who has turned a generalized nihilism into a political movement. But once we do so, the best way to keep it from happening again is to damp down the very justified feelings of oppression and despair that are seething in so many average Americans. And the only way to do so is to provide them with a better life, despite the fact that it would cut into the profits of the 1%. Only then would such people have the choice of thinking about aspiration and achievement and work-life balance.
It was not supposed to be this way. In 1962, when it was becoming clear that automation would eventually eliminate most low-level jobs, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a Universal Minimum Income, capable of sustaining at least a secure basic lifestyle, beyond which people would be free to work and earn more if they wished. A forthcoming age of leisure was widely predicted, in which ordinary people would be faced with the problem that in the past was confronted only by the aristocracy: how to fill a work-free life. Undergraduate education in the humanities was going to flourish as people were liberated to seek enrichment. To some degree, that actually happened for perhaps a generation, sustained by 60’s affluence. Then it collapsed, when the blue-collar work that had sustained the lower middle class began to disappear, and, instead of being replaced by a Universal Minimum Income, was replaced by low-level service jobs. We have gone backwards, retracting some of the gains made by pioneers such as John Lubbock in the 19th century. The story of John Lubbock is told in a book I have celebrated in another newsletter: Storylines: How Words Shape Our World, by J. Edward Chamberlin:
Born Sir John Lubbock, he was relatively comfortable. But he recognized that many of the people he met every day, and often took for granted, were not….But what for me is most inspiring is that he recognized the needs that preceded storytelling—not only the need for books to be available to everyone, but for everyone to have the place and the time to read them and to talk about them, and then the opportunity to tell stories and sing songs themselves and to listen to others. The problem was that there was hardly any such leisure time for people working on the streets and in the shops of the cities and towns her knew well—the kind of people Charles Dickens wrote about, for whom eighty or ninety hours a week, often on their feet all day, was a standard work schedule. And even if they had the time, there were few places such as public parks where they could gather and play games and have picnics and tell stories, and very few lending libraries where they could get books to read. Many weren’t desperately impoverished even though they were poor, but were physically, morally, and spiritually exhausted. (144-45)
So Lubbock got himself elected to Parliament, and contrived to get legislation passed establishing the Bank Holiday in England—at first only one, but eventually four each year. He also worked to expand public parks and create lending libraries. Talk about someone with a calling. Lubbock believed that working people would be hungry for culture, for something beyond just superficial distraction, if only they had time and their lives did not exhaust them so much. I find his story moving because I know from 40 years of teaching how true it still is. So many students even in college do not have time and energy for it: they are also working one or more jobs, caring for family members and occasionally whole families, struggling to make enough to pay next semester’s tuition, and their grades suffer for it. And then there are the former students who after graduation have built lives for themselves, sometimes very good lives, but who miss the community of learning and common enthusiasm for books and the arts. They are the mainstays of both this newsletter and my podcast, and it is part of my vocation to fill a little of this need.
For those who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to ask it, the question of leisure and its relationship to the life of striving and achievement that has been not just the American but the modern ideal has never been answered. Platitudes are a way of avoiding real thought, and all we have in this area are platitudes such as “You have to make time to smell the roses.” Americans have very little in the way of sick time and family leave compared to Europeans, and where we get two weeks of vacation a year, a European may get two months. One reason we have little idea what to do with retirement when we get to it is that we haven’t had any practice, so to speak.
It may sound silly to ask who Maslow’s self-actualized person, driven by a vocation, is going to date. Most people are not thus driven, and this can make for problems. In the not-so-good old days, the striving achievers were male, and the woman’s job was to support his vocation. This was especially true if the vocation involved public life. But it has also been true of artists who are often ruthlessly driven by their creative drive. In a poem called “The Choice,” Yeats said,
The intellect of man is forced to choose: Perfection of the life or of the work. And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
Northrop Frye called the first two lines profound but the second two “self-dramatizing nonsense.” But I think that was not Frye’s most insightful moment. The theme of Jung’s essay on the drive drive, “Psychology and Poetry,” is that “A man must pay dearly for the gift of creative fire.” Creativity demands a total commitment, and there is often not enough left over for a human life. Goethe’s symbol of such a character is Faust, who is saved at the end because he never ceases to strive. But the Faustian ideal, which Spengler declared the driving force of Western culture, is challenged by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a lazy, good-time-loving parasite—but deliberately, as a rejection of the kind of idealism that drives the political people around him to seek “honor.” It is an illusion. Who has honor? “He who died a’ Wednesday.” We are torn between the Faustian and the Falstaffian.
Yeats put his finger on something with the word “perfection.” A strange and unhealthy perfectionism seems to pervade our society these days. Toyota created the cult of continuous improvement in the auto industry: every new model has to be an improvement on last year’s. Because the car’s actual performance can only be improved so far, improvement thereafter takes the form of adding extras, resulting in a car full of unnecessary electronic gadgets. This cult of improvement moved from the business world to the academic world some decades ago, and has made the lives of professors miserable. They are constantly pressured, in promotion and tenure processes, to demonstrate that they never stop improving. I used to protest this when I was full-time. Stop, and just let people teach! Teaching may actually suffer because so much time and energy is taken up trying to demonstrate improvement. Students are affected as well. I have students who are paralyzed by their perfectionism with every single assignment, getting work in late because, ironically, they are “afraid to disappoint me,” as they often put it. In the work world, customer satisfaction surveys have become the bane of everyone’s existence. Everyone wants me to rate every single thing I buy, every clerk who has waited on me, everyone who has done work for me. I usually feel obligated to complete the surveys because someone’s job rating may depend on it. In Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “Andrea del Sarto (Called the Perfect Painter),” the title character considers himself a failure because his work is merely perfect: technically flawless, it lacks the “soul” of artists whose work is less perfect because they are striving for something greater than perfection, leading del Sarto to his famous line, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” But the situation is paradoxical: the artists del Sarto envies seek a greater kind of perfection than mere flawlessness, though one that may be beyond human capacity.
The dilemma of the self-actualized person driven by a vocation may take an even more acute form in the retirement years. When I was young, I swore I would never become one of those old people whose vital life simply stopped at retirement, the type dramatized in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt (2002), the retirees whose dilemma is how to fill up the endless spare time. Actually, the Jack Nicholson character in that film is an extreme case. In my experience of online dating sites in the last few years, the retired women seem to be enjoying the leisure they never had in their earlier lives, merely looking to share it with someone. But will they, in that case, be happy with Maslow’s type of vocation-driven, still-active, involved self-actualizers? No one is at fault, but the disjunction points to one of the central conflicts of opposites in human nature, between the active and the relaxed or receptive; between striving to transcend one’s limits and accepting those limits. Biblically, it is the problem of the Sabbath. The unresolved conflict affects how we think of the imagination, which we usually characterize in terms of active creative achievement. But the imagination has, or should have, a Sabbath mode, in which it rests, contemplates, and tries to appreciate what it has created, and find that it is good. If I find the secret to that balance, I will let you know.
Reference
Chamberlin, J. Edward. Storylines: How Words Shape Our World. Douglas & McIntyre, 2023.