Saturday Extra

Well Saturday is traditionally a day when a lot of us enjoy a little shopping therapy. Nothing like a new pair of shoes or the latest electronic gadget to make us feel whole again—or new again—at least such is the promise of consumerism in our times.

And with everything just a click of the mouse away, we might be seduced into thinking we truly can choose our way to a fulfilling existence. But is all this choice helping or hindering our ability to be better, happier individuals?

Transcript

Alan Saunders: Now it's Saturday, and Saturday's traditionally a day when a lot of us enjoy a little retail therapy; nothing like a new pair of shoes or the latest electronic gadget to make us feel whole again, or new again.

Or at least that's the promise of consumerism in our times. And with everything just a click of the mouse away, we might be seduced into thinking we can truly choose our way to a fulfilling existence.

But is all this choice helping or hindering our ability to be better, happier individuals?

My next guests worked in tandem on a recently-published book and that's rather ironic, considering that it's called The New Individualism - The Emotional Costs of Globalisation. They're both sociology professors, Anthony Elliott, who joins us now from Flinders University, and Charles Lemert, from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Gentlemen, thanks very much for joining me.

Anthony Elliott: Thank you for having us on the program Alan.

Alan Saunders: First to you, Anthony Elliott. Why the term 'New Individualism'? What has brought this phenomenon about and how does it offer from the old individualism, whatever that might have been?

Anthony Elliott: Yes. Charles Lemert and I are calling this term the 'new individualism' to try to capture and define new social pressures which we think are increasingly evident today in the polished, expensive cities of the West and these are pressures, we think, which are increasingly at work on all of us to be seen now to be actively transforming aspects of our lives to be engaged in re-inventing and redefining our identities. So that the 'new individualism' as we define it, refers to certainly the reinvention craze which has taken off, but it refers above all to the creative renewal, the instant transformation of identity today.

How it differs from the individualisms of old is a huge debate which has unfolded particularly now across Europe and the public sphere throughout Europe. Our take on this, at least in the book The New Individualism, is to contrast it with the sort of perspective offered by someone like de Tocqueville in his writings, if you take a book like Democracy in America.

Alan Saunders: This is the Frenchman who went to America in I think the 1830s and was, broadly speaking, impressed by the very different society he found there.

Anthony Elliott: Yes that's right. And one of the takes on the kinds of individualism that he saw at work in America in the 1830s was a retreat, a drawing apart I think was how they described it, a drawing apart from others in the society to be able to reflect on yourself, to reflect, to try to reach some kind of state of composure whereby through that composure, in finding yourself, you come back and contribute in a stronger sense to the community. What we think is different today is that with the reinvention crazes that have taken off, by which we mean everything from compulsive consumerism through to corporate networking and instant identity makeovers, it's very difficult to see exactly how people today can find this state of composure that de Tocqueville talked about then.

Alan Saunders: Charles Lemert, I know that Tocqueville, his notion of how people would contribute to society after they'd returned from this period of composure, would be among other things, attending town meetings in New England. Well since you're in New England, perhaps you can tell us, this is not the sort of thing that on the whole people are doing in the West today, is it?

Charles Lemert: No, not at all, in fact as Anthony was speaking, I had a thought for the first time that what de Tocqueville was astonished by was in part, the new privileged class, that was able to afford to withdraw from society, certainly not the poor or the agrarian or the sometime rated the industrial worker. But he also saw something that he labelled as distinctly American. Now that doesn't mean it's exclusively American, but we certainly are the land of a radical kind of individualism. I think no other European society or European-derived society, places quite so much emphasis on freedom as the freedom of the individual to escape from relations with other people.

Alan Saunders: Now Anthony, there are I suppose two important points to understanding why this new individualism has arisen. The consumerist culture and 24/7 global economy, a lot of contract works: you're no longer a company man for life.

Anthony Elliott: Yes, I think all of these features are there at work. What needs to be underscored here, I think, right at the outset of our discussion, is the paradox that the search today for identity, and the search for a refined sense of individualism, the paradox is that the focus these days is actually on how people create identities. It's to do above all, I think, with the speed with which identities can be reinvented and instantly transformed, and in a sense that is the irony because with complete reinvention, which is increasingly rapid and thoroughgoing, identity, paradoxically, becomes disposable. At least this is what we've found with many of the people that we spoke to and interviewed over a five year period for the book The New Individualism. So that in the case for example with cosmetic and plastic surgery, with surgical culture, that the sorts of reinvention processes people are undergoing, it's producing all sorts of certainly experimental—where people can now undertake identity reinventions that certainly our parents and their parents could never have dreamed of—but on the other hand it's leading them into this uncharted terrain which is that there are certain costs here, social costs and political costs which sometimes aren't talked about, certainly not within the kind of perspective offered by reality television and so on.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look at some of the costs. Perhaps I might throw this one to you, Charles. Your book is full of real life stories which is why it's so accessible I think, and you tell one about a globetrotting executive who's actually on the verge of a mental breakdown. You say he's—you call him Larry—you say Larry's typical of many people in contemporary Western society who are materially well off, but can't tell if they're winners or losers in today's world. How is Larry emblematic do you think of the way people feel today?

Charles Lemert: Well actually I can counter with a story of my own, but first let me make the general point: people like Larry and like many others up and down the socio-economic scale, are simply bombarded with good or bad news of very distant information. The personal story I tell (I don't think my case is as extreme as Larry's) but it happened that an Israeli film crew flew over here to interview me this summer on this recent topic, and I'd been growing a beard because it was summertime, and before they came I thought, 'Well I'd better shave off this beard, because they might suspect me of being Hezbollah'. Well I mean, I'm about as white and as non-Hezbollah, I mean they sounded totally hilarious.

Now what's the point? You know, I've written a book with Anthony, I know what's going on, and yet there's some sense in which this distant image of another part of the world has impacted me and caused me to make what turned out to be an absurd adjustment. And so the struggle for re-making identity has to do with—like Larry and many others we described—a sense of being lost in a world, of being bombarded not simply with stimuli, but certainly with a lot of stimuli, but stimuli that don't really give a clear message. The theorem of thermodynamics, just to be a little extreme about it, says that the world will end when everything is the same and there's way too much information. And in some sense, this is what I think people experience: too much bombardment and too little sense of where they stand in the array of possibilities.

Alan Saunders: Well Anthony, Charles's story about himself seems to indicate that you can actually be a professor of sociology and still be affected by this; but would you say that the New Individualism is more prominent in younger or older generations, as it were in kids or their parents?

Anthony Elliott: Well firstly on sociology, Alan, and the priests of sociology often like to imagine that they're operating above society, and this has been a very interesting research project to work on, particularly. Our take on this is the debate over individualism as it's played out in Europe and across North America, the last five years especially it's been very intense, but the thing that struck Charles Lemert and myself was the lack of flesh and blood human beings in these discussions about individualism. So that's why we went and talked to so many people. In respect of your question about the generations, I think this really does cut to the core of it, I mean certainly, again, to go back to the example of surgical culture: one of the things that comes out I think in the book there, is if you look at the appetite for all things surgical now right across Europe, it's particularly striking the way in which the younger generation, that is, those in their early 20s particularly, are embracing this; where they feel there's certainly not much sense of any moral transgression or any social guilt to do with any of this. In fact surgically enhanced beauty is all the rage and is something that one can, as it were, wear quite proudly. And statistics that come out through our research here, indicate that more than a quarter of all women undergoing the surgeon's knife today, for example, are under the age of 25. That's an extraordinary statistic, and it gives, I think, some indication of the power of the reinvention craze, the sweep of this new individualism as we're defining it.

Alan Saunders: What's driving this? Is it fear?

Anthony Elliott: Yes I think there's a considerable amount of anxiety. You mentioned earlier the pressures of the global economy, and it's the institutional factors that we're trying to get at in the book. The commonsense understanding of the reinvention craze and the new individualism, is that the blame is laid squarely at the door of celebrity culture, that increasingly, apparently, we're all held in thrall these days to a culture of Botox and bling, and that's how we've got hooked on instant identity makeovers.

Charles Lemert and I disagree. We look at changes within the workplace, changes within the global economy. We're in a situation now where with this new corporate ethos, instant identity makeovers and flexibility are increasingly represented. They're passed off, I think, as the only adequate response to globalisation and, because of that, employees are finding themselves having to go that extra distance, that extra mile. Now this is not wall-to-wall, we're not saying in the book this is happening everywhere; it does seem to us from our research it's increasingly in sectors of the new economy, by which we mean marketing and communications, the finance sectors and so on. But nonetheless, it has certainly really started to soar in the last five years especially.

Alan Saunders: And Charles, just briefly at the end of your book, you do suggest another solution to the crisis of the new individual: aggressiveness, aggression. What's behind this idea?

Charles Lemert: Well aggression is a fundamental human instinct. We are after all animals in some sense, and we share that with the animal kingdom. The trouble is that in the modern world, especially since the 20th century, all of our aggression, especially collective aggression, has turned to violence. It's often said, and it's evidently true, that the 20th century was the most violent century in human history. Continuous war from 1914 on and still today. Aggression's another thing. Aggression is the ability to resist where resistance is appropriate. Thus the expectations, the demands, and to pursue legitimate interests in the world. I don't mean this in the 19th century sense of self-interest. One of the stories we tell is of Norman Bishop, a very poor man, HIV-positive, lives on government cheques, but who in his community has become, because of his commitment to overcoming these problems, has become an aggressive supporter of other people's suffering, poor people and other others suffering the effects of HIV. And he's the calmest, quietest, most saintly guy you'd want to meet, but his aggression is very real. That's what we need more of.

Alan Saunders: Well on that happy-ish note, we'll have to close. The book is called The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalisation. It's published by Routledge, and I've been talking to the editors, Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert. Thank you both indeed for joining us.

Both: Thank you.

Guests

Anthony Elliott
Professor of Sociology at Flinders University

Charles Lemert
Sociology professor, Wesleyan University in Connecticut

Publications

Title: The new individualism: the emotional costs of globalization.
Author: Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert
Publisher: Routledge

Presenter

Alan Saunders

Producer

Ian Coombe

Story Researcher and Producer

Jason Di Rosso