America’s Fascination with Personality

The Commonweal Institute’s Uncommon Denominator has lamented our society's increasing dependence on images and the rise of domestic fundamentalism, and, as a response to these anti-democratic trends, called for a renewed emphasis on critical thinking in the public educational system: "The qualities of thought we wish to promote should be promoted among younger students . . . such that they enter their adult years already better equipped to make good decisions for their lives, and to understand the forces and processes that shape their world."

There's much more to say on this issue, and that last phrase, in particular, deserves more attention. Americans too often are not oriented toward the "forces and processes that shape their world," and this aspect of our national character results not only from a broad decline in critical thinking skills but from a pervasive cultural fascination with personality. Not a fascination, precisely, but a habit of mind, an inclination to think in terms of individuals -- their backgrounds, characters, doings, looks, relationships, accomplishments, failings, and so forth -- rather than in terms of a complex array of impersonal "forces and processes." This may be a universal human inclination (most people would rather read fiction, after all, than sociology), but American culture seems to have greatly accentuated it.

Examples are legion. Most obvious are the supermarket tabloids, with their addiction to "celebrity," their escapist appeal, and their implicit message that the lives of "ordinary" people are somehow less important than those of the famous. Witness also, however, the popularity of full-length biographies; the success of "reality T.V." with the "real" lives it purports to represent; the preeminence of first-person journalism and fiction; the confessions and confrontations that make up so much of our national media diet; the focus on political candidates' personalities rather than their policies; the lust for scandal, which thrives on conflicts among easily recognized characters; the near-obsession with various categories of identity (race, sex, age, religion, etc.), which feeds all manner of prejudice.

Clearly, much of this is driven by the mass media, which cater to our national A.D.D. [attention-deficit disorder] by trafficking in surfaces and episodes and bold-color feelings. But there are deeper causes at work. Intellectual laziness -- one aspect, undoubtedly, of a general cultural complacency -- must rank near the top of the list. Include, next, the way in which political leaders tend to simplify reality (and the people who inhabit it) by appealing to an "us-versus-them" mentality. Perhaps even the Left's "identity politics" and its commitment to demographic diversity have elevated personal above impersonal considerations. Most profoundly, and poignantly, the interest in personality might be seen as a reaction to the loss of intimacy endemic to a society where an increase in economic and geographic mobility has frayed traditional social bonds and heightened many people's sense of atomization and anonymity. Feeling isolated? Watch "Oprah" or "The Real World," or even someone's "private" on-line webcam.

Some of this is relatively innocuous, some not so innocuous. The personalizing of reality becomes dangerous to the degree that it limits understanding of how the world actually works.

Take the "war on terror" and the current war in Iraq. From the start, there has been a fixation on individual "evildoers" -- Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Moqtada al-Sadr -- rather than on the deeper sociological problems on which such figures base their popular appeal. The personalizing of an enemy helps to mobilize a populace, but it also implies that the problem will disappear once we capture or kill certain individuals. That's like cutting off the tops of dandelions while leaving the roots undisturbed. Killing Osama bin Laden, or any of his lieutenants or protégés, may be both productive and justified, but it won't really address the underlying conditions on which Al Qaeda's recruitment thrives: poverty, constraint, humiliation, and a general sense that the West has allied itself to undemocratic or ungodly regimes in order to keep the oil supply flowing.

The same dynamic has informed the administration's handling of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The emerging strategy is to maximize (with the help of Fox News) the focus on low-level grunts such as Lynndie England and Jeremy Sivits, and to minimize the institutional problems and laissez-faire climate that higher-ups are necessarily responsible for -- indeed, that their job descriptions make them responsible for. In this case, the dots that have to be connected are the administration's long-standing denigration of international standards of conduct and -- lo and behold -- the violation of international standards of conduct at Abu Ghraib.

The point is that regarding people narrowly as pure autonomous agents, as self-initiating moral actors, rather than as participants in larger social systems and expressions of broader, impersonal forces, can blind us to the elaborate patterns of cause-and-effect that have much more to do with our collective destiny than do the lives of, say, Vladimir Putin or Britney Spears.

Whatever the particular scandal, conflict, or triumph may be, we need to balance our human desire for "the good story" with more contemplative analysis of its conditions, causes, and potential consequences. We need, in other words, to be better critical thinkers.

Strangely enough, but tellingly, the impulse toward critical thinking in our society seems to express itself most fiercely in the form of conspiracy theories. Misguided though they usually are, such theories nonetheless reflect a healthy desire to fathom the workings of society behind the personalized façades that form our collective Main Street. Such theories are like the bastard cousins of critical thinking, thriving in soil where some but not all of the right nutrients are present. Conspiracy theorists connect the dots, but not necessarily the right dots.

If we don't want to raise a generation of dupes or tools or conspiracy theorists, our society must make certain educational commitments. We need to incorporate critical thinking systematically into the curricula of our public school systems. We need to teach students in the younger grades that the faces they see, the words they hear, the personae they encounter, are only that -- faces, words, personae -- and are not fundamentally responsible for how society operates. Helping young minds penetrate the mist of personality to the underlying "forces and process that shape their world" is a necessary part of equipping them to shape their world as well.

 

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