The Unknown Candidate: The Entitled Cabal

Saturday, April 08, 2006

The Entitled Cabal

Today's NY Times op ed by David Brooks (see below) is both interesting and more perceptive than usual.

One caveat: I plead ignorance to statements about Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons," having not had the pleasure of reading it. (I just made a mental note to do so.)

I also admit to not following the Duke University gang-rape fiasco, except peripherally.

It is the larger subject Brooks references that gets a resolute head nod from yours truly: that is, the prevalence of the feeling of "entitlement" in American society today. It's a feeling so thick, so pervasive, so blatant it all but drops a planet-sized rock on your head.

"Beyond Entitled," a book I am currently writing, examines how this attitude has permeated all aspects of our society from big business to mom-and-pop-shops to parenting to George Bush.

Examples abound: a woman enters a busy Ben & Jerry's Scoop Shop with two small, screaming, wild-eyed children who proceed to destroy everything in their path, along with everyone else's peace of mind and sanity; smearing chocolate ice cream all over walls and gift items, including white t-shirts on display; handling and often breaking other items clearly marked "Please do not touch"; flooding the floor by "playing" with the water cooler sans cup; hanging dangerously from glass sneeze guards glued to the counter, which could easily come crashing down on top of them; climbing on tables; and emitting ear-splitting screeches whenever the impulse strikes.

Now, in my generation, this kind of behaviour by children would not be tolerated by any adults--including parents, shop keepers and other customers.

But that was then.

Today, the mother is inexplicably entitled to ignore her children, to provide no guidance or discipline; to be unaware and unconcerned about the disapproving glances she is getting from others; or, better yet, to dump her kids at Ben & Jerry's, rendering them instant, free baby-sitters, while she goes next door for a much needed, relaxing, Starbucks Mocha Grande Latte with her equally entitled girlfriends. There, she and her friends treat the Starbucks staff and other customers with a rudeness, impatience and disregard eerily similar to that of her kids.

Heaven forbid the Ben & Jerry's manager politely request that a mother please control her children, since her kids are disturbing other paying customers. The response of anger and outrage at the presumptuousness of the request is clearly meant to communicate that the manager is most certainly not entitled. The typical thought process goes like this: "How dare you worry about your $350,000 investment in a private ice cream shop over my immediate gratification and my entitlement to do any darned thing I like, any way I like, with whomever I like, whether you or your customers like it or not!"

Typical parent comments: "It's a public place, we can do whatever we want!" "It's not a restaurant, it's an ice cream shop; it's supposed to be fun for kids." When the owner points out that there are 65-year old patrons and others who are also trying to enjoy their experience, it's as if the owner were speaking in foreign tongues. How dare anyone else's experience supersede their own?

Responsibility and common courtesy are not part of the "entitled" repertoire. Writing a nasty, retaliatory letter to Ben & Jerry's Corporate Management complaining about the Scoop Shop manager is. Lying as embellishment is also allowed.

It's no different in business. When I started out in the corporate world, I was taught that I would have to pay my dues and prove myself; that nothing was beneath me, no matter how distasteful the assignment to my intellect, creativity, or ego.

Today, young people walk into first time jobs as self-appointed "experts" who instantly, by the mere act of being hired, know everything and can do everything far better than anyone else. They don't believe they have to prove themselves and they refuse to do what they don't like. Prima donnas, they feel entitled to instant success, despite having never earned it. They rarely look upon a boss as someone from whom they can learn something; rather he or she is someone who must be tolerated and, preferably, undermined. They, after all, were annointed from birth, as if by Immaculate Conception, with superior wisdom and knowledge.

The Bush cabal is perhaps the most blatant example of how dangerous this sociological phenomonen of "entitlement" can be. BushCo feels entitled, despite the Constitution and laws, to do whatever it likes. When Bush signs a bill into law, he immediately writes a signing statement which negates the necessity for him to obey it. When no evidence exists that Sadaam Hussein is an immediate threat to our security, BushCo is entitled to "fix the facts around the policy." When BushCo fails Katrina victims, it is entitled to do so without apology or acceptance of responsiblity. When BushCo spies on us illegally, it is entitled to do so; BushCo is entitled to re-interpret the law to suit its own ends. In short, BushCo is entitled to behave immorally, illegally, corruptly -- however it likes--soley because BushCo says it is entitled to do so.

Used to be, that kind of entitlement only came with despots, dictators, and kings. Come to think of it, it still does. Long live King Bush.

Virtues and Victims
By David Brooks
The New York Times

All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.

If you wander through the thicket of commentary that already surrounds the Duke lacrosse scandal, the first thing you notice is how sociological it is. In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes.

"This whole sordid party scene played out at the prestigious university is deeply disturbing on a number of levels, including those involving gender, race and the notion of athletic entitlement and privilege," a USA Today columnist wrote.

"The collisions are epic: black and white, town and gown, rich and poor, privilege and plain, jocks and scholars," a CBS analyst observed.

The key word in the coverage has been "entitlement." In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.

The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players "license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."

It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.

Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.

If you were looking at this scandal through that language, you would look at the e-mail message one of the players sent on the night in question. This is the one in which a young man joked about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.

You would say that the person who felt free to send this message to his buddies had crashed through several moral guardrails. You would surmise that his character had been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and that he'd entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.

You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

But in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe tried to steer readers back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul. Wolfe's heroine is a modern girl searching for honor in a world where the social rules have dissolved, and who commits "moral suicide" because she is unprepared for what she faces.

Many critics reacted furiously to these parts of Wolfe's book. And we are where we are.

Photo credit: David Brooks (The New York Times)