The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 7 of 8
What do we make of the effort to make the violence of managers invisible, while accentuating the violence of those who are managed?
Some years back a company I'll call Centauri was in trouble, and they called in a great devops engineer whose initials are SH to help them modernize their tech stack. They also brought in a great business consultant, whose initials are JW. I've written about these two before, so you can probably guess who I mean.
JW perhaps thought that the new tech stack should be ready for use by March, but April arrived and the new tech stack still wasn't operational. So JW called SH into a meeting.
"Have you setup the servers with the new Oracle databases?" asked JW.
"Yes, the servers are running and the software is installed," said SH.
"If that's true, what's the roadblock that keeps us from using this in production?" asked JW.
"Mostly it's a matter of security,” said SH. “I don't know what roles or permissions we need in production.”
"Well, why don't you find out!" shouted JW. "Do you realize we are running a month late? Do you care that we're running a month late?"
"I've spoken to the lead engineer, but he doesn't know either," explained SH. "There are some big changes, relative to the old system, and yet none of the new roles have been officially defined yet."
"And it never occurred to you to simply copy over the roles and permissions you were using in development?" shouted JW. "Are you a complete idiot?"
"Again, we weren't told what the new roles would be,” said SH, “so in development we left the database wide open to anyone."
"Are you insane?" screamed JW. "Wide open to anyone? All the company secrets could be stolen!"
"No chance of that," said SH. "I locked it down to the local network, so only engineers in the building could reach it. But for them, the database is wide open, they can do anything with it."
"I'm tired of your excuses!" shouted JW. "It was your responsibility to set up the database and you've failed, and now we are a month late! If the lead engineer didn't know what the new roles and permissions would be, you should have gone and talked to his manager!"
"I did go talk to his manager," explained SH, calmly. "And his manager couldn't give me an answer. He simply hasn't defined anything yet. We can guess what most of the new roles will be, but he hasn't sat down and made anything official yet."
"Oh, I see," said JW, suddenly calm. "Okay, I'll go talk to him and get an official answer today."
As unlikely as it seems, this was the start of a beautiful friendship. JW thereafter trusted SH and called him into to a dozen different companies to help with a dozen different rescue missions.
Was JW actually angry during this conversation? Probably not. It's likely that he understands the strategic use of anger and in this case he was pretending to be angry so as to test SH. Like some of the greatest managers, JW is also a great actor, and can enact an imitation of rage whenever he needs to.
Those of you who have read my book How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps will recall an even longer fight that was I was involved in, with even more shouting on the part of my manager. In that case, one trick my manager pulled was that he started to cry, and then he demanded an apology from me, which I refused to offer. I wrote:
"He sounded like he was going to cry. This note of self-pity was surprising to me. My friends and I have sometimes discussed the right-wing television personality Glenn Beck and his tendency to cry on television. Is Beck truly overwhelmed with emotion as frequently as it seems, or is it all just an act? The best explanation I had ever heard, from a friend of mine who is a professional actress, was that a great actor fully experiences the emotions they're portraying — so it’s possible that Beck is playing a character in one sense yet still genuinely feeling his emotional raptures in another. And I think something similar must be true of Milburn. On the one hand, it seems naive to think that he really felt such strong emotions over my failure to call him, but on the other hand, his emoting seemed entirely sincere."
Clever managers use a host of psychological tricks to manipulate those who work for them, and for this deceit they are granted generous salaries that put them among the most affluent 2% of all Americans.
But what should we say of books that try to put it the other way around, suggesting that the working class is full of rage, or that working class men often lose their temper? Even worse, what should we think if a professor of psychology argues that working class men are brutish, almost social deviants, developmentally "retarded"? What does it mean when hundreds of books are published, by journalists and psychologists, all of them suggesting that upper-middle-class men are refined and well mannered while working class men are likely to beat their wives? What do we make of the effort to make the violence of managers invisible, while accentuating the violence of those who are managed?
It amounts to propaganda for class warfare, a war in which every form of decency and compassion is attributed to upper-middle-class men, whereas working class men are painted in the savage colors of jungle animals. I'm not suggesting that the priests who espouse this propaganda are conscious of their role in the class war, but however unconscious their motivations might be, the end result is the production of still more reasons why society should heap rewards on those who have already been well-rewarded, while stripping resources from those who most desperately need more resources.
The Hearts of Men
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Page 134-146
[Of the attempt, in the 1970s, by psychiatrists to diagnose working class men as suffering from mental and emotional pathologies, or perhaps outright “retardation”.]
Many of them (a majority, in fact) failed to achieve the kinds of occupations - like psychiatry or management - that required a studied, Weberian impersonality. Psychologically, they remained arrested at the boyhood level of physical expressiveness. Farrell called these “physical-strivers” to distinguish them from the “student strivers” and “leadership strivers” more commonly encountered in graduate school and the middle-class work world. All men suffered from their constant striving, but none was more pathetic than the one whose ambitions remained vested in his musculature. “Of all the strivers, the physical striver appears to suffer the most from masculine values the older he gets,” since, obviously, the rewards for this type of prowess declined rapidly after the final football game of his high-school senior year. As if offering a fresh sociological observation, Farrell noted that “with the exception of the few who play sports professionally, the student and leadership strivers become the most successful job strivers.”
The official ideology of liberal sociology and men’s liberation was egalitarian: All men were oppressed by the same stereotypes, imprisoned in the same male sex role. But within that metaphorical prison - as in any real one - the chances of rehabilitation depended markedly on one’s class of origin. Men’s liberation not only shared but reinforced the liberal middle-class perception of blue-collar males as culturally retrograde “hard hats.” Charles Reich had called them the “arch-opponents of the new consciousness,” and sex-role sociologist Josesph Pleck found them trapped in the “traditional” male role, “where interpersonal and emotional skills are relatively undeveloped,” relative at least to “middle-class culture.” The Weberian role of the middle-class man had its manifest limitations, but it was at least up-to-date, or, in Pleck’s typology, “modern,” while the working-class male role was marked by “obsolescence” and “dysfunctionality.”
The literature on the male sex role offers only scattered attempts to explain the perceived backwardness of blue-collar men. The most common explanation is that they are compensating in the only way they know how for the humiliations attendant on their low occupational status. Lacking power over other men, they are overbearing to women; and, lacking the substance of public authority, they have to make do with its facsimile - the make-believe authority of machismo.
An alternative explanation comes from the English men’s liberationist Andrew Tolson, who is the only one, as far as I know, to suggest that the working-class version of masculinity might serve some purpose other than letting off steam. He argues that the “seemingly anachronistic working-class masculinity” can help generate real power in, for example, workplace confrontations with management:
"...the language of masculinity contributes to a supportive, working-class culture, capable of local resistances, and even of subversion. The richness of this culture - its flexibility and spontaneity - has only recently become apparent to middle-class eyes. In this context, working-class male chauvinism...is a vital cultural defence."
Any serious attempt to understand class differences in masculine roles would probably have to start by confronting the limitations of what is “apparent to middle-class eyes.” These would include not only the possibility that patterns of working-class behavior may be formed, in part, in response to middle-class behavior and observation. The middle-class “gaze” (in Foucault’s expanded sense of observation and surveillance) can be an uncomfortable one - associated, in lower classes, with workplace supervision and with negative judgements by teachers and other authorities. What appears to be a lack of “interpersonal skills” can be a withdrawal from middle-class discourse; what looks like residual “physical aggression” can be actual and ongoing hostility; and what Tolson took to be “working-class male chauvinism,” might be an expression of class, rather than gender, antagonism.
An acquaintance of mine, who works in a factory warehouse, explained the kind of dynamic that can arise between blue- and white-collar men: “We had a manager here who was always wanting to ‘level’ with people psychologically, but in his view I think all of us out here [the warehouse] were a bunch of animals. Well, we thought he was full of shit.”
Whether the blue-collar male is actually as benighted as he seems, or perhaps has some good reason for his belligerence, is not a question that has consumed American sex-role theorists. He was assigned, in the scheme of things, to the lowest level of consciousness, the dumping ground for all the vestigial masculine traits discarded by the middle-class. His association with a prior stage of the middle-class life cycle - boyish “physical striving” - only confirmed his diagnosis as a psychic retard; and, in keeping with American egalitarianism, this diagnosis substituted for more overt and now outmoded forms of class prejudice.
Machismo in the Movies
The movies of the seventies, for example, returned obsessively to the interlocking themes of masculinity and class, and in accordance with the sociological categorization, Hollywood located “traditional” masculinity in the working class, much as it had once been located in the filmic West. Various judgments followed, not all of them in accord with the liberal, middle-class perspective on sex roles. In Rocky, the muscle-bound Italian-American hero is romanticized in contrast to the cosmopolitan middle-class outer world where a cynical black man reigns as heavyweight champion.