The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (19 page)

In fact, our relationships with our cell phones and iPads are far more intimate than Babbitt’s to his gadgets. These objects have almost become extensions of our physical selves, threatening to take the place of actual contact with others and with the world around us. They are our intimate companions: in the streets, in our cars, in supermarkets and at restaurants, even during family meals and in bed, we communicate with them and through them, we ask them for advice and direction, feeling lost, almost bereft, without them.

Possessions have always been symbols of class and status, or mementos of love and friendship. But America has come up with a new role for them: they are now our pals, and although we may find ourselves addicted to them, they are ultimately dispensable. You love your iPhone, yet in the blink of an eye you can exchange it for something newer, better, more desirable. Excitement, free of commitment, is the basis for our most intimate relationships these days. This constant need—greed—for the new is both our strength and our vital flaw; it is what makes America a country of manufacturing dreams, or, more correctly, all kinds of dreams, and one that can also be shallow, unthinking, even fragile. What is surprising is not how much things have changed since the beginning of the last century, but how much they are alike. The gadgets in question have changed, but the mentality that packages them and buys them is basically the same. Are we all becoming Babbitts now?

It seems quite simple, this condemnation of consumer society, until one realizes that we are, of course, part of the problem. What are my exact grievances against my laptop, cell phone and now my iPad? How far am I implicated in the creation and preservation of the very world I find so easy to dismiss and despise?
Babbitt
is full of surprises, small complications, forewarning of future dilemmas. It is deceptively simple. We don’t like to think that innovation and vitality go hand in hand with complacent commercialism, and yet here we are, and it is this unexpected revelation that has made
Babbitt
gnaw at me for so many years. Much has been said about the corrosive nature of consumer society, its hazards and the inevitable conformity it generates.
Babbitt
does not merely condemn this consumerism; it lays open the paradox at the heart of American society: the urge (perhaps “addiction” is a better word) for novelty, for movement, for constant change that creates “Pep” and motivates “invention” while at the same time being an impediment to imagination and reflection.

In her review for the
New Statesman,
Rebecca West wrote that
Babbitt
has “that something extra, over and above, which makes the work of art, and it is signed in every line with the unique personality of the writer.” She goes on to quote one of Babbitt’s public speeches, adding, “It is a bonehead Walt Whitman speaking. Stuffed like a Christmas goose as Babbitt is, with silly films, silly newspapers, silly talk, silly oratory, there has yet struck him the majestic creativeness of his own country, its miraculous power to bear and nourish without end countless multitudes of men and women. . . . [T]here is in these people a vitality so intense that it must eventually bolt with them and land them willy-nilly into the sphere of intelligence; and this immense commercial machine will become the instrument of their aspiration.”

Interestingly enough, it is Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, friend of the workingman and astute critic of Zenith and its corrupt leaders, who most understands and appreciates this intense vitality. Responding to a foreign friend who condescendingly criticizes American conformity, Doane reminds him that there is standardization in every country: in England (“every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour”), in France (with its “sidewalk cafes”) and Italy (where the “love-making” is standardized). For him, “Standardization is excellent,
per se.
When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in.” Doane goes on to explain how when he saw, in London, the picture of an American suburb in a toothpaste ad on the back of a
Saturday Evening Post,
“an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of ’em, or with low raking roofs and—the kind of street you’d find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights,” he felt homesick. He thought to himself, “There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t care if they
ARE
standardized. It’s a corking standard!”

“What I fight in Zenith,” Doane proclaims, “is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains . . . are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.” This was Sinclair Lewis’s dilemma. The only way to prevent the harmful aspects of “standardization” is by cultivating its opposite, that which is unique and wayward, independent and individual: ideas and imagination. Unless we have independence of mind, how can we confront the illusions of advertising or see through the false promises of conformity?

We may laugh at Babbitt as he irritates us and invites our sympathy, but what is at stake is not just a matter of socks, shoes, cell phones and alarm clocks; the real danger lies in the commodification of our souls. Now, mind you, Babbitt himself would in no way agree with this. He, like his latter-day descendants, has his own definition of the problem. “Trouble with a lot of folks,” he informs his son, Ted, is that “they’re so blame material; they don’t see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that inventions like the telephone and the aeroplane and wireless—no, that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may be another—may be another factor. I tell you, Ted, we’ve got to have Vision.”

There is something irresistible about Babbitt’s innocent hijacking of words and ideas. He transforms familiar concepts beyond recognition through his odd pairings—“real thinker,” “spiritual . . . Efficiency.” And yet you have only to pay a little attention to what goes by the name of “spiritual” these days to see that his philosophy has had many converts. Whatever the field or arena, the language we use to describe (or, in today’s parlance, “market”) our policies, our ideas and feelings, is the same, reduced to a single, deceptively sincere and utilitarian slogan.

Take “The Sermon on the Amount,” which tells us, “The next time you get paid, you write the first check to God. . . . And then you watch God take care of you,” and exhorts us to “Get involved with God financially,” because if you do, “God will provide for you.” You may think these words belong to
Babbitt
’s fictional preacher Mike Monday, the “Prophet with a Punch” and the “world’s greatest salesman of salvation,” who has “converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.” But the Sermon on the Amount is a real sermon, delivered by the very real Dr. David Jeremiah, radio show host, televangelist and pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church, in San Diego. On his Sunday television show, Dr. Jeremiah will educate you about “God’s economic plan,” and offer to take you on a cruise along with his wife, and sell you
30 Days to Understanding the Christian Life in Just 15 Minutes a Day.
He has also helpfully written a book called
The Worst Financial Mistakes in the Bible and How You Can Avoid Them,
advertised as a “‘What Not to Do’ guide for your finances from a biblical perspective!” Once your money problems are solved, you can then turn to ChristianMingle.com to help you find your true love: “God’s match for you!”

We have come a long way from Babbitt’s desirable dictaphone to Christian Internet speed dating, but the mind-set that came up with the concept of “investing” in God is still very much with us. Slowly, imperceptibly, it has reshaped our thoughts and feelings. “I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt complains to his parents. Young Ted, who has to study “plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus,” concedes, “I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ ’em—These teachers—how do they get that way?” His mother sympathizes and consoles him with the recollection that “when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really, they weren’t at all nice.”

The ever utilitarian Babbitt tells his son he should soldier on and slog through the courses because they are required for college entrance. But he does not see why “Shakespeare and those” are required for college or “why they stuck ’em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state.” He believes it would be better if “you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull.” This argument is now all too familiar: learning “Shakespeare and those” won’t help you pull in a paycheck down the road.

Despite Ted’s dislike of college and his desire to take up “mechanics,” Babbitt wants him to go to college and study law—no doubt because when he was young, his own ambition, derailed by his unexpected marriage, was to become a lawyer. “Trouble with you, Ted,” he tells his son, “is you always want to do something different! If you’re going to law-school—and you are!—I never had a chance to, but I’ll see that you do—why, you’ll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”

Babbitt is a fan of home-study courses, “which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education.” These courses entice the discerning mind with advertisements that begin like this:

$$$$$$$$$

POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING

One in particular is taught by Professor W. F. Peet, “author of the Shortcut Course in Public-Speaking” and “easily the foremost figure in practical literature, psychology & oratory.” Babbitt figures that this “correspondence-school business had become a mighty profitable game.” We now have many versions of homeschooling, where the student does not have to actually attend school but can pay an online provider to get a degree. Had he been alive today, Babbitt would have been a sucker for for-profit education and a great mentor to those who are shaping and formulating our system of education. His terms “Business English” and “practical literature” would fit beautifully into the educational plans our policy makers have been dreaming up. Babbitt believed “somebody’d come along with the brains to not leave education to a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out of it.” And how right he was!

Almost a century after Babbitt was conjured into being, what he could only dream of is on the point of being actualized. In college we are encouraged to learn “Corporate Communications,” and Democrats and Republicans have come together to relieve young kids like Ted of that “old junk.” The American public school system is being Babbittized, with learning increasingly seen as a means to an end, a vehicle for job creation. We all need jobs, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to help people who are struggling to find them, but why should earning wages be at odds with nurturing genuine knowledge and independent thought? It is no longer literature, philosophy or history that will preserve the nation in these complex times; it is practical-minded college graduates, comfortable in their new language of acronyms and shortcut, brandishing their diplomas and awash in debt.

A heated controversy has broken out in education circles in the past few years over the “Common Core State Standards,” new guidelines released in 2010 and now endorsed by forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Although the Common Core was formulated and implemented by a Democratic administration, it was both supported and opposed by members of both parties. To understand its philosophical underpinnings, it is helpful to take a step back to the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative, and one more step back to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind.” Both of these programs were predicated on the belief that public schools in America were broken (one big worry was that we were falling behind China) and that the solution lay in instituting new systems of evaluation that would enable school administrators to punish the teachers of poor-performing students and reward those whose students passed the new tests. The idea was that this would motivate them to teach better, though by all appearances it has instead persuaded them to teach their students to fill out multiple-choice tests, which cannot be the best approach for preparing young people to live rich and meaningful lives. According to Diane Ravitch, an impassioned critic of these reforms, teachers have been encouraged to “teach to the tests,” resulting in a narrowing of the curriculum in most schools and a focus on reading and mathematics at the expense of art, history, civics, literature, geography, science and physical education.

Where Bush opted for sticks, Obama chose to lure with carrots, and so Congress allocated an additional $5 billion to the Department of Education, and “Race to the Top” was born. States were made to compete for the jackpot and had to agree to certain rules as a condition for participation: they would have to evaluate teachers’ performances based on the results of students’ test scores and agree to adopt “College- and Career-Ready Standards.” This nebulous directive was the seed of the future Common Core. Suddenly, the goal of school was no longer to prepare children for the world and to turn out fully formed and informed citizens, but to create employable, college-worthy test takers capable of passing multiple-choice math and English tests.