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Introduction

Most of the essays in this book originated as scribbles and exclamation points on yellow, lined paper, and they were often a puzzle to decipher months later. From there, they grew into public lectures, which found their way into print mostly in the last decade, and here they are newly revised. Two essays, “So How’s the Family?” and “Empathy Maps,” I wrote expressly for this book, while one essay, “The Diplomat’s Wife,” is the very first one I wrote.

Re-reading that essay decades later, I recall a powerful split between two parts of myself—one geared to “doing” and the other to “figuring things out.” The year was 1965. Movements of social justice were sweeping the nation as well as the University of California at Berkeley campus where I was a graduate student in sociology. The civil rights movement was on, and I was fresh from a stint teaching black history at Palmer Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, and work as a freedom school teacher in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Almost weekly, hundreds of Free Speech activists protesting a ban on students’ rights to sit behind political activity tables in the central plaza were being bused to jail. Fourteen thousand students and others opposed to the Vietnam War marched from the campus to an Oakland army base, holding signs such as “Peace in Vietnam,” “Return to the Geneva Convention,” or in one case, simply “Why?” Barred from the base, students were tear-gassed, beaten, and jailed. The feminist movement was soon to emerge through hundreds of consciousness-raising groups and departmental caucuses. Berkeley was at the epi-center of the national ferment of the 1960s.

With these movements swirling about me, I set about the quiet, steady work of gathering intellectual tools with which to clearly understand what was going on. One day, while researching my first essay, I was poring through an arcane 1963 U.S. Department of State bulletin sent to protocol officers and others at diplomatic missions around the world. It was an etiquette book for diplomats. In what order should various officers and their wives enter and exit a diplomatic reception, it asked. Ambassador first, counselor second, economic officer third, on down in order of importance. How long should the wife of a junior officer stay for an initial courtesy visit to the ambassador’s wife? (“Approximately 20 minutes unless strongly urged by the hostess to stay longer,” although the pamphlet warned that “Must you go so soon?” does not mean she really wants you to stay.)¹

Reading about such decorous ritual moments while tear gas canisters were flying outside seemed a little like walking in on Elizabeth Bennett having tea in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, while Tom Paine pounded on the front door, the American Revolution astir behind him. Part of me wanted to march out the door behind Tom Paine, the other part wanted to hang out in the parlor with Austen, curious to see what was really going on there. I wanted to climb inside the mind of the protocol officer who penned that advice, the mannerly world of the diplomat, the confining place of women in that world, and perhaps, above all, the dilemma of my mother who had spent thirty years quietly trapped in it. I wanted to find a magic key to unlock her gilded cage, it occurs to me now, and I was scouring sociology in search of it. I could not find that particular key, it turned out, but I collected other great magic keys along the way.² And my search began to link the public trends astir at that time to the more private world of the family. Some keys unlocked the injustices that so stubbornly remained long after the parades had passed and the marchers gone home. Other keys helped me into the lives of time-stretched working families, online daters, migrant nannies, commercial surrogate mothers, and others, as I report in this book, a sequel to my 2003 collection of essays The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work.

Some essays reflect a historical approach. In chapter 7, Sarah Garrett and I explore the shifting cultural meaning of terms such as “brand” appearing in the pages of the New York Times in the periods 1899–1901, 1969–71, and 2003–2005. At the beginning of the twentieth century, “brand” was used mainly to refer to animals and slaves and was spoken of as a neutral or bad thing. By the end of the century, “brand” was used to describe colleges, museums, and human beings, often to make them seem good. Other essays reflect a cross-national approach. In chapter 4, for example, I compare the wealth gap in the United States to that within Sweden, Japan, and other democracies, and in chapters 10, 11, and 12, I describe nannies and surrogates caught in the great divide between the rich and poor nations of the world.

In all these essays, I use the term “family” broadly to refer to all who feel like family—heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual couples, married or unmarried, with and without children. For I think of families as our most precious and emotionally powerful form of mutual commitment. Also, although I have tried hard to limit repetition across essays, and between these essays and my books, some remains. In some cases, I have drawn passages from my books (listed at the beginning of this one) to pursue new points. In other cases, I sketch a context in one essay in the way I do in another, so a reader can understand one without having to read the other. Revising these essays, I have felt as if I were crisscrossing the same mountain, so to speak, binoculars in hand, telling of streambed dwellers on one expedition, and mountain top dwellers on another, always bearing in mind the whole habitat.

EMOTION AND THE AMERICAN SELF

Varied though they are, all these essays derive from my deepest belief that it is through emotion that we know the world.³ Without emotion, the world loses color and meaning. This might seem an obvious thing to say if it did not fly in the face of our usual American understanding of self. For many of us hold to the idea that a rational self is an emotion-free self, and that emotion gets in the way of rational understanding.⁴ But the more fundamentally we understand emotion, our own and that of others, the better we know the world around us, and the closer we come to being reasonable people; and the better we get at detecting fake rationality. For many deeply irrational events—conduct in the Nazi camps, the Soviet show trials, the Cambodian killing fields, the torture of political prisoners around the world—are achieved through apparently emotionless, orderly, mechanical acts by people who claim to be rational.

In addition to valuing a non-emotional self, Americans have historically revered the independent self. Being self-reliant, self-controlling, start-from-the-bottom, non-dependent—we admire these things. They tour history as a democratic, immigrant-based, entrepreneurial culture, proudly free of feudal or totalitarian rule. Psychologists who study “locus of control” find American students more likely to endorse such statements as “My life is determined by my own actions” or “When I get what I want, it is usually because I worked hard for it” than their counterparts in East Asia, Central America, Europe, or Canada.⁵ Male business students born in America had higher ratings on locus of control than male business students born in Mexico.⁶

But every “I” comes with a “we.” We depend on others and stand ready to be depended upon. The idea of the independent self, separated from history and circumstance, is a fiction. I often remember a student’s remark: “It sure takes a lot of people—parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, specialists, strangers—to make one independent self.” Indeed, if my essays could speak in chorus, they would say, “Through what we imagine and do, we are forever relating to others, and often more dependent on them than we’d like.” As the Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges noted in Brodie’s Report—a story focusing on one person named Brodie—“in every story there are thousands of protagonists, visible and invisible, alive and dead.”⁷

Not only do we depend on other people, we are also creatures of larger circumstance—a widening class gap, a crashing job market, a warming and more volatile climate that leads to such things as rising food prices, and new anxieties. One circumstance we do not control is the very culture of the era into which we are born, and its tacit rules of emotional control. As the German sociologist Norbert Elias has argued in The History of Manners, modern society obliges us to cultivate a modern—and more emotionally controlled—self. As clans became fief-doms and fiefdoms became nations, he pointed out, people developed wider networks of social interdependence.⁸ To sustain those needed relationships, people learned greater emotional self-control. We moderns mind our manners and manage our emotions far better, Elias said, than our counterparts in medieval times did, when quarrels more often flared into murder and the sight of flesh led to acts of rape.⁹ As we come to appreciate the importance of emotion management, we will become a more civilized people.

So what is an emotion? Is it a matter of pure biology and thus pretty much the same for everyone? Or do aspects of emotion—sadness, joy, jealousy—vary from one culture to another? One premise underlying all these essays is that culture has found its way into emotion. For one thing, various cultures provide special inventories of prototypic feelings. Like differently tuned keys on a piano, each cultural prototype guides us in the act of discerning different inner notes. As I have written, the Tahitians have one word—sick—for what people in other cultures might call ennui, depression, grief, or sadness. According to the novelist Milan Kundera, the Czech word litost refers to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief, a term with no equivalent in any other language.¹⁰

We listen for feelings in different ways. A man I met on a recent trip to Rovaniemi, Finland, a town by the Arctic Circle, described walking alone in the snow: “You walk along in whiteness. Suddenly there is a startling flutter of wings, and you see a white snowbird, its two black eyes staring at you. After that, you listen to the snow differently.” Many people listen to—and listen for—feelings the way this man listens to the snow. Perhaps the more inexpressive the culture, the more one tunes an ear to ever-so-slight shifts in tone.

We have ideas about what feelings should be. We say, “You should be thrilled at winning the prize,” or “You should be furious at his insult.” We appraise the fit between a feeling and a context in light of what I call “feeling rules.” By these rules, we try to manage our feelings—to feel happy at a party or grief-stricken at a funeral.

When paid to do a job, we are often asked to abide by certain feeling rules; thus, the company edict that “the customer is always right” means we do not have the “right” to feel mad at a customer, even if we are. So we find ourselves doing emotional labor—the effort to seem to feel and to try to feel the right feeling for the job, and to try to induce the right feeling in certain others. A flight attendant, as I described in The Managed Heart, is trained to manage fear during turbulence, exasperation with cranky passengers, or anger at abusive ones.¹¹ A bill collector is often trained to inhibit compassion for debtors. A wedding planner may coax a once-divorced groom to “get excited” about planning his second wedding. According to the Japanese scholar Haruo Sakiyama, hospice workers make it okay for relatives of the dying to face the dying of their loved ones.¹² Not all jobs that deal with feelings call for emotional labor, and not all emotional labor is stressful (see chapter 2). But as services now make up the largest sector of the American economy, service workers—salespeople, grocery checkers, complaints clerks, nurses, nurses’ aides, social workers, dog walkers, nannies, doulas, secretaries, personal assistants, life coaches, actors, teachers, hospice workers, funeral parlor directors, commercial surrogates, call-center workers, and wantologists, among others—all do it.¹³

Some jobs that call for emotional labor are done by Americans on American shores. Other jobs immigrant laborers do in America. Service workers have long migrated from one country to another, but today increasing numbers of care workers leave their young and old in the poor global South to take up jobs tending—and giving their hearts to—the young and old in the affluent North.¹⁴ Such jobs often call on workers to manage grief, depression, and anguish vis-à-vis their own families back home, even as they genuinely feel—and try to feel—joyful attachment to the children, elderly, and sick they daily tend in the affluent North (see chapters 10 and 11).

Emotional labor crosses borders in the other direction as well. By e-mail and telephone, service providers in Bangalore, India, tutor California children in math, make long-distance purchases of personal gifts, and even scan responses on Internet dating sites to help busy First World professionals chose whom to invite to a romantic dinner. Commercial surrogate mothers in India “rent their wombs” to infertile couples from the global North as I describe in chapter 11. This service calls for the ultimate in emotional labor: the effort to detach from the babies they carry and give up.

So it is through our way of seeing reality—our dictionaries and rule books of feeling—and our ways of managing it, that emotion and feeling are partly social. This is true of our lives at home and at work, in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. If, as C. Wright Mills said, the sociologist’s job is to trace links between private troubles and public issues, then emotion lies at the very heart of sociology.¹⁵

Many economic and social trends bear down on private troubles. Important among them, I believe, is the growing dominance of large corporations and their indirect effects on the culture of personal life. As Franklin D. Roosevelt observed in the 1940s, the major corporations have become kinds of “private government.”¹⁶ Among the world’s hundred largest economic entities, forty-four are corporations.¹⁷ Corporations have been granted the status of legal persons, and the fiduciary responsibility of boards of directors has been legally limited to serving stockholder interests. As the engines of prosperity, the growth of American corporations has been heralded as a largely unmixed blessing.

But as Bob Kuttner has argued in Everything for Sale, a former balance of power—between companies, government, and labor unions—has now tilted in favor of large companies.¹⁸ For in the 1970s, American companies started to relocate their plants near cheaper labor pools around the world, undercutting labor unions at home and getting city, state, and national governments to compete in their offers of lower taxes and more lax regulation in order to entice capital investment. As companies have grown in power, so have they grown in cultural influence over areas of private life far removed from the boardroom. A market culture has come to the fore, proposing its own ideas of self and relationship, its own rules of emotional attachment to and detachment from others, its own demands for emotion management.¹⁹

Indeed, as I suggest in chapter 1, many of us find ourselves moving along a market frontier. On one side of this frontier, we see activities as simple things we do. On the other side, we see them as rent-able or saleable. When we come to see an activity as being for rent or sale, we see it differently. Take friendship: normally we understand friendship as the offer of generosity, trust, faith, and the promise of a loving, long-term give and take between two people. But in the ads for a new commercial service enabling clients to find friends in their local neighborhood, a new language has crept in.²⁰ An ad for Girlfriendcircles.com, a for-pay friend-finding site, reassures readers that they can rest assured that fellow clients are serious about finding a friend. Why? Because they paid money for it. “We value what we invest in,” they note. Under “What Is the Cost?,” the Web site reads, “We want you to care enough about friendship to put a little [money] into it. . . . Some have said, ‘It’s wrong to pay for friends!’ And we whole-heartedly disagree! We pay for shoes, movies, mochas and manicures—why not for one of the very things that research shows plays a gigantic role in our happiness, health, longevity, stress reduction and chances of success in our life goals?”²¹ By describing how to find a friend in a spirit of such breezy, self-interested pragmatism, the entrepreneurs pry us away from the idea of being a friend.²²

Our emotions tell us where to draw the line. We say to ourselves, “This feels right,” or “This doesn’t feel right.” We experience an anxiety tipping-point which tells us “this is new but it’s okay” or “this is weird and not okay.” We may do nothing in response to the sense that “this is not okay.” But far more often, as I describe in chapter 1, we react to that feeling by trying to re-personalize our world.

Behind every answer in this volume are a host of yet more important questions. In the title essay, I ask, “So How’s the Family?” But following that, I ask: How’s empathy? How’s the way we look for joy? Where in our lives are those precious connections between the Thomas Paines of the world and the Jane Austens? I invite you on a journey through these questions in the faith that finding better answers will help us build a better world.