The shift from the Little Me culture to the Big Me culture was not illegitimate, but it went too far. The realist tradition that emphasized limitation and moral struggle was inadvertently marginalized and left by the side of the road, first by the romantic flowering of positive psychology, then by the self-branding ethos of social media, finally by the competitive pressures of the meritocracy. We are left with a moral ecology that builds up the exterior Adam I muscles but ignores the internal Adam II ones, and that creates an imbalance. It’s a culture in which people are defined by their external abilities and achievements, in which a cult of busyness develops as everybody frantically tells each other how overcommitted they are. As my student Andrew Reeves once put it, it cultivates an unrealistic expectation that life will happen on a linear progression, a natural upward slope toward success. It encourages people to “satisfice,” to get by on talent and just enough commitment to get the job done on time, without full soul commitment to any task.
This tradition tells you how to do the things that will propel you to the top, but it doesn’t encourage you to ask yourself why you are doing them. It offers little guidance on how to choose among different career paths and different vocations, how to determine which will be morally highest and best. It encourages people to become approval-seeking machines, to measure their lives by external praise—if people like you and accord you status, then you must be doing something right. The meritocracy contains its own cultural contradictions. It encourages people to make the most of their capacities, but it leads to the shriveling of the moral faculties that are necessary if you are going to figure out how to point your life in a meaningful direction.
Conditional Love
Let me just describe one way the meritocracy’s utilitarian, instrumentalist mindset can, in some cases, distort a sacred bond: parenthood.
There are two great defining features of child rearing today. First, children are now praised to an unprecedented degree. Dorothy Parker quipped that American children aren’t raised, they are incited—they are given food, shelter, and applause. That’s much more true today. Children are incessantly told how special they are. In 1966, only about 19 percent of high school students graduated with an A or A– average. By 2013, 53 percent of students graduated with that average, according to UCLA surveys of incoming college freshmen. Young people are surrounded by so much praise that they develop sky-high aspirations for themselves. According to an Ernst & Young survey, 65 percent of college students expect to become millionaires.18
The second defining feature is that children are honed to an unprecedented degree. Parents, at least in the more educated, affluent classes, spend much more time than in past generations grooming their children, investing in their skills, and driving them to practices and rehearsals. As Richard Murnane of Harvard found, parents with college degrees invest $5,700 more per year per child on out-of-school enrichment activities than they did in 1978.19
These two great trends—greater praise and greater honing—combine in interesting ways. Children are bathed in love, but it is often directional love. Parents shower their kids with affection, but it is not simple affection, it is meritocratic affection—it is intermingled with the desire to help their children achieve worldly success.
Some parents unconsciously shape their expressions of love to steer their children toward behavior they think will lead to achievement and happiness. Parents glow with extra fervor when their child studies hard, practices hard, wins first place, gets into a prestigious college, or joins the honor society (in today’s schools, the word “honor” means earning top grades). Parental love becomes merit-based. It is not simply “I love you.” It is “I love you when you stay on my balance beam. I shower you with praise and care when you’re on my beam.”
Parents in the 1950s were much more likely to say they expected their children to be obedient than parents today, who tell pollsters they want their children to think for themselves. But this desire for obedience hasn’t vanished, it’s just gone underground—from the straightforward system of rules and lectures, reward and punishment, to the semihidden world of approval or disapproval.
Lurking in the shadows of merit-based love is the possibility that it may be withdrawn if the child disappoints. Parents would deny this, but the wolf of conditional love is lurking here. This shadowy presence of conditional love produces fear, the fear that there is no utterly safe love; there is no completely secure place where young people can be utterly honest and themselves.
On the one hand, relationships between parents and children may be closer than ever before. Parents and children, even college-age children, communicate constantly. With only quiet qualms young people have accepted the vast achievement system that surrounds them. They submit to it because they long for the approval they get from the adults they love.
But the whole situation is more fraught than it appears at first glance. Some children assume that this merit-tangled love is the natural order of the universe. The tiny blips of approval and disapproval are built into the fabric of communication so deep that it is below the level of awareness. Enormous internal pressure is generated by the growing assumption that it is necessary to behave in a certain way to be worthy of another’s love. Underneath, the children are terrified that the deepest relationship they know will be lost.
Some parents unconsciously regard their children as something like an art project, to be crafted through mental and emotional engineering. There is some parental narcissism here, the insistence that your children go to colleges and lead lives that will give the parents status and pleasure. Children who are uncertain of their parents’ love develop a voracious hunger for it. This conditional love is like acid that dissolves children’s internal criteria, their capacity to make their own decisions about their own interests, careers, marriages, and life in general.
The parental relationship is supposed to be built upon unconditional love—a gift that cannot be bought and cannot be earned. It sits outside the logic of meritocracy and is the closest humans come to grace. But in these cases the pressure to succeed in the Adam I world has infected a relationship that should be operating by a different logic, the moral logic of Adam II. The result is holes in the hearts of many children across this society.
The Age of the Selfie
This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn’t made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, about how goodness and character are built, but everything is fuzzy. Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism.
This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20