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flaw

flaw “Karl Mannheim's conception of self-rationalization is useful in understanding what is one of the central social psychological processes of organizational life. In a world where appearances - in the broadest sense - mean everything, the wise and ambitious person learns to cultivate assiduously the proper, prescribed modes of appearing. He dispassionately takes stock of himself, treating himself as an object. He analyses his strengths and weaknesses, and decides what he needs to change in order to survive and flourish in his organization. And then he systematically undertakes a program to reconstruct his image. Self-rationalization curiously parallels the methodical subjection of self to God’s will that the old Protestant Ethic counseled; the difference, of course, is that one acquires not moral virtues but a masterful ability to manipulate personae.”(Berger p.263)) Like Mannheim, Ritzer also analyzes society but on a more macro level. Ritzer describes the McDonaldised society as a system of "iron cages" in which all institutions come to be dominated by the same principle. The fundamental problem with McDonaldised systems is that it's other people in the system structuring our lives for us, rather than us structuring our lives for ourselves. “You don't want a creative person clerk at the counter - that's why they are scripted. You don't want a creative hamburger cook - you want somebody who simply follows routines or follows scripts.” That's the reason why it is dehumanizing.” (Ritzer) Humanity is essentially creative and if you develop these systems that are constraining and controlling people they can't be creative, they can't be human. “The idea is to turn humans into human robots. The next logical step is to replace human robots with mechanical robots. And I think we will see McDonaldised systems where it is economically feasible and technologically possible to replace human robots with non-human robots.”(Ritzer) The Brave New World image is one of centralised control. What McDonaldisation is, is “microsystems of control or whole systems of Microsystems of control. Actually Michelle Foucault, the French post structural theorist, talked about these micro politics of control, micro mechanisms of control and I think that what's being set in place here is not an iron cage, but innumerable mini iron cages and there are so many of them and they're so widely spaced throughout society that the iron cages envisioned here is one where you simply have your choice of which cage to enter but there's nothing but cages to go to.”(Ritzer) McDonald's has a profound effect on the way people do a lot of things, it leads people to want everything fast, to have limited attention span so that kind of thing spills over onto television viewing or newspaper reading, and “so you have a short attention span, you want everything fast, so you don't have patience to read the New York Times and so you read McPaper, you read USA today. You don't have patience to watch a lengthy newscast on a particular issue so you watch CNN News and their little news McNugget kinds of things so it creates a kind of mindset which seeks the same kind of thing in one setting after another.”(Ritzer) Like Ritzer and Mannheim, Lasch looks at society from a more micro approach as he studies the elites of our society and compare them to the ones of the past. Christopher Lasch’s book describes America's "democratic malaise." The book looks at the "intensification of social divisions" in the nation; the second surveys the degradation of contemporary public discourse; and the third offers Lasch's reflections on the spiritual predicament at the heart of America's social and political crisis. The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch. The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts -- lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc.”(Lasch) These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life." The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." Lasch charges that the fixation on opportunity and the "democratization of competence" betrays rather than exemplifies the American dream. "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "laboring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people. The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" -- beyond the home and workplace -- which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions -- ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places -- that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders." In "The Lost Art of Argument," Lasch laments the degradation of public discourse at the hands of a media establishment more committed to a "misguided ideal of objectivity" than to providing context and continuity -- the foundation for a meaningful public debate. In a final section titled "The Dark Night of the Soul," Lasch examines what he considers a spiritual crisis at the heart of Western culture. This crisis is the product of an over-attachment to the secular worldview, he maintains, which has left the knowledge elite with little room for doubt and insecurity. Traditionally, institutional religion provided a home for spiritual uncertainties as well as a source of higher meaning and a repository of practical moral wisdom. The new elites, however, in their embrace of science and secularism, look upon religion with a disdain bordering on hostility. "The culture of criticism is understood to rule out religious commitments," Lasch observes. Today, religion is "something useful for weddings and funerals but otherwise dispensable." Bereft of a higher ethic, the knowledge classes have taken refuge in a culture of cynicism, inoculating themselves with irreverence. "The collapse of religion," he writes, "its replacement by the remorselessly critical sensibility exemplified by psychoanalysis, and the degeneration of the 'analytic attitude' into an all-out assault on ideals of every kind have left our culture in a sorry state." Things Fall Apart has been so influential, not only on African literature, but on literature around the world. Its most striking feature is to create a complex and sympathetic portrait of a traditional village culture in Africa. Achebe is trying not only to inform the outside world about Ibo cultural traditions, but to remind his own people of their past and to assert that it had contained much of value. All too many Africans in his time were ready to accept the European judgment that Africa had no history or culture worth considering. He also fiercely resents the stereotype of Africa as an undifferentiated "primitive" land, the "heart of darkness," as Conrad calls it. Throughout the novel he shows how African cultures vary among themselves and how they change over time. The wider world consists of the group of nine related villages which comprise Umuofia and certain other villages like Mbaino. One famous line in the novel is "proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." Palm oil is a rich yellow oil pressed from the fruit of certain palm trees and used both for fuel and cooking. The chi or personal spirit (rather like the daemon of Socrates) is a recurring theme in the book. The term "second burial" is a delayed funeral ceremony given after the family has had time to prepare. The British followed a policy in their colonizing efforts of designating local "leaders" to administer the lower levels of their empire. In Africa these were known as "warrant chiefs." But the men they chose were often not the real leaders, and the British often assumed the existence of an centralized chieftainship where none existed. Thus the new power structures meshed badly with the old. Similarly the missionaries have designated as their contact man an individual who lacks the status to make him respected by his people. In Things Fall Apart Okonkwo is faced with a major dilemma, which later cases his downfall and ultimately his death. Ritzer argues that we have lost touch with our traditional beliefs in that fact that postmodern ways such as McDonalization has ruined our way of life. Okonkwo would have agreed with Rizer in that aspect that Christianity like McDonalization has corrupted our society. Lasch would also be in agreement with Okonkwo in the fact that Lasch believes that the New Elites have corrupted society as we see it. The older generation of Elites were good people who gave back to their community and created a bond of friendship and respect with the people. Okonkwo would agree that there culture has changed in the face of new power with in his African society. Ritzer, Okonkwo and Lasch would all agree on a sense of agency. Agency being a reluctance to change. All three people are over whelmed by social change within their own society. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1792