Author (or Editor): Callahan, David |
Title: The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead |
Fiction? N |
Publisher: Harcourt |
Date: 2004 |
ISBN: ISBN 0-15-101018-8 |
Series Name: |
Physical description: hardcover |
Relevance to doaskdotell/doaskdotell: hyper-individualism and ethics |
Review: The film (The Perfect Score) from Tollin /
Robbins hits the market the same time as the box jellyfish sting book on
business ethics and personal character by David Callahan: The Cheating
Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (Harcourt,
2004, ISBN 0-15-101018-8). Callahan traces the evolution of our own kind of
laissez-faire, bottom-line, winner-take-all individualism and the “Trickle
Down Corruption” that it generates (“Everybody does it”) ranging from
academic cheating, to illegal piracy and copyright infringement on the
Internet, to tax cheating, to conflicts of interest, and frank cooking of
books and insider trading. The most
telling chapter is probably “A Question of Character.” Business and personal
ethics and even family values have to get back to a notion of “principled
conscience.” A few “fair use” quotes here set the tone. “Before the 1960s,
individualism in the I guess my own sin is more that of drawing attention to myself (through self-publishing) without credentials or reportable accountability, without “paying my dues” in a competitive, meritocratic game that places too much emphasis on the short term. Of course, the point of that game used to be to promote family. A bit of irony. Okay, my lifestyle, which neglects having wife and children, could be said to “cheat the system.” Family cuts both ways in the ethics game: within any one social class, it focuses individuals on meeting the needs of others and away from excessive attention to one’s own values, possessions, expression or other experience, but family and especially nepotism also tend to continue the disparities between groups of people—and this supports the author’s contention that many of these problems are collective and not personal. (Look at how wealthy parents “compete” by how they place their kids in private schools and indulge in expensive tutoring programs –“The Perfect Score”--that encourage richer kids to cheat.) The loss of “meaning” for the traditional gender-marriage-based family because of “competition” from the gay community then might have a bearing on excessive individualism. In my case, there is resentment from others around me because I maintain a certain secrecy and dispassionate detachment in my own affairs, and do things that others say I could not do if I were accountable to biological family. This is, it seems, another way to look at the cheating problem. The long view that Dr. Callahan takes is instructive,
however. At the personal level, he has a peculiar, zero-tolerance
meritocracy (in the “Consciousness II” sense of Theodore Reich’s The
Greening of A particularly atrocious example of cheating comes when
retail managers, apparently feeling pressured, electronically alter time
records of hourly employees to save money for the bottom lines of the
individual stores at which they work. Steven Greenhouse of The New York
Times reports about this practice on For more on academic cheating see this link. On
What about The
Kids? Elliott Currie provides a supplement to the cheating culture
over-individualism thesis in The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture
and the Crisis of Adolescence ( “The rejection of the idea of mutual
responsibility, a righteous distaste for offering help, the acceptance or encouragement
of a view of life in which a competitive scramble for individual preeminence
and comfort is central, the insistence that even the most vulnerable must
learn to handle life’s difficulties by themselves and that if they cannot it
is no one’s fault but their own—those were not the idiosyncratic views of a
few parents but pervasive themes in American society and culture during the
past years in which these teenagers were growing up.” (p. 122) Currie goes on to discuss this tough-it-out approach in the therapy business and especially the school systems, with their zero-tolerance policies of the 90s. Curiously, though, Currie ignores No Child Left Behind, and things are changing. Currie’s solutions have a lot to do with keeping the social safety net and
especially improving parental benefits and universal health care – and he
conveniently ignores the balance with flexibility in creating new kinds of
jobs quickly and encouraging small business, which can be burdened by “social
responsibility.” You get back to
thinking through what our virtues should be at the individual level. Caring
for others is also an important responsibility for the individual (even if
childless), not just “society.” So you have to balance individual merit and
accomplishment with community and family virtues, and with the need for equal
opportunities. There is some tension among these.
|
Related reviews: movies: The Perfect Score; ENRON,
The Smartest Guys in the Room
book: Kay Hymowitz: Ready or Not: Why Treating
Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Futures – and Ours. |
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