The Triumph of Meanness: America’s War Against Its Better Self

Nicolaus Mills, 1997, Houghton Mifflin ($25.00)

Reviewed by Bonnie Berry

Social Problems Research Group

Nicolaus Mills’ book on meanness is an accurate and thoughtful timepiece, providing social scientific commentary on social conditions in the United States. Through the examination of meanness, we come to know the sources of social problems, the present state of our specific social problems, and the reason for our societal failure to treat social problems. For example, meanness has become our problematic "first response to a series of social problems" (p. 2). The meanness of the 1990s, writes Mills,

… is not just a political response we make periodically in our weaker moments. Meanness today is a state of mind, the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us (p. 2).

Meanness is a part of our culture; indeed, Mills refers to the U.S. of the 1990s as a culture of meanness.

Mills, an American Studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, begins his analysis with local descriptions of unnecessary meanness, such as disallowing the homeless to lie upon benches in subway stops. Professor Mills makes clear that meanness creates and aggravates social problems, but worse is the public acceptance of mean measures, to wit, our acceptance of "bumproof" benches as the norm. We see meanness in our hardened attitudes toward the poor. We see it in the "third worldization" of our society — where only those ensconced in the very top socio-economic stratum have security.

In the initial chapters, "Mean Times" and "The New Savagery," and throughout the book, Mills brings forth the notion of time periods as essential to the context of meanness. Schlesinger (1986) has noted that complex societies vary approximately every three decades on meanness versus generosity, tolerance, and kindness. He writes specifically of fluctuating (left and right, progressive and conservative) political powers controlling social programs and policies (social security, welfare, immigration, health care, etc.). While it is true that these are mean times and that every culture fluctuates across time in terms of its meanness (Berry 1999), the 1990s are particularly mean.

Other scholars monitoring present-day U.S. culture have described the 1980s through the end of the century as mean times, full of contemporary social hatreds and rage (Kaminer 1995; Wolfe 1998). We live in a time of gated communities to keep out our socially-constructed enemies and of unprecedented prison construction. We live in a time of selfish "need" to own environment-destroying sport utility vehicles. We live in a time of superficiality, narcissism, vacuousness, and materialism. We live in a time of unreasoning and loud voices, taking the place of reasoned and reasonable discussion aimed at resolving violent, harsh, and pointless disagreement (Tannen 1998). We live in a time of militia movements taking the forefront of our attention, demanding that we as a society hear their male and white supremacist message and that we respond to their threats of and imposed violence with cooptation (Aho 1990, 1994; Dees and Fiffer 1993; Smith 1994; Hamm 1994;1997; Coates 1995; Dees and Corcoran 1996; Lamy 1996; Stock 1996; Stern 1997; Bushart, et al. 1998). Such measures of meanness necessarily overlap with behaviors of the political right, the religious fringe, the media, economic poor times, and continuing sexism and racism.

The U.S. has repeatedly experienced mean times in which cruelty targets the vulnerable, as evidenced by Indian removal, immigration quotas, anti-Semitism, the red scare, and so on. But Mills insists that the 1990s are uniquely mean times since, for one thing, the new meanness is pervasive and, for another, it stands the test of public scrutiny. Meanness is now a "part of our everyday world in ways that we now take for granted" (p. 16). While decency triumphed over past meanness, 90s-style meanness is so deeply embedded in our culture that the "new meanness is … style and attitude, meanness without guilt" (pp. 16-17). In short, ruthlessness is reinforced; current meanness has become institutionalized.

A couple of social forces are blamed for the current meanness. The end of the Cold War deprived the U.S. of an external and vaguely-understood enemy. Corresponding with sociology-of-the-enemy interpretations, we have turned our hostilities inward and toward the homeless, immigrants, criminals, homosexuals, racial minorities, women. A second and related force culminating in current meanness is the downward mobility of the middle class. White-collar unemployment now exceeds blue-collar unemployment, and the unemployed white-collar workers (often white men, but more generally Americans expectant of the "American Dream") need a scapegoat.

Economics. Economic bad times play a huge role in the creation and sustenance of meanness. U.S. corporations now use humiliation as a management tool, laying people off unnecessarily, under-paying them, firing them. The anxiety created by such a system has quickly turned to anger — anger at other economic victims (welfare recipients) and at affirmative action policies (which are blamed for unemployment among white men). Strangely, many in American society persist in the belief that our society is basically fair and that those at the bottom deserve to be there. Such an attitude allows us to shed any sense of responsibility toward the poor and disadvantaged. Such an attitude encouraged the popularity of the Contract with America, a political directive credited to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The Contract called for drastic cuts in the poverty programs that the New Deal (1930s) and the Great Society (1960s) had put in place, in less mean eras.

Mills explains "corporate Darwinism" in much the same terms as does Michael Moore (1996) in his book Downsize This. Corporate downsizing, on the scale that we have unhappily observed in the 1990s, is essentially the unnecessary firing of workers without thought to personal or social impact. From a business perspective, it is

perfectly all right for a thriving company to shed thousands of workers, watch its stock prices shoot up as a consequence, and then reward its CEOs and top executives with stock options that were even more valuable than before (p. 63).

Companies downsize when they are healthy and when their businesses are profitable. For the workers, this means that they can not count on being employed over the long haul, no matter how well they have performed their jobs; workers no longer have a social contract with their employer. They must consider themselves as freelance workers, as self-employed vendors who must sell their skills to a company, on a tenuous, temporary basis. Meanness on the part of the employers begats not only anxiety, homelessness, and poverty, but also backlash meanness on the part of the employees. That is, the angst of American workers produces backlash by American workers, not against appropriate targets (the downsizers) but, not uncommonly, against foreign labor. The same forces that create a feeling of violated expectations here also encourage brutality and exploitation in foreign workplaces, as we find in Asia, South America, and other countries where American corporations re-locate. Exploited American laborers are not usually sympathetic to exploited foreign labor, however.

Popular Culture. The content of our entertainment is also a sign of the mean times. Human and non-human cruelties are among the things we like to watch: cockfights, dog fights, and human fights (Roller Derby, American Gladiators, and Wrestlemania being popular TV shows). We watch TV talk shows that display violence and encourage violence: the Jenny Jones Show, Jerry Springer, and Geraldo. Moreover, we like violent movies that target minorities.

Music is also an avenue for expressing social emotions, such as social rage (see and Leighton 1997, 1998; Berry 1999). Much of white supremacist rock music targets minorities (women, Jews, et al.) and homosexuals. Rap music, usually associated with African-American male recording artists, is considered by Mills to be responsible for very poor attitudes toward human life in general and women in specific. Drive-by shootings and black-on-black gang violence are "central to rap, and from there the hate spirals every which way. Anyone who is different is seen as hostile…" (p. 54). Black women are judged very harshly in rap music, as "hos" and "bitches" worthy of abuse and sexual humiliation.

Racism, Sexism, and Anti-Immigrantism. Regarding race relations, Mills tackles the uncomfortable issue of African-American racism against whites. For example, he describes the racism exhibited by African-American university students against white university students and aptly refers to this kind of phenomenon as "racial payback." Racial meanness in the 1990s is not (in other words) one-way, white against black. White-against-black racism has grown and one strong bit of evidence is the resistance toward alleviating black poverty (through welfare and other social programs). Further evidence is bias crimes against blacks that have skyrocketed in recent times. Racial meanness is also black against white, black against Jews (recall the Million Man March and other anti-Semitic messages promoted by Louis Farrakhan), black against Asians, and black against other blacks. Generally, the racial divisions in our society have widened over the past decade and "widened in ways that increasingly make racial payback our response of first resort" (p. 86). Today’s racial meanness

has locked us into roles in which racial concession is taken as a sign of weakness. The pay-off, especially in politics, comes from playing hardball, from making sure every racial encounter is treated as a symbolic clash of interests (p. 109).

As with racism, we see that in some ways our society has devolved rather than progressed on the issue of sexism. In his chapter, "Sexual Warfare and the Post-Liberated Man," and borrowing from his language on race, Mills refers to an ongoing "male backlash." This backlash is illustrated by men "taking back" their already-firmly-entrenched position of privilege, as though reassertion of their traditionally-held status and "rights" are in order. We see it in the resistance to affirmative action programs, programs which angry white men see as favoring women and minorities rather than attempting to grant equal opportunity. We see it in advertisements, as the one by Brut cologne, stating definitely that "Men Are Back." We hear it from radio and TV talk show messengers, such as Rush Limbaugh, who terms women expecting equal treatment as "feminazis." Mills cites a 1993 Gallup poll showing that almost half of men in the U.S. believe that the "women’s movement has made their lives harder" (p. 133), providing yet another example of the spiteful and non-empirically based attitude that advancement of one category of people necessarily removes resources (economic power, social power, etc.) from another category of people.

The sexual culture war rages against women in sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle ways. In the chapter "The Contract of 1996" in the section on Politics Without Future, Mills describes an event at the 1996 Republican convention that unequivocably demonstrates conservatives’ fear of independent women.

At the Republican convention the GOP’s frustrations were reflected in the Hillary Clinton dismemberment dolls that vendors sold for twenty dollars apiece. The rag doll with arms and legs that could be torn off, gave anyone who bought it an excuse to have a temper tantrum (p. 200).

We find the same pattern of selfishness in our mean dealings with immigrants, as described in the chapter "Lifeboat Ethics and Immigration Fears." Mills cites Mark Mellman, Democratic pollster, as stating,

Today the notion is that the pie is shrinking and that each new person who arrives not only takes a piece of the pie but takes it from me (p. 111).

Mean people’s views of immigrants is that they are leeches; they take jobs away from us and disproportionately usurp our tax money. Immigrants do, out of desperation, accept employment that more privileged people do not want, at wages that the more privileged would not consider. But to assume that all immigrants are illegal aliens and to blame immigrants for draining our tax dollars is not just mean, it is false. Nevertheless, "we have crossed a threshold on what can be said in public about immigration" (p. 114). Repeatedly, we are told that our culture should be a one-language culture; and with this argument, we have turned the English "language into a weapon for fighting diversity" (p. 119). Clearly, the problem is not diversity in language. We have no problem with people speaking French in restaurants or elsewhere. For that matter, the problem is not with the Spanish language. The language issue, I would argue, is a distraction. We have a problem with Spanish-speaking people.

At this juncture, we can combine our meanness regarding race, immigration, and cut-throat corporate behavior. And here again, we see meanness derived from a sense of being threatened. That is, it is not just white Americans who feel, falsely or not, economically threatened by influxes of immigrants. Black Americans, "especially those struggling to find entry-level jobs" feel the impact of immigration, perhaps more so than white Americans. Mills writes,

In the 1990s it is immigrants from Latin America and Asia who have taken the place of Europeans in elbowing out blacks in the competition for entry-level jobs (p. 127).

Media and Politics. The media are also partly to blame for the meanness in our culture. Mills describes the rampant meanness in media portrayals of social events in his chapter, "Reporting with Attitude." He finds much the same media behavior as do I in my Social Rage analysis — not just meanness on the part of the media, but massive distortion as well. Personal denigration matters greatly in political elections. Incriminating details matter more than relevant facts; policy decisions are secondary in importance to political figures’ sexual and other personal behavior. Overall, media adherence to objectivity has become obsolete. Citing journalist Michiko Kakutani, Mills reports that there is "increasingly little reason for writers to try to reign in their own biases and, more important, their anger" (p. 165). Hearkening to Tannen’s study of the argument culture, Mills suggests that the abandonment of "objectivity and fairness for the sake of mean-spirited combat" does not lead to enlivened debate. Indeed, we learn nothing from such attitudinous reporting; there is little "distinctions between fact and opinion, information and mere assertion" (p. 168).

In summary, The Triumph of Meanness is a uniquely useful book for scholars of American society as well as for members of the general public who seek a firmer understanding of current social problems in the United States. It would be equally appealing to university students at the advanced undergraduate and graduate-level. Students of the sociology of emotion and selected topics in social problems would be especially appropriate classroom audiences. While Mills’ analysis tends toward the sociological, this work is also relevant to those with a more political science and psychological bent.

I heartily recommend this book.

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