Charm Read online

  What remains of the great age of psychotherapists is no one idea or even series of ideas, but instead such general notions that hold an active sex life (apart from procreation) is central, indeed essential, to the good life, that confession brought about by easy intimacy is healthy and everywhere to be not merely tolerated but encouraged, and above all repression, the arch-enemy, is to be avoided. One sees these notions played out everywhere. In contemporary life what is taken to be psychological health ranks well above moral scrupulosity. The individual thought of Freud, Jung, Reich & Co. may seem to have been defeated idea by idea, yet as of the moment victory is nonetheless theirs.

  The result is that the psychotherapeutic has swept the boards, won the day, exercising a subtle but genuine tyranny throughout contemporary culture. Therapy, as Philip Rieff had it, has indeed been triumphant. Anyone older than seventy will recall a time when people were what I think of as “pre-psychological,” with morality and stern common sense in command. I think of my own parents here. If I had said to my father that I felt “insecure” about something, he, a gentle and good man, would have told me to pull up my socks and not be a coward. When my mother turned eighty, she was discovered to have liver cancer. Enrolled in a chemotherapy regimen, she nevertheless was fairly (and rightly) certain of her death, which left her, with good reason, mildly depressed. I mentioned her depression to an acquaintance, who told me that there were many support groups for people with terminal illnesses, and perhaps one of them might be helpful for my mother. I imagined her response to my telling her this.

  “Let me understand,” I can easily hear my mother saying. “You’re saying that if I go into a room with strangers and listen to their problems and then tell them mine that I shall feel better for doing so. Is that what you are suggesting? [Pause.] Is this the kind of idiot I have for a son?”

  To the extent that the therapeutic has triumphed, charm has been defeated. Not that therapy is itself evil or vile, though it is surely too frequently called into play and too often misbegotten and can be tyrannical. Insofar as it is interested in cure, psychotherapy is another of the healing arts, like orthopedics, cardiology, urology, dermatology, and the rest. The difference is that these latter branches of medicine, unlike the psychotherapeutic, do not go beyond anatomy and physiology to posit a preferred way of living. Other branches of medicine are concerned with healthy organs and bones. Psychotherapy, like most religions, sets out to teach its patients how to live; it offers a model of the good life. This life, featuring devotion to one’s own well-being, is implicitly understood to be superior to all other modes of life that have come before it.

  The triumph of the therapeutic would never have resulted if other, older cultural systems didn’t seem to have broken down. “At the breaking point,” Philip Rieff writes in his final chapter, “a culture can no longer maintain itself as an established span of moral demands. Its jurisdiction contracts; it demands less, permits more. Bread and circuses become confused with right and duty.” The mention of bread and circuses of course calls up Rome, where luxury and hedonism generally broke down the Roman military and communal spirit, with Christianity, a much more forgiving culture, picking up the pieces and eventually conquering. Might it be that now even Christianity, despite its strong doctrine of forgiveness, is too forbidding for the modern temper?

  A cultural revolution is never so clearly marked an event as a political revolution. We think of 1776, 1789, 1917—but there are no precise dates for cultural revolutions, which nevertheless occur and usually establish themselves with greater pervasiveness and efficacy than political ones. Among cultural revolutions, Rieff held that the therapeutic revolution “cannot be viewed simply as a break with the established order of moral demand, but rather as a profound effort to end the tyranny of primary group moral passion . . . as the inner dynamic of the moral order.” So widespread has been the cultural victory of the therapeutic, that even once reticent movie action heroes are given to confession, weeping, open displays of sadness. In a book titled The Origins of the Cool in Postwar America, Joel Dinerstein, after recounting the reticent style of such film noir heroes as Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Robert Mitchum, notes that in the movies of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and others “neurosis was no longer suppressed but expressed, a sign of how deeply psychoanalysis had penetrated artistic and intellectual communities.” Dinerstein goes on to refer to Brando as showing the “liberatory energies of the therapeutic man.” As Stanley Kowalski, his signature role in Streetcar Named Desire, Brando cries in remorse for his treatment of his wife. Difficult to imagine Bogart in any of his roles crying, but then Bogart’s movies were made before the triumph of the therapeutic.

  If Marlon Brando in his movie roles is therapeutic man, surely therapeutic woman is Oprah Winfrey. Her career seems to have broken through on a confessional note of her own: that of her chronicling, on television, the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Her battle against weight gain has been a saga now running into the decades. A splendid interview for her was one in which she gets a guest to open herself up before the vast numbers who used to watch her show and reveal her weakness, sadness, fears, wretched past, and anything else that happens to be on hand. The enormous success of Oprah Winfrey, who neither sings nor dances nor is especially penetrating in her conversation, would not have been thinkable in any other than a therapeutic age.

  The larger point is that the therapeutic is personal, individual, while charm operates under the aegis of the social, the communal. To confess, though it might conduce to greater intimacy, is never charming; not to repress—“The enemy is repression,” said one of the producers of the movie La La Land, holding up his Oscar for the year’s best film (2017) before it was taken away from him owing to a mistake—might make for psychic health but also for hellish social relations. One of the first rules for charm, surely, is not to say precisely what one thinks and certainly not as soon as one thinks it.

  The therapeutic culture is devoted to the self. In the root sense, it is selfish. The charming person asks, “How may I please?”; the therapeutic patient or person asks, “How do I please myself?” The charming person looks outward; the therapeutic person inward. The charming person is never touchy; the therapeutic patient tends to be edgy, on the qui vive for innuendo, insult, hidden aggressions. The first person I ever encountered in therapy was the young husband of a sister of a boyhood friend of mine, who was undergoing a training analysis for his own future career as a psychoanalyst. “Be careful around Dover,” my friend told me, “he’s in the middle of his training analysis.”

  The charming person is always tactful—tactful and tasteful. The therapeutic person, setting tact and taste aside, is primarily interested in psychic health; no subject is out of bounds that touches upon or might affect it. In Chicago there has for some years now been a sex-advice columnist who writes a column for a giveaway paper called The Reader. He dispenses advice on efficient sodomy, the varied and intricate uses of the clitoris, the ranges of sadomasochism, including stoppage of breath by choking during fornication. He advises his readers to be adventurous. “I’m not saying you have to be nonmonogamous,” he writes. “I’m saying a couple can be exclusive and sexually adventurous at the same time.” People write to him under stage or therapy names. “Trembling Man” writes to him about his panty-wearing fetish, to which our columnist responds: “There are women out there who think men can be sexy in panties—and anyone who thinks men can’t be sexy in panties needs to check out all the hunky panty wearing models at xdress.com.” Charmant? You decide.

  Owing to the triumph of the therapeutic, actors in our day feel perfectly comfortable going on talk shows, or writing full-blown books, discussing their mistreatment by sexually perverse fathers, alcoholic mothers, brutish husbands. Others go on television to speak of their “sex addiction”—as if every healthy man between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five isn’t addicted to sex—and their attempts to defeat it. Actresses recount their batt
les with drugs. Why not? Why hold back? Repression is the enemy, confession good, if not for the soul, certainly for the psyche.

  In contemporary writing, the sobbing memoir has become common currency, the genre of the day. Novelists, poets, critics, journalists learn that they are to die and see in it a promising subject for a book, or novel, or poems: Christopher Hitchens, Jenny Diski, Clive James have all played the literary death game, writing about their imminent death in public. Others must be content with exposing their parents or former husbands and wives, noting the heavy mental torture they had visited upon them.

  Widened tolerance for irregular behavior, which the age of the therapeutic has brought, has been offset by the diminishment of decorum that is part of the therapeutic bargain. Vast is the pain that the psychotherapy, greatly aided in recent decades by pharmacology, has relieved, from that of raving paranoid schizophrenics to those born with genetic mis-wiring to those depressed and otherwise defeated by misfortune in life. Much can be said about the use and value of psychotherapy, but its toll on charm has been heavy.

  Chapter XIV

  Charmless Politics

  The reason salesmen, barbers, and others dealing with the general public are instructed to avoid the topics of religion and politics is that these are the two general subjects that most readily inflame people and are most likely quickly to get the conversation to the shouting stage. The reason religion is an outlawed subject is obvious; it is in the realm of the sacred, and therefore not a fit subject either for trivial conversation or one finally open to argument without touching on the deepest and most tender feelings. As for politics, Jonathan Swift said that one cannot reason people out of something they haven’t been reasoned into, and over the years there has been less and less evidence to prove that politics, at least people’s personal politics, has all that much to do with reason.

  Politics aren’t about politics merely—about how people should be governed, about the proper distribution of power and wealth, about just social arrangements—but about something much more personal. More and more in our time politics are expressions, in one form or another, of personal virtue. Disagree with my politics and you are telling me that I am not a good person—certainly not as good as you. Which figures to tick me, as I’ve no doubt it would tick you, to the max. Whenever I sense people want to argue politics with me—which, I’m pleased to report, isn’t very often—I warn them that they ought to know beforehand that I have never lost a political argument, a fact whose impressiveness is offset only by the countervailing fact that neither have I ever won one. The reason is that, pace Jonathan Swift, we do not come into our politics through reason and so thereby cannot expect to be argued out of them, or argue anyone else out of theirs, by reason.

  Some of us adopt the politics we do because they were the politics of our parents; others because they are strongly opposed to those of our parents. One’s milieu—be it the corporation, the university, the country club, or the neighborhood bar—can be decisive in forming one’s politics. Over and above all this there are the competing virtues that lie behind politics, entailing such issues, or points in contention, as abortion, climate change, the distribution of income, and the rest. The liberal or progressive finds his virtue in what he thinks a strong sense of social justice, the conservative his in an equally strong sense of the importance of liberty for the formation of character. The liberal thinks the conservative hard-hearted, the conservative thinks the liberal hopelessly naïve about human nature. Liberal and conservative, each faces the other confident of the superiority of his or her intelligence and virtue over that of the other.

  Besides, there is something coarsening about the certainty of views held by intensely political people—a certainty and aggressiveness that works against the nature of charm. H. L. Mencken, in Minority Report, captured this quality neatly when he wrote:

  Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”

  Because of its inherent contentiousness, politics has never been an arena in which charm has flourished. To be sure, politicians are often called upon to charm supporters, colleagues, voters. A politician utterly bereft of charm, unless he be a ruthless dictator—a Nero, a Hitler, a Stalin—would be in difficult straits, certainly in electoral politics. But his charm is likely to have its limits, and these figure to be strict. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to have been charming. He charmed the coldhearted Walter Winchell, who, through his newspaper columns, rallied support for all Roosevelt’s programs. Yet during his years in office, nearly half the country—that ample portion that didn’t vote for him, or hold with his general ideas—not merely disliked but greatly loathed him. Some of the nuttier among his haters, thinking to cash in a chip of anti-Semitism while at it, claimed he was Jewish, real name Rosenberg.

  When I asked friends and acquaintances to name five charming figures in public life, not a few mentioned Barack Obama, one or two named Michelle Obama. Quite as many people, however, intensely disliked the Obamas, and not for reasons of race. They disliked Barack Obama’s policies; his taking sides other than theirs in foreign and domestic policy; they thought Michelle Obama stiff, unconvincing in her avowed sensitivity, ultimately phony and trivial with her campaign against obesity. One measure of an American president’s charm, though a vastly inexact one, is his approval rating; and for much of his eight years in office, Barack Obama’s hovered under 50 percent. In the current American political atmosphere of intense political disagreement, that may be the best any American president in our day can hope for. Our current president has yet to get anywhere close to a 50 percent approval rating, though, true enough, no one, even among his most ardent supporters would ever think to call him charming to begin with. So much does he bring out the unpleasant passions in people—his defenders and contemners alike—that in a biweekly meeting with old friends I have instituted a no-Trump-talk rule.

  If ever one wishes to view a politician at his most charming, one might look into the charm Benjamin Disraeli turned on Queen Victoria. The stern queen and the rather exotic Jew who had climbed what he called “the greasy pole” of politics to rise to its top as Tory prime minister of England would seem the oddest of odd couples. “I live for Power and Affections,” Disraeli claimed, and from Victoria, through his charm, he managed to wring both. How he amused the woman known for so frequently uttering “We are not amused” is no great secret. He expressed unstinting admiration for her beloved Albert. By the time of his second prime-ministership (1874–1880), he, Disraeli, joined her in widow(er)hood, which made for a bond of mutual sympathy between them. In her, he found his ambition as a social climber fulfilled beyond all possible expectation. In him, she found a friend, full, as she wrote, of “romance, poetry, and chivalry.” He wrote her gossip-filled letters, took care of those little but bedeviling tasks that might otherwise have complicated her life, addressed her, this small, buxom, double-chinned, middle-age woman, as “Faery Queen.” And she went for it, hook, line, and sceptre. Lytton Strachey, in his appreciative biography, Queen Victoria, writes:

  He [Disraeli] had understood from the first that in dealing with the Faery the appropriate method of approach . . . It was not his habit to harangue and exhort and expatiate in official conscientiousness; he liked to scatter flowers along the path of business, to compress a weighty argument into a happy phrase, to insinuate what was in his mind with an air of friendship and confidential courtesy. He was nothing if not personal; and he had perceived that personality was the key to the Faery’s heart. Accordingly, he never for a moment allowed his intercourse with her to lose the personal tone; he invested a
ll the transactions of State with the charms of familiar conversation; she was always the royal, the adored and revered mistress, he the devoted and respectful friend. When once the personal relation was firmly established, every difficulty disappeared . . .

  She became intoxicated, entranced. Believing all he told her about herself, she completely regained the self-confidence which had been slipping away from her throughout the dark period that followed Albert’s death. She swelled with a new elation, while he, conjuring up before her wonderful Oriental visions, dazzled her eyes with imperial grandeur of which she had only dimly dreamed. Under the compelling influence, her very demeanour altered. Her short, stout figure, with its folds of black velvet, its muslin streamers, its heavy pearls at the heavy neck, assumed an almost menacing air. In her countenance, from which the charm of youth had long since vanished, and which had not yet been softened by age, the traces of grief, of disappointment, and of displeasure were still visible, but they were overlaid by looks of arrogance and sharp lines of peremptory hauteur. Only, when Mr. Disraeli appeared, the expression changed in an instant, and the forbidding visage became charged with smiles.