Richard Sennett
DESTRUCTIVE GEMEINSCHAFT
Every generation engages in a life-long struggle with what it
first believed . Sometimes people repudiate early ideals, but their tempera–
ment remains unchanged , as , for example, those rigid Stalinists who have
become fiercely anti-Marxist. In other generations, like our own, the first
truths are not challenged explicitly, rather they are affirmed with a voice
that grows ever more tired, weak, and resigned .
The truth
to
which our generation assents is that psychological self–
exposure is a moral good . In this view it is better to show your feelings
to
another person, no matter how wounding the feelings are, than to suppress
or disguise what you feel. A person is not being authentic with you unless
he or she is willing
to
share his or her secrets. This compulsion to expose the
self shows up in many different ways: it is the rationale of the feeling–
industry, from Esalen to rolfing to encounter weekends at hotels in the
Catskills . It is the rationale of the modern biography or autobiography, in
which exposure of the subject's intimate affairs is presumed to have an
important bearing on how he painted or wrote. It is the rationale also of
our political imagination: a politician's "credibility" is measured not so
much in terms of his past performance as through a reading of what sort of
personality he ..projects ."
But it is in an increasingly passive spirit that we take self-disclosure to
be a moral good ; this passivity is forced upon us by the very nature of our
belief. An existence of unrelieved confession, openness, and revelation of
inner secrets would be absolute hell.
It
is by no accident that encounter
groups are pleasurable only as weekend affairs at hotels, nor that in mar–
riages sustained confrontation leads so often to divorce, nor that the political
imagination searches only for glimpses of the man behind the legislator to
measure the credibility of the legislator at work. If in general people can
bear only so much truth , it would seem that they have an especially limited
tolerance when it comes to sustained awareness of the maelstrom of envy,
kindness, rapacious desire, and gentleness of which the human psyche is
