Empathy Trend?

Lately, it seems that empathy is being talked about. Over the past decade or so, throughout what felt like a peak in the ongoing Age of Narcissism, empathy was very much left out of the cultural conversation. The ability to step into another's shoes, to feel another's feelings, empathy is lacking in narcissistic and sociopathic personalities. That lack is a hallmark of those disorders.

Economic crisis is a blow to human narcissism--those at the extreme were enjoying the grandiose sides of their dual personalities and are now mired in their depressive sides, in which they feel worthless (leading to a spike in suicides). This may be why empathy is popping up all over.


j-No, LES Garden Heroine, VNY flickr pool

Patricia Sellers at Fortune sees a lack of empathy as the failing of Wall Street and all those "arrogant titans of industry who have stirred populist wrath," and notes that President Obama has helped bring empathy back to America.

The Times had an in-depth piece on how empathy is now being taught to privileged middle-school kids, "gossip girls and boys" raised in a narcissistic environment.

A team of neuroscientists just released news about a research paper entitled, "Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass." In it, they look at how the quick dissemination of info bits can erode our ability to empathize. (Wired picked up this story and connected it to the MTV-style editing of TV news.) "If things are happening too fast," said one of the researchers, "you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality."

And in a recent issue of The Believer, video-game journalist Heather Chaplin said, "Video games are good at fostering problem solving, but they're not so good at fostering human empathy or a deeper understanding of the human condition. Novels are about psychological empathy; games simply are not. And if games are telegraphing something about the future, maybe that tells us that psychological empathy, concern with the human condition, is not going to be that important in the twenty-first century."


Hat Shopper, VNY flickr pool

So, quite suddenly, we're concerned as a culture with our ability, or inability, to empathize with others. Is this a wave of healthy guilt following a decade of destructive greed? Maybe we are in a time of reparation. I've already written about the upside of the downturn, and this may be another aspect.

Empathy drives people with power to help the powerless--or to simply consider the people around them. In concrete terms, for this vanishing city, empathy can do wonders. It can stop a developer from bulldozing a block of homes. It might push an individual to buy prescriptions from a mom-and-pop pharmacy instead of a chain, or just remind people to keep their volume down and not disturb the neighbors. Empathy in politicians can lead to the creation of humanistic policies and urban planning.

In a society built by the human psyche, with all its attendant fears and needs, what will emerge from this shifting moment in time? Empathy may be experiencing a moment of vogue, but malignant narcissism is notoriously intractable to cure. It will be back. But, for now, perhaps, a reprieve.


Alessandro Busà, 125th St., VNY flickr pool

Celebu-Rama

In the American Dialect Society's journal American Speech, Volume 3, Number 83, from Fall 2008, I came upon a pair of interesting articles on the popularity of the prefix Celebu.

The first of the two articles, "Paris Hilton, Brenda Frazier, Blogs, and the Proliferation of Celebu-," by David West Brown of the University of Michigan, traces the origin of the prefix to its first appearance in the nonce word Celebutante, coined not recently, but by Walter Winchell in 1939. He was writing about the coming-out party of banking heiress Brenda Frazier, who, he wrote, "inspires a new 1-word description: Celebutante."

Since the 1930s, explains Brown, celebutante receded into the background of the American language, reappearing in the 1980s to refer to club kids, but only gaining prominence thanks to the blogosphere and Paris Hilton. 2003 seems to be celebutante's tipping point, when Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers listed it among her "Current obsessions/topics of interest."


Source: American Speech

"Thus," writes Brown, "when Hilton and Richie's television show, The Simple Life, debuted on the Fox network on December 2, 2003...celebutante was already circulating in the blog lexicon. The term quickly became associated with her, and its frequency of use mushroomed."

That mushrooming is displayed in the second article from the journal, "Celebu- Word List: An Interesting Foray into Calculating Relevance," by David K. Barnhart of Lexik House Publishers. He begins, "The combining form of celebu-, as in celebutard, celebu-chef, and celebuspawn, to name but a few, came to the attention of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society during its deliberations for Word of the Year for 2007."

First of all, how exciting is it that there is such a thing as a New Words Committee and that they've been deliberating on celebutard? Here then, for your reading pleasure, is a handful of celebu- words, provided by Mr. Barnhart:



The question now is, with the yunnipocalypse upon us and the party over, will celebu- keep spawning? Or will it return to the bottom drawer of the cultural filing cabinet, to be dusted off and trotted out again when the new Paris Hiltons of the future rise from the ashes?

Post-Crash Revisionism

Since Wall Street crumbled and the yunnipocalypse began, it seems more and more journalists have come out of the woodwork to say:

1. They never liked investment bankers, hedgefunders, and other masters of the universe
2. They believe such people have half-destroyed New York
3. They miss the old, pre-Gilded Age city and hope the downturn will bring about its return



I'm glad they're speaking up, but where were they for the past 10 years, under a cone of silence? I don't remember hearing these sentiments. At least not until right after the initial crash:

Judith Warner in the Times discussed "a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in the late 1990s... a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth. They had taken over everything."

In the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote, "maybe Manhattan will become affordable again, and cool, and dangerous. Dangerous in theory, but not to you or your family and friends. Dirty, but in a good way."

Alex Williams in the Times declared, "Wall Street hotshots were never beloved figures on New York’s cultural landscape. It’s no coincidence that the protagonists of books and movies like 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' and 'American Psycho' tended to be narcissistic jerks, or worse."



Fran Lebowitz told the Observer, "Just when you think how horrible New York has become in terms of things interfering with the tone of the city, they’re finally leaving! The rich people! They’re leaving! They’re leaving!"

The Times of London attested, "in New York, nobody likes investment bankers... In recent years, there have obviously been way too many of them and, as a result, a load of bad restaurants, galleries and bars have been allowed to flourish. Now they’re going, that froth will be off too, and it’s no bad thing."



These quotes all come from last fall, back in September and October, before the sins of Madoff, AIG, and all the rest were made public. Since then, many more people are claiming that New York always hated Wall Streeters and Sex & the City kids, with their indulgent ways, their bottle service and shopaholism, all those values that permeated and wreaked havoc on the city.

But is that true? Did most New Yorkers resent Wall Street culture until last summer's end?



I seem to recall everyone having a pretty good time, riding that golden wave of conspicuous consumption, munching cupcakes, making "resy's," buying shoes with abandon. Let's face it: There wasn't much complaining until now.

(Even celebu-chef Anthony Bourdain has jumped on the disappearing New York bandwagon, visiting almost-lost Sophie's bar and bemoaning, "Where can a guy get a drink when the last gin mill closes down, when there’s nothing left but the fern bar or the lounge, when the barkeep has been replaced by the mixologist?")

To be sure, everything we now all seem to agree is detestable about the Narcissistic Age will come again. Hopefully, when it does return, New York will resist. And members of the mainstream media will be critical of that corrupt culture from the start. This last time around, they could have provided a strong voice of dissent, powerful enough to help sway mass culture.

Maybe then our city would not have vanished.

Yunnipocalypse Now!

Is the era of the New York Yunnie coming to an end? Has the Yunnipocalypse finally begun?



*Also see my opinion piece: The Downturn's Upside, Daily News

It began in September 2008 and has snowballed since. Several recent reports (see links at end of post) indicate a rising anxiety that New York City is returning to its "bad, old days" of crime and grit.

Let's not be afraid. The choice was never between safety or terror. Just like the Bush administration manipulated a nation into believing they had to give up their human rights for the sake of safety, the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations convinced a city they had to give up their uniqueness, wildness, and verve to be secure and live well.

They've attempted to create a sanitary, Epcot-style European village, like a planned suburban community, in the middle of what has long been America's most fertile cultural hotbed. They made it amenable to swaggering, narcissistic bots. But maybe that swagger is vanishing.



Last week's New York Times suggested so. Alex Williams writes, "The sudden downturn has affected the very industries that give New York its identity — finance, media, advertising, real estate, even tourism — with extreme prejudice. The result is that some New Yorkers feel that the city is losing, along with many jobs, its swagger and its sense of pre-eminence."

Girlfriends of beleaguered bankers have formed a jokey support group to share their pain (you can join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life"), as the bankers are now forced to dine at McDonald's (and they can't even supersize it).

Williams suggests that the blow to the city's overinflated grandiosity now causes us to suffer from an emotional contagion of shared pessimism. But not everyone has caught that bug.



Many of us are feeling optimistic about this city for the first time in a decade. New York's identity has always been about much more than just real estate and money. The path of the New Yorker "has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things."

That quote is from President Obama's inaugural address. In his rousing speech, there is great hope that the narcissistic, sociopathic tenor of our entire country, the dark cloud we've been living under for the past 8 years, is poised to change. And so it is changing in New York, too, where the "risk-takers, doers, and makers of things" have too long been stifled and squeezed out by a swaggering crowd of safety-seeking do-nothings.

Like Bush on his way out of office last week with his posture deflated, their swagger has diminished already. And our city will be far better for it. We don't need to tumble into violence and degradation. We can be safe, we can prosper, we can enjoy beautiful things--without living in a sociopathic New York.


from my flickr

To cut-and-paste from Obama's speech, imagine a new mayor saying this to the city: "Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the [city] for a new age. The time has come to set aside childish things. A [city] cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility."


SliceofNYC's flickr


More:
Support Group for Banker Girlfriends [NY Times]
Scared to Come to NY [NY Post]
Law & Disorder [NY Times]
When the Action Moves On [NY Times]
Revenge of the Bad Old Days [NY Post]
Fun City Returns? [Voice]
Degentrification [Curbed]
Movies of the bad, old days [Gawker]

How 9/11 Sells

September 11 changed us. Remember how, in the weeks following, as the smoke cleared, New York felt more cohesive? The whole city seemed to bind together in a warm, shared sorrow. The baker clapped your shoulder as he handed you a loaf of bread, waitresses gave you sad little smiles of recognition, strangers on the street moved tenderly around each other. It was an unexpected good feeling that could not last--and didn’t.

This feeling of connectedness soon crumbled. War began. Our streets rumbled with the noise of demolitions like aftershocks in the wake of the fallen towers. Glass high-rises began rising everywhere, as if to make up for the loss of those 220 floors. And the new buildings were stuffed with banks and stores.

The personality of this city changed as "Consume!" became New York's anxious war cry.



It has been well documented that Americans changed their consumer habits drastically after 9/11. Now, in the paper "The Sweet Escape," researchers Naomi Mandel and Dirk Smeesters take a fascinating look at why.

The authors discovered that when many people think about their own death they tend to eat, drink, and shop more. They become super-consumers. You might think people do this out of a desire for hedonistic pleasure, "I'm going to die, so I might as well live it up." But this is not what the research showed.



Instead, the study revealed the critical role of self-esteem. People with "high levels of self-esteem were less impacted by thoughts of death--and therefore less likely to increase their levels of consumption when dealing with those thoughts--than those with low self-esteem."

People with low self-esteem become ravenous consumers, instead of moderate, thrifty consumers. Such people, says Mandel, "are trying to put all of these [death] thoughts out of their minds. They want to escape from self-awareness. They don't want to confront the fact that they don't live up to cultural standards, and one way to do that is through overeating or over-consumption.”

Marketers know all about this dynamic and they use it to sell products. Just as our politicians have used 9/11 to sell themselves and their policies, stoking the fears of an insecure populace.


waiting for the iPhone

Narcissists are particularly known for their low self-esteem, though they may appear confident. This article in Harvard Magazine lays out the difference between narcissism and self-esteem, explaining clearly how self-loathing underlies the narcissist's apparent grandiosity.

After 9/11, a confluence of factors converged on New York City. Which came first, our dominant culture of narcissism or super-gentrification? Maybe it happened like this: Those already here with low self-esteem became hyper-consumers. The city fed that hunger with more stores, restaurants, condos, bars, and banks. New York must have begun looking like an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord to the insecure and fearful across America. And they flocked to come feed themselves, too.

It amazed me that after 9/11, more people came to New York than left, as if terror exerted a strange attraction.


cupcake feeding frenzy

The toll of 9/11 continues to reverberate in many different ways. People still suffer flashbacks and anxiety, along with grief for lost loved ones. Perhaps we must also include in that day's rolling tally of losses the vanishing of our city's mom-and-pops, priced-out artists, evicted poor and middle classes, and the tens of thousands of fallen buildings that once made up the fabric of our city.

Maybe the terrorists are "winning" after all.

The Joneses Are Here

I've been puzzling as to why yunnies hate mom-and-pops so very, very much. I was reading this post by EV Grieve in which he quotes an online review of an Irish pub that came down to make way for a new luxury tower. The reviewer writes:

"I hope places like this close down soon: We are all working on building a better downtown. I bought a 1.5 million dollar condo around the block from this place. I stopped in one weekday during lunch (i was off.) The place had 3 patrons at the bar, all of which looked worse then the other. The decor is lacking, the floors dirty, and the food was just ok. This place may be decent for someone who does not like finer things..."

And I wondered, as I have many times when reading similar commentary, what is this about? Why do yunnies feel such intense hatred of harmless, dumpy old places? The hatred seems deeply personal and expresses itself in a wish to destroy. It's one thing to say, "I don't like this place so I won't go there," yet another to say, "I hope it is eradicated." We hear this sentiment again and again in blog commentary and online reviews. It feels a lot like hysteria.

Then I realized (with thanks to Mr. Grieve): It's all about property values.



The yunnies are like suburban home owners, the Joneses who mow their lawns every Sunday and keep their porches freshly painted. Trimming hedges and weeding gardens, they want their neighbors to do the same--to not damage their property values. When a neighbor chooses to let their lawn grow, display chainsaw stump art in the yard, leave a car up on blocks in the driveway, or allow their paint to peel, oh how Mr. and Mrs. Jones go wild! "We are all working to build a better downtown," they say, "Why aren't you one of us, one of us, one of us?"



It is hysteria. "Burn it down! Run them out of town! A scourge on Elm Street!" the Joneses cry. Terrified by the specter of falling property values, they drag their neighbors into court, ordering them to keep up, keep up, keep up with us Joneses! And if you don't keep up...well, here comes good old blight, good old eminent domain, and didn't we need a new park anyway? Maybe something with cannons and faux piles of cannon balls, symbols of our terror of dirty, smelly natives who don't care about the finer things.

I have nothing against cleanliness. I like to see my elderly, immigrant neighbors sweep their stoops in the morning. This is Old World tidiness, not the same as New New York sterility. A little dirt is good for you--keeps the immune system strong. Today we're besieged by germaphobes. Their fearful suburban parents taught them to slather themselves and everything around them with antibacterial agents. Vongerichtification is their way of cleaning up the city.



The children of suburban Boomers have come back to reclaim the cities their grandparents fled years ago. They bring with them fear and hatred of anything urban. They bring suburban values that don't mesh with the city--and this is different from other, non-yunnie transplants to the city, who yearned to leave suburbia behind. The yunnies refuse to be city people. Dirt, rats, ugly signage? Clean it up, clean it up, clean it up! they say. Or else.

• Grandmother Jailed for Not Mowing Lawn
• Mow Your Lawn or Go to Jail
• Keep Up Your Curb Appeal!
• Form a Lawn-Mowing Task Force
• Disinfect America!
  

American Psychos

If you have watched American Psycho lately, as I have, you may have noticed that the film and the main character bear a striking resemblance to today's New York. In 1991, when the book was published, and 2000, when the film came out, Patrick Bateman was a caricature of the 1980s Wall Street yuppie with a sleek condo on the Upper East Side. He was specific to a certain time and place.

Watching the movie today, his specificity washes away. In 2008, Bateman's condo could be anywhere in Manhattan (and many places in Brooklyn), he could work in an office in Times Square or Soho, and his malignant narcissism is no longer a pathology of the few.

In today's New York, the American Psycho is an everyman.

1.


Bateman's kitchen is an orgy of stainless steel and overperforming appliances, features greatly fetishized in today's popular condos. Below is the gleaming metallic kitchen from Blue:



2.


Bateman's condo shows off the cold emptiness of luxe condo aesthetic. But his windows are small compared to the floor-to-ceiling "oculi" enjoyed by 21st-century yunnies and seen here at 459 18th Street:



3.


Bateman is obsessed with his looks. He wants his body to be hard. So do the people who will live in The Platinum, according to their advertising images of steely cyborgs:

• Slate's review

Autumn in New York

It's warm again. 74 degrees today. It's mid-October and the air ought to be crisp, but it's muggy. With global warming ramping up, what will happen to autumn in New York?



Diesel answers that question with their image of a vanished city -- and a vanished world -- in their new ad campaign. Gothamist comments on Wired's open question: Are these ads evil or fun? I think the answer to that is obvious.

The campaign's website features a video that outlines the dire consequences of global warming then says, "Hold on! Global warming cannot stop our lives." Cue the party music. Just like George Bush's hideous insistence that if Americans stop shopping and going to Disneyland then "the terrorists win." Now Diesel tells us: If you stop partying (e.g., burning fossil fuels) then you're letting global warming win.

• The Washington Post mocks, "You can't be too well-dressed for the apocalypse."
• Torontoist calls the images "vomit-inducing adverts for the masses."

Adam & Yves

Yesterday, a worker was stapling up these shrouds of self-promotional advertecture on Yves, one of the many, many condo buildings currently rising in Chelsea.


photo: my flickr

Here I see a fantasy of the primordial, prototypical yunnies posing in their post-lapsarian world. Expelled from Paradise, they seek a return to the blue waters of mother's chilly womb. They look towards but not at each other. Separate, they can't touch. Like Narcissus, they may gaze at their own reflections in the pool, but human connection remains out of their reach.

Here is a portrait of the alienation that is washing over our city, an alienation that has somehow become admired and longed for, rather than critiqued. How long before there's no one here but these robots?

McHale's Sign Salvaged

photo from aboutmattlaw

I recently stumbled upon its signage, thanks to this flickr stream. Apparently, the vintage neon sign was up for sale (a couple grand) somewhere on 26th Street. I'm not sure if it's still there. If anyone knows the fate of this sign, please let me know.

As for the former McHale's site, this giant condo rises from the rubble, a 43-story "power residence." The advertising imagery makes me think of Randian heroes, titanic John Galts who view free-market capitalism as the way to individual triumph. This isn't the only place Ayn Rand pops up these days. Are we in a new Randian age? I am thinking here also of Thor Equities, named after the Norse warrior god.



What world is this where power-hungry, hard-muscled men and women stride out of sportscars to ascend into flaming Babelian towers of steel? According to the website, it's a "rarified world etched in water and fire, stone and glass...and power."

Young Urban Narcissists

(This post has been updated)


"Yunnie" stands for Young Urban Narcissist. An obvious play on the outmoded "yuppie," this neologism was my earlier attempt to grasp a mass cultural shift currently generating and feeding on tremendous change in New York City--and much of the country.

While "yuppie" was aimed at professionals, describing people of a certain socioeconomic bracket, "yunnie" described a characterological type.

I originally introduced the yunnie in August of 2007. Since then, my ideas about the narcissistic personality and its effect on New York City have evolved. It's no longer a term I use, but you'll still find it scattered among old posts.

I've since become interested in the connection between wealth, greed, and materialism and malignant narcissism or sociopathy--the absence of empathy--illustrated in the work of Paul Piff and many other researchers. What I called the yunnie seems to be a psychopathic personality type that has emerged in the age of neoliberalism--for more on this, see psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe's writing on the topic.



A few old links:

As of 3/09, the idea of An Age of Narcissism has caught fire in the media. This Slate article provides an excellent overview.

A 6/12 cover story in New York magazine outlines research into the ways that having money, pursuing money, even thinking about money reduces one's empathy and makes you more, basically, narcissistic.

In 1/13, Consumer Affairs asked, "Are today's young people deluded narcissists?"

May 2013 TIME cover: "Here's the cold, hard data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older..."

A few NY Times articles:
Narcissism on the rise?
Everyone's a narcissist (and misunderstand the term)
Situational narcissism