Brave new world redux - Haaretz

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Tue., January 01, 2008 Tevet 23, 5768

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Brave new world redux

By Ofri Ilani

Tags: Israel, Self-help

Sagit, a 28-year-old single mother from the Haifa suburb Kiryat Bialik, sits in the middle of the room. A team of experts from the program "Hamarah" ("The Mirror"), huddling in the next room, observe her and fire off diagnoses: "Her chest is sagging and empty. We have to lift it," one expert says. "In my opinion, she has excess weight," another adds, even though the woman looks perfectly normal. A third expert delivers the decisive blow: "That girl is simply dependent. It is because she lives with her grandparents. She doesn't have a partner and she totally lacks self-confidence."

As the program - the Israeli version of "The Swan" - proceeds, it presents the plastic surgery Sagit will undergo. On the show, female participants undergo a "redesign" at the hands of a battalion of plastic surgeons, personal coaches and holistic healers. This may be reality TV at its most vulgar, but Sagit is by and large a grotesque metaphor for our collective condition: Never before, it would seem, have we been under such a powerful assault of demands for self-improvement.

After taking the United States by storm, the ethos of self-improvement has invaded Israel, and no realm of lifestyle or culture seems to be exempt. It takes form in countless courses and talks, in spiritual training books like "The Secret," and perhaps more extremely in next-generation reality shows like "The Mirror," "Family in Overdraft," and "Super Nanny," where a family places itself in the hands of an expert in order to receive an overhaul.

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On the face of it, people in contemporary consumer society have access to an infinite number of services and products that provide happiness and pleasure. Oddly, though, what the individual actually faces is an infinite series of demands. The citizen-consumer of post-industrial society is never good enough, and is called upon to undergo reeducation in all spheres of life in order to meet the standards. Ideologies and social utopias have been replaced by individualistic utopias, entailing perfect performance and a perfect body. But as in other utopias, the promise of self-fulfillment morphs into a sophisticated type of suppression and regimentation.

Apart from the obvious qualifications required for the labor market and the constant demand to "look good," we are flooded with demands that question our performance in every realm.

It turns out that we don't know how to manage our home, raise children, eat or have sex. Anyone who tries to keep up with the array of instruction books and self-development theories will find that every branch of life necessitates almost professional capability. Self-improvement is a kind of diet for the soul, calling for abstinence and abstention, and as with a diet, from the moment you start, it never ends.

The distinctive element of this suppression is that the affluent classes suffer no less than the poorer ones.

"Everything around us is always conveying the message that we have to do one more small thing in order to be truly perfect," says Yoav, 32, who works for an advertising agency.

"It's clear that when it comes to my appearance I am never satisfied, but the way I behave socially also doesn't suit me. I have a constant fear of not being current, of being perceived as provincial. For example, I have an absolute dread of waiters. I am always afraid of mispronouncing the name of the dish and having them correct me.

"Logically, I understand there is no real reason for this - the 19-year-old kid waiting on us doesn't really care if I know about seafood or not. But it makes no difference. The person who is on trial is me. When I am alone with my girlfriend, I also ask myself whether this is what we are supposed to be doing together. When we are simply together and not doing anything special, I feel we are missing opportunities.

"Our parents' generation didn't have this heavy pressure to be happy," Yoav says. "They might have been under pressure to buy an apartment, own a car, be successful. But no one meddled in the smaller moments of life and tried to define what they were supposed to do. In the final analysis, we are not the ones who decide what is supposed to make us happy."

In recent years, the media has shown a far greater willingness to address issues relating to the average person - questions of family, raising children, health and interpersonal relations. Editors know that newspaper consumers would rather read about a problem that touches on their private lives than about an international crisis or a speech by a public figure. The only trouble is that placing private life on the public agenda has made it more exposed, and more amenable to supervision by the guiding eye of societal norms.

One of the areas in which the social pressure of the self-improvement culture is felt most powerfully concerns the demands facing parents, from all the new child-raising theories constantly being published.

"It used to be that people talked a lot less about the difficulties of parenting; today everything is far more open to discussion," says Renana Zimbalista, a parenthood consultant and the coordinator of the parents workshops in the Diada parent and child network.

"But the result is also that every mother is flooded with comments, criticism and advice, and she is constantly being told that she is not doing things the right way. These parents are filled with guilt. The child has to develop fastest, get the highest grades in school, attend the most enrichment groups."

Zimbalista's occupation is, of course, also part of this phenomenon.

Over the past few years, several books attacking the self-improvement industry and its impact on society have been published in the United States. In "Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life," the sociologist Micki McGee describes this industry as an indication of social distress and lack of confidence. According to McGee, the self-improvement industry views life as a cruel life-or-death contest. Even regarding love or sex, the lexicon of self-help is derived from the business world. The same type of advice one receives in business (from tax consultants, stock market advisers and insurance experts) is now being applied to family, sex life and child rearing.

"It is a culture of solitariness and atomization," says Nurit Hadari, editor of the feminist site "H G R" (www.hgr.co.il - Hebrew only). "Self-improvement says that if you don't succeed in improving yourself, you alone are to blame. It creates a type of person who is well-suited to a country that owes its citizens nothing."

Hadari believes that the main victims of the self-improvement industry are women.

"Regrettably, it is largely a culture of women. And even more regrettably, it is coming in place of more social and political answers to life's problems, like those feminism proposed. The self-improvement approach is that I cannot change reality, only my attitude toward it. But I think it is possible to criticize and change reality, not just ourselves."

What happens to people who adopt the demands of the books, television programs and newspaper advice columns? Can self-satisfaction come from self-help?

"Looking for examples, for counsel and guidance, is an addiction. The more you need to do it and the unhappier you feel when deprived of fresh supplies of the sought-after drugs," the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote in "Liquid Modernity" (recently published in Hebrew by Magnes Press).

"In the consumer race the finishing line always moves faster than the fastest of runners; but most runners forced onto the track have muscles too flabby and lungs too small to run fast. And so, as in the annual London marathon, one may admire and praise the winners, but what truly counts is staying in the race to the end."

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