[Self Made] Are you better than other people, or do you just work harder?
Reading chapters 3-4: “A Sneer for the World” and “WORK! WORK!! WORK!!!”
Welcome back to the summer book club.
We’re reading Self Made: Creating Our Identities from DaVinci to the Kardashians.
For now, feel free to begin a conversation in the comments. We might open up a Zoom session in a few weeks for a more personable chat when the book’s key ideas have been teased out a bit.
Your regularly scheduled issue of Three Things will arrive this Thursday.
Chapters 3 and 4: “A Sneer for the World” and “WORK! WORK!! WORK!!!”
Three Things to Notice
Back in the introduction, Burton teased the two types of self makers we’d meet in the book: the aristocratic and the democratic. We’re reminded that these two characters will fuse to become the ubiquitous twenty-first century self maker by the end of the book (61), but first we need to meet each one separately—one in Europe and one in America.
Chapter three takes us to nineteenth-century London where capitalism and colonialism were creating a world where you could leap out of your social station and let the whole world know it … via your clothing. Here we meet Beau Brummell, in whom the Renaissance concept of genius becomes the Regency ideal of bon ton. The person with bon ton is an aristocrat not of blood, but of style, and with it experiences “a freedom from and superiority to other people, even princes” (51).
We cross the Atlantic to meet Frederick Douglass, the superstar former slave who was both proponent and shining exemplar of another kind of self making. Like Douglass, the democratic self maker believes that the hard, virtuous work of self-governance and self-cultivation can liberate every person from the shackles of base instinct and human custom. If everyone committed to this way of life, a free and equal society would ensue (76). The person who doesn’t make themselves has only themselves to blame.
Notable Quotes
On what bon ton requires (60):
Bon ton, like sprezzatura and Rameau's nephew's vision of originality before it, was characterized by a posture of not caring too much. The ideal possessor of bon ton had to cut himself off not only from the leading strings of custom but from the chains of sentimental attachment, regarding the rest of the world from a vantage point of superiority. Brummell was famous, after all, for being—or at least appearing to be—constantly bored.
Frederick Douglass on the democratic self maker’s vision of the world (73):
The wise man, Douglass insists, "knows that the laws of God are perfect and unchangeable. He knows that health is maintained by right living; that disease is cured by the right use of remedies; that bread is produced by tilling the soil; that knowledge is obtained by study; that wealth is secured by saving and that battles are won by fighting. To him, the lazy man is the unlucky man and the man of luck is the man of work." Custom, circumstance, birth—these may lack divine weight. But the moral character of hard work remains, for Douglass, thoroughly enchanted.
Conversation starters (pick one)
1. Where do you see the “studied boredom” of bon ton on display in today’s world? Why is it so necessary for image maintenance?
2. What is missing from the democratic self maker’s vision of the world (as expressed in the second quote above)?
See you next week for chapter five — “Light Came In as a Flood”.