When I received an email asking me if I would be interested in a review copy of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything by F.S. Michaels, I was intrigued by the book’s description:
As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world — your work, your relationships with others and the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity — are changing, or have already changed, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn’t just changing your mind — it’s changing your life.
A book about the stories we tell about ourselves and one story in particular that is getting out of control? Ok, I’m in!
Before starting the book I tried to think of what story it might be about and decided that technology was the most likely candidate. But I was wrong. The story is economic. But let me back up a bit.
The governing pattern that culture obeys is a master story – one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture.
The monoculture story invades every aspect of our lives and colors the way we approach issues and talk about things. A monoculture doesn’t mean everyone believes the same thing, but it ends up acting as a shared belief and assumptions about who we are.
Michaels focused on the United States and a little on Canada in her examination of the economic monoculture. The economic monoculture isn’t just about money, it is much bigger than that. The story says that we are all individuals who “fundamentally exist apart from others.” It also says that we are rational. Rational here means that when faced with making a decision about something we go through a 3-step process: 1) examine all the ways you can reach your goal (the story assumes you know what your goals are) and determine the costs and benefits of each possibility; 2) figure out what the most efficient option is, in other words, which one gets you what you want for the least cost to you in personal resources; 3) choose the most efficient option because the most efficient option is always the best choice. The economic story also says that everyone is self-interested, always looking out for our own best interests and acting accordingly. The story says that you know yourself and what you want, what you prefer, what makes you happy and that you can never have enough, your wants are unlimited. But the world has limited resources so there isn’t enough to go around.
The world is also made of markets run on the basis of supply and demand. If you can’t afford something or your wages are too low or you lose your job, nobody is to blame but the market. How you navigate in the markets and your experience of them is determined by how much information you have and the quality of that information. When the economy grows, life gets better for everyone.
These are the basic tenets of the economic story. Michaels does a great job of laying them out in an easy to understand way that makes sense and left me with a creeping dread the more I read. I won’t go into all the areas Michaels examines but I will say that I was pretty convinced by the time I got to the discussion on libraries.
The economic story has affected the way governments do business. It used to be that programs were created because they were deemed a public good. But now everything is going private and the approach is one of business. A worthwhile government program has become one in which the government gets a good return on its investment.
Libraries used to operate under the belief that books changed lives and that civilization rested on the foundation of a literate and educated population. The purpose of public libraries was to improve people through books. Apparently librarians in the 1940s and 50s used to argue over whether “light” fiction should be allowed on the library shelves because it was considered entertainment. Because libraries were viewed as a public good, they existed outside the market, preserving the human record and embodying intellectual freedom.
When the economic story spread to the library,
library services become understood as a market, and what goes on in markets starts happening at the library. Information is transformed from a social good that helps to develop informed citizens into something to buy and sell and profit from The library becomes an information business in the information services industry and starts to focus on what businesses focus on: customer service, cutting costs, efficiency, productivity….
Library patrons become customers, and libraries start to gathering information about customer needs and wants through market research. Libraries become worth supporting not because they are a public good, but because they respond to customer needs.
And so libraries start to look like and be run like bookstores and libraries have to “market” themselves, keep track of numbers to prove they are a good return on investment. Libraries sell naming rights to different spaces within the building and the previously neutral public space is no longer neutral but an advertisement for big business. You also get governments outsourcing the running of public libraries to private companies who say they can run the library cheaper and more efficiently than the librarians who have been working there for years. This has actually happened in several California counties.
I enjoyed, if enjoy is the word, the book very much. Sometimes I thought the issues were too simply boiled down and lost a bit of complexity. But overall it was somewhat of an eye opener. I mean some of the things I was aware of, but others like the decline of community and the public good, were presented from such an interesting angle that I had to stop and consider my assumptions about what I knew and how I saw things. I didn’t always agree with everything, but I found the book to be greatly worthwhile.
I like the approach that posits this free-market, economic model as one story—not good or bad in itself, but threatening if it becomes the ONLY story we’re telling. Since I approve of certain outcomes relating to that story (for example, with libraries, I like the idea of libraries being tools that meet users’ needs, rather than some kind of prescriptive cultural gatekeepers), but don’t like other outcomes (e.g. that everything must make a direct financial return on investment), applying the monoculture lens helps to evaluate the pros and cons. It’s not that we should eliminate this one story altogether, just that we should be cultivating a healthy diversity of other stories to go along with it. Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
I was wondering what you thought about the libraries. Our library system hasn’t changed much (well, except for the addition of computer stations), but I’ve read a great deal about problems other libraries have. We still have plenty of friendly and helpful library workers.
I haven’t finished yet, but I do think the book recounts many of the things we all complain about. On the other hand, it has a lot of “back in the day” things were all sunny. Still, an interesting read.
Any theory that posits a single determinant of personal or institutional behavior is bound to be limited. A multiplicity of stories is the rule. And how wonderful it would be if we were so rational, that we went through the decision making steps that you attribute to Michaels. That isn’t the way it works either, as a great many behavioral economists have pointed out. Thank you for a fine review of a book that surely must have raised a great many questions in your mind too.
Emily, you’ve hit the nail on the head Emily and Michaels says the same thing in the end. There will always be a master story, what is at stake is the diversity of other stories that are allowed to exist along with it. The entire book has much food for thought in it especially when it comes to corporate responsibility and interpersonal relationships.
Jenclair, I’m against running libraries like a business just like I am against running government and the educational system like a business. While there are some good things that can be derived from such a model, it ultimately fails in the long run when applied across the board. I agree with you about the “back in the day” aspects, but I also agree that it is a really interesting book.
Richard, the book encourages us to create a multitude of stories because limiting ourselves to just the master story, which Michaels is very concerened is the case, is detrimental to all of us. It is the economic story that says we are all rational. Michaels actually points out many instances where the story does not reflect real life and the problems that this causes. The book raises a good many questions and I made lots and lots of underlinings.
Thank you for your clarification. What do you do with your underlinings, as you call them? Do you save all of them, only some, or none? And if save some, where are they saved? You know of my interest in commonplace books. So, for example, have you added any of your underlinings from the Michaels’ book to your commonplace book?
I read the book on my Kindle so currently all my underlinings are on my Kindle. I have not yet tried to figure out how to export any of my Kindle notes. I have not added any of the underlinings to my commonplace book – yet. I need to go back through all of them to discover if any of them are worthy or if most of them were just helpful memory prompts for writing about the book. But as long as I keep the book on my Kindle, and there is no reason for me not to, all the underlinings will remain there until I delete the book.
Running education as a business, which has definitely become the norm over the past 20 years, absolutely sucks. It makes kids into consumers (or their parents, more like) which means they must all receive the same ‘value’ of goods, which is nonsense and fails to account for the most essential part of children – their individuality. I think I would definitely agree with this book, but it does send shivers up my spine. We need some alternative stories in there, and fast, or all the stuff that isn’t purely self-interested (and my work has always been in the wildly misunderstood ‘caring’ professions) gets mishandled.
Unfortunately it is true that libraries now need to market themselves–show their worthiness, that they are still necessary in order to get funding. Some people think Google is the answer to everything–that’s where students do their research, and sometimes it’s the people making the decisions who think that way. Sad and scary.
Litlove, I agree wholeheartedly. And because of it humanities departments are being forced to find ways to justify themselves in economic terms. And higher education becomes a means to getting a job that will make a good salary. Whatever happened to education for the sake of becoming a well-rounded, knowledgable person? It is a sad situation that gives me shivers too.
Danielle, I don’t think a little marketing is bad but to have to find ways to prove the value of a library in hard numbers is ridiculous. How does one quantify the infinite and tiny ways a library affects people? The difference it makes in someone’s life? As for Google, I use it all the time, it is my main search engine, but it doesn’t provide the answers to everything. I think libraries and proprietary databases need to find a way to make their content more accessible to Google so they are included in search results to make ourselve more visible. Otherwise, sadly, all the decision makers will really believe libraries are obsolete.
This sounds very interesting and I would probably agree with the conclusions, but I’m not sure I could bear to read it because it sounds so depressing! I don’t want to avoid unpleasant things all the time, but reading a whole book that brings such bad news (okay, maybe mixed news?) would be tough. It really is a fascinating concept, though.
This sounds fascinating and in a slightly generalized way, an underpinning of the problems we’re facing today. If it’s all about the bottom line, the current economy shows that a percentage of our population is utterly worthless and that’s just inane.
Rats. Our library doesn’t have it. I’ll have to suggest it. Maybe I’ll buy it so I can scribble wantonly in the margins.
This sounds like a fascinating read and one that would lead me to want to discuss it with others. I’ll have to look for it and see if they have the Kindle version.