In its early days, Cabrini-Green was a way station for those temporarily down on their luck. Sociologist Richard Sennett lived in the housing project from 1946 to 1950, moving to Minneapolis when his mother had earned her degree in social work. Sennett circled back to Chicago to play the cello and eventually to attend the University of Chicago. He went on to become a prominent sociologist, with such books as “The Hidden Injuries of Class” (co-authored with Jonathan Cobb) and “The Uses of Disorder” known to a generation of college students. His most recent book, “Respect in a World of Inequality” (reviewed in this section Feb. 16), mixed memoir and sociology to explore important questions about welfare and the workplace. On a recent visit to Chicago, Sennett chatted with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor about his childhood, the importance of music and the dangers inherent in meritocracy:
Q. What is it like for you to return to Chicago and see such a changed landscape?
A. It’s very difficult for me to–as we would say–relate to it, because it’s so transformed from what I knew as a very young child. And then when I occasionally came back to revisit, I have one or two childhood memories. My mother wrote a great deal about Cabrini-Green, and I really remember through her memories of it when I was a little kid here.
The other part of Chicago for me is the positive part of Chicago for me: I came back here to study music. We moved from Cabrini to Minneapolis–colder, even colder than Chicago, because our fortunes improved. But I came back here to study music because there was a great cellist here named Frank Miller, who was the first cellist in the Chicago Symphony. And he was my teacher.
It was an amazing time for music in Chicago in the late ’50s and early ’60s. People forget–you know, we think about Chicago’s architecture as kind of the claim to its renown. But this was a great musical–and remains–a great musical culture.
When I came back to study [music]–I can’t say I wanted to recover my roots or anything like that. I didn’t have that kind of feeling. Mainly what I thought about the city was just how exciting it was, how much music there is in it. And I think people in Chicago take this for granted. You have the greatest conductor in the world as the head of the Chicago Symphony.
So I had this very double image of the city.
Q. How did you, a sociologist, decide to take an autobiographical direction with this book? How does music relate to this sociology?
A. It was the first time I’ve ever written anything autobiographical; to me, my autobiography is less interesting–the fact that I was born poor–than my life as a musician, you know. When I think of what my past is, it’s that.
And I started thinking about why was I really so interested in this subject. And it wasn’t because I was poor. It was because I had performed the social themes in this book as a musician. . . . It’s true, in any performing art, that people have to interact with each other. They’re not all stars, although we cellists like to think we’re the most important part of the orchestra, the truth is we are not. You’re buried in a mass of people. . . . That’s the nature of orchestral work, that you’re not singled out for respect because you’re a soloist. And yet people take a great deal of self-worth from doing that kind of collective thing. So in a way it was just a natural thing for me to do.
Q. If respect is a social performance, what’s the role of the audience?
A. Well, I think probably that’s where this analogy gets a little funny, because we have to imagine in everyday life that everybody’s a performer. But the point I’m trying to make in the book is that American society puts a great premium on people earning self-respect by being special.
In schools, you know how we always single out the two Merit Scholarship students. We single out the JD’s, you know, the juvenile delinquents. Most kids are right there in the middle, and the teacher doesn’t go: “Well done, Johnny. You know, you did the best you could. You really helped the school develop.”
And I think that’s a problem that we don’t pay enough attention to ordinary people and to their needs for building self-respect in themselves and getting acknowledgment from other people. So that’s sort of how this book got really launched.
Q. How did you organize the book?
More Top Picks Best Nintendo Switch Consoles
A. This book was an experiment for me, since I had never written anything like this before. What I wanted to avoid was to write a rags-to-riches story, or a story of social mobility, which wasn’t the point. And I had to learn how to write a memoir so that I chose things from my own life that would resonate to this larger theme. It took a long, long time. I now understand people who write really good memoirs and what an art this is, because lots of things that are important to me would be absolutely boring to somebody else.
Q. How did you determine a tone that integrated the authority of sociology and the intimacy of memoir?
A. Tone is very important. As a genre, a lot of American memoirs seemed to revolve around shock. The shock of awareness, the sudden understanding. Mine is not oriented around that tone.
Q. But there were some shocking elements to the book.
A. Yes, I mean the only shock part of this that I had to sort of figure out in my life was when I lost the use of my hand. How to describe that to the reader? It was a shock to me, but it’s not interesting to a reader. I really see it as a pretty complicated art form. I can’t pretend to have mastered it in any way, shape or form.
Q. If you’re poor in a society that values financial success, how do you get respect from others?
A. Those two things don’t follow one from the other. Oftentimes when you talk about respect in terms of prestige, we’re talking about just material possession–the hotshot young stockbroker who has three Porsches in the garage. But oftentimes these are not people who feel very much self-respect. You know, they have material prestige, but they feel very solemn inside themselves. . . .
One of the interesting things about respect, mutual respect or self-respect, [is that it is] how one goes about surviving. If you feel you’re acting responsibly and ethically, you’re much more resistant to the blows of material fortune. I think it’s an American error to assume that people feel better about themselves the more money they have.
Q. What is the cost of meritocracy?
A. When you emphasize that a social system is meritocratic, that it rewards people who’ve really proven themselves, usually what you’re talking about is a very slim slice of people up at the top. And what that does to the others is that if they don’t show merit, they don’t get recognition.
In the book, as you know, I’m particularly trying to look at this in terms of rewarding people with exceptional potential, which is more and more how the American educational system [works]. . . . The emphasis on meritocracy is something that has pretty deep roots in modern society. It goes back to rewarding careers based on talent. . . . I’m not making an opposition in this book between respect and disrespect, but between indifference and respect. You know, somebody who is just part of the woodwork–you don’t notice them–versus somebody who stands out. . . . The result is it demoralizes average kids, because they have held up to themselves this kind of unattainable ideal.
One of my critics in Germany said: “So you are an egalitarian. You are against talent.” And I said: “Not at all. What I’m against is that the only people who we really pay attention to are the people at the absolute top.”
You can see this in the sports world. Ballplayers get paid millions and millions of dollars. They are the soloists. But there’s an orchestra that makes it up. In sports [there is] this incredible emphasis on becoming really super good at something, rather than just learning how to play with other people, how to be a good team member.
Q. You argue that this kind of society is not so good for the soloist, right?
A. Soloists may look down on other people with pity, but–as I try to show in my book–it’s a close cousin to contempt. . . . A really great soloist learns how to perform with a mass of other people. He or she has to.
I used to play with Jacqueline du Pre, a wonderful cellist, and we were playing . . . and she turned to this orchestra and she said: “No, look, this is a passage where you just forget about me. I’m not so important here. Just really play on it.” And I felt, “OK, you really understood it.” That kind of generosity is extraordinary, not condescending. I’ll never forget.
The real issue here is how to create a society in which we’re paying attention to all those people in the middle. The big bulk. You know, how do we stop paying attention only to our soloists?