Thinking about the big house (no, not that big house)

The iron cage describes how we mindlessly go through the motions to pursue an end without any real sense of why that end is important or meaningful or even what we actually want to do.

I’ve taught many smart students in my almost twenty years (yikes!) of teaching. Also many kind students and funny students and, yes, a few annoying students, though luckily for me, most are annoying only in short bursts.

I haven’t taught a lot of wise students, which isn’t really surprising. Wisdom is hard to come by at any age, but probably more so when you’re in your late teens or early twenties.¹ So the students who show some wisdom stick with me and one young man in particular.

This young man wasn’t a sociology major. But in talking about his experience in college, he admitted that he made just enough effort to get B grades. Yes, he admitted, he could work harder and spend more time stressing out about getting A’s. But he wanted to really enjoy his time in college, so he’d made the intentional decision to settle for B’s.

This was early in my own teaching career and I remember being blown away by his approach. “That’s very smart, “ I probably said. And it is, but more than smart, it’s wise. It’s a next-level insight, being honest with yourself about what’s most important to you rather than following the norms telling you to mindlessly kill yourself for that A, even when you’re not exactly sure why the A is so important in the first place.

I guess this might sound strange coming from a college professor, being the person who gives the A or the B.² It helps to understand that I don’t care about grades. In fact, it’s stronger than that. I hate grades. Were I not in a system that demanded them, teaching a population of students who get very nervous without grades as their guiding light, I would do away with grades altogether.³ I don’t care about grades. I care about learning. The two things are quite different, even if it took me some time to understand that.

I think that young man had already caught a glimmer of this truth. Would he actually learn any less with a B versus an A? Or was there a possibility that by not stressing over every single point on every single assignment, he might carve out the space to learn more, not less? And even if he didn’t learn more, might he enjoy his college experience more, which is also a good and worthy goal?

In the language of sociology, this student had found his way out of the iron cage. The iron cage is a concept that comes from Max Weber, a 19th century sociologist. It describes the way we become trapped within a hard shell of rationalization. We mindlessly go through the motions to pursue an end (an A), without any real sense of why that end is important or meaningful or even what we actually want to do. In an ideal world, students would do the work in my classes because they want to learn. In reality, they do the work because they want a good grade.

My middle class students want a good grade because that will allow them to graduate and they want to graduate so they can get a good job and they want a good job so they can make a lot of money and they want to make a lot of money so they can buy a big house and then they have to keep making a lot of money so they can pay the mortgage to keep the big house…why? Because all of this will make them happy? Maybe, but probably not.

It’s all a bit like that children’s book, A Fly Went By. They get the grade to get the degree to get the job to get the money to get the house. But where does it all start and where does it all end?⁴

Money is, sadly, still necessary to our survival.⁵ But beyond that basic level of survival (which many, many people have not achieved) how much money is enough? Is enough what allows you to buy a small house? A big house? A house bigger than your parents? The biggest house on the block, decorated in enough style to make it onto the tour of homes? Or enough to make sure your own kids make even more money than you? Where does it end?

Inside the iron care, the money is the end. The A is the end. Outside the iron cage, money might be a means to an end, but maybe your end doesn’t require that much money. Maybe you need just enough money to live in a community you love. Or just enough money to buy yourself time for your real passion. Outside the iron cage, an A is just a letter. What do you really want from your four years of college? What do you really want your life to be?

This is what I love about teaching Weber and the iron cage. The bad news of Weber is that with increasing rationalization in society, we’re more trapped in that cage then Weber could have even imagined.⁶ The good news is, if you’re aware of this trap, you have a chance of stepping out of it. You can be that student and ask yourself, “Is getting an A the most important thing to me?” Or, “Is the big house really going to make me happy?”

Experts speculate about what forces are behind what some are calling the Great Resignation, but maybe this is the answer. The pandemic made the iron cage more visible than ever. It provided an opportunity for some of us to ask ourselves, what the hell am I doing with my life and why?

Every year when I teach Weber and the iron cage in my sociological theory class, I remember to ask myself these questions—what am I doing with my life and why? What cages have I made for myself and how might I step outside of them? What A’s am I wasting my time on when I could be so much happier with the B?

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1. Sometimes I realize that I teach people in their late teens and early twenties and it feels sort of shocking. Like, really? It’s a strange phenomenon that people get their PhDs for many reasons, but very few because they have decided they want to spend the rest of their lives with people in their late teens and early twenties. I suspect quite a few people who end up as professors don’t actually like young people. I feel lucky that it turns out I do, though it didn’t occur to me until much later that this would be my career.

2. Historically, colleges and universities didn’t always give grades. You sat for an exam at the end and you either passed or you didn’t. Maybe there were some distinctions based on how well you passed (honors or passed with distinction). But a specific grade wasn’t so much the point. The point was to be good enough to get the degree or move on to the next level. This makes more sense to me than A’s and B’s, especially if you need to use grades as a gatekeeper of some sort, which is a function they serve, though not very well. What grades most often reflect is the social class background of students, but that’s a whole other newsletter.

3. Since the pandemic, I have, in fact, been trying to do away with grading, bit by bit. You can’t abolish grading altogether in your classroom because, one, it really does make students nervous and rightly so. They’ve been conditioned their whole lives into the mindless pursuit of good grades. When they get a bad grade, they believe that it is a moral failing, because this is what their culture has taught them. This is part of how the iron cage works. We’re like those factory-farmed chickens who become so used to being stuck inside that when the doors open, we’re too scared to walk through them. But I also can’t abolish grades because the whole system is built around grades. Students need them to apply to graduate school and the college uses them for assessment (don’t even get me started on that). Grades are built into the system, which makes it hard to leave them behind.

4. Of course, if you’re poor or working class, you’re working mostly just to survive. The question isn’t whether you need a big house or not, but whether you can afford a place to live, enough food on the table, or to pay the electric bill.

5. At least until capitalism finally collapses and we have universal income, but that’s also a whole other newsletter.

6. In fact, another sociologist, George Ritzer, took Weber’s ideas about rationalization and adapted it to our 21st century lives, where it becomes the irrationality of rationality, or the process of rationalization on steroids. Rationality goes so far that it loops back around on itself until it becomes irrational. A quick example—in Indiana, we live in one of the most fertile areas on the planet. Thousands and thousands of acres in our state are dedicated to agriculture, but most of it is stuff we can’t eat until it’s been shipped somewhere else and processed (into corn syrup and soy products). All this fertile land, but if you eat in a restaurant in Madison, 100% of the food comes from outside the state, traveling thousands of miles to arrive on our plate. That is some irrational shit, my friends.