Why are shows about bad people so popular?

The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad are popular television shows about people who do terrible things. I haven't seen Deadwood or The Shield, but perhaps those also fit in this genre. If you read the websites I read, you'd think that these are the most popular television shows; in fact, they're niche entertainments compared to NCIS or the various CSI franchises. They're shows for young Bobos, more or less. Two hypotheses:

1. Deep down, we see ourselves as morally compromised. We know that we have and use more than we deserve, and we don't want to give it up. We tell ourselves that we're avoiding our just deserts for the sake of our families.
2. We like badassery, but we also need an excuse for our interest. The psychological angle gives us the illusion of moral distance. So we can tell ourselves that we're not interested in evil, but rather in the analysis of evil's effects.

There are two motions here: there's a larger structure of judgment, within which the characters' bad choices are shown to be harmful, but scene-by-scene the viewer's enticed by the allure of the anti-hero. I suspect that this is not moral seriousness, but rather the sense of it.

UPDATE: Should have given credit where credit's due. I started on this line of thinking after reading something Freddie wrote on G+.

Gray areas.

In Salon:

Many react to the idea of someone having zero interest in sex as offensive. It goes against everything we understand about what makes the world go 'round, so it's an inherently confrontational concept. With this disbelief often come attempts to write asexuality off as a result of repression or sexual trauma (as of now there's no evidence of that). It becomes even more complicated for people to understand when they discover all the variation within the asexual community.

Is this discussion of "asexuality" where the notion of "sexual identity" really starts losing its usefulness?

What I'm seeing is that some people are finding that they don't fit any of the sexual identities on offer -- homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and so on. They're are positing yet another sort of identity. And I'm sure this solution is helpful on some level, but I take the existence of the problem as an indication that there's something wrong with how we're using these ideas in the first place. So my reaction to this article is think that the framework of sexual identity is just not the best way to approach questions about "what intimacy is, what human connection is, and how you build that."

On the other hand, maybe modern people just don't have another framework available.

[Via The Dish]

Prescriptivism.

From David Bentley Hart at First Things, writing about English usage rules:

Everyone who cares about such matters engages in both prescription and description, often confusing the two. So does every dictionary. Everyone, moreover, knows words shift in meaning over time. The real question, at the end of the day, is whether any distinction can be recognized, or should be maintained, between creative and destructive mutations.

[...]

The analytic, lexically antinomian line is that, in themselves, words mean nothing; persons use them as instruments to mean this or that. But, conversely, persons can mean only what they have the words to say, and so the finer our distinctions and more precise our definitions, the more we are able to mean.

While this is about "usage" in the sense of language, there's also a lesson here for a certain breed of technology enthusiasts.

Maturity as romance.

In a Beliefnet article entitled "How to Fall in Love with Yourself," a woman named Christine Arylo is interviewed her approach to a fulfilling life.

Eventually, she learned to listen to her intuition and it led her to a revelation.

"I was with a good friend of mine -- a girl who had just gotten divorced and was miserable," she says. "She was trying to find herself and couldn’t. We were dancing in the living room to Frank Sinatra. All of a sudden, it just hit me. I looked at her and I said, 'You need to fall in love with yourself.' It was like the universe said this to me. I’m the one that’s going to teach women how to love themselves."

[...]

Through her spiritual journey that continues to unfold, Christine Arylo’s message remains the same and it springs from the vows she made to herself: "You really have to love yourself first. Honor yourself first. Trust yourself first. You have to develop a partnership with yourself first."

It seems that there are a good many people who can only conceive of a healthy interior life in the terminology of romantic relationships. Which is fine if it helps people become better people, and apparently it does, but talking about a "relationship with yourself" makes it hard to question the concept of the romantic relationship, which is probably the source of the problem in the first place.

On the other hand, there's Kierkegaard: "[t]he self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self."

Hodgmania.

There's a great long interview with John Hodgman at the AV Club. My favorite line:

"You see them arriving in this city, New York, practically every 30 seconds—and all of us who live here, unless we were born here, was one of them at some time—who are drawn like moths to a cliché, to things that will destroy them, to a completely unnecessary complication in one’s young or not-so-young life, to live in a completely implausibly expensive city and sacrifice savings and sanity and living space to be here for some period of time. I guess it’s like experimenting with smoking cigars in college: Sometimes you just have to get it over with, and unfortunately for some people, it becomes a lifestyle."

Also, the beginning of an interesting train of thought on affectations:

"The mustache is an affectation that I grew as a joke, and then just sort of enjoyed, and it allows me to really embrace wholeheartedly the idea of affectedness, and affectations in one’s personality. ... [S]omehow when I started the affectation of wearing the mustache, and started thinking about affectations, I was reminded of someone I know from the literary world who is extremely affective, unapologetically so. ... I obviously can’t reveal who that person is, because it would be mean."

Maybe I'll better understand what he's getting at if I ever watch Bored to Death, because that's what he's talking about.

Also, I had no idea that Phil Morrison, director of the excellent Junebug, was the man behind the camera for those Mac vs. PC commercials.

Leadership.

Any community or organization needs good leadership, just as they have a need for people who set out to improve the way things work, but setting out with the primary objective of being a leader or changing the world is a good way to accomplish the opposite of either of those goals. Effective leadership arises out of circumstance and experience, when it is needed. The people who start off with the driving desire to be leaders are the problem, not the solution. I don’t want to tell any of my students that they’re already leaders, or that they’re being trained for it.

-Timothy Burke, "When We Think We Lead We Are Most Led"

El Paso.

I really liked my friend Meaghan's essay about her hometown of El Paso:

I can’t forget my little stucco house on Guthrie street. At dusk the light would catch Guthrie’s street sign, shooting glares through my bedroom window, affixing the memory of that sight at the front of my memory. Oakbridge and Rockwood didn’t puzzle me, but Guthrie, what was that? I’ve never known how to shut my mind off when it settles into speculation. For my parents this meant an unrelenting eagerness to question everything. But answers to the real questions, not why a brain freeze happens, or why the stop lights are red, yellow, and green, but the questions with consequences, those questions I sometimes wish went unasked. As for that Guthrie street sign, it’s fun to think of it as a signal from the “Dust Bowl Troubador” himself, Woody Guthrie, picking me out early on, singing to me before I had answers that hurt the both of us.

At one point, Meaghan had the idea of having everyone in our group of friends write essays about where we're from and putting them in an anthology. I never got around to writing mine, but I probably should.

(Here's another chapter for that anthology, this one about Medicine Hat, Alberta.)

Things found, again and again.

Timothy Burke uses an article on a weird theory about the calendar to talk about how the same conversations constantly recur on the internet:

Read enough forum threads across a wide enough range of websites and you ought to become fairly expert in predicting the range and distribution of responses and even of anticipating where you’re likely to fall in that picture yourself, should you choose to join the discussion.

[…]

What I get the increasing sense in experiences like these multiple articles and conversations about Phantom Time Syndrome is of the acceleration of a “Groundhog Day” dimension to culture, that we will be having the same conversations about some of the same prompts again and again and not really know that we’ve done so.

I mean, that's the idea, but the whole thing is worth a read.

Timid poets.

When we're told stories of the great modern stylistic changes in Western art—representational to abstract, tonal to dissonant, formal to free verse—we always hear about photography's effect on visual art and we sometimes hear about the effects of recording and amplification on music. Maybe there's a story to be told about recording, reproduction, and poetry, but the poets seem to be keeping it to themselves.

But think of it this way: if you're writing short sequences of words in hopes that people will understand, remember, and repeat them, you'll want your words to be memorable. In English, rhyme and rhythm was one tried-and-true technique. These days, you can store documents, podcasts, and songs on your phone. From this perspective, I wonder if our poets have largely given up on rhyme because the public no longer needs to memorize. A poet can't count on an audience eager to remember; the best he can ever hope for might be half a minute of a New Yorker reader's time.

Why we tweet like we do.

Alan Jacobs, after considering the way in which knowledge of the Bible permeated every part of Victorian culture:

Today, it seems to me, there is no such truly common cultural currency. Instead, there is currency shared among small groups of initiates into certain mysteries, often meant to exclude others as much as to include the like-minded. This is what song lyrics and South Park quotes are for, after all.

When it comes to dropping unexplained references in hopes of picking out fellow insiders, I'm a great sinner, if not the chief. (My only Google Chat status that doesn't fall under this indictment is "lunchtime.") But I suppose another somewhat less plausible -- but surely not impossible -- motivation would be to try to provide your friends little moments of wonder at the unfamiliar.

A human-centric internet.

“The architecture of the internet must support a global, universal micropayments capability. In this way, anyone could charge for information made available online, whether it is music or a program for a future robot. A silly YouTube-like prank might generate a windfall for a silly teenager, while a scholar’s writing might be only occasionally accessed, but over a long period might still generate enough income to be of use. People could then re-create the best social formula that has been achieved thus far in human experience. Middle class people could own something- the information they produce- that would give them sustenance as they have children and age.

“In order for this scheme to work, there would have to be some structural changes introduced gradually, as I explain in the book. This direction is the only way to create a human-centric internet, instead of one that serves the cultists who believe in information more than people. It would not attempt to make information free, but instead make it affordable. It is worth noting that this is exactly how the web would have developed if the initial design proposal for it, dating back to the 1960s, had been carried out. (This was Ted Nelson’s vision.) It is the obvious way to design the network if people are your top priority.”

-Jaron Lanier

I read Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget last night. It has me thinking pretty hard about what I want to use internet tools for. Lanier imagines a different web ethic than the one we have now, with a primary difference being that creators are compensated for their work instead of expected to give it away and make money on knicknacks. Though I’m not sure I buy everything Lanier has to say about the need to get away from the command line or the sorry state of music (though he’s certainly right about the sorry situation of musicians), it’s a book that demands critical thinking about the technologies we have so often uncritically adopted.

Bill Kauffman is on to Charlotte's trickery.

Bill Kauffman recently traveled through my hometown's airport and saw some kind of ad campaign for “Charlotte, USA.” In The American Conservative, he muses on why they left out the “NC”:

“So N.C. is gone, ostensibly because Charlotte is no mere city but is instead a 16-county two-state blob that absorbs all the little communities within devouring distance, chewing them up into one masticated bolus flavorless enough to be swallowed by savvy global investors put off by states with directional adjectives in their names.”

He calls for impromptu citizen repair of these posters; if I were in Charlotte now, I'd be tempted to take him up on it.

But, yes, this is an ongoing problem with Charlotte, whose lurching efforts to become a World Class City provided the backdrop to my childhood. He's kind of got it pegged: Charlotte's explosive growth during my lifetime — at least 275,000 people since 1990, if the census is to be believed, which is approaching a 70 percent increase over a period of 17 years — has a lot to do with people who came for Charlotte, USA, rather than Charlotte, NC. It's Charlotte, USA gets the yuppies and the corporations. It's banks, not basketball or barbecue, though I should admit now that Charlotte wasn't particularly known for its barbecue, and, in my opinion, the Davidson / UNCC rivalry isn't much compared to what we've got going on in the Triangle. Anyway, banks: could it be a coincidence that Charlotte's business leader, Hugh McColl, changed his bank's name from North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) to NationsBank, and later Bank of America?

Much of the city feels soulless to me, although there's a strange comfort in that our efforts to become World Class are paying off in the form of a NASCAR hall of fame right next to the convention center. I suppose that this keeps Charlotte somehow tied to the North Carolina tradition of running moonshine — Wilkes County, Junior Johnson, and all that. (The apparently complicated issues of localism and corporatism in the world of NASCAR I will leave to the side, not being a racing fan myself.) Another bit of history that we try to keep in mind is that James K. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County — but do we really want to celebrate that? I'm going to have to think on how to find history in Charlotte, NC.

Chapel Hill, on the other hand, drips history, as old university towns tend to do. Might I again remind you that UNC was the first public university in the nation to open its doors?

Someone take the baton, please.

So Culture11 is done, though I don't know when the site will go down. I'm sad that it didn't work out, but I'm sure the bloggers will find new haunts or return to their old ones in due time. (John Schwenkler's got some links for you.) What I'll miss is the articles: the range and energy of the young writers they found, some on their first commissions, exploring weird corners of the world. I was pretty sold on Conor Friedersdorf's take on journalism, and it was great to see him put it into practice.

With some tweaking, I think the formula could work again. Maybe a better site design, maybe a less explicit commitment to conservatism. Then again, maybe I'm just wishing again that everyone on the planet had the same taste as me.

Joshua Treviño has written an analysis of why the business model didn't work, etc. It seems pretty smart to me.

New-man? Knew, man!

From the preface to Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University (if you're a Catholic who loves the life of the mind, I'm sure you've already seen this):

“When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual. In the case of most men it makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it. In some it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department. In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession.”

Ah, the benefits of a liberal education.

First the tide rushes in.

For part of the last year, I was confident in my opinions. I was not certain of them, but I thought they were respectable enough to offer. But then, for one reason or another, you slip into a re-building stage…

I saw Milk last night. As a total movie, it's not the best thing I've seen, though the acting is certainly solid.

The opening bits of old newsreel footage hit me hardest: the mixes of shame, defiance, anger, and resignation in the faces of the gay men as the police guided them out of bars and into vans. The rest of the movie wasn't straight hagiography: it portrayed Harvey Milk as a smart, brave, charismatic man, but one who couldn't always tell when he was pushing his friends and allies too far. And the poor lost boys that Milk did so much to inspire: isn't part of true religion caring for the orphans?

Traditionalist that I am, I should probably have something to say about promiscuity, or the institution of marriage, or something—but I don't, not really, not now. I don't want to argue this thing on principles. Beneath the preachiness of the movie is the struggle of what I can't deny is a real community of my friends and neighbors. And the sense that we are all in this together, even if we have to fight with each other to get through it.

EDIT: This entry, perhaps, demonstrates why you should let fresh ideas air about before typing them up for all to see.

Modern conservatism and instability.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was trying to avoid talking about The Future of Conservatism. Scott Payne called me out on it. But now I’ve finally found an article that has what looks like a good angle on the whole thing.

R.R. Reno posted an article called “The Challenge Facing Conservatism” at First Things yesterday, in which he flips around all the labels in a really good way. Modern American conservatism, in Reno’s reading, is anything but a Burkean defense of some big-business status quo. Deregulation has been radically destabilizing. There are opportunities to get fantastically rich; it’s just as easy to lose everything. In foreign policy, too, we’ve seen an idealism that doesn’t hesitate to “destabilize” (or rather, destroy) an entire region in hopes of building something new and better.

The result of this instability is an anxious feeling of vulnerability. Reno argues that Obama won because he addressed this kind of worry: “Obama’s election signals a collective American desire for stability.” Conservatives since Reagan have been enamored of creative destruction, but “freedom to fail” scares even the successful. Thus:

“So, conservatives need to face this singular political fact squarely: The people who have benefited the most from free-market policies were the ones who led the charge against the Republican party. And if my analysis is correct, they did so because of a deeply felt insecurity—an insecurity that we can trace back to our collective experience with something conservatives fought to achieve: a raucously creative, productive, and invariably unpredictable economic system.

[…]

“Voters are reading the ideological situation accurately. And they are pushing back against the instabilities that arise from conservative economic philosophy and foreign policy.”

This explains, I think, what is going on with most Obamacons, and with the so-called centrism that drives the further-left segments of the Democratic Party absolutely crazy. And it implies that the liberal (“classical liberal”) strain of American conservatism has been much more effective than the traditionalist one. John McCain campaigned as an outsider (I refuse to use that M-word here), after all, trying to convince people that he would shake things up in Washington, to break up the old system. Obama’s promises of change, on the other hand, were not fundamentally about any sort of socialist utopia: they were about a turning away from the politics of destabilization.

If deregulation is meant to unleash latent energy in an economy, re-regulation clamps down on it. If the voters start to see the economy as a runaway train, it’s only natural for them to support the person who promises to hit the brakes. In this analogy, conservatives who pushed for further free-market reforms sound like they’re arguing that a runaway train just gets you to your destination faster. (Unless it crashes…)

I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important for conservatism to set its sights on creating cultural stability through “a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority.” (I’m surprised that James Poulos hasn’t commented on this part yet.) One could see this as just another attempt to get some attention for the social conservative agenda, but I’m inclined to take it as a philosophical point. If we don’t attend to our culture, we won’t be able to handle instability that would be otherwise salutary. And I don’t mean attending to culture through government; I mean working through cultural institutions.

That’s the part of conservatism I’m most interested in. So many of my most talented peers are confused, rootless, and often depressed. Extra instability doesn’t help: it just makes the future look bleaker. I hate to have to come back to MacIntyre again, but Stanley Hauerwas draws on him to make this point in his inimitable (i.e. hyperbolic) style:

“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are probably deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account for what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”

This is what is at stake in questions of cultural authority. And I’m by no means convinced that conservatives have the best side of the argument. But I think conservatives have to recognize that in the absence of a public philosophy of cultural authority, an obsession with tax cuts and aggressive foreign policy is going to keep losing. The trick is that cultural authority can’t be primarily created through politics.

I have to add: Reno only talks about what instability does to economic winners. I hope that he writes about the other side sometime soon. Even if you can make the argument that the material standard of living has been rising, the less tangible consequences of economic inequality can be crushing.

So that's my “The Future of Conservatism” post. You can see why I was so reluctant to write it…

Fact, interpretation, and talk radio.

I generally ignore talk-radio/FOX News conservatives, but for some reason I'm fascinated by the John Ziegler / Zogby poll. Ziegler is a former AM radio personality in the Limbaugh mold who wanted “to try and identify which news stories broke through the clutter and reached the average Obama voter.”

The relevant links:

• HowObamaGotElected.com, the site Ziegler created to promote the results.
• Nate Silver's original attack on Ziegler's method, in which he overstates the case by calling Ziegler's survey a “push poll.”
• The transcript of Nate Silver's interview with Ziegler, in which Ziegler flips out as Silver asks him simple questions for context. Silver created the transcript, so it's possible that he's deliberately making himself look calmer than he was, but given the persona that each man tries to project—Ziegler the outraged populast, Silver the levelheaded numbers guy—this doesn't seem very likely.
• The Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy blog's critique of Ziegler's questions. (Verdict: Ziegler's interpretation of his results is by no means unassailable.)
• Ziegler's aggressive response to the challenges, in which he maintains that “[t]here was ABSOLUTELY ZERO DOUBT as to who the answer any of the questions [sic].”
• Nate Silver's reflections on his encounter with Ziegler, which end in media criticism: “Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.”
• The 2005 David Foster Wallace article¹, from which Silver quotes extensively, and which is the key to the whole brouhaha, and which, despite its length, is well worth reading.
  

We all know, or should know, that all info-tainment commentary thrives on a constant conflation of fact and interpretation. I suppose I can agree that every assertion of fact already contains some act of interpretation, but this doesn't render the distinction useless.

If I put forward an assertion as a fact, I am assuming that a generalized conversation partner will accept it and its epistemological baggage into the conversation, or that if it is challenged I can easily support it with resources that will be accepted by my conversation partners. When I put forward an assertion as an interpretation is one, I anticipate resistance, or realize that I don't have the resources for a conclusive proof at hand but want to persuade anyway.

My categorization of a particular assertion can change in the course of a conversation. When challenged, I may find that something I took to be a fact does not hold up in other valid epistemological frameworks, and perhaps doesn't really hold up in my own. (I suppose the problem could be a refusal to admit that other valid epistemological frameworks even exist, but that admission seems pretty crucial to democracy, pluralism, and basic human decency.) On the other hand, in the course of attempting to persuade someone of an interpretation, I may stumble upon evidence that moves my guess into the realm of fact, or simply discover that my interpretation is so widely shared that it can be taken for granted.

What is important here is a certain flexibility in classification. Needless to say, this sort of flexibility would spell doom for Ziegler-style talk-radio pseudo-populism.

¹INTERROBANG.

Newt Gingrich wants to destroy all adolescents.

By which I mean that he wants to change the culture so that kids become adults without this weird in-between stage that so many of us get trapped in. It's worth a read, just to exercise the brain.

EDIT: It occurs to me that the entertainment industry would embrace Creative Commons before it would let anyone seriously disrupt the cultural construction of the “teenage.”

(Via Freddie.)

Gay marriage will keep happening.

I’ve been hearing people talk about Proposition 8 failing to pass passing in California. I have a few scattered thoughts on the matter. I will put them here, since that is what a blog is for.

To put it simply, I don’t think there are enough arguments against gay marriage to keep it from becoming mostly legal in this country during my lifetime.

I have read some well-written natural law arguments against gay marriage, but I am pretty sure that they were secret theology, of the sort that would not be convincing to the irreligious. If these arguments are correct, the conclusion would have to be imposed.

I’m not aware of any modern philosophy that offers an argument against gay marriage as such.

That leaves us with the well-being of the children. You know, the sociological argument for the traditional definition of marriage: that, by tinkering with such a delicate institution, we will end up damaging it, which will hurt the children more than it hurts us. But will people wait for thirty or forty years while social scientists carefully observe what happens when children grow up with two parents of the same sex? And could sociologists on either side of the issue be objective? I am somehow doubtful.

On the other side of the question, you have a pretty straightforward argument based on consent, commitment, stability, and justice. (See, e.g., Jonathan Rauch.)

So if the natural law argument is secretly theological, modern philosophy offers little or no resistance, the sociological argument just takes too long, and straight people in younger generations have more and more gay friends, I don’t see how the traditional-marriage folks can hold out much longer.

For the sake of the Constitution and political culture, I hope that gay marriage comes by way of legislatures, not courts.

As for me, I sort of want to give in to my libertarian side and downgrade everyone to civil unions, at least as far as the government is concerned.

EDIT: Just realized I got Proposition 8 exactly backwards in the first sentence. Oops.

Conor Friedersdorf is the change he wants to see in the world.

Culture11 has been posting some interesting journalism along with its many editorials and essays. Today brought an article on state licensing and barbershops in New Jersey. Requiring aspiring barbers to learn how to do manicures is precisely the sort of bureaucratic ridiculousness that a healthy populism should be opposing.

It seems to me that C11 is publishing more of these articles than they did when they started. Back in August, features editor Conor Friedersdorf announced his vision for conservative journalism (a plane full of “Tom Wolfe clones”), and apparently this is what it looks like in practice. Say what you will: it's far better than more tired screeds about socialism or whatever.

In conclusion, you should support your local barbershop. Don't know where it is? Try this barbershop locator.

EDIT: Also, watch The Man Who Wasn't There, if you like films with barbershops, minimalistic acting, downmarket nihilism, and murder.