"Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order." -- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Saturday, 8 December 2012
"Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order." -- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Thursday, 6 December 2012
I've been thinking of Margaret Thatcher, actually, when it comes to Douthat's birthrate concerns. The problem with the conversation is that Douthat is talking about what he perceives to be a societal need to have more babies, but children are going to be had by couples, and more accurately by individual women. The problem is that even if you agreed with him that we need higher birthrates, you're stuck with the fact that individuals are the ones who are going to bear the burden. And in particular, individual women are going to have to sacrifice a great deal in order to make this rise in birthrates happen.
Thatcher was speaking about the idea of societal obligation to provide to those who couldn't provide for themselves. Her point was that while we might talk about a societal obligation to provide, it's individuals who get taxed. For a lefty like me, that's an okay tradeoff, but her point remains important, which is not to let talk of society obscure individual desires. Here, we're talking about a burden that falls unequally on women, and one that is far more personal, physical, and invasive than paying taxes. The continuing failure of Douthat and other conservatives to recognize that as a burden at all speaks volumes about why single women remain such a reliably liberal constituency. If only men were expected to pay taxes, I'd understand them being specially concerned with the issue, and paying taxes is hardly as extreme as pregancy.
It's simply the case that women have special interests when the topic is child rearing, and anyone discussing the issue should take pains to recognize those special interests, and the paramount importance of women's opinions on the topic.
Douthat, of course, is not talking about coercing anyone into having children they don't want to have. But then, that's part of the difficulty with this issue: what do we want to do, and to what extent and effect? I'm not pulling a wonk and saying "where's the policy angle, here?" I am asking, though, for a more concrete understanding of what kind of pressures Douthat wants us to apply, and how extreme he thinks that pressure should be. Like a lot of people, I intuitively believe that when it comes to the highly personal decision of whether to have kids or more kids, the answer is none.
Thatcher was speaking about the idea of societal obligation to provide to those who couldn't provide for themselves. Her point was that while we might talk about a societal obligation to provide, it's individuals who get taxed. For a lefty like me, that's an okay tradeoff, but her point remains important, which is not to let talk of society obscure individual desires. Here, we're talking about a burden that falls unequally on women, and one that is far more personal, physical, and invasive than paying taxes. The continuing failure of Douthat and other conservatives to recognize that as a burden at all speaks volumes about why single women remain such a reliably liberal constituency. If only men were expected to pay taxes, I'd understand them being specially concerned with the issue, and paying taxes is hardly as extreme as pregancy.
It's simply the case that women have special interests when the topic is child rearing, and anyone discussing the issue should take pains to recognize those special interests, and the paramount importance of women's opinions on the topic.
Douthat, of course, is not talking about coercing anyone into having children they don't want to have. But then, that's part of the difficulty with this issue: what do we want to do, and to what extent and effect? I'm not pulling a wonk and saying "where's the policy angle, here?" I am asking, though, for a more concrete understanding of what kind of pressures Douthat wants us to apply, and how extreme he thinks that pressure should be. Like a lot of people, I intuitively believe that when it comes to the highly personal decision of whether to have kids or more kids, the answer is none.
OK. People seem to think that my little cartoon didn't take Ross Douthat's argument seriously enough. That's because I don't think it's a serious argument, and there's a whole ancillary conversation about seriousness we could have, but here goes.
The first and most disqualifying problem with Douthat's column and followup is the absurdity of talking about the value of population growth without taking global warming or environmentalism remotely seriously. In the thousands of words Douthat dedicated to the topic in these two essays, the only time he demonstrates any interest in environmental questions at all is in a purposefully dismissive reference to "radical environmentalism." That's it. This fact alone is enough to disqualify Douthat's opinion on birthrates. The are two reasons someone could claim that the effort to curb climate change is of interest only to radicals: they are ignorant or they are dishonest. And Douthat is not ignorant. The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that climate change is a real, growing, and deeply serious problem. Climate change represents an existential threat to our way of life. And the single biggest contributor to growing carbon emissions is population growth.
The fact that someone can get a column and followup about our legacy to the next generation published in The New York Times without seriously considering global warming at all is, frankly, an embarrassment, to the writer and the publication. And it demonstrates that conservatism remains resistant to science, despite all of their gripes about the notion, and the often-repeated assertion that Douthat is a profoundly reasonable writer.
Beyond what his argument is missing is what it contains. And, frankly, what's there is not serious. Douthat expliticly refers to a moral obligation to hypothetical people:
All of this is not even to address the assumption that more human beings is better for those hypothetical beings. (Who are hard to talk about as moral agents, considering that, you know, they don't exist.) To simply say "more humans means more human flourishing!" is to ignore the fact that more humans also means more human suffering. You want to debate if more human life is better, even though more human life can often mean worse conditions for existing humans, fine. But you've actually got to do that mental work. Douthat refers to the moral obligation to produce new generations out of short-term rhetorical necessity and then quickly abandons it, likely because he knows he is opening himself up to questions he can't possibly answer. It's lazy and irresponsible.
Next, there's the gender equality issue. As is his tendency, Douthat almost entirely ignores the different material pressures that women operate under in his column. Fatherhood is, obviously, a serious obligation. But for a woman to have a baby is a level of physical responsibility and difficulty that men simply don't face. Douthat wrote a column that shames women for not having their bodies captured for nine months by the needs of another being, and permanently altered in the process, without remotely considering how much of a burden that is for them. Then he follows up, again without considering women's special vulnerabilities and interests when it comes to child-rearing. It's not enough for social conservatives, apparently, that women feel guilty when they don't carry a pregnancy to term. They now are expected to feel guilty for the pregnancies that don't even begin.
Finally there's the question of whether Douthat has the facts straight on declining birthrates. I have some sympathy here, as the question is complicated and it's a mistake I could make. But then again, I don't write for The New York Times, and I don't have the vast resources that he has at my disposal. I expect more from a professional writer operating under the masthead of the most widely-read and respected paper in the world.
There's something profoundly odd about the argument that Douthat makes here, of a piece with a lot of his work. It speaks to the dictates of supposedly reasonable social conservatism: Douthat has to reverse engineer religious morals into an argument he can make for a secular audience.
I made Douthat into my spirit guide in the comic for a reason, beyond that I thought it was funny. As I read his column I thought to myself "it's like he's my fucking fairy godmother or something." Douthat writes with a peculiar kind of moral didacticism that he takes care to express in irreligious terminology. The effect is jarring. To be frank with you, I don't know if Douthat himself really buys his own arguments here. (I know, that's the sort of thing you're not allowed to say.) I think that he frequently argues from a stance of religious conviction that he knows can't be expressed in religious terms, lest he lose a large percentage of his audience. The result is a confused mess. I would much rather Douthat say "there's a God, and his church is the Catholic Church, and his will as expressed through that church is that you make babies and only have sex for procreation." That would be retrograde and wrong, but it would make sense. Instead he takes this kind of amorphous moral guardianship without wanting to say exactly where his vision of morality begins. That's how you get such odd arguments, and that's how you get vague references to virtue or decadence that refer to some abstract moral system rather than the concrete moral calculus of the good of particular people. It all comes out seeming like spiritual pedantry for the sake of no particular group of people. I don't need a spirit guide, thanks.
As far as seriousness goes, well, there's a whole long argument I could make about "seriousness" and bad faith, or "seriousness" and our media. And I am a big believer in the necessity of being a bit of a punk, of being a bit juvenile in political argument. For now it suffices to say that I didn't express a particularly serious argument against Douthat because I don't take his argument seriously, because it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. The fact that so many people who oppose Douthat's politics feel the need to declare him one of the good ones speaks to the bullshit reverence that we bestow on publications like the Times, and the grand Reasonable Conservative Affirmative Action program. We grade social conservatives on such a curve, expecting so little of them, that if they don't excuse rape or call for the bombing of Mecca we treat them like geniuses. I don't think that Douthat's argument met a minimal threshold of honesty or coherence. That's not a big deal; I'll read him in the future, and if he says something smart, I'll say so. What I won't do is write as if I believe he has some sort of inherent gravitas that transcends whether a particular argument is right or wrong. Making a comic out of him is only some terrible libel if you endorse a view of politics as deeply reverent that I don't share. And as far as "personal" goes, well, to me it's far more personal to condemn millions of people for not wanting to have kids than it is to paste someone's face onto a coyote.
I am fighting against the notion that a person's place of publication, position in the media landscape, or credentials within our system should determine how charitably or critically you read that person's arguments. This is especially difficult when the person is using his status to jury rig arguments that enforce traditional inequalities without coming right out and saying so. One of my only weapons against that is insouciance. Insouciance, and Photoshop.
Update: Christ.
Yglesias's piece is well worth reading. Dear dudes: please, please stop telling women that they aren't the ones who bear a far heavier burden when it comes to building that next generation. It's really, truly, stupid and gross.
The first and most disqualifying problem with Douthat's column and followup is the absurdity of talking about the value of population growth without taking global warming or environmentalism remotely seriously. In the thousands of words Douthat dedicated to the topic in these two essays, the only time he demonstrates any interest in environmental questions at all is in a purposefully dismissive reference to "radical environmentalism." That's it. This fact alone is enough to disqualify Douthat's opinion on birthrates. The are two reasons someone could claim that the effort to curb climate change is of interest only to radicals: they are ignorant or they are dishonest. And Douthat is not ignorant. The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that climate change is a real, growing, and deeply serious problem. Climate change represents an existential threat to our way of life. And the single biggest contributor to growing carbon emissions is population growth.
The fact that someone can get a column and followup about our legacy to the next generation published in The New York Times without seriously considering global warming at all is, frankly, an embarrassment, to the writer and the publication. And it demonstrates that conservatism remains resistant to science, despite all of their gripes about the notion, and the often-repeated assertion that Douthat is a profoundly reasonable writer.
Beyond what his argument is missing is what it contains. And, frankly, what's there is not serious. Douthat expliticly refers to a moral obligation to hypothetical people:
After all, if children are not the only good in human life, they do seem like a fairly important one, no? Maybe even, dare one say, an essential one, at least in some quantity, if the pursuit of the wider array of human goods is to continue beyond our own life cycle? Or to put it another way, if we have moral obligations to future, as-yet-unborn generations, as almost everyone seems to agree, surely those duties have to include some obligation for somebody to bring those generations into existence in the first place — to imitate the sacrifices that our parents made, and give another generation the chances that we’ve had?Ethan Gach already made a hash of this, but to put it briefly: to posit moral rights for hypothetical people is such an immense ethical move that conventional western morality can't begin to contain it. Here's a question: how many kids does Ross Douthat intend to have? I'm sure he's planning on having a large brood. But how big is big? Is he gonna have, say, 15 kids? I recognize that Ross can say that he needs to be able to support as many kids as he fathers, but I am fairly certain that he's not going to have as many as he can really afford. After all, he explicitly points to higher quality of life compared to years past as a reason to think that people can afford more children than they are having now. You know, those virtuous old-timey folks made it work, so why can't you, yuppie? But that makes him susceptible to the question of whether he's maximizing his child-rearing capabilities himself. So is he working overnight to eke out as much money as he possibly can, in order to fulfill the moral obligation to have all the kids he could feed? Of course not. Male fertility is far less restricted to a particular age window than that of women. So is Douthat going to be pumping out kids into his 70s? How is it that a 33 year old dude only has one child, if he believes that we have "some obligation"-- oh, what a powerful "some"-- to bring new generations into existence?
All of this is not even to address the assumption that more human beings is better for those hypothetical beings. (Who are hard to talk about as moral agents, considering that, you know, they don't exist.) To simply say "more humans means more human flourishing!" is to ignore the fact that more humans also means more human suffering. You want to debate if more human life is better, even though more human life can often mean worse conditions for existing humans, fine. But you've actually got to do that mental work. Douthat refers to the moral obligation to produce new generations out of short-term rhetorical necessity and then quickly abandons it, likely because he knows he is opening himself up to questions he can't possibly answer. It's lazy and irresponsible.
Next, there's the gender equality issue. As is his tendency, Douthat almost entirely ignores the different material pressures that women operate under in his column. Fatherhood is, obviously, a serious obligation. But for a woman to have a baby is a level of physical responsibility and difficulty that men simply don't face. Douthat wrote a column that shames women for not having their bodies captured for nine months by the needs of another being, and permanently altered in the process, without remotely considering how much of a burden that is for them. Then he follows up, again without considering women's special vulnerabilities and interests when it comes to child-rearing. It's not enough for social conservatives, apparently, that women feel guilty when they don't carry a pregnancy to term. They now are expected to feel guilty for the pregnancies that don't even begin.
Finally there's the question of whether Douthat has the facts straight on declining birthrates. I have some sympathy here, as the question is complicated and it's a mistake I could make. But then again, I don't write for The New York Times, and I don't have the vast resources that he has at my disposal. I expect more from a professional writer operating under the masthead of the most widely-read and respected paper in the world.
There's something profoundly odd about the argument that Douthat makes here, of a piece with a lot of his work. It speaks to the dictates of supposedly reasonable social conservatism: Douthat has to reverse engineer religious morals into an argument he can make for a secular audience.
I made Douthat into my spirit guide in the comic for a reason, beyond that I thought it was funny. As I read his column I thought to myself "it's like he's my fucking fairy godmother or something." Douthat writes with a peculiar kind of moral didacticism that he takes care to express in irreligious terminology. The effect is jarring. To be frank with you, I don't know if Douthat himself really buys his own arguments here. (I know, that's the sort of thing you're not allowed to say.) I think that he frequently argues from a stance of religious conviction that he knows can't be expressed in religious terms, lest he lose a large percentage of his audience. The result is a confused mess. I would much rather Douthat say "there's a God, and his church is the Catholic Church, and his will as expressed through that church is that you make babies and only have sex for procreation." That would be retrograde and wrong, but it would make sense. Instead he takes this kind of amorphous moral guardianship without wanting to say exactly where his vision of morality begins. That's how you get such odd arguments, and that's how you get vague references to virtue or decadence that refer to some abstract moral system rather than the concrete moral calculus of the good of particular people. It all comes out seeming like spiritual pedantry for the sake of no particular group of people. I don't need a spirit guide, thanks.
As far as seriousness goes, well, there's a whole long argument I could make about "seriousness" and bad faith, or "seriousness" and our media. And I am a big believer in the necessity of being a bit of a punk, of being a bit juvenile in political argument. For now it suffices to say that I didn't express a particularly serious argument against Douthat because I don't take his argument seriously, because it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. The fact that so many people who oppose Douthat's politics feel the need to declare him one of the good ones speaks to the bullshit reverence that we bestow on publications like the Times, and the grand Reasonable Conservative Affirmative Action program. We grade social conservatives on such a curve, expecting so little of them, that if they don't excuse rape or call for the bombing of Mecca we treat them like geniuses. I don't think that Douthat's argument met a minimal threshold of honesty or coherence. That's not a big deal; I'll read him in the future, and if he says something smart, I'll say so. What I won't do is write as if I believe he has some sort of inherent gravitas that transcends whether a particular argument is right or wrong. Making a comic out of him is only some terrible libel if you endorse a view of politics as deeply reverent that I don't share. And as far as "personal" goes, well, to me it's far more personal to condemn millions of people for not wanting to have kids than it is to paste someone's face onto a coyote.
I am fighting against the notion that a person's place of publication, position in the media landscape, or credentials within our system should determine how charitably or critically you read that person's arguments. This is especially difficult when the person is using his status to jury rig arguments that enforce traditional inequalities without coming right out and saying so. One of my only weapons against that is insouciance. Insouciance, and Photoshop.
Update: Christ.
Yglesias's piece is well worth reading. Dear dudes: please, please stop telling women that they aren't the ones who bear a far heavier burden when it comes to building that next generation. It's really, truly, stupid and gross.
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
In another post that touches on the Lincoln controversy, Corey Robin has asked about how school influences our cultural understanding of the Civil War. I had a somewhat unusual high school experience in this regard, and it speaks to the very controversy about the movie.
First-- I find, as with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin, and most other people that the Civil War was of course about slavery, and that efforts to claim otherwise are misguided at best and offensive at worst. Some people linger on the fact that what the North was really fighting for was to preserve the union. And, well, yeah, but herp de derp-- the union had to be preserved because of slavery. Yes, the stated reasons for fighting the war, frequently coming from Lincoln himself, often included the need to maintain the territorial and political integrity of the United States, but the historical record shows that the issue of slavery was broadly understood as the central conflict in the Civil War. Disputing that sidelines the most important issue, morally and practically, of what is perhaps the most important historical period of our history. Worse still are people like Ron Paul, who will admit the immorality of chattel slavery but insist on the noble aspirations of the Confederacy in fighting for the right to secede and the principles of federalism. This ignores the fact that the South wanted to secede only because of their desire to preserve the system of racist chattel slavery and makes a hash of the elementary moral ideas at play in the Civil War, in a way I find unforgivable.
I actually had a high school history teacher who looked at the question a little differently, though. He stressed the fact that the Civil War was not just about slavery (and I know that "just" is pretty loaded) not as an excuse for the South but as an indictment of the North.
What I mean is that he wanted us as students to be very skeptical of an unduly heroic picture of the Union and its role in the Civil War; he wanted us to see that the fact that the North was on the right side of that conflict, and that the North's victory was an immense benefit to slaves and America, should not be confused with our thinking that the North was "the good guys" who behaved out of a principled stance against racism. He made the point several times that many prominent figures in the North, despite their support for abolition, were explicitly and virulently racist. Here, the eternal question of historical era and context creeps in: I can understand, and to a degree agree with, those who say that the broader cultural understanding of issues like racism should color our judgments of historical figures. But that context does not excuse these Northerners for their racism, as there were white people at the time who exhibited racial attitudes that we would recognize as more or less enlightened. That the material consequences of their opposition to slavery overwhelms these qualms doesn't, I think, obscure the basic point. Northern opposition to slavery was founded on enlightened principles, but it came packaged with profoundly ugly beliefs as well. Those beliefs are not merely a side issue, as they either tacitly permitted or contributed directly to the great post-Civil War oppression of freed blacks. And as with any conflict, there were self-interested reasons for the politicians of the North that were not in any sense enlightened.
My teacher had a broader point about history, I've come to think in the years since, and particularly about American history: it isn't and shouldn't be understood as a march from less to more enlightenment or the triumph of good over evil. To understand history this way is ahistorical. Lincoln himself was a complex figure who held some views that many of us would find distasteful. A historical figure's attitudes towards topics like race and gender, and their context in that figure's era, are neither everything nor nothing. But when you believe in a Great Man theory of history, or when you advance a reading of American history that amounts to American propaganda, those considerations of simplistic goodness and badness can overwhelm everything. The North was better but it was not good; the fact that the end of slavery was followed by decades of structural inequality, concerted violence, and institutionalized racism should tell us that.
Perhaps these are obvious points. But remember, this was a high school history class, in a country where we like our national stories to be filled with uplift and heroism. Whether this insight was worth the risk of coming too close to the offensive portrait of Civil War as test case for federalism, I couldn't say.
First-- I find, as with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin, and most other people that the Civil War was of course about slavery, and that efforts to claim otherwise are misguided at best and offensive at worst. Some people linger on the fact that what the North was really fighting for was to preserve the union. And, well, yeah, but herp de derp-- the union had to be preserved because of slavery. Yes, the stated reasons for fighting the war, frequently coming from Lincoln himself, often included the need to maintain the territorial and political integrity of the United States, but the historical record shows that the issue of slavery was broadly understood as the central conflict in the Civil War. Disputing that sidelines the most important issue, morally and practically, of what is perhaps the most important historical period of our history. Worse still are people like Ron Paul, who will admit the immorality of chattel slavery but insist on the noble aspirations of the Confederacy in fighting for the right to secede and the principles of federalism. This ignores the fact that the South wanted to secede only because of their desire to preserve the system of racist chattel slavery and makes a hash of the elementary moral ideas at play in the Civil War, in a way I find unforgivable.
I actually had a high school history teacher who looked at the question a little differently, though. He stressed the fact that the Civil War was not just about slavery (and I know that "just" is pretty loaded) not as an excuse for the South but as an indictment of the North.
What I mean is that he wanted us as students to be very skeptical of an unduly heroic picture of the Union and its role in the Civil War; he wanted us to see that the fact that the North was on the right side of that conflict, and that the North's victory was an immense benefit to slaves and America, should not be confused with our thinking that the North was "the good guys" who behaved out of a principled stance against racism. He made the point several times that many prominent figures in the North, despite their support for abolition, were explicitly and virulently racist. Here, the eternal question of historical era and context creeps in: I can understand, and to a degree agree with, those who say that the broader cultural understanding of issues like racism should color our judgments of historical figures. But that context does not excuse these Northerners for their racism, as there were white people at the time who exhibited racial attitudes that we would recognize as more or less enlightened. That the material consequences of their opposition to slavery overwhelms these qualms doesn't, I think, obscure the basic point. Northern opposition to slavery was founded on enlightened principles, but it came packaged with profoundly ugly beliefs as well. Those beliefs are not merely a side issue, as they either tacitly permitted or contributed directly to the great post-Civil War oppression of freed blacks. And as with any conflict, there were self-interested reasons for the politicians of the North that were not in any sense enlightened.
My teacher had a broader point about history, I've come to think in the years since, and particularly about American history: it isn't and shouldn't be understood as a march from less to more enlightenment or the triumph of good over evil. To understand history this way is ahistorical. Lincoln himself was a complex figure who held some views that many of us would find distasteful. A historical figure's attitudes towards topics like race and gender, and their context in that figure's era, are neither everything nor nothing. But when you believe in a Great Man theory of history, or when you advance a reading of American history that amounts to American propaganda, those considerations of simplistic goodness and badness can overwhelm everything. The North was better but it was not good; the fact that the end of slavery was followed by decades of structural inequality, concerted violence, and institutionalized racism should tell us that.
Perhaps these are obvious points. But remember, this was a high school history class, in a country where we like our national stories to be filled with uplift and heroism. Whether this insight was worth the risk of coming too close to the offensive portrait of Civil War as test case for federalism, I couldn't say.
Monday, 3 December 2012
It's true.
1. Restricting your potential customer base to people who own a particular, proprietary device that is practically restricted to the affluent might not, perhaps, be the best idea, in an industry that depends on scale. Digital media, whether ad-based or subscription, is based on many transactions of very low cost. Luckily for companies in the digital world, it costs you essentially nothing to dramatically upscale the number of those transactions. Why on earth would you lock your content down to a particular, ludicrously expensive device?
2. Why would people think that you could have a viable media business model while catering only to people who own iPads? Because our media world is made up of people from a particular social and cultural class. Broadly speaking, they're a myopic and provincial bunch, and so when they look around at their peers and social cohort, they see that everybody owns an iPad and assume that's true of the world at large. You're sure to see tons of analysis of this story in the usual places in the coming hours-- The Atlantic, Slate-- and it'll be written by people from the same narrow group that worked at The Daily in the first place. As such, they'll be lacking an important perspective, which is what the world looks like outside of the narrow slice of educated digitally-connected strivers who write the Internet. It's the most consistent and determinative aspect of our media: it's a homogenous group that fancies itself diverse and thus cannot see how incredibly out of touch it is with how most people live. I invite reporters to come here to Lafayette Indiana and ask around at the Village Pantry about the demise of The Daily.
3. I've said it before: the amount of people who are employed in digital media seems completely unsustainable, to my amateur eyes. So many people are willing to do it for free, and we've inculcated an expectation that paywalls and subscriptions are inherently stupid, and meanwhile online ad pricing is driven down by the immense supply of places looking for advertisers. I think the whole industry is kept afloat by investment money, and sooner or later, the check is coming due. Good was a sign, and The Daily is a sign, and I think a lot of people who live very comfortable and secure lives are going to get less comfortable and less secure in a hurry.
1. Restricting your potential customer base to people who own a particular, proprietary device that is practically restricted to the affluent might not, perhaps, be the best idea, in an industry that depends on scale. Digital media, whether ad-based or subscription, is based on many transactions of very low cost. Luckily for companies in the digital world, it costs you essentially nothing to dramatically upscale the number of those transactions. Why on earth would you lock your content down to a particular, ludicrously expensive device?
2. Why would people think that you could have a viable media business model while catering only to people who own iPads? Because our media world is made up of people from a particular social and cultural class. Broadly speaking, they're a myopic and provincial bunch, and so when they look around at their peers and social cohort, they see that everybody owns an iPad and assume that's true of the world at large. You're sure to see tons of analysis of this story in the usual places in the coming hours-- The Atlantic, Slate-- and it'll be written by people from the same narrow group that worked at The Daily in the first place. As such, they'll be lacking an important perspective, which is what the world looks like outside of the narrow slice of educated digitally-connected strivers who write the Internet. It's the most consistent and determinative aspect of our media: it's a homogenous group that fancies itself diverse and thus cannot see how incredibly out of touch it is with how most people live. I invite reporters to come here to Lafayette Indiana and ask around at the Village Pantry about the demise of The Daily.
3. I've said it before: the amount of people who are employed in digital media seems completely unsustainable, to my amateur eyes. So many people are willing to do it for free, and we've inculcated an expectation that paywalls and subscriptions are inherently stupid, and meanwhile online ad pricing is driven down by the immense supply of places looking for advertisers. I think the whole industry is kept afloat by investment money, and sooner or later, the check is coming due. Good was a sign, and The Daily is a sign, and I think a lot of people who live very comfortable and secure lives are going to get less comfortable and less secure in a hurry.
Sunday, 2 December 2012
I recently offered a qualified defense of an article that was critical of contemporary irony. But today Salon has published a piece that shows just how counterproductive anti-irony pieces can be, how badly they can fail to prosecute their own arguments or even understand what they think they're fighting for. It's also indicative of something that's dogged Salon since its inception, which is the significantly uneven quality of the work it publishes.
Based on very scant evidence, Robert Robi expresses his fear that The Hobbit will be ironic. (The headline, "'The Hobbit' is not a hipster," is a cynical link-baiting trolljob, and certainly not the fault of Robi.) What's made eminently clear by this piece is that Robert Robi has a loose grasp on what irony means. Look at his argument.
It gets worse.
What Robi wants to write about, but lacks the vocabulary to express effectively, is in part metatheatrics and in part a vague conception of jokiness. Because what bothers him is ill-defined, he wanders out onto branches that can't hold his weight. He identifies the knowingness and irony he doesn't like as a failure of the modern world, but those dynamics were well-established in the time of Canterbury Tales. He says that what he yearns for is "direct connection," and yet I can think of few movies that establish a deeper direct connection on the emotional plane than Royal Tennenbaums, a movie that would fail every test of "irony" or knowingness Rodi could apply to it. The text available to him fails to provide him with the substance he needs for his critique, so he makes claims based on idiosyncratic reactions and unprovable observations. ("Martin Freeman ... has the eyes of a modern, ironic man." Well that settles it!) And he writes it all in a style he can't pull off. (I died a little inside when I read "this complex cultural gavotte postdates Tolkien by just enough years to make it an uneasy fit for his major works.")
Aside from the hyperbole he lavishes on the movies and Elijah Wood-- those eyes! so sincere!-- Rodi's biggest problem is one that afflicts many who want to leave their own time. He confuses Tolkein's premodern subject matter with a premodern sensibility, complaining that when we listen to Bilbo's dialogue, "We hear modernity." Of course we hear modernity; we live in modernity, and so did Tolkein. His books are profoundly modern. They operate through pastiche, appropriating myth and folklore from a variety of traditions, cobbling them together with no regard for their own internal logic or values. To understand the world as pre or post modern is itself dependent on a modern mindset. To choose one or the other is an act totally foreign to the premodernity Rodi desires. An article like Rodi's asks for a time before modernity while it engages in the kind of self-reference that is itself indicative of modern thinking. You can't escape.
If that's too wooly for you, then let's just talk aesthetics. What Rodi identifies as the strength of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy is in fact its biggest problem. I admire those movies and their creators but they have a ton of problems, and none more obvious than their immense corniness. If ever movies could use an injection of irony, a little acknowledgment that what is going on onscreen is a bit ridiculous, it's this trilogy. Lines like "not lightly do the Leaves of Lothlorien fall!" are so wince-inducing both because they are awful dialogue and because they indicate that the writers take their own material way, way too seriously. Fantasy stories move us because of their ability to invoke ideas or emotions that are relevant in the real world. The mark of poor fantasy or sci fi is when it becomes more interested in the minutia of its own world than in evoking emotions that matter in ours. When nerds freak out because such and such character survived getting poisoned despite clearly failing their saving throw, they are putting the cart before the horse. When LotR sets aside its self-seriousness long enough to convey simple and identifiable human emotions, it can be quite affecting. When it's nattering on about the Shards of Narsil, convinced that we should imbue that empty totem with lots of gravitas, it is ridiculous.
Irony is not some awful pollution of the human condition, it is a part of the human condition, one that arises from the pettiness of chance, the need for resistance, and the human tendency to mistake our traditions for natural law.
Rodi says he is after direct connection, unfettered emotion. I'm with him there. And as with Christy Wampole, I too believe that a kind of reflexive comedic defensiveness has deadened many people to the experience of intense emotions. But to identify that problem in art as a problem of irony is to misidentify the actual villain, which is unearned cynicism, or a lack of conviction, or simple incompetence. You can't ascribe the failures of movies or art to establish the deep connection we crave to irony. Rather they fail because they just aren't good enough. And if The Hobbit succeeds, it will do so because of how well Peter Jackson and his crew transcend the limitations of the material in speaking to non-elven, non-dwarven, non-Orcish adults. And if people are to escape the self-consciousness and defensiveness which prevent them from living emotionally rich lives, they won't get there by fearing irony. They will only get there through fully committing to an emotionally unguarded life. If they do, it will be nobody's business by their own.
Based on very scant evidence, Robert Robi expresses his fear that The Hobbit will be ironic. (The headline, "'The Hobbit' is not a hipster," is a cynical link-baiting trolljob, and certainly not the fault of Robi.) What's made eminently clear by this piece is that Robert Robi has a loose grasp on what irony means. Look at his argument.
There’s a sequence in the most recent trailer for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” that worries me. It’s at the very end: The dwarves are tentatively emerging from the debris of some colossal battle or other, and one of them says, “Well, that could’ve been worse” — and then a Volkswagen-size goblin carcass crashes down on them.So if-- if!-- this single named scene from the trailer is indicative of the rest of the movie and trilogy's general ethos, well, The Hobbit is a Kevin Smith movie, or something. Speaking conservatively, we've got a good eight hours of Hobbit movies coming up. Generating a perception of something so long from something so short is, well, stupid. Now I can accept a reading of this moment as dramatic irony, although I wouldn't write it into the dictionary as an example. But please note that this is not irony coming from a character but rather irony coming from the narrator and the audience. The character is not speaking with verbal irony; rather what he says is rendered somewhat ironic by its contrast with the following event. Is that really the kind of corrosive ironizing Rodi is complaining about? He makes explicit reference to how irony is a disease of contemporary times. But this kind of dramatic irony is as old as the ancient Greeks. If dramatic irony bothers you, don't read Shakespeare, or any number of writers from way back when. Dramatic irony's not new, and if it undermined the ability to really connect with a work of art, that damage would have been done long, long ago.
This is more Chuck Jones than J.R.R. Tolkien, and if there’s more of the same in the coming feature film — whose scope, as we already know, has expanded far beyond that of the original novel — it may not be just Tolkien’s lovely little picaresque adventure that gets swallowed whole, but its plucky, whimsical tone as well, consumed by modern irony.
It gets worse.
Peter Jackson triumphed with his earlier “Lord of the Rings” trilogy because that immediacy — that urgency — miraculously came through, being only occasionally undercut by modern ironic moments (as in Legolas and Gimli’s competition to see who can tally up the most kills in any given battle).If you can express a definition of irony that includes the Orc-killing contest, I'd love to hear it. That part of the movies is lame, and I certainly wish Jackson and Co. had taken it out, but it is not irony. Two characters in a movie have been killing a lot of bad guys. They decide to make a contest of it. They comment on their contest, as one would. What about that is ironic? In what way, at all, are they doing or saying something when they intend the opposite of their stated or surface intent? In what way are their actions or statements thrown into ironic relief by the events that follow? In no way. What's more, this aspect of the movies doesn't even amount to meta, if that's what Rodi is complaining about; for it to be meta, they would have to be commenting on the events in a way that indicates their knowing that they are part of a fiction. If Legolas said to Gimle "this is the part where I turn out to be the real hero!," that would be meta. If Gimle winked towards the camera and said "You knew I'd win!," that would be meta. Commenting to each other on their own in-world behavior and the in-world events that are unfolding around them? Neither ironic nor meta. Just jokey. Characters are going to talk to each other about the action that is happening in the fictional world around them. Why wouldn't they?
What Robi wants to write about, but lacks the vocabulary to express effectively, is in part metatheatrics and in part a vague conception of jokiness. Because what bothers him is ill-defined, he wanders out onto branches that can't hold his weight. He identifies the knowingness and irony he doesn't like as a failure of the modern world, but those dynamics were well-established in the time of Canterbury Tales. He says that what he yearns for is "direct connection," and yet I can think of few movies that establish a deeper direct connection on the emotional plane than Royal Tennenbaums, a movie that would fail every test of "irony" or knowingness Rodi could apply to it. The text available to him fails to provide him with the substance he needs for his critique, so he makes claims based on idiosyncratic reactions and unprovable observations. ("Martin Freeman ... has the eyes of a modern, ironic man." Well that settles it!) And he writes it all in a style he can't pull off. (I died a little inside when I read "this complex cultural gavotte postdates Tolkien by just enough years to make it an uneasy fit for his major works.")
Aside from the hyperbole he lavishes on the movies and Elijah Wood-- those eyes! so sincere!-- Rodi's biggest problem is one that afflicts many who want to leave their own time. He confuses Tolkein's premodern subject matter with a premodern sensibility, complaining that when we listen to Bilbo's dialogue, "We hear modernity." Of course we hear modernity; we live in modernity, and so did Tolkein. His books are profoundly modern. They operate through pastiche, appropriating myth and folklore from a variety of traditions, cobbling them together with no regard for their own internal logic or values. To understand the world as pre or post modern is itself dependent on a modern mindset. To choose one or the other is an act totally foreign to the premodernity Rodi desires. An article like Rodi's asks for a time before modernity while it engages in the kind of self-reference that is itself indicative of modern thinking. You can't escape.
If that's too wooly for you, then let's just talk aesthetics. What Rodi identifies as the strength of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy is in fact its biggest problem. I admire those movies and their creators but they have a ton of problems, and none more obvious than their immense corniness. If ever movies could use an injection of irony, a little acknowledgment that what is going on onscreen is a bit ridiculous, it's this trilogy. Lines like "not lightly do the Leaves of Lothlorien fall!" are so wince-inducing both because they are awful dialogue and because they indicate that the writers take their own material way, way too seriously. Fantasy stories move us because of their ability to invoke ideas or emotions that are relevant in the real world. The mark of poor fantasy or sci fi is when it becomes more interested in the minutia of its own world than in evoking emotions that matter in ours. When nerds freak out because such and such character survived getting poisoned despite clearly failing their saving throw, they are putting the cart before the horse. When LotR sets aside its self-seriousness long enough to convey simple and identifiable human emotions, it can be quite affecting. When it's nattering on about the Shards of Narsil, convinced that we should imbue that empty totem with lots of gravitas, it is ridiculous.
Irony is not some awful pollution of the human condition, it is a part of the human condition, one that arises from the pettiness of chance, the need for resistance, and the human tendency to mistake our traditions for natural law.
Rodi says he is after direct connection, unfettered emotion. I'm with him there. And as with Christy Wampole, I too believe that a kind of reflexive comedic defensiveness has deadened many people to the experience of intense emotions. But to identify that problem in art as a problem of irony is to misidentify the actual villain, which is unearned cynicism, or a lack of conviction, or simple incompetence. You can't ascribe the failures of movies or art to establish the deep connection we crave to irony. Rather they fail because they just aren't good enough. And if The Hobbit succeeds, it will do so because of how well Peter Jackson and his crew transcend the limitations of the material in speaking to non-elven, non-dwarven, non-Orcish adults. And if people are to escape the self-consciousness and defensiveness which prevent them from living emotionally rich lives, they won't get there by fearing irony. They will only get there through fully committing to an emotionally unguarded life. If they do, it will be nobody's business by their own.
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