The Devouring Public

The movie Gladiator depicts the protagonist Maximus addressing spectators directly at gladiatorial games in the Roman Colosseum with this meme-worthy challenge: “Are you not entertained?” Setting the action in an ancient civilization renowned for its decadent final phase prior to collapse, referred to as Bread and Circuses, allows us to share vicariously in the protagonist’s righteous disgust with the public’s blood lust while shielding us from any implication of our own shame because, after all, who could possibly entertain blood sports in the modern era? Don’t answer that.

But this post isn’t about our capacity for cruelty and barbarism. Rather, it’s about the public’s insatiable appetite for spectacle — both fictional and absolutely for real — served up as entertainment. Professional wrestling is fiction; boxing and mixed martial arts are reality. Audiences consuming base entertainment and, in the process, depleting performers who provide that entertainment extend well beyond combat sports, however. For instance, it’s not uncommon for pop musicians to slowly destroy themselves once pulled into the attendant celebrity lifestyle. Three examples spring to mind: Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Whitney Houston. Others call hiatus or retire altogether from the pressure of public performance, such as Britney Spears, Miles Davis, and Barbra Streisand.

To say that the public devours performers and discards what remains of them is no stretch, I’m afraid. Who remembers countdown clocks tracking when female actors turn 18 so that perving on them is at last okay? A further example is the young starlet who is presumably legitimized as a “serious” actor once she does nudity and/or portrays a hooker but is then forgotten in favor of the next. If one were to seek the full depth of such devouring impulses, I suggest porn is the industry to have all one’s illusions shattered. For rather modest sums, there is absolutely nothing some performers won’t do on film (these days on video at RedTube), and naturally, there’s an audience for it. Such appetites are as bottomless as they come. Are you not entertained?

Speaking of Miles Davis, I take note of his hiatus from public performance in the late 1970s before his limited return to the stage in 1986 and early death in 1991 at age 65. He had cemented a legendary career as a jazz trumpeter but in interviews (as memory serves) dismissed the notion that he was somehow a spokesperson for others, saying dryly “I’m just a trumpet player, man ….” What galled me, though, were Don Cheadle’s remarks in the liner notes of the soundtrack to the biopic Miles Ahead (admittedly a deep pull):

Robert Glasper and I are preparing to record music for the final scene of Miles Ahead — a possible guide track for a live concert that sees the return of Miles Davis after having been flushed from his sanctuary of silence and back onto the stage and into his rightful light. My producers and I are buzzing in disbelief about what our audacity and sheer will may be close to pulling off ….

What they did was record a what-might-have-been track had Miles incorporated rap or hip hop (categories blur) into his music. It’s unclear to me whether the “sanctuary of silence” was inactivity or death, but Miles was essentially forced onstage by proxy. Flushed is a strange word to use in this context, as one flushes an enemy or prey unwillingly from hiding. The decision to recast him in such “rightful light” strikes me as rather poor taste — a case of cultural appropriation worse than merely donning a Halloween costume.

This is the wave of the future, of course, now that images of dead celebrities can be invoked, say, to sell watches (e.g., Steve McQueen) and holograms of dead musicians are made into singing zombies, euphemized as “virtual performance”(e.g., Tupak Shakur). Newly developed software can now create digitized versions of people saying and doing whatever we desire of them, such as when celebrity faces are superimposed onto porn actors (called “deepfakes”). It might be difficult to argue that in doing so content creators are stealing the souls of others, as used to be believed in the early days of photography. I’m less concerned with those meeting demand than with the demand itself. Are we becoming demons, the equivalents of the succubus/incubus, devouring or destroying frivolously the objects of our enjoyment? Are you not entertained?

The Frailty of Reason, pt. 1

rant on/

Authors I read and podcasters to whom I listen, mostly minor celebrities of the nonentertainment kind, often push their points of view using lofty appeals to reason and authority as though they possess unique access to truth but which is lacking among those whose critical thinking may be more limited. Seems to be the special province of pundits and thought leaders shilling their own books, blogs, newspaper columns, and media presence (don’t forget to comment and subscribe! ugh …). The worst offender on the scene may well be Sam Harris, who has run afoul of so many others recently that a critical mass is now building against him. With calm, even tones, he musters his evidence (some of it hotly disputed) and builds his arguments with the serene confidence of a Kung Fu master yet is astonished and amazed when others don’t defer to his rhetoric. He has behaved of late like he possesses heroic superpowers only to discover that others wield kryptonite or magic sufficient to defeat him. It’s been quite a show of force and folly. I surmise the indignity of suffering fools, at least from Harris’ perspective, smarts quite a bit, and his mewling does him no credit. So far, the person refusing most intransigently to take the obvious lesson from this teachable moment is Harris himself.

Well, I’m here to say that reason is no superpower. Indeed, it can be thwarted rather handily by garden-variety ignorance, stupidity, emotion, superstition, and fantasy. All of those are found in abundance in the public sphere, whereas reason is in rather short supply. Nor is reason a panacea, if only one could get everyone on board. None of this is even remotely surprising to me, but Harris appears to be taken aback that his interlocutors, many of whom are sophisticated thinkers, are not easily convinced. In the ivory tower or echo chamber Harris has constructed for himself, those who lack scientific rigor and adherence to evidence (or even better, facts and data) are infrequently admitted to the debate. He would presumably have a level playing field, right? So what’s going on that eludes Sam Harris?

As I’ve been saying for some time, we’re in the midst of an epistemological crisis. Defenders of Enlightenment values (logic, rationalism, detachment, equity, secularism), most of whom are academics, are a shrinking minority in the new democratic age. Moreover, the Internet has put regular, perhaps unschooled folks (Joe the Plumber, Ken Bone, any old Kardashian, and celebrities used to being the undeserved focus of attention) in direct dialogue with everyone else through deplorable comments sections. Journalists get their say, too, and amplify the unwashed masses when resorting to man-on-the-street interviews. At Gin and Tacos (see blogroll), this last is called the Cletus Safari. The marketplace of ideas has accordingly been so corrupted by the likes of, well, ME! that self-appointed public intellectuals like Harris can’t contend effectively with the onslaught of pure, unadulterated democracy where everyone participates. (Authorities claim to want broad civic participation, as when they exhort everyone to vote, but the reverse is more nearly true.) Harris already foundered on the shoals of competing truth claims when he hosted on his webcast a fellow academic, Jordan Peterson, yet failed to make any apparent adjustments in the aftermath. Reason remains for Harris the one true faith.

Furthermore, Jonathan Haidt argues (as I understand him, correct me if I’m mistaken) that motivated reasoning leads to cherry-picking facts and evidence. In practice, that means that selection bias results in opinions being argued as facts. Under such conditions, even well-meaning folks are prone to peddling false certainty. This may well be the case with Charles Murray, who is at the center of the Harris debacle. Murray’s arguments are fundamentally about psychometrics, a data-driven subset of sociology and psychology, which under ideal circumstances have all the dispassion of a stone. But those metrics are applied at the intersection of two taboos, race and intelligence (who knew? everyone but Sam Harris and Charles Murray …), then transmuted into public policy recommendations. If Harris were more circumspect, he might recognize that there is simply no way to divorce emotion from discussions of race and intelligence.

rant off/

More to say on this subject in part 2 to follow.

Everyone on Board

I’ve been modestly puzzled of late to observe that, on the one hand, those in the U.S. and Canada who have only just reached the age of majority (a/k/a the threshold of adulthood, which is not strictly the same as “the age of sexual consent, marriageable age, school leaving age, drinking age, driving age, voting age, smoking age, gambling age, etc.” according to the link) are disregarded with respect to some political activism while, on the other hand, they’re admired for other political activism. Seems to be issue specific whether young adults are to be taken seriously. If one is agitating for some aspect of identity politics, or a Social Justice Warrior (SJW), one can be discredited as simply being too young to understand things properly, whereas advocating gun control (e.g., in the wake of the Parkland, Florida shootings in February) is recognized as well within a youthful mandate. Survivors of violence and mayhem seem to be uniquely immune to gun advocates trotting out the meme “now is not the time.”

As it happens, I agree that identity politics is a load of horseshit and tighter gun control (no, not taking away everyone’s guns totally) needs to be tried. But I haven’t arrived at either position because youth are either too youthful or wizened enough by horrific experience to understand. Hanging one’s positions on the (dis)qualification of age is a red herring, a meaningless distraction from the issues themselves. Rather, if thoughtful consideration is applied to the day’s issues, which I daresay is not an easy prospect, one should ideally arrive at positions based on any number of criteria, some of which may conflict with others. For instance, I used to be okay (not an enthusiastic supporter, mind you) with the death penalty on a number of grounds but changed my opinion for purely pragmatic reasons. The sheer cost of automatic appeals and other safeguards to ensure that innocents are not wrongly convicted and executed, a cost borne by U.S. taxpayers, is so onerous that to prosecute through to execution looks less like justice and more like maniacal vengeance. Life in prison without the possibility of parole is a much saner and less costly project in comparison.

With intractable debates and divisive issues (e.g, abortion, free speech, right to bear arms, immigration, religion, Israel/Palestine conflict, euthanasia, etc.) plaguing public life, one might wonder how do we get everyone on board? Alternatively, how do we at least agree to be civil in spite of our disagreements? I have two replies but no solutions. The first is to recognize that some issues are indeed intractable and insoluble, so graceful acceptance that an opposing opinion or perspective will always be present is needed lest one twist and writhe inconsolably when one’s cherished perspective is not held universally. That’s not necessarily the same as giving up or succumbing to fatalism. Rather, it’s recognition that banging one’s head against certain walls is futile. The second is to recognize that opposing opinions are needed to avoid unhealthy excess in social environments. Put another way, heterodoxy avoids orthodoxy. Many historical practices we now regard as barbaric were abandoned or outlawed precisely because consensus opinion swung from one side to the other. Neil Postman called this a thermostatic response in several of his books. Other barbaric behaviors have been only partially addressed and require further agitation to invalidate fully. Examples are not mentioned, but I could compile a list rather quickly.