Is facebook turning us into machines?
As we saw here yesterday, a lot of the critical reaction to ‘Avatar’ is animated by anxiety about how much of our lives are now lived online. This anxiety is widespread. For example, William Deresiewicz’s essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education throbs with anxiety about friendship in the age of facebook. “We have given our hearts to machines,” he says, “and now we are turning into machines.” The essay actually has many more threads than this Luddite slogan might suggest. Some are really interesting and some are tired, but in the end I think that if Deresiewicz’s piece shows anything it’s that, more than machines, we should be afraid of each other, of the human herd, of becoming animals.
First of all, if you’re going to talk about friendship it’s worth distinguishing several things that travel under that name. There’s deep friendship, the one-to-one connection between two heroic souls exemplified by Achilles and Patroclus, Montaigne and Etienne La Boetie. There’s group friendship, where the connection is more to the unified social entity than to any of the individuals it comprises. (The discussion of group friendship is one of the real strengths of the essay.) Finally, there’s acquaintance friendship, what you have when you’re merely friendly with a person. In cosmic terms, deep friendship is clearly most valuable, group friendship second, and acquaintance friendship a distant third. There’s always been this hierarchy; it’s foolish to delude oneself into thinking that back in the good ol’ days all friendship was deep friendship, though it may well have been more common, or at least more commonly aspired to. Moreover, all three forms of friendship have always been susceptible to pettiness and self-interest. There is in every case the potential for relationships based on superficiality, though deep friendship is no doubt the least susceptible of the three.
Now everyone knows that being facebook friends isn’t the same as being friends full stop. Facebook friendship maps most directly onto mere acquaintance friendship, and is to that extent just a newfangled name for an old phenomenon. It would be silly, then, to protest facebook on the grounds that facebook friends often share nothing more than a passing acquaintance, because that’s what they are–acquaintances. At most facebook is guilty of a too-liberal use of the word ‘friend’. But this is pretty harmless, and excusable considering that facebook is the best tool ever created for maintaining acquaintance friendships.
For his part, Deresiewicz steers clear of this semantic trap, but some of his criticisms are similarly suspect. For example, he thinks that facebook tricks us into somehow believing that digital representations of people are, or are as good as, real people. We’re like children playing with dolls, convinced that the dolls are real. Deresiewicz says that these digital dolls are:
simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.
But Deresiewicz never considers that facebook might be as little a threat and as much a means to real friendship as baseball cards are to a real love of baseball.
Absurdly, Deresiewicz also thinks that reconnecting with old friends through facebook threatens to erase, overwrite, and corrupt our memories of those friends: “The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs.” In its maudlin way, this is true enough. But if it’s an argument against facebook, it’s also, as Deresiewicz himself points out, an argument mementos, snapshots, and reunions, all of which wreak far more powerful effects on the memory than learning the current occupation, interests, and favorite TV shows of an old friend from summer camp. In fact, if you want that badly to live in your heart and not the real world, then you should take comfort in the fact that facebook offers only superficial connections.
Some of Deresiewicz’s other criticisms are far more cogent. Because facebook displays all your friends in the same place, it encourages the cozy illusion that your friends form a circle of friends, that your friends are all friends with each other. It’s an astute observation, but the problem might be largely solved with a simple change to the facebook interface: just group the user’s friends together only when those friends are themselves friends.
His most penetrating observation is about publicity. Facebook puts us all on a permanent stage before a permanent audience. Even if that audience is made up of our genuine friends, indeed our circle of friends, it still forces us to take on a certain roles. Nothing wrong with role-playing as such–it’s essential to group friendship. But there is something wrong with too much role-playing, because deep friendship requires more. You can never form soul-on-soul bonds when you’re always playing to the crowd, no matter how friendly it is. Deep friendship needs to develop in a sphere of privacy.
So the real danger of facebook is that it makes us into herd animals. It may be wonderfully heterogeneous herd, but it’s still a herd. We each of us may assert his or her individuality, buck the trends, but when we do it’s always with thoughts first and foremost of how it will play in public, as a status-update, as a badge to be displayed on our profiles. This hardly seems like becoming a machine, as Deresiewicz suggests. We succumb to our lower natures, but not to mere mechanism. Instead, we submit to forces of social cohesion, the forces that make us take an instinctive, insatiable, prurient interest in the lives of others, that make us gossip, that make us want to uphold or defy the group for its own sake, and that in different ways hold together bands of chimps, stone-age tribes, and circles of friends. Far from inhibiting friendship (at least group friendship), facebook may be all too successful at whipping up the potentially dangerous forces that lie underneath.
The Book
Looks like the literary arm of The New Republic has launched a new website, The Book. Should be useful for taking the Establishment’s temperature on humanistic matters.
Caleb Crain says ‘Avatar’ is morally corrupt
In a rambling, free-associative post, Caleb Crain attempts to probe ‘Avatar’ ‘s “morally corrupt” “unconscious” (his words):
Some might protest: But what aboutAvatar’s anti-imperialism and anti-corporate attitudinizing? They’re red herrings, in my opinion, planted by Cameron with the cynical intention of distracting the viewer from the movie’s more serious ideological work: convincing you to love your simulation—convincing you to surrender your queasiness. The audacity of Cameron’s movie is to make believe that the artificial world of computer-generated graphics offers a truer realm of nature than our own. The compromised, damaged world we live in—the one with wars, wounds, and price-benefit calculations—can and should be abandoned.
So the movie supposedly wants us all to stop worrying, plug in, and drop out. Of course, this is all impossible to square with the movie’s ultra-romantic, pantheistic vision of nature as a benevolent, beautiful whole. The anti-imperial and anti-corporate stuff might be red herrings, but I take it the pro-nature stuff isn’t, even if it is a bit silly. Crain, though, is convinced that it’s just “rank mystification.” The Na’vi have to be advertisements for technology because 1) the movie was animated using technology and 2) they interface with nature through organic ports and cables, just like so many computer peripherals. As for the first point, any use of technology in art arguably constitutes an implicit endorsement of that technology. But only in a pretty thin sense, one that leaves room for art to offer substantive criticism of its own technological medium: films can critique films, books can critique books, and so forth. That a critique of books appears in a book doesn’t make it “rank mystification.” As for the second point, it’s true that the nature-as-digital-network metaphor figures prominently in ‘Avatar.’ But I think Crain gets things backward. The movie isn’t trying to use our positive feelings about nature to advertise networks–it’s using our positive feelings abut networks to advertise nature. Like it or not, most people have already plugged in, and it turns out this is hardly the existential catastrophe that Crain fears.
Wikipedia links
1. I had no idea there were so many kinds of leopards: Amur, Arabian, Indian, Indo-chinese, North Chinese, Persian, Sri Lankan.
2. Olentzero, the Basque Santa Claus.
3. Liquidators
(Photo by wikipedia user Lamiot, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License)
4. Benandanti:
The Benandanti, which included both male and female members, were a small group of Shamanic witches that ensured the protection of the crops and villagers. Unlike most other occult organizations, the Benandanti were born, not made: only children born with “the caul,” or the amniotic sac partially covering their face were destined to join the ranks of the Benandanti.
5. War Pig, the answer to the War Elephant.
6. Trial by Ordeal:
Indeed, the term ordeal itself, Old English ordǣl, has the meaning of “judgment, verdict” (German Urteil, Dutch oordeel), from Proto-Germanic *uzdailjam “that which is dealt out”.
Fiction and Taboos
In an essay I discussed here earlier, Katie Roiphe speculates that the Important Male Writers write less about sex today than they did a generation ago because “we have landed upon a more conservative time.” An alternative thesis is that it’s because we have landed upon a more permissive time, what with the Internet porn and the wardrobe malfunction and the sexting and the Lady GaGa and the so on and so forth. (Set aside, for the moment, the fact that two theses really aren’t incompatible since the first concerns personal sexual behavior and the second concerns standards of public discourse.) Ross Douthat, among others, floats this alternative here and goes on to bemoan the fact that we apparently live in an age so permissive it makes great art almost impossible:
In their wild quest to overturn every conceivable taboo, in other words, the Great Male Authors of mid-century may have succeeded a little bit too well. By tearing down every possible stricture on fictional representations of sex, they abandoned their successors to the vicissitudes of a world where anything could be written, but nothing could really shock. Great art depends on walls as well as open doors, on constraints as well as cultural blank checks. And anyone who’s nostalgic for the exhilarating transgressiveness that once animated American literature should probably be at least a little bit nostalgic for the taboos that made transgression possible.
A couple things. Surely, those authors didn’t break down every conceivable taboo and every possible stricture. Taking the obvious test cases, surely incest and pedophilia would still shock a lot of people. (As a case in point, consider some of the outrage that met the recent English-language publication of Jonathan Littell’s novel “The Kindly Ones”.) Douthat also overestimates the importance of “walls”, i.e. explicit social taboos. Great art opens up new possibilities, typically where we didn’t even realize there were new possibilities. There needn’t be anything especially transgressive about this. Indeed, transgressive art usually just breaks down barriers that everyone is already all too aware of–it typically works with a familiar but artificially divided space of possibilities. Really great art, art that is not merely transgressive, completely reshapes that space. What is true is that great art needs conventions and small-mindedness to push off against, but of these we’ll never be in short supply. Finally, even if certain social conditions help produce great art, it’s abominably bad intellectual policy to feel, on those grounds, even a little nostalgia for those conditions. Should nostalgia for the soaring greatness of Gothic cathedrals inspire nostalgia for the fear and ignorance that produced them? Obviously not.
One hypothesis to take seriously and that I have seen mentioned is the following: midcentury fiction seems so much better than the contemporary stuff because the older writing is so much more titillating and therefore has more mass appeal, which is what critics like Roiphe and Douthat are picking up on. When it comes to gauging the ultimate value of different highbrow fictions, we shouldn’t have too much confidence in our own critical instruments. It can take a while for the reading public to see what is really of value in an author. Of course, this shouldn’t preempt serious discussion; it’s just something to keep in mind.
‘Avatar’ and the White Messiah
A lot of annoyed people, e.g. David Brooks, think ‘Avatar’ perpetuates the Myth of the White Messiah, the idea that only a white man gone native can protect the delicate, spiritual primitives against the greed and violence of the white race. Well, that is what happens in ‘Avatar’ and it is trite, but, triteness aside, it hardly merits much of the morally-inflected hand-wringing it’s met with.
It’s worth distinguishing several of ‘Avatar’’s potentially objectionable features.
- The human-Na’vi conflict is set up as one between reason, technology, and cold economic logic on one side and spirituality, community, and a warm oneness with nature on the other. This is a pretty dumb but durable cartoon we’ve seen a hundred times before.
- Cameron illustrates the spirituality-nature-community side of the conflict using images that the public associates, rightly or wrongly, with African, Native American, and other indigenous cultures. Moreover, the voices of the major Na’vi characters are all ethnic sounding and in fact all supplied by people of color (Zoe Saldana, Wes Studi, CCH Pounder, Laz Alonso). In most people, this sort of thing sets off all kinds of “stereotype!” alarm-bells.
- The movie endorses the value of spirituality, oneness with nature, community, etc. For many, this probably smells too much of patchouli and ‘meat’ made from soy. At least implicitly, the Na’vi deserve their autonomy because of their peaceful spirituality. But wouldn’t even a more callous race deserve to be left alone?
- With good intentions and a little understanding, Jake is able to bridge the divide between human and Na’vi values. But aren’t there be some gaps that are just too wide? Aren’t there some that it’s pointless and dangerous to try to close?
- Jake is not just one of the Na’vi, but their champion. With a bit of practice and a flirtatious guide, he can do anything they can do and more, including stuff no one has done in generations, namely tame the nastiest dragon, unite the clans, and lead them to victory. White people, the movie seems to say, are just naturally better at everything.
- There’s no real explanation for why Jake is The One. He’s a nice guy and a good solider but basically just a meathead. Nevertheless, the universe has somehow selected him for greatness. He attracts those jellyfish-like seeds as sign of his specialness. The Na’vi then pick up this and accept him. At the end of the day, though, it seems to be all just fate. Or something.
Personally, none of these offend me, and, aesthetically, the last annoys me by far the most. I think it’s the movie’s main extravagance. The Na’vi’s acceptance of Jake is just never satisfyingly motivated.
Most of the others, though, make a certain amount of good aesthetic sense. They’re trite, but they’re trite for a reason. Look, if you’re going to make a blockbuster movie about the clash of two civilizations, one of which is “ours”, with a hero who goes on a journey of personal discovery and saves the day for everyone else, Cameron’s choices are pretty natural. First of all, if one of the civilizations in conflict is Ours, you can’t have Us win. It’s simply not done. But it’s a blockbuster, so one side has to win, so it has to be Them. Second, making the hero an outcast who goes over to the other side is the perfect way to unite the personal growth and epic conflict threads: his personal growth becomes the means by which he eventually saves the day. When two civilizations are in conflict, there’s no more obvious form of personal growth than seeing how the other half lives. But since the Other side eventually wins, the hero has to be one of Us and so he has to learn about Them. This means Their mores and rituals have to be at least minimally accessible to him. Finally, since our hero saves the day, he’s saving it for Them, and so doing something they presumably couldn’t do themselves.
Obviously this arc can be traced in more or less complex ways, and ‘Avatar’ does it particularly straightforwardly, but the overall structure will be similar. Note, though, that even this broad-brush structure contains a lot of the elements that people find objectionable about ‘Avatar’. This might mean that the structure itself is morally objectionable or it might mean that there’s another explanation for a lot of the plot elements besides a hidden belief in white superiority. I think it’s the latter.
Something similar is true for Cameron’s use of African- and Native American-branded imagery. It’s lazy, but at least it’s lazy with a purpose. Given that you’re going for a caricatured technology vs. nature conflict, drawing on already established images of that conflict is quick and effective way to do it.
What we haven’t explained, though, is the movie’s pro-spirituality/oneness/nature agenda. But this is just a substantive feature of the movie; it can’t be given the same schematic explanation offered earlier. Obviously, you could fill in the personal-journey-plus-epic-conflict schema with a pro-rationality/technology/profit agenda and get a movie in which we would be the more backward race.
I suspect that what irks a lot of people, e.g. David Brooks, about Avatar is exactly this substantive agenda. They bristle at the suggestion that we would do well to become more like the Na’vi. That’s fair enough if you really think we’re doing enough to preserve the environment or you really think that the movie is advocating illiteracy, but no serious person thinks these things.
What’s lazy and unfair is invoking the White Messiah charge as a way of dismissing the movie’s substantive, if shallow critique. The suspect reasoning goes like this. “In the movie, environmental/inter-cultural harmony is achieved through the action of a White Messiah. Therefore the movie’s take-home message of environmental/inter-cultural harmony presupposes the White Messiah Myth. But we should reject the Myth, and so the Message along with it.” But a moment’s thought reveals that we can perfectly well reject the Myth and keep the Message. And a little reflection on the aesthetic logic of the movie confirms it.
Katie Roiphe, crypto-puritan
“The Naked and the Conflicted,” Katie Roiphe’s recent essay in The New York Times Review of Books, is a bunch of outrageous, sometimes contradictory assertions pasted down around the following undeniably sound points:
- Today’s Important Male Writers (by name: David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel, Jonathan Safran Foer) are far less preoccupied with sex than Yesterday’s (Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow).
- The manifest sexism of Yesterday’s IMWs is today more quaint than offensive, more relic than threat.
- That same sexism is perfectly consistent with the Old Guard’s real, even permanent artistic merit.
Petty qualifications aside, these claims are apparent in outline to all but the most obtuse or puritanical reader. But Roiphe’s agenda is less to expound than excoriate. On these sober intellectual foundations, she builds a shaky, angry indictment of the New Guard. They’re not just dull, they’re diseased! The essay eventually finds its way back to a calmer resting place, but not before losing a lot of pissed-off readers along the way. (Whatever gets ‘em talking, I guess: her former student Conor Friedersdorf says here that Professor Roiphe is explicit about the rhetorical value of less-than-sincere polemic.)
Roiphe begins with an ostensible mystery: why do Philip Roth’s sexist sex scenes still after all these years incite ‘punitive, vituperative’ reviews and spontaneous book-flingings? This turns out to be a red herring, for they don’t enrage us, at least not on the grounds of their sexism. No, they enrage us because they simply don’t measure up to the literary porn of decades past. Is this falling off because the Exuberant Virility shtick is played out or because Roth himself has lost a step? Some of both, most likely. Roiphe herself initially leans toward the first explanation—Roth’s “The Humbling” is ‘redundant’—then swerves, settling on the second—our “rage” actually hides pity for the giant stumbling where he once excelled, like Willie Mays falling down in the Mets’ outfield. This shift is significant, since her later moralizing depends on it.
Roiphe then turns to the New Guard. Sex, for them, is no longer the existential pivot it was for their forefathers—a spot-on, if elementary observation. But Roiphe’s language has the same ‘punitive, vituperative’ character she earlier puzzled over.
Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, post-feminist second-guessing.
These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself… .
They are good guys, sensitive guys, and if their writing is denuded of a certain carnality, if it lacks a sense of possibility, of expansiveness, of the bewildering, transporting effects of physical love, it is because of a certain cultural shutting down, a deep, almost puritanical disapproval of their literary forebears and the shenanigans they lived through. [my emphasis]
This, of course, invites the question: Why the righteous indignation? Literary styles change with the times and when they do it’s occasion for excitement, stock-taking, nostalgia, and perhaps regret. But why anger? Surely we can appreciate both Old and New, each on its own terms. Exuberant virility can be sublime, but so too a low-temperature sexuality. We can debate their relative merits, of course, but it’s like debating Mozart vs. Beethoven—it should be done over coffee, not before a judge and jury. It’s a conversation, not an inquisition.
So here’s the real mystery: why is Katie Roiphe so mad? (She’s so mad she can’t even be bothered to parse the different kinds of ambivalence. She writes that the current sexual style is “childlike” but that triumphing in sex is now seen as “passé”. Well, which is it, the ambivalence of innocence or the ambivalence of experience? Exhaustion with the world or ignorance of its ways?)
I suspect that Roiphe’s anger is more than just overzealous appreciation of the Old Guard. For Roiphe, the new ambivalence represents nothing less than a disease of the healthy male psyche. It’s the sickness of false consciousness. The new ambivalence is all fundamentally fake, an elaborate, well-entrenched pose. If it revealed something from deep in the writer’s soul, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t. It expresses nothing beyond a superficial desire to appear cool or ‘with it’ in the eyes of others. Roiphe writes that passivity, paralysis, and ambivalence are “somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life”, implying that the New Guard is interested in merely the signs, not the constituents of a rich inner life. Where the old exuberance was about asserting one’s nature, the new ambivalence is supposed to be simply about cowing to fashion. (Roiphe never seriously considers the extent to which the ambivalence might be authentic and the old exuberance a pose.)
But whose fashion? Surely not the general public’s: we’re told that they only object to sexism done badly. Crusading feminists at large? Maybe, but, as Roiphe notes earlier, their influence has been limited: they were powerless to stop the Old Guard from winning honors and readers. The answer comes out on the last page: liberal education and, in particular, the writers’ college girlfriends. The somewhat veiled charge is that these women used sex as a weapon and turned their boyfriends’ natural virility against itself, making it self-denying, deformed, a perversion of the natural order.
It should be obvious now why Roiphe needs to shy away from the hypothesis about the Exuberant Virility shtick being simply played out. For that would suggest that Roth’s virility is no more natural than Wallace’s ambivalence—the latter is not just a corruption of the former—and hence that each should be taken on its own terms. Roiphe would have grounds for thinking the new writers inferior to old, but none at all for haranguing them (or their poor girlfriends).
So underneath the rhetoric, Roiphe has a tidy story. Exuberant virility is somehow deeply inscribed in the natural, eternal order of things, and it’s therefore a central criterion of aesthetic success, at least for male novelists. When social taboos came down after WWII, the previously latent virility was free to flower. But since then a cadre of sex-wielding feminists has turned the virile forces into instruments of their own repression, leading to work that is not just aesthetically suspect but morally defective. This theory achieves the neat trick of making feminists look both more threatening (in their alleged power to corrupt the young) and more helpless (against the tide of history) than they actually are. Of course, the problem with all this is that it’s laughably simple-minded and odiously moralistic. One might even say ‘puritanical.’
axe, pen, & bell 