Democratic Mores and the Hospital-Theater of the Absurd
“As a school, we’ve done a lot of work with human rights,” said Michael McDermott, the middle school principal. “But you can’t have kids saving Darfur and isolating a peer in the lunchroom. It all has to go together.” — The New York Times
Nonsense. It doesn’t have to, and it doesn’t, go together; in fact, it pulls in different directions that each intensify as we oscillate between them. Tocqueville was very good on the way mores grow more gentle in a democratic age, but Constant showed better, even as it saddened him, how it’s public mores that improve while private ones are free to decay. And, to the extent that legalism comes to fully supplant our political space, decay they do — not because politics is, in Arendtian fashion, some privileged realm for the disclosure and display of one’s True Self, but because legalism ‘officializes’ everything, including mores. As political public space wanes and legal public space grows, legalism transforms the very definition of public and private space — or, that is, supplants them simply with official space and unoffical space. In terms of mores, it’s no surprise that the official aligns itself in a liberal democracy with gentleness, relegating beastliness to the unofficial space we awkwardly still refer to as ‘private.’
But, of course, as legalism thrusts the ‘public’ realm into the private, and increasingly beastly mores thrust heretofore ‘private’ conduct ever more brazenly into public, liberalism’s rather cherished public/private distinction becomes rickety, dilapidated, perforated, and porous, increasingly both official and absurd. As is well known to writers who have outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted our 20th-century totalitarian regimes, common folk increasingly recognize officialdom wherever absurdity is found, and come to associate the public realm with the realm of the fictitious and fraudulent. Officials congratulate themselves when certain lessons ‘stick’, but at the same time they are intensifying and concentrating a beastliness that shifts even further into ‘private’, which is to say other, residually ‘unofficial’ (and ever more embarrassingly so) public realms.
Sarah Frohman, 13, said that she catches herself when she is about to call someone who annoys her a “retard,” and that she has told her soccer coach in a youth league not to use the word.
Annie Gevertz, 12, said that she is more careful of what she says about other students. “Sometimes, I think about how it would feel if it were said about me, and I’ll keep it to myself instead of sharing,” she said, though she expects gossip will probably never be gone for good “because we’re teenage girls and that’s something we do.”
Yet the regulation of the sexual mores of the young, with or without condoms, continues to lose steam and confidence justified by any standard other than official gentleness — with all the efficiency value, as a constant in the risk-calculation factor of resource-allocation projections, that mass gentleness has for officialdom. But our public obsession with security and health parallels our ‘private’ tastes for risk and self-poisoning, and our loving, de-eroticized pieties concerning Respect for All grow apace with our beastly appetite for erotic impieties.
In the face of all this, small-l liberal politics largely bites its lip. The ultimate hero of our civilization is a sixteen-year-old sexpot who saves Darfur and bitchily destroys her rivals, all in a day’s work — Lolita Borgia in a reality-TV production of Legally Blonde 4: Barely Legal Bottle-Blonde Beasts of Prey.
“Debbie Reegen, an insurance administrator and Dana’s mother, said she believes that empathy is lacking in many Scarsdale children and that the efforts should start in elementary school.
“They should make the parents come as well,” she said. “I think there’s a sense of elitism, and a bit of arrogance, among the parents here.”
Guess who’s kids didn’t get invited?
— Klug · Apr 5, 10:51 PM · #
Hmm…aren’t individual temperament plus values taught/enforced/modeled at home more influential on behavior than laws?
— Joules · Apr 6, 02:57 AM · #
My, what a remarkable mix of random italics, random words in caps and random words in single quotes!
Throw in the cliches, failed attempts at wit and fulsome self-congratulatory tone and you have a just remarkable bit of pompous prose. Not simply bad. Excruciatingly so.
Everyone connected with this website should be mortified. Truly, kids.
— Amused yet appalled · Apr 6, 07:05 PM · #
This is why Culture11 died an early, deserved death.
Countering meaningless pap with more meaningless pap is pointless.
How do you raise your kids, Paulos? Do you cloister ‘em? Home school? Or do you even have any?
Wait. I forgot the main lesson I learned from Culture11: vampires don’t exist, so Jesus Christ is the way and the light! Brilliant, brilliant stuff!
— Graeme · Apr 6, 07:17 PM · #
Dear Mr. Poulos,
What in blazes are you going on about?
Thanks in advance for any clarification.
— pinchme · Apr 6, 07:30 PM · #
Yeesh. What drivel.
— Bartles · Apr 6, 07:49 PM · #
So….the problem with leftism is that it, on the mild side, tries to encourage social mores of empathy and gentleness, and if that don’t work, creates laws that mandate such behaviour…and all these leads to teenagers fucking like bunnies? They have to act all “nice” to people, and not call them “retards” and they then exhaust the energy built up from repressing all that viciousness through mindless sex? Did I get that right? And that the solution to this would be more Ann Coulters, please —- a generation of prudes in private and a scolds in public?
Hunh. Stepping back for a moment to reflect, I must applaud you. The original article was vacuous —- to have surpassed it in this way I would not have thought possible. Who knew you could square zero?
— C. · Apr 6, 08:06 PM · #
You base your whole dichotomy on the supposed sexual activities of today’s teens, without any evidence that these are any different than they’ve ever been. Seems like the same old hell-in-a-handbasket thing to me. And teaching kids to be sensitive to the feelings of others is bad because…?
— alan in sf · Apr 6, 08:22 PM · #
Sorry James, meant to say “for its occassional veering too far into obscurity,” or something like that, but i guess I hit submit and my unedited version jumped the gun. And BTW, your twist into Legally Blonde there at the end is just precisely right.
— Carl Scott · Apr 6, 08:42 PM · #
I’m not sure I get the significance of your “official/non-official” paradigm or your contention that it is somehow unique to liberal democracy, but all of this seems to be a simple playing out of the Virgin/Whore dichotomy in the absence of a Naked Public Square (err..maybe Neuhaus’ coinage was unfortunate, seeing as a corallary of the problem is an abundance of nakedness all over the public, but whatever).
This tension has played out in every society in every time and every place. As we saw on the Internet last week, it plays out with lashing when “Lolita” is Pakistani. We are amok in a different way not because of some imbalance between Public and Private, but because we have destroyed any foundation upon which to balance the two.
At this point, no amount of hand-wringing about condoms-in-schools/SSM/hell-in-a-handbasket/etc. can stop the flood; there is no “Official” (legislative/public) salvation to be had.
We’ll only restore balance through the “demand side,” through private “non-official” efforts, be restoring a social foundation upon which to build. Hopefully within a few generations.
— tim a · Apr 6, 08:43 PM · #
It should please you that I, more or less a member of “the left,” am not smart enough to comprehend what the hell you just said. Is there really a Legally Blonde 4? I didn’t know there was a 3. Is this a belated April Fool’s Joke.
— Billy · Apr 6, 08:56 PM · #
You have to reach all the way to a TV reality show named Legally Blonde 4 to find the “ultimate hero of our civilization”?? I would say right now, Barack Obama fits that bill better — the problem with your screed is that he makes your hypothesis laughable. I do get the thing about public moralism and private amorality though— you know, like Rush Limbaugh, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Bill Bennett, etc. etc. That kind of thing is what you are talking about right?
— scott · Apr 6, 09:06 PM · #
That was incoherent. You need to learn how to say what you mean, instead of trying to prove how much 19th century philosophy you know. Maybe you can practice by giving the right the same treatment; one can only imagine what their combination of xenophobia, social conservatism and money-worship is compensating for.
— nil · Apr 6, 09:34 PM · #
I got linked over here from Sullivan’s blog, who quoted that last paragraph in an entry today. I was quite intrigued.
What a disappointment.
I can kinda what you are claiming, but I can’t see any real connection between this piece and any actual political point of view that any real person holds or any actual observable human behavior that I’ve ever seen. Public/private has been increasingly problematized. . . okay. I’ll go along. We are certainly more self conscious when it comes to “gentileness,” but so what? Where do you get the idea that people have gotten more “beastly” lately? People have always been beastly. That’s part of the deal. Do you seriously believe that P.C. culture has made people meaner, or randier. . .or whatever you are trying to say. . .
I give up.
This is tripe of the first kind.
— Jamie · Apr 6, 09:37 PM · #
I can’t decide whether this is simply incoherent or actually meaningless.
— James · Apr 6, 10:04 PM · #
Tough crowd.
— Freddie · Apr 6, 10:24 PM · #
Here, since everyone else as ripped this to shreds already for being incoherent (guilty) and theoretically flawed (guilty), let me try some social science.
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that we do have an increasingly law-based trend of increasing public civility, combined with an increasingly mean-spirited, sexually indiscriminate, etc, private culture. (I doubt this, too, but what the heck).
Where’s the evidence that the two trends are in any way related? The first thing you learn about culture is that it is self-replicating and self-intensifying. People enjoy rudeness because we’re programmed that way, just like we enjoy sexual promiscuity for the same reasons (this does not exclude contradictory counter-programming, welcome to being human). Once you have a set of social interchanges in which those qualities are valued, they will be reprocessed in more extreme forms, unless they are regulated by counter-programming.
There’s no “public” culture on earth, formal or informal, that will get rid of this. Theocratic or totalitarian states may do a better job of suppressing it, via draconian punishments or commune-like forced collectivization of private life. But then you end up whipping 14-year old girls for being caught outside their house. Fail.
There’s no combination of subtle persausion, tax incentives, or television advertising that will stop kids from being mean and having lots of sex, or even high-fiving each other about it. Possibly you can terrorize them into it, but that’s about the extent of your options. Public culture can not eliminate private culture, because public culture is just a way of coercing people to behave, and a highly inexact way at that. And “private culture” is a catch-all for a gazillion things done away from where they’re coerced not to do them.
— glasnost · Apr 6, 10:36 PM · #
The argument is simple, and lets use everybody’s favorite president as an example. Honest Abe as everybody knows worked as a lawyer. How did he get to be a lawyer? Pass the bar? Study at Harvard Law? Maybe Illinois Law? No, Abe read the law and was known as Honest. He had private virtue which was recognized in public first as a lawyer and later as a politician. Fast forward to today. How many people can jump through all the legal hoops to become a lawyer? Quite a few seem to do so. The path is determined by law and regulation. Is private virtue (i.e. Honesty) the means of their elevation? No. And that is a high vocation. All over our society we have turned realms that private virtue was the entry or requirement into legal and regulated area. Once legalism takes over, I can have public respect and income by following ever increasing legal barriers and requirements. My private virtue is ignored and infact held as meaningless. And that is the path to perdition. Eventually the lack of private virtue will swamp the legalistic society as those at the top stop even paying the homage to virtue. Such as bankers who should be thrifty making extremely stupid loans to rack up big temporary bonuses.
— Mark · Apr 6, 11:28 PM · #
Mark, you’ve hit the nail on the head brilliantly. Pre-Industrial Revolution, the gap between “public” and “private” was scalable. Today it is essentially infinite.
From the Beginning through the late 18th Century, “private” referred to a small community of family and neighbors within which virtue could be known.
By the early 20th Century, “private” was reduced to the individual. Mobility had already destroyed any true local community. The gap between “private” and “public” had widened exponentially beyond historic proportions.
Lincoln was the last of the old breed. Our Civil War and subsequent Federalization helped solidify the new way. The realms of “official” and “non-official” were redefined. “Small” (economically, politically and socially) went into death spiral. “Big” (economically, politically and socially) ascended.
We are at the tail end of a 200-year transition from “how things have always been” to the “brave new world.”
There’s no “going back,” but we aren’t locked into carrying this out to its ugly conclusion. We need to reclaim what we’ve relinquished and re-adapt it for the 21st Century and beyond.
No Man is an Island. Humans require accountability within a close, small community. I finally realize what Poulos may have been getting at in the first place. The “official/public” sphere has gotten too big to be of any use in governing private behavior. But the “non-official/private” sphere has shrunk to nothing beyond the individual. And if anything is self-evident, it’s that the individual as sole arbitor of acceptable behavior is catastrophic.
“It takes a village.” Yes, brilliant. But 300,000,000 people aren’t a village. And one person isn’t a village. If I beat my wife circa 1720, my wife’s brothers would have been close enough to beat the shit out of me. If I’m a slave to booze or coke or porn today, who’s going to kick me in the ass? I don’t want it to be the Feds. Lincoln was known by his community to be a man of character. But what community exists today to make this sort of personal judgement? That megachurch in Colorado Springs thought Ted Haggard was a swell guy. Barack Obama and Bobby Jindahl also seem like swell guys, but who really knows? Under the current regime, Sarah Palin managed to paint herself as a swell lady. Her odds of being elected President of the U.S. are now probably greater than her odds of being elected back into the mayorship of Wasilla, Alaska. What should that tell us?
Where do we go from here?
— tim a · Apr 7, 12:43 AM · #
Thanks for giving me a comic book idea. I’m sure someone will pick up a story about “Teenage bitchy sexpot saving Darfur.” Maybe Joe Quesada, since he’s a profit monkey.
— ??? · Apr 7, 03:00 AM · #
I don’t think Mr. Poulos is telling us that public virtue CAUSES private vice- just that the two aren’t correlated.
— Mike · Apr 7, 05:34 AM · #
This post is an embarrassment. Mr. Poulos, I cannot believe that you have seriously written something that postulates that American schools are not violent enough.
Also, your belief that America’s teenagers are having constant sex, is well, factually wrong and mainly just your personal fantasy.
The facts are that American schools have a major problem with violence and there is a definite “empathy gap”. Also, Americans have less sex than the citizens of any other Western Industrialized nation.
— ebinnyc · Apr 7, 04:09 PM · #
Everything about this post makes sense when you realize James is an exile from the Hollywood machine, about the only context in which his assertions bear any resemblance to the culture as it actually exists.
— Joseph · Apr 7, 05:16 PM · #
Everything in this post make sense if the James Poulos who wrote this is the same James Poulos who plays T-Bone in this movie:
http://www.fancast.com/tv/Jailbait/74913/606324297/Jailbait/videos
— Tony Comstock · Apr 7, 05:57 PM · #
With a few exceptions, these comments are an embarrassment. For those who think before they write, and for those interested in what James, Mark, and Tim A. say, check out Philippe Beneton’s Equality by Default, especially the chapter on “souless institutions.”
— Carl Scott · Apr 8, 03:19 AM · #
Kudos to Tim and Mark for making something worthwhile out of this silly post. I’m not sure I totally agree with either one of them, but those are reasonable ideas.
The original article doesn’t really make those arguments though. Tim’s argument (which I sympathize with) is about the political changes that happen when the SCALE of a community gets too big for traditional rules of solidarity and reciprocity to make sense. Tim’s argument is not really about democracy or legalism or anything else the original article claimed to be about. I find much to sympathize with Tim’s idea, and my own cobbled together political stance comes from that place.
But I think the idea that the “official sphere” causes private coarsening to be quite silly. Things like scale of our communities, the elimination of community space, our increased exposure to commercialized niche media culture, our greater (and not always voluntary) workplace mobility, etc. seem to be the causes of our more fragmented community, and that fragmentation seems explanation enough to our having more public regulation and more private license.
If that’s what the original article was supposed to argue. . . well, I have to say that I’m used to reading unintelligible academese (not political science, so maybe there’s some inside baseball going on), and I can’t make out that argument in there. So I don’t think it’s me.
Of course, the small conservative town where I grew up is a bit behind in terms of this shift from public/private to official/unofficial, and I’d say it’s a pretty damn beastly place. I greatly prefer to live in a more “legalistic” community where if somebody harasses or assaults you, there is less risk that it will be seen as a “private” matter.
I’m a bit suspicious of these kind of grandiose explanations for human behavior. It’s a fun parlor game, but it seems unserious.
— Jamie · Apr 13, 08:20 PM · #