The Kind of People Who Want to Know What Kind of People They Are

I recently read Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos and have since been looking at the world through the lens he introduced.

Percy's argument is that the fundamental human problem is that we are subjects trying to be our own objects. That is, we are frustrated by our attempts to define ourselves--as a species and as individuals--the way we define everything else.

The problems that arise from this are endless but most relevant in modern America is everyone's need to define what kind of person they are.

A few weeks ago, New York made the connection between Jonah Peretti, the critical theorist, and Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed. Critical Theory has a rundown here.

It seems that Peretti wrote an article for the journal Negations that predicted the future web sensation, albeit in anti-capitalist terms. "Late-stage capitalism" produces consumer "schizophrenia," is the basic idea. The takeaway is that what companies and consumers end up exchanging are identities.

Think Apple vs. Windows vs. Linux. Or Starbucks vs. indie coffee shops. Or, dating back generations, Ford vs. Chevy. One's consumer choices define what kind of person one is.

The reverse can also be true. If one is the type of person who cares about social justice, of course one is going to buy Fair Trade certified products. If one doesn't, then obviously one isn't really that type of person. The consumption and the identity are indivisible.

I've discussed before how this is working politically. The populace is divided into smaller and smaller segments, each of which is positioned against a perceived majority. If one is the type of person who is kind and considerate, of course one is going to support teaching children safe ways to have gay sex. The identity and the moral choices are indivisible.

Buzzfeed really has mastered this element of modernity. Every five-minute quiz is based around viewing oneself as a fixable object in the cosmos. Who am I? Well, if I were a member of One Direction, I'd be Harry. I'd be happiest living in a Tuscan cottage. I'm definitely an 80s kid and my spirit plushy is a Pound Puppy.

But Buzzfeed's attitude is basically harmless, except in its perfection of shallow distraction. If Percy's description of the human condition is accurate, then Buzzfeed is like trying to stave off hunger with an endless supply of potato chips. Buzzfeed gives the reader a tiny definition, then a thousand more in the hopes that it will satisfy the desire for one complete definition.

The happy truth is that most Americans aren't "smart" enough to be ruined by Percy's existential misery. Irritated, manipulated and lost, maybe, but not ruined.

Take, on the other hand, NYT's article on Jill Soloway, creator of Amazon's transgender drama, Transparent:

In college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she tried her hand at playing the ideal college student — “makeup, hair, cute clothes” and “dating horrible, gross dudes.” She even tried to pledge a sorority, but a poorly timed dermatologic event pre-empted this. One day she was taking a walk on the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison with some of the friends she’d made, still very much preoccupied with cuteness, when she saw a bunch of people — “like hippies, feminists, demonstrators, political kids, people who fought” — wading in the water, just having a good and un-self-conscious time. These, she realized, these were her people.

Emphasis is, of course, mine, but it should be obvious that Soloway is acting precisely as Percy describes--she's trying to find a definition for herself first and be herself last. Finding that perfect definition, she will find freedom, or at least the absence of self-consciousness.

[A side note:  Percy's arguments help make sense of Esther Vilar's definition of love in The Polygamous Sex. She explicitly states that love "defines" an individual "completely." If the definition is incomplete, then it is not truly love. Percy would probably agree to her terms but point out that the only complete definition can come from God, who loves us more completely and more truly than any individual human ever can. This would cause Vilar to vomit.]

Lest the reader think that Soloway was simply having a typical college-age "finding oneself" moment, consider this recent event:

Soloway was greeted heartily by workers around the back lot as she made her way to the set of “Transparent.” She had mixed feelings about all the chumminess: Yes, it’s only hello, but sometimes you just want to get to work. She said “hi” back, of course, because what are you going to do, but even a small exchange like that can lead Soloway to rant on gender roles. “I don’t have the privilege to just stand there and go, ‘Hi,’ ” Soloway said, mimicking the men.“ ‘Look at that walking by. I’m trying to have sex with that.’ ”

 Here's another:

Soloway has managed with “Transparent,” which is part cutting-edge TV show and part gender-studies utopian experiment, to keep alive the questions that have preoccupied her for years: If we are living in a post-gender-binary world, what is all this talk about feminine and masculine styles? How can you be a good feminist and also love watching beauty pageants and “The Bachelor” and the “Real Housewives” franchise (which Soloway does very much)? If gender isn’t important — if it’s just a construct — why is it so important?

And this:

 “I have the same problem with alcohol that I do with femininity,” she says. “With alcohol I can’t figure out how much to drink before I feel drunk. With femininity, the moment I put it on and see that I look like Daisy Fuentes, I’m a real estate agent and I have my own bus bench.”

Can there be any doubt that this woman is broken? Percy would describe her as having a "reentry" problem--she spends so much time transcending the real world with her intellectual theories and artistic translations that she can't handle saying hello to a group of blue collar men. She's so wrapped up in the objective identities she's defined for herself that she can't enjoy the Miss America pageant without hours of self-reflection. She can't do anything that comes natural to her without comparing it to the definition she has for herself.

It's people like Soloway that give me hope. Their path is a dead end and their misery is proof. Keep trying to make it work and the absurdity will only become clearer.

Logical Castles in the Sky

Earlier this week, I listened to a back-catalog interview with Phil Hendrie on Rick Overton's podcast. Somewhere in the second part, Overton starts spilling gobbledy-gook. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, he said, men did the killing. As Rick imagined it, killing another creature would be traumatizing--the hunters would naturally sympathize with the death throes of their dinner. To prevent them from being too distraught to feed their clan, men developed capacity for compartmentalization. This, of course, explains why men are able to commit heinous acts and then go on about their business.

Several years ago, I had a customer at my bar educate me, "You know, man is made to crave sugar and fat," because of energy needs out in the wild. He gestured down his overweight, slack body. "You see where these cravings get you."

Likewise, the article I discuss here had a detour tracing the origins of jealousy back to "caveman" times.

Theories based in evolutionary psychology--as least as practiced by the chattering class--are simply science fan-fiction. They take whatever trait they'd like to endorse and trace it back to an imaginary situation in which that trait would be an advantage. Thus, we are hard-wired to have that trait. Thus, we must accept that trait unconditionally.

Overton himself is a great example of this attitude writ large. He's a funny person and his discussions of comedy, improv and performance are always interesting. There's no doubting his expertise and passion for these subjects but he insists on inserting his smart-guy-liberal opinions into everything.

One subject he returns to is his theory that education has been intentionally dumbed-down by the powers-that-be to prevent another uprising of intelligent youth as they had experienced in the 60s. Because clearly those in charge are descendants of Barry Goldwater, only more nefarious. And because clearly our educational system is tightly controlled by a handful of people and not a sloppy mess of bureaucrats, loan officers and those-who-can'ts.

We see this again and again among smart-guy-liberals. They may be decent thinkers but they never, ever examine their first principles. Was the youth activity of the 60s really the result of a bunch of kids using the full capacity of their minds? Did they really, as Overton insists, "stop the war?"

When one starts making arguments from incorrect premises, one might as well start discussing the rules of order for the Hogwart's teachers' union. It has just as much relation to reality.

Improving the Rabble Through Education

When I first moved back to my home town, I took a comfortable little apartment downtown. It satisfied what I loved about city living--I could walk to work, the grocery store and the bank--and added a little extra:  I finally had a balcony.

A balcony, more or less. In actuality, it was the roof where the first floor extended beyond the second. It allowed me to tickle the child inside by entering and exiting by way of my bedroom window and gave me a private place to smoke.

It had a perfect view into the courtyard of my town's most downscale bar. Charming, in its way. Always dark inside, it rented rooms to itinerants and was closed only when state law mandated it.

From my vantage point, above and unseen, I saw just what you'd expect to see. Drug deals, public sex, breakdowns and plenty of people sleeping it off.

One late morning I stepped outside for my breakfast smoke. The door to the courtyard flew open and a group of three came out. They were led by a middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt and what I know as sleep pants but are standard apparel here.

They were talking loudly but I couldn't make out what they were saying. The woman turned away from the door and dropped the back of her pants to just below her ass.

From her position and the way the two others gathered behind her, my first thought that she was getting some sort of shot. Diabetes or something. Out of instinct, I turned away, thinking that they had gone out back for privacy.

I heard a hissing, popping sound. I turned back, just in time to see a bottle rocket shoot out of the woman's ass crack.

They whooped it up and returned inside. Well, that's something, I thought.

A week or so later, I told the story to a young man that I knew, who found it plenty amusing. In time, the conversation turned to his upcoming entry to college. He was over twenty-one and this was his first go at higher education.

I gave him my standard advice. "Don't go until you know exactly what you want to accomplish there. You want to make sure that you get through as fast as you can and come out with a job."

I added my usual spiel about how college was overvalued. That got him to lay down the standard liberal line, "I think everyone should go to college."

"What about that woman who shot the bottle rocket out of her ass? What would she have gotten out of college?"

So, you can imagine my surprise when EducationRealist highlighted the first paragraph of Caitlin Flanagan's fraternity smear in The Atlantic:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his a** and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

ER's students had the appropriate response:

“Why would she write about an idiot?” asked Dino, ever the challenger.

“How did someone so stupid get to college?” Bruce wanted to know.

Well, Bruce, that's what college is all about. At least, these days.