A Taste for Frivolity [Guest post]

[Iskra Fileva is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and a popular blogger at Psychology Today. —mh]

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When the British government asked the Internet for help naming a multi-million dollar polar research ship, participants rejected such (stately) entries as “Endeavor” and “Falcon” and voted for “Boaty McBoatface”: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatface-what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html.

I think that this reaction is symptomatic of an aspect of the modern Zeitgeist that I will, for lack of a better term, call “a taste for frivolity.” Current trends are such that one mustn’t give the impression of taking anything – least of all, oneself – too seriously. Michelin star restaurants try to be “playful” (https://www.alinearestaurant.com), CEOs show up to work in hoodies, and there is a general distaste for elaborate rituals except in jest. Even periods at the end of text messages are seen as out of place – not simply as residues of a bygone era but as signs of aggression, as if to end a text with a period is to bow to a grammar deity and use its prescriptions to bludgeon others into submission.

The taste for frivolity involves a penchant for informality in such things as dress and conventions in instant communications, but it involves also a preference for a relaxed attitude in general, toward any problem or activity. Most anyone these days identifies as a member of the counterculture. “Subversive” is a term of praise. We want to adopt an ironic stance toward life.

But what exactly is it that we wish to oppose and subvert? It is not clear. The rebels meme has dominated culture for a while now, and we seem to have run out of idols to topple and sacred cows to satirize. In consequence, we have begun to satisfy our taste for frivolity by rejecting earnestness itself. It is only for so long that one can be a rebel without a cause before one turns into a jester without a subject matter.

Here, I am interested in what explains these trends. Whence our taste for glibness?

In a mood for egalitarianism

A move away from earnestness and especially from the appearance of earnestness is perhaps a natural consequence of the egalitarian cosmopolitanism of the World Wide Web. Rituals and norms of propriety in dress or speech have always been, at least in part, tools for maintaining social hierarchy. But we are tired of hierarchy, so naturally, we reject its instruments. Internet users prefer such names as “shaquille.oatmeal,” “born-confused,” and “Bread Pitt.” Anyone of any background can be behind those names, and that’s the beauty of it. Everyone is invited to the ongoing mask ball of the global village, and clever masks are especially welcome. Any contribution can “go viral” and be said to have “won the internet,” and the label “Boaty McBoatface” is precisely the type of contribution that has what it takes.

It may be supposed that in behaving this way, we are refusing to grow up. Perhaps, we have all discovered the pleasures of Pajamas Day and of eating cake for breakfast. Adulthood is preferable to childhood and adolescence for many reasons, but an important one is that no one can scold an adult for behaving as both children and adults may be naturally inclined to. Indeed, it may be that few of us opt to have children because we don’t want to be obliged to act mature and play the adult in the relationship. Parenting is too serious a business.

While there is something to the idea that 50 is the new 15, there is a difference between the frivolity of children and that of adults. While children, under the stern look of adults, may pretend to be serious even though they are really amused, as when a child finds a baptism ceremony funny but stifles a laugh, adults, by contrast, like to be seen as playful and not too earnest even if, in fact, they are not amused. Frivolity is in part performance. We like to appear as witty masters of satire even when we don’t feel like laughing. Why?

I’ve mentioned a mood for egalitarianism, but there is more.

Amusing ourselves (and each other) to death 

In a 1985 book titled Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book about the way in which television changed culture, Neil Postman writes, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”[1] And also, “But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”[2]

Postman was onto something, and the internet has taken us farther in the direction of attempting to present all subject matter as entertaining than television ever did. Television does not allow ordinary users to participate, and there were always gatekeepers whose job it was to ensure that some subject matter will be taken seriously. There are no gatekeepers of the World Wide Web. Anything can be made light of and become the subject of memes and an object of mockery.  

This is all, perhaps, related to our economic success. We have plenty of time to get bored. It used to be mainly royalty and nobility whose lives were secure enough for there to be ample room in their lives for boredom. They had court jesters to entertain them. We all want court jesters now.

But more interestingly, we want to be jesters for other people, and we do it for free. Postman is right in this too: we constantly try to entertain each other. That too, I suspect, is related to our economic success. We no longer need each other as we used to, so we don’t have to accept the cost of tedious or unpleasant interactions. We must compete for each other’s attention and outcompete not only other people, but every other way in which our desired interlocutors may entertain themselves. We must, consequently, make ourselves amusing and interesting. 

Numbing & Nihilism

That is not all. I suspect that there is, in addition, a kind of creeping nihilism of an ironic variety which affects culture. There may be things that matter – really and objectively – but we can easily become uncertain of their existence if we make a habit of glibness and frivolity. Such a habit may make us intuit that irony and frivolity rather than earnestness help us capture the deeper truth.  

Postman, in the book I quoted from earlier, writes: “For in the end, he [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”[3] When laughter is not a respite from serious work or talk but a default response, it may induce a kind of value amnesia whereby we forget what, if anything, matters. Harry Frankfurt once ended an article-turned-small-bestselling book called “On Bullshit” with the line “Sincerity itself is bullshit.”  

But sincerity is, in some ways, unavoidable. Human life is not typically entertaining, and an ironic stance is not always possible, not as an actual attitude. This is why frivolity is bound to remain in part performance. Pain is painful, and the worst bits of the human condition – aging and mortality – are unavoidable. If we always expect amusement from each other, we must all bear the pains alone.

Marcel Proust touches upon this issue in Swann’s Way. He describes people we may think of as exemplifying the taste for frivolity but in a different time, when relatively few could spend much of their time seeking amusement and those few embraced formality in superficial aspects of human interaction. There is a scene in the book in which a character named Charles Swann wants to tell his friends the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes that he is dying. They are, just then, off to a social engagement, and the Duchess says to Swann, “You must be joking.”[4] He responds that it would be a charming joke if he were. The Duke, in the meantime, tells the Duchess that her shoes do not match her dress, and that she has very little time to put on a different pair.            

The Duke and Duchess de Guermantes are friends with Swann, but their friendship is premised on the assumption that he would be clever and entertaining in conversing with them. They don’t know what to do with the news of a fatal diagnosis. They are unprepared for a friendship which involves sharing his pain.

The same fate awaits them too, of course. One day, they will be the ones dying, and someone else in turn will respond to the news with, “You must be joking.”

Where does all this leave us?

There is much to recommend what I have here called “a taste for frivolity.” The inherent cosmopolitan egalitarianism is an achievement, and little good can come from dwelling for long on unpleasant topics, particularly if not much can be done. Playfulness and laughter are among the greatest gifts in life. But an insatiable desire for amusement can be our undoing, even as laughter is, and will always remain, one of our means of salvation.  

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[1] Postman, p. 92.

[2] Ibid., p. 87. 

[3] Ibid., p. 163.

[4] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 594.