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]
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.
[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.
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Here in New Zealand we voted for a new national flag… we very nearly got this ‘Laser Kiwi’ flag! https://images.app.goo.gl/B3MYSxYcYUySDoaD8
Really a spot on essay. I was actually talking about this topic with a dear friend of mine a while ago, and we considered some of the hypotheses reviewed here - like the one about nihilism. There are other possible explanations that I would like to put on the table:
1) Glibness can serve as a resource in the passive-aggressive toolkit: it's the strategy of the teenager that provokes you until you react, and then says "I was just kidding :)" or "Come on, can't you take a joke?". From both anecdotal and survey-based evidence, people tend to be more passive-aggressive online than in person, so the diffusion of social media might have indirectly contributed to promoting irony as a passive-aggressive strategy.
2) An environment in which we are always potentially joking frees people from responsibility: everything I say, no matter how reprehensible, can be easily reframed as a joke. Talking from my personal experience, it is increasingly common to hear people saying "I was joking!" as an excuse even in situations in which it is obvious that they were talking seriously. People tend to like a frivolous environment because it gives a handy excuse whenever they are spotted saying something false, stupid, immoral, or inappropriate.
3) Seriousness is associated with an allegedly "traditional" way of communicating and conducting one's life, so people who speak ironically believe that they are being somewhat innovative or anti-conformist, because they are deviating from the traditional way of communicating. Funnily enough, this association is largely due to ignorance. A friend of mine has called it the Three Musketeers Paradox: whenever a new film adaptation of the Three Musketeers is released, people - both audiences and critics - greet it as an ironic re-reading of Dumas's novel; that happened with the 1948 version directed by George Sidney starring Gene Kelly, then with the 1973 version directed by Richard Lester, and then with the 1993 version produced by Disney. The truth is, Dumas's novel itself is very ironic: the adaptations are not deviating from the source, but are simply trying to maintain the ironic spirit - though with different styles and different levels of success. Something similar happens with action films: it's common to hear people praising an action film because it is ironic "unlike most action films"; instead, it is actually very hard to find action films that are serious. In other words, it almost looks like every generation is convinced that the old world was uniformly serious and stodgy, and they are the ones who brought irony.
4) The life plan of many people in Western countries has changed: fewer people are having children, and fewer people are getting married. Bonding, building a family and bringing up children are not as common as they used to be, and thus many people seek other sources of purpose and meaning in life. Professional achievement and fun - or "having a good time" - are the most obvious candidates. Of course, there are other possible sources of purpose and meaning in life, such as the pursuit of knowledge and the appreciation of art and beauty, but those are always going to attract a minority of the human population. Since fun is one of the few things left, people are trying to sprinkle it everywhere, and glibness is a way of doing that. In addition to that, even those people who get married and/or have children tend to do it later than in the past generations: as a result, they stay in the "fun zone" for longer, so the fun-oriented mindset gets more ingrained into their habits - and that's how you get middle-aged guys going around with a little kid and a T-shirt with the slogan "I'm a dad who games" XD.
5) It has become common to dismiss high culture and art as elitist and anti-egalitarian cultural manifestations - this hypothesis relates to the Egalitarianism hypothesis considered in the essay. Despite that dismissal, people are still going to have certain intellectual and aesthetic needs to satisfy. Here is where irony and glibness come to rescue. Jokes offer an acceptable surrogate for deeper insights, and fun - in the most innocuous sense - offers an acceptable surrogate for the appreciation of art and beauty. Needless to say, high culture actually abounds with ironic and comic works - Molière, Rossini, and Lubitsch, to mention a few names from different art forms - but many people ignore that (see my hypothesis number 3). Notice that this hypothesis doesn't require taking at face value the division between high culture and low/pop culture: whether that division actually obtains or not is irrelevant here; what matters is that people tend to take that division for granted.
6) Online environment encourages the use of irony, because the absence of non-verbal cues makes every utterance more ambiguous than in in-person communication. Irony largely relies on ambiguity and multiplicity of reading, and thus an online environment facilitates its practice. This factor alone is not sufficient to explain the widespread "taste for frivolity", since people are also going to need a motivation for doing it, besides the preconditions for doing it; however, it is most likely a contributing factor.