Awhile ago I was flipping through the New Yorker and saw an interesting cartoon: two men in uniform, guns trained on a pedestrian, behind them a van with “Fashion Security” on the side. The caption read, “Sir! Sir! Kindly remove the bolo tie and set it on the ground—nice and slow!” I find this significant on a couple of levels. First, it has political resonance at a time when civil and personal liberties are threatened by the most incompetent demagogues ever to hold power in Empirica. Second, it takes a personal idea of bad taste and makes it a public danger, thereby exaggerating a fact about taste—that it has less to do with personal liberty than public authority.
There’s a similar joke in the film Deconstructing Harry—the scene where Harry Block (Woody Allen) dreams that his friend (Billy Crystal), as Satan, is giving him a tour of Hell. Passing the lowest circle, Block asks who’s condemned there. Satan replies, “The inventor of aluminum siding.” It employs the same bathos (severe to trivial) and comic reversal (personal to public), with religious authority as the punitive institution. It also suggests that, while it’s hyperbole to say that bad taste deserves a fate worse than death, bad taste is not only punishable but punished.
The only reason the dictates of taste appear free and easy is that most people take them for granted. From the age they become fashion-conscious, they condemn their less fashion-conscious peers, casting them into respectively lower ranks of the social order (Hell). As they mature, they learn to pretend that they have tamed this punitive instinct and, unlike schoolchildren, are quite sociable, tolerant, understanding. But they’ve only learned to dissimulate this invidious comparison and, despite appearances, continue to compete in matters that require even the most shallow and immediate judgment, like fashion. The popular (preferred) embodiment of taste as the dancing, IPod-plugged ragamuffin in the grips of Dionysian ecstasy doesn’t jive with the fact that, both personally and socially, taste is under more stringent censorship than almost any other aspect of our existence.
Empirican politicians take the idea of liberty very seriously. They point condemning fingers at theocracies that force women to wear body tents and social democracies that prohibit religious dress in schools. Yet they legislate to prohibit teenagers from showing a couple of inches of underwear between pants and shirt, and mandate the pledge of allegiance and prayer in schools. This sort of liberty looks more like hypocrisy, bigotry and self-righteous morality—the sort of liberty satirized in the Randy Newman song “Political Science.”
Many of these so-called “public servants” consider laissez-faire capitalism to be synonymous with liberty. However, like the idolaters of the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies (here a mutant cross between Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith), these free-market ideologues would actually replace all public institutions with private ones. It is hard to say whether their belief in the tenability of a free-market El Dorado is due to naiveté with regard to human nature, historical ignorance or self-destructive optimism. For the society that forsakes its public institutions for profit-only interests lapses to the rule of brute force and blind faith. The HBO series Deadwood portrays just such a prospect and concludes, as history repeatedly has, that the “invisible hand” is neither gentle nor tenable and soon cedes to the hand of law and order. As business precedes law in the evolution of human society, there are many examples of the state in which lawless, business-only societies must briefly exist—one of physical oppression and mental darkness (barbarism).
The same ignorance which renders barbarians incapable of conceiving or embracing the useful restraints of laws exposes them naked and unarmed to the blind terrors of superstition.
Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
In the last decade, the ideology of total privatization and the mass superstition of evangelical Christianity have become preponderant conservative political influences. While this has served to emancipate the uber rich and powerful from the rule of law, it has left most Empiricans with a limited freedom to sell goods (market), buy goods (consume), flaunt goods (compete) and attribute supernatural causes to the conditions in which they live. Their prosperity is gauged not by quality of life, which includes education and health, but “consumer confidence,” which is solely their willingness to unconditionally spend. Business-only politics has left them a government of two parties, the jackass and the mammoth—the one with more money, hence power to engineer public opinion, the other with almost as much money, hence the power to prop up an illusion of choice—both “incentivised” (bought out) by corporate lobbies.
Mass religion has always had the politically expedient effect of supplanting doubt with faith, reason with belief, judgment with feeling and fact with fable. Presently, we find individual decision in matters ethical, esthetic and political less fashionable than it was decades ago. The cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, which advocated freedom in almost everything—dress, sexuality, work, speech, leisure—ceded to luxury. Individualism and what religious conservatives refer to as “the culture of relativism” are now inconvenient. Too much of the outward manifestation looks like chaos and self-indulgence; too much of the inward manifestation looks like pop superstition and effete analysis. Consciously or not, Empiricans now prefer conformity and consent, which are nicer, neater, firmer. These come preapproved and therefore induce less distress, error and conflict. They also come with less invention, genius and general intelligence. Nostalgia for a culture that was more progressive, expressive, inventive and better educated has become entertainment (e.g., some wacky-days-of-yore show or rockumentary). Not to say that the present boy-next-door society doesn’t have its geniuses, inventors, intellectuals and artists; just to say that they have ceased to matter. They have careers, not causes, to worry about.
There will always be those who find appearance arbitrary, yet have a natural thirst for things intellectual, esthetic and spiritual—who believe, with Seneca, that “Inwardly everything should be different but our outward appearance should conform with the crowd.” But where the signs of progress cease to manifest, progressive ideas have ceased to influence. Not that there is anything wrong with stability and conformity per se. But these without consciousness are harmful. These confused with liberty and a will to defend them against, and impose them on, the rest of the world too often result in a consolidation of public opinion behind destructive policy.
The drinker who thinks he’s sober drinks until he does something unconscionable or passes out. The responsible drinker knows he’s drunk. Unfortunately, Empirica doesn’t know it’s drunk. It still believes that it’s the freest place on earth. Why? Because its citizens can buy the same polo shirt in five colors, walk down a supermarket aisle filled with five brands of cereal, buy coffee at one of five neighborhood Starbucks, buy one of five cars that all look like a Jeep Cherokee, and watch one of five network channels that all air the same lobotomized news. Which brings to mind another gag in Woody Allen’s excellent satire: Block’s clarification to a prostitute that he doesn’t want to be beaten, blown and tied, or blown, tied and beaten, but tied, beaten and blown.
What Empiricans actually have is something easier and more comfortable than liberty; they have a belief in liberty. So far, that’s been enough to compel them to tack Old Glory to their homes, bodies and automobiles, burn oil like it’s going out of style, eat more pizza, pray to their God and produce an extended dance version of the National Anthem. It has not, however, kept them from becoming an increasingly homogeneous society that, in its naive belief in liberty, has goose-stepped into the biggest error in its history, barring slavery.
-Jan DiVincenzo
© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.