Hi Roger, it's Joel againext_1507640November 22 2012, 00:26:10 UTC
I can't write with your erudition and I happily toddle off to google many of your references every time I read you, for which I am grateful. But I still can't shake my conviction that what you're on about is bad faith and not irony proper. Yes, irony can shield people arguing in bad faith, but so can outright lies (Rummy, Cheney, even Romney) and half-truths (Bill Clinton), and let's not forget distracting reporters from the ugly truth. Some of your friends and my heroes speculated that the extravagance of Sir Philip's funeral may have been a ploy of that very kind.
But to American consumers. We are bourgeois, though not robustly so --most of us are a couple of months away from bankruptcy, despite having mortgages and cars. We are sincerely religious but most of us in an unreflective way, perhaps because our continent was not ravaged by wars of religion. On race and slavery, benighted as we are, we are more enlightened than our European friends, probably because our continent *was* ravaged by a war that turned on the economics of industrial slavery, if not its morality. But we are not ironic, no matter how much ironic stuff we consume. And our great sins are vacuity and incuriosity, not irony.
Maybe it is self-defeating cynicism that vexes you. I have been meaning for years now to go back to Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, to try to understand it. The wikipedia entry will be a help to me. In a cynical world, irony helps the sincere man stay civil. I'd even go so far as to say it helps him find friends -- those who can appreciate his irony can see the world from his perspective and understand his critique. It is cynicism that concludes from the critique of an unjust situation that there's nothing to be done about it, so one might as well try to profit.
Re: Hi Roger, it's Joel againroger_kuinNovember 22 2012, 20:36:39 UTC
Joel, what a great comment. Thank you. There is much in what you say. For right now, I'll just say that to me self-defeating cynicism is a tautology. I am intrigued by your statement that in a cynical world irony helps the sincere man stay civil: I'm simply not sure that that is true or possible. I hope I am a sincere man (and have occasionally been taken to task for same); I am not sure that I live in a cynical world: I always suspect that the world is far less cynical than we are led to suppose. Most people are actually pretty soft (what Brits call "soppy"): they love their dogs/cats, their kids and sometimes even their wives and neighbours, they try to make ends meet, they work for the local library in their spare time or go visit elderly rural folk, and look for presents for their nephews'/ nieces' birthdays. The Great Sadness of our time is that it is Politics that brings out their cynicism: the very activity that we/they should be proudest of, as being the one thing that keeps us from being the slaves of a Great Khan, the cannon-fodder of Stalin, Hitler or Trotsky, and that allows us occasionally to cheer for a President we can admire and/or a monarch who saves his country (cf Juan Carlos of Spain a number of years ago). If we can learn to combine our sincerity with our status as citizens and voters, and banish political cynicism in the face of overwhelming Original Sin, we may have something going for us in the long run. The most important thing is to learn to understand the Media. They a) are in no way transparent, b) have an agenda, c) have an agenda that consists of Drama and Catastrophe, d) are into Entertainment disguised as Information, and e) are fine as long as one understands and discounts that, whether in Fox or MSNBC, or even CNN. In fact, the Media are today's Shakespeare/Webster/Middleton. Finally, I am increasingly drawn to asking friends not what they hate/criticize/disapprove in politics, but what/whom they admire. Try that on your friends, and see how few (but how interesting) answers you get. NB: NOT what/whom you admire in extrapolitical outsider rebellion/revolts (e.g. OWS), but what/whom *inside* the institutions you admire. If the answer is "oh, fuck, nobody", you are dealing with exactly the cynicism I deplore. (More on cultural irony -- a slightly different subject -- soon.) Again, thanks. This is **much** more fun than Facebook.
Re: Hi Roger, it's Joel againext_1507640December 4 2012, 04:31:23 UTC
Roger, I've now written two deeply thoughtful, moving, poignant, and all-round amazing replies on my kindle fire, which then didn't post. So I'm going to write something short right now and see...
Re: Hi Roger, it's Joel againext_1507640December 4 2012, 05:43:52 UTC
Ok, it *was* the Fire. So, first, yes this is much more fun than FB. And thanks for your advent post, too -- you and Sean are doing wonders for my spiritual life. Seriously.
I have been trying the "whom you admire" question on my students, but they always say "my parents." But I'll offer an unsolicited opinion. I really do admire Barack Obama for his pragmatism and his general refusal to escalate conflict pointlessly. No-drama Obama: I can get behind that. To that list I'd add Elizabeth Warren, Simon Johnson, and in some respects Angela Merkel.
This seems worth mentioning in part because of your diagnosis of the media, with which I couldn't agree more. So has it not always been thus with American media? No, there really were better days in the latter half of the twentieth century, when networks and newspapers had big news-gathering organizations and editors had the resources to enforce high journalistic standards, which some did some of the time. I think that the long post-war economic expansion, coupled with relatively progressive tax structures and social programs, made that period possible. There was a period of something like fifty years when American profit-driven corporations could support news-gathering operations as well as and often better than state-subsidized media elsewhere. My pet theory is that, in good times and well-regulated markets, media operations could look like decent investments with not great, but not terrible returns. By "well-regulated" markets, I just mean markets where regulations keep things somewhat transparent and overt, so that buyers and sellers have comparable access to information and resources, and you have relatively efficient markets.
Now, however, media companies are global and so not subject to any one nation's market regulations. They have to compete in barely-regulated capital markets which have begun to revert to the boom-and-bust cycle that typifies inefficient markets, in which only a few players have the information and resources to be fully realized agents. So you've heard of the latest Rupert Murdoch maneuvers. In such conditions, the incentive is not to pursue steady 4.5% returns. But you have little information, which makes you susceptible to following trends. Writ large, these conditions are those in which a few players can reap huge profits, bubbles and crashes are the rule, and hardly anyone who has capital has any incentive to support or invest in the dissemination of information to the people who don't individually have financial resources that matter in global capital markets.
In short, I think that while media corporations have evolved into spectacular goliaths in the past twenty years, the part of their product lines we call "news" has devolved back into the product that it was from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century: Drama and Catastrophe (and two-headed circus-freaks), Entertainment disguised as Information and so on -- the Middletons and Dekkers of our day, as you pointed out.
So maybe people like me are just too sensitive to not being able to rely on the accuracy or perceptiveness of what is presented to us as "news." Maybe we retreat into irony and sarcasm because we (and only one or two generations before us) grew up, unlike most generations before us, in a little golden age when Walter Cronkites delivered fairly accurate news to us every day. Now we find ourselves in the morass of infotainment and disinformation that most of humanity could expect from its "media outlets" for most of the history of mass media, we're at a loss.
Re: Hi Roger, it's Joel againroger_kuinDecember 4 2012, 16:28:10 UTC
How cheering that your students admire their parents. And with your feelings about Obama and Elizabeth Warren I entirely concur. About Angela Merkel my feelings, as a non-German European, are a lot more mixed. The little I know about economics (my father was an economist, and boy, do I miss his lucid explanations) makes me support Paul Krugman’s views, according to which Merkel and those like her have managed mainly to worse Europe’s situation by advocating belt-tightening during a recession. But I suppose I admire her toughness, even when it says “Nein” to many things I would say “Ja” to.
As for the media, I think you are absolutely right. There is, outside the depths of the ocean, no lower life-form than Murdochs and their remoras. Here in France there are still a few good newspapers; we now have two 24/7 news channels, which have not yet become agitprop tubes; and public radio (here not a tiny sideshow but the main event) is on the whole excellent. And there are still fine dailies in Germany and Switzerland. Britain, I’m afraid, has lost its quality press as it has lost its auto industry, with the possible exception of the Guardian, which is much too far left for my taste but still good. I still have a fondness for the NY Times, though for some weird reason it doesn’t seem to like Obama very much. As for your TV (which I only see when I’m over), I dislike CNN for its ta-ra! drama style. I quite like MSNBC even though it’s Fox in reverse: Chuck Todd is the best political analyst I’ve seen, and Maddow’s feistiness you have to like even when you cluck your tongue. And while they are as partisan as Fox, at least they verify facts and do not knowingly lie. But yeah, all the media (except maybe NPR) do have a Drama/Catastrophe agenda, and will always more happily report an outrage or a failure or a tsunami than a success or a kindness (OK, there was the patrolman and the boots, but that came from a member of the public). I’m still meditating my next take on cultural irony, but don’t have a lot of time right now. Btw, have you seen Robert Hughes’ “The Shock of the New”? An old TV series on the history of modern art, available on 3 DVDs. Well worth it - he is Australian and irreverent, and quite funny. Good for background for your students - I used to use it sometimes after Clark’s “Civilisation” to help fill in the oceanic gaps in their general knowledge.
But to American consumers. We are bourgeois, though not robustly so --most of us are a couple of months away from bankruptcy, despite having mortgages and cars. We are sincerely religious but most of us in an unreflective way, perhaps because our continent was not ravaged by wars of religion. On race and slavery, benighted as we are, we are more enlightened than our European friends, probably because our continent *was* ravaged by a war that turned on the economics of industrial slavery, if not its morality. But we are not ironic, no matter how much ironic stuff we consume. And our great sins are vacuity and incuriosity, not irony.
Maybe it is self-defeating cynicism that vexes you. I have been meaning for years now to go back to Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, to try to understand it. The wikipedia entry will be a help to me. In a cynical world, irony helps the sincere man stay civil. I'd even go so far as to say it helps him find friends -- those who can appreciate his irony can see the world from his perspective and understand his critique. It is cynicism that concludes from the critique of an unjust situation that there's nothing to be done about it, so one might as well try to profit.
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I have been trying the "whom you admire" question on my students, but they always say "my parents." But I'll offer an unsolicited opinion. I really do admire Barack Obama for his pragmatism and his general refusal to escalate conflict pointlessly. No-drama Obama: I can get behind that. To that list I'd add Elizabeth Warren, Simon Johnson, and in some respects Angela Merkel.
This seems worth mentioning in part because of your diagnosis of the media, with which I couldn't agree more. So has it not always been thus with American media? No, there really were better days in the latter half of the twentieth century, when networks and newspapers had big news-gathering organizations and editors had the resources to enforce high journalistic standards, which some did some of the time. I think that the long post-war economic expansion, coupled with relatively progressive tax structures and social programs, made that period possible. There was a period of something like fifty years when American profit-driven corporations could support news-gathering operations as well as and often better than state-subsidized media elsewhere. My pet theory is that, in good times and well-regulated markets, media operations could look like decent investments with not great, but not terrible returns. By "well-regulated" markets, I just mean markets where regulations keep things somewhat transparent and overt, so that buyers and sellers have comparable access to information and resources, and you have relatively efficient markets.
Now, however, media companies are global and so not subject to any one nation's market regulations. They have to compete in barely-regulated capital markets which have begun to revert to the boom-and-bust cycle that typifies inefficient markets, in which only a few players have the information and resources to be fully realized agents. So you've heard of the latest Rupert Murdoch maneuvers. In such conditions, the incentive is not to pursue steady 4.5% returns. But you have little information, which makes you susceptible to following trends. Writ large, these conditions are those in which a few players can reap huge profits, bubbles and crashes are the rule, and hardly anyone who has capital has any incentive to support or invest in the dissemination of information to the people who don't individually have financial resources that matter in global capital markets.
In short, I think that while media corporations have evolved into spectacular goliaths in the past twenty years, the part of their product lines we call "news" has devolved back into the product that it was from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century: Drama and Catastrophe (and two-headed circus-freaks), Entertainment disguised as Information and so on -- the Middletons and Dekkers of our day, as you pointed out.
So maybe people like me are just too sensitive to not being able to rely on the accuracy or perceptiveness of what is presented to us as "news." Maybe we retreat into irony and sarcasm because we (and only one or two generations before us) grew up, unlike most generations before us, in a little golden age when Walter Cronkites delivered fairly accurate news to us every day. Now we find ourselves in the morass of infotainment and disinformation that most of humanity could expect from its "media outlets" for most of the history of mass media, we're at a loss.
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As for the media, I think you are absolutely right. There is, outside the depths of the ocean, no lower life-form than Murdochs and their remoras. Here in France there are still a few good newspapers; we now have two 24/7 news channels, which have not yet become agitprop tubes; and public radio (here not a tiny sideshow but the main event) is on the whole excellent. And there are still fine dailies in Germany and Switzerland. Britain, I’m afraid, has lost its quality press as it has lost its auto industry, with the possible exception of the Guardian, which is much too far left for my taste but still good. I still have a fondness for the NY Times, though for some weird reason it doesn’t seem to like Obama very much. As for your TV (which I only see when I’m over), I dislike CNN for its ta-ra! drama style. I quite like MSNBC even though it’s Fox in reverse: Chuck Todd is the best political analyst I’ve seen, and Maddow’s feistiness you have to like even when you cluck your tongue. And while they are as partisan as Fox, at least they verify facts and do not knowingly lie. But yeah, all the media (except maybe NPR) do have a Drama/Catastrophe agenda, and will always more happily report an outrage or a failure or a tsunami than a success or a kindness (OK, there was the patrolman and the boots, but that came from a member of the public).
I’m still meditating my next take on cultural irony, but don’t have a lot of time right now. Btw, have you seen Robert Hughes’ “The Shock of the New”? An old TV series on the history of modern art, available on 3 DVDs. Well worth it - he is Australian and irreverent, and quite funny. Good for background for your students - I used to use it sometimes after Clark’s “Civilisation” to help fill in the oceanic gaps in their general knowledge.
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