Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Curator’ post of the week - riffs on the most interesting pieces I found on the ‘artistic/intellectual’ web. I’d also like to spotlight the latest piece on
- a tender, thoughtful rumination on Dostoevsky by .Best,
Sam
OUR BLAND AND FRAGMENTED VISUAL ENTERTAINMENT
There are two long, thoughtful stories out on entertainment that say pretty much the same thing — one a New Yorker profile of Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s global head of television; the other a surprisingly anguished New York Magazine piece about the end of the ‘golden age’ of documentaries. These are worlds I work in and the pieces help to express something that I’ve had trouble articulating for a while. Basically — and this is not at all an unexpected phenomenon — streaming television, and documentaries specifically, sold out. They hit a middlebrow formula in which, as Bajaria somewhat nauseatingly puts it, they were able to create a “gourmet cheeseburger” out of any one of their offerings. The point was that you could reach an audience of around 25 million for a Netflix show, it could check all the right boxes, and could be reasonably worthy, something other schlock — and that you could repeat this forever.
In some sense there’s no problem at all with any of this. The streamers managed to replace television and they did so with a product-first service — no commercial breaks and a standard of quality much higher than, for instance, in the heyday of basic cable. If, as streaming addicts have been noticing, there’s a certain ‘visual blandness’ to everything on Netflix, no matter how far-flung its point of origin, that shouldn’t be too unexpected. Netflix is a factory and the products emerging from a factory are bound to be somewhat interchangeable.
Bajaria, as a globe-trotting missionary of the middlebrow, has an interestingly straightforward perspective on Netflix’s evolution. “It’s not a science, but it’s about recognizing that people like having more,” she said. Her promotion to head of global television is understood to be a sign of the ascendance of the middlebrow — the crime of her rival, according to The New Yorker profile, was that she was overly interested in prestige offerings that would win awards and impress her friends. Bajaria, by contrast, is refreshingly free of that hangup. “She is not an intellectual, she’s smart and bold and able to keep forging ahead,” says a colleague of hers — and she had thoroughly jettisoned the idea of the ‘golden gut,’ the premise that top television executives could know viewers better than they knew themselves, in favor of adherence to utterly safe formulae. As Bajaria puts it in her thumpingly middlebrow homily — with yet another fast food analogy — “People have very different tastes, and I have no disdain for whatever those things are. What is quality? What is good versus not? That’s all subjective. I just want to super-serve the audience.”
That’s pretty much exactly the same set of developments as occurred in documentaries. Documentary was a famously scrappy form, but over the last decade or so the ‘industrialized’ doc emerged — and was closely intertwined with the rise of Netflix. The point here was that documentaries could be made for a fraction of the cost of scripted material — no arts or wardrobe departments, and most importantly no remuneration for the on-screen talent; and if audiences had always been reluctant to see documentaries in movie theaters, documentaries were conducive to screening and particularly to Netflix’s niche categories. And the result, in the end, was profits but also formulazation. “The streamers had enough data to know what people liked — murders, celebrities, episodes that end with a cliffhanger — and by 2020, when Netflix was releasing a new documentary or docuseries every week, the streamers were competing less for awards than for the next true-crime hit,” writes Reeves Wiedeman in the New York piece.
Wiedeman and many of his interviewees are clearly very upset about what has happened to documentaries. Dan Cogan of Impact Partners, who has done as well from this phenomenon as anybody, says, “People talk about the golden age of documentary, and it was exciting to be a part of that. It is also true that we left that age three or four years ago and we now live in the corporate age of documentary.” An unnamed director is very unhappy about being given only two weeks to shoot and ten weeks to edit a documentary — not nearly enough time to make anything that’s not formula. Another director complains that the pitch meetings she has more often than not turn into “Did anybody murder your sister and do you want to make a film about that?”
Everything that Wiedeman is describing is true but it’s difficult to share in the outrage. It’s just what happens with mainstreamization and popularity. There are more careers for more people in the art form. More people consume the art form than ever before. Production values go up, and with that the appetite for risk diminishes —and much of the fun and the creativity of the art form inevitably goes away.
What I’m more interested in with this discussion is the way in which cultures tend to form into centers — and how cultural fragmentation is, in some very deep psychological way, distressing to us. That’s happening in dramatic form with the sense of nostalgia for the lost ‘golden age of television.’ To a great extent, the golden age of television was just HBO — and then a handful of HBO-style risky shows (e.g. Mad Men) that other networks were willing to take a chance on because it had worked for HBO. The ascendancy of HBO created a very attractive cultural landscape in which the entire society seemed to be circling around a few shows — and an office on a Monday morning would be a very lonely place if you hadn’t seen Game of Thrones the night before. And filmmakers had a very clear aspiration — more than anything, they wanted to make something that would be picked up by HBO. Once Netflix succeeded in pushing out its down-market version of HBO, the equation changed. There was no longer a sense of a cultural center — and, in the society at large, no longer an easy way to develop affinity with strangers over having seen the same shows. (Conversations now are very different from how conversations were five or ten years ago — people in coffee shops could happily parrot whole Curb Your Enthusiasm scenes back to each other or discuss, in great detail, the lineage of the royal families of Westeros; now, people find themselves swapping long lists of pretty-good shows, Derry Girls or Only Murders in the Building, with relatively little chance of the conversationalists’ viewing experiences overlapping.)
Again, it’s hard to argue that this development is exactly a bad thing — it means more content, which means more creators and means, in theory, more diversity of perspectives. As Rachel Syme puts it The New Yorker piece, “a single mass culture had fractured into a mass of niches, so that the future of the entertainment industry lay not in producing megahits that please everyone but in catering to many distinct groups of avid fans” (a view that Bajaria, for instance, had internalized into her laissez-faire persona). But at the same time the new development was somehow wildly unsatisfying. The tendency is towards the middle. Creators lose the ambition to dream big — to create the one work of art that everybody is talking about at the same time — which paradoxically also means that they lose the ambition to dream small, to make a work that’s so unique to them that it will either go nowhere or will captivate the entire culture. Instead, much as it was in the pewter age of television, the instinct is towards safety first. The formula is so clear-cut — serial killers, celebrity-reveals, etc — that it becomes difficult to go wrong. Everybody hits singles and doubles. Nobody swings, however fancifully, for home runs.
ARE THE KIDS ALRIGHT?
It’s hard to think of any possible topic more tedious than this one. The short answer, now as always, is that the kids will turn to be maladjusted adults in their own unique way, just like every generation before them. So in some higher sense, there’s no cause for concern — the world will be shaped however they end up shaping it. It will feel somewhat weird and different to everyone older than them but will just be the new reality.
Still, Jonathan Haidt — shy about old fogeyism and submitting all appropriate caveats — contends that “this time really is different,” and the current younger generation actually is objectively crappier than the generations preceding it.
Haidt has been ahead of the curve on this. In 2015, he wrote, together with Greg Lukianoff, one of these typically alarmist Atlantic articles, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” about how a real generation gap had become apparent, with college students obsessed about safety — and, sure enough, our culture wars over the last half-decade have to a startling extent boiled down to conflict between Gen Z, always alert for ‘triggers,’ always quick to take offense, and everybody older than them. Haidt, in a Substack piece, now extends his thesis a bit further to claim that the ‘three terrible ideas’ that were loose in college campuses in the 2010s (fragility, emotional reasoning, and ethical dualism) are now ruining the mental health of the current cohort of teenagers.
Haidt, in this case, keeps his argument largely data-based, and it becomes very hard to dispute that there isn’t some sort of a serious problem. Recent data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows that the percentage of teenage girls who say they experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57% over the past decade while suicidal ideation among teenage girls has increased by 50% over the same time span. As Kathleen Ethier, head of the CDC’s adolescent and school health program, said of the recent findings, “I think there’s really no question what this data is telling us. Young people are telling us that they are in crisis.”
And, meanwhile, an equally dire data set appears in education. In a New York Times piece, David Brooks notes that, since the Covid school closures, enrollment has shrunk, absenteeism has skyrocketed, disciplinary issues increased, and academic scores badly regressed. A particularly eye-popping national test in the fall revealed that third grade academic performance (which had been improving for two decades) reverted to levels of the early 1990s. “I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the federal agency that administered the exam. Brooks cites a study showing that the decline in math scores, if it persists, would lead to a loss of $900 billion in future earnings over the course of the students’ lifetimes.
In the case of the collapse of educational performance, there’s an obvious culprit — the pandemic school closures which are looking more and more like a generation-defining blunder. And in the case of the mental health crisis, the equally-obvious culprits are smart phones and social media. “There is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media,” writes Haidt. And, in terms of a sort of material culture-based understanding of things, it’s hard to challenge that argument. I remember, as I graduated high school in the 2000s, having a feeling like I’d escaped just in time from a burning building. Sites were starting to appear that rated ‘the ugliest girls in a school’ or that posted anonymous gossip about high schoolers. It felt exactly as if all of the worst possible elements of school — bullying, cliquishness, exclusion, malicious gossip — were now reified in cyberspace. The Facebook ‘friends’ feature alone seemed like the ultimate high school nightmare made manifest — now you knew (and everyone knew) just how unpopular you were.
But, as Haidt is fully aware, the smart phones and the school closures are symptomatic of larger cultural trends. The school closures were coddling-taken-to-the-extreme — a terror of adverse health outcomes even when kids weren’t getting sick — and a willingness to sacrifice kids’ intellectual and emotional development for the sake of eliminating even a shadow of a health risk. And that over-protectiveness was coupled with a sense of tech determinism — Zoom was available; and the belief was that, with the help of the wonderful new technology, everything out turn out alright.
The rise in teenage depression, from the beginning of the decade, coincides with another trend — which is an identification of oneself as a victim; a certain ethic of suffering. This ties in with what, really, is the underlying idea of everything written in this Substack — that there are distinct paradigms, which are best recognized by the ideal way of being envisioned within each one of them; that individuals and communities organize themselves in reference to them; that the various paradigms can be deeply contradictory; and that it is possible to shift from one to another in a very short time. I’ve been very startled over the course of my lifetime to see one of these shifts occur — a paradigm based on individualism, the vision of the capacious self, giving way to a paradigm based on identification with the collective and, particularly, with the sufferings of the collective. In the case of the social shift experienced during my lifetime, that identification with the collective merges with a vision of inalienable progress — a combination of technological determinism and ever-unfolding social justice. In a forthcoming book, Left Is Not Woke, Susan Neiman links the ethic of suffering to a fundamental turn in consciousness that occurred in the aftermath of World War II. “Identity politics embodies a major shift that began in the mid-20th century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim,” Neiman writes. But around the year 2012 — identified as epochal by both Haidt and Martin Gurri — the new ethos vividly emerges. The smart phones engender a conviction of being on the cusp of some technological utopia, and meanwhile a mode of messianic thinking emerges in which it’s understood that society must dedicate itself entirely and self-sacrificingly towards social justice, and meanwhile the very peculiar social space created by smart phones makes everybody feel that they are part of some great collective endeavor even as in their daily life they find themselves almost hopelessly isolated. That sort of collective pressure — intensified in adolescence by the ways in which everybody feels observed and judged by social media — engenders a whole cluster of anxieties and depressions.
Critics of this whole way of thinking — people who argue that the kids are, in spite of all appearances and all data, doing alright — have to perform a very complicated intellectual judo move to reverse the presumed causal trends. Vicki Phillips, writing in Forbes, and David Wallace-Wells, writing in The New York Times, argue that these are uniquely difficult times — given Trump, global warming, Covid, etc, and that the kids have emerged better than can be reasonably expected. Addressing the collapse in test scores, Wallace-Wells writes, “The declines, all told, strike me as relatively small, given the context: a brutal pandemic that terrified the country and killed more than a million of its citizens, upending nearly every aspect of our lives along the way.” And Phillips claims, somewhat astonishingly, that the spike in depression and suicidal ideation is actually good news and a sign of maturity. “[Haidt] fails to note the remarkable truth,” she writes. “Gen Z is in fact embracing a new, more open and honest relationship with their mental health, one that destigmatizes the issue so that it can be addressed.”
Haidt is able to deal fairly summarily with Phillips’ argument. He notes that non-spinnable metrics — deaths by suicide and hospitalizations for self-harm — have spiked among teenagers in the past decade. And the general argument of Phillips and Wallace-Wells just doesn’t hold. Ours isn’t a uniquely difficult time; and it takes a real leap of faith to believe that Gen Z and current teenagers are somehow more resilient, in their own data-proof way, than preceding generations.
What may be the case, though, is that we’ll all muddle through. I find myself appalled by Gen Z’s ethic of fragility and perpetual victimization, just as I am shocked by the startling decline in literacy, but, already, as a millennial, this is starting to not be my world. Gen Z has its beliefs about the world, including tech determinism and the primacy of social justice, and those will clearly prevail — and lead to wherever they lead. And, meanwhile, communication moves more and more to videos, emoticons, and, generally, a post-literate sort of space. I don’t love it — I find it deeply unhealthy — but at some level there’s no choice except to roll with it.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CENTRE-RIGHT?
Jeremy Cliffe has a compelling piece in The New Statesman on what happened to the centre-right. Cliffe writes in comparison to George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England and contends that we are dealing with a parallel phenomenon. Dangerfield’s thesis — which isn’t taken all that seriously by most historians of the period but is enchanting — is that the Liberal Party, which dominated Britain’s politics in the latter half of the 19th century and seemed to be utterly ascendant as late as 1906, was moribund by the outbreak of World War I not because of the war but because of a confluence of overpowering social pressures, so much so that the war seemed at the time like a relief from vexing domestic problems.
Cliffe suggests that something similar has happened to the centre-right, which he calls “the West’s most powerful and successful ideological tendency over the past seven decades” and which seemed to be so entrenched not so very long ago in figures like George W. Bush and David Cameron.
I think Cliffe is basically right and right to view the collapse of the old conservative consensus not so much through specific political events but through broader cultural trends. “[The collapse] speaks of deep sociological and socio-economic changes; of the decline of a certain domain of life in much of the West that once provided moderate conservatism with its base,” Cliffe writes.
The list of underlying forces he puts together are 1) the rise of tertiary education; 2) secularization; 3) growing diversity; 4) identity politics. The point is that some old balance between conservative and liberal elites has shifted. There are far more people now with advanced degrees who tend to skew overwhelmingly liberal (but are at the same time disconnected from the exigencies of the market). A stolid religious sensibility — which animated Europe’s Christian Democrats and America’s Moral Majority — has more or less evaporated. And meanwhile a series of stressful social events — mass immigration, the emergence of progressive identity politics — drove elements of the centre-right into the far-right extreme. Cliffe surveys elections over the past decade and finds, over and over again, humiliation for the sort of standard-issue right-of-centre candidates who once seemed like the ‘establishment picks’ — Jeb Bush in the U.S., Valérie Pécresse in France, Simone Tebet in Brazil, etc.
Mostly, of course, the centre-right candidates lost to their own right-wing — ‘primaried out,’ in America political language. And this sequence of events is familiar to anyone who’s been following politics. Cliffe, who seems to like groupings of four, names ‘takeover, fragmentation, shrinkage, and rightwards drift’ as the reigning dynamics in how the old-fashioned conservatives lose to the right-wing radicals. That part of it is straightforward enough — the conservatives got squeezed from the right and, to attempt to survive, usually ended up trying to sell themselves out to the extremist position. As Bret Stephens put it — having a conversation with David Brooks on many of the same questions — the main dynamics weren’t intellectual so much as the push-and-pull of electoral politics. “I don’t think the ideas [of traditional conservatism] were the core problem, even if not every one of them stands the test of time,” Stephens wrote. “The problem was that, when the illiberal barbarians were at the conservative gates, the gatekeepers had a catastrophic loss of nerve.”
On a similarly pragmatic note, I suspect that a great part of the centre-right’s decline was that, when in office, the centre-right stalwarts simply didn’t do that great of a job. George H.W. Bush failed to get himself re-elected. George W. Bush got the second term but sold his soul to do so — and the failures of his administration, the pointless war in Iraq, the massive increase in the national debt, the collapse of the economy in 2008, may have discredited the centre-right for at least a generation. Come to think of it, Dubya seems as good an explanation for the demise of the centre-right as anything — his ineptitude shut the door on Democratic-leaning independents voting Republican; and, immediately after his departure, the Republican Party took its sharp turn to the right.
But I am interested in Cliffe’s deeper-reaching thesis of some sort of massive cultural hollowing-out. This is most apparent in the nexus of religion and politics. “There was a huge confessional [religious] dimension to the centre right until recently, but it is just not the centre of gravity it once was,” wrote Robert Ford, author of Brexitland. And apparent too in the economy — the sense, as with the Great Recession, that traditional laissez-faire conservatives just didn’t have the answers that they needed to have. Or, to put things a little more abstractly, conservatism lost its meaning when the world started to change very rapidly — and it wasn’t at all clear what the traditional values were that conservatives were ‘preserving.’ The old-fashioned family structure had largely already broken down; and conservative capitalism had done nothing to keep jobs from moving overseas.
In the last few years, as I’ve been going through my own political journey, the absence of any credible centre-right position has seemed a peculiar lacuna in political life. The thinkers I’ve found myself paying attention to — David Brooks, Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Glenn Loury, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Michael Shellenberger, etc — seem to be articulating positions that belong to a standard-issue right-of-centre party, the kind of party that’s associated with Dwight Eisenhower or George H.W. Bush. There’s a genial common sense, an abhorrence of identity politics, a belief in gradualism and in the virtues of some sort of old-fashioned civic space, as well as a certain hard-nosedness when it comes to a foreign policy. But virtually all of these figures find themselves out in some political wilderness — some canceled and ostracized; others advocating for positions that have no corollary in party politics. The intelligent critique of liberal hypocrisy does seem like a reasonable place for a future centre-right movement to get its bearings — that’s what somebody like Christopher Rufo is about and what many political types are half-hoping DeSantis will be. But it’s true that, as Cliffe frames it, the old centre-right has completely melted down, and a new moderate conservative movement would have to be more or less built from scratch. What’s refreshing about it, whenever it does come, is that it likely won’t be build on religion, as was George W. Bush’s ersatz coalition. It will at least be about common sense and civil society, the vigorous protection of civil liberties; and, likely, will be ‘liberal’ in the traditional sense of the word.
Thanks for the mention, Sam! I appreciate that. Check me out on Inner Life, peeps! And subscribe to Inner Life!
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
“The rise in teenage depression, from the beginning of the decade, coincides with another trend — which is an identification of oneself as a victim; a certain ethic of suffering.”
Yep. Nietzsche’s ‘Slave morality.’ Am I allowed to say that? 🤯🤣🤣 There’s an obsession amongst Gen Z around constant external validation. It’s a product of extreme coddling and American prestige, wealth and privilege. We need to toughen these kids up. Maybe the old European model of 1-2 years military service after high school?