by Mark Greif
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“But how can you ask other people to lower their salaries, without giving your life to charity first? Isn’t it hypocrisy to call for change for everyone without turning over your own income?” Morality is not saved by any individual’s efforts to do charity, a pocketful here, a handful there. Charity is the vice of unequal systems. (I’m only repeating Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”) We shouldn’t have to weigh whether our money would do more good in a destitute person’s pocket, or our time do more good if we ladled soup to the hungry, or our study do more good if it taught reading to the illiterate. It always, always would. Because it is hard to give up your money, however, when not everyone else does, and hard to give up your time when not everyone else does—and nearly impossible when you have less time, and less money, than the visibly rich and comfortable—and frankly, because it’s not often a good idea to give up your true calling or your life at all, our giving is limited and fitful. It can never make a large-scale difference.
Not only decency, justice, and community but nobility, excellence, and individualism can come about only by redistribution, not charity, in a society organized against drastic monetary inequality in the first place. It would be a good society in the broadest sense, one in which life was worth living, because the good life (as a life of morality, and as a life of justified luxury) could be pursued without contradiction.
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The essence of individualism is morally relevant inequality. The misuse of inequality occurs when it comes to be based on wealth rather than ability; on birth rather than talent; on positioning rather than genius; on alienable money (which could belong to anyone) rather than action and works (which can be done only by you). These distortions spell the end of a society of individualists. Money inequality creates a single system that corrals every person and places him above or beneath another, in a single file stretching from hell to the moon. These so-called individualists will then be led, by the common standard of the dollar, to common interests, common desires, and little that’s individual at all.
Some say the more the rich are rich, the better off everyone will be. But really the Dick Cheneys of this world are obese because they’re eating everybody else’s dinner. Trickle-down economics is an alimentary philosophy: the more the rich eat, the more crusts they stuff in their maws, the more they create for the benefit of all the rest of us underneath them. Even if it worked, one could not forget that what they pass on to us is predigested, already traveling through their stomachs and fattening them first, giving excess nutriment to the undeserving. Their monuments, too, which we do marvel at, are composed of waste. Why gain the world as excrement? Why should we not take it in its morally original form—if money need not pass through the rich to reach us?
• Legislative Initiative No. 3: It makes most sense to have a president and vice president who will forswear wealth permanently. A man who rules for the demos need not come from the demos. But he ought to enter it; he ought to become one of the people he is responsible most for helping—that means the rest of us.
Worst-case scenario two, if we prioritize human satisfaction instead of productivity, is de-development. For centuries, it has been at the back of the Western mind that technological development might reach a point at which a democratic community would want to stop, or change direction. So the Erewhonians, in Samuel Butler’s utopia, broke their machines.
It’s finally become possible to take a better view: not unlimited laissez-faire hubris, and not irrational machine-breaking, either. In a country where some portions of development have gone farther than anybody would like, because of everyone’s discrete private actions (as in the liquidation of landscape and the lower atmosphere)—while other portions, as in medical insurance and preventive care, have not gone far enough—then intentional de-development might be the best thing that can occur. The eradication of diseases is not something you would like to see end; nor would you want to lose the food supply, transportation, and good order of the law and defense. On the other hand, more cell phones and wireless, an expanded total entertainment environment, more computerization for consumer tracking, greater concentrations of capital and better exploitation of “inefficiencies” in the trading of securities, the final throes of extraction and gas guzzling and—to hell with it. I’d rather live in a more equal world at a slower pace.
[2006]
V
THE REALITY OF REALITY TELEVISION
There is a persistent dream that television will be more than it is: that it will not only sit in every home, but make a conduit for those homes to reach back to a shared fund of life.
The utopia of television nearly came within reach in 1992, on the day cable providers announced that cable boxes would expand to five hundred channels. Back then, our utopian idea rested on assumptions both right and wrong. We assumed network-sized broadcasters could never afford new programming for so many active channels. That was right. We also assumed TV subscribers wouldn’t stand for five hundred channels of identical fluff, network reruns, syndicated programs, second-run movies, infomercials, and home shopping. That was wrong.
We were sure the abundance of channels would bring on stations of pure environmental happiness, carrying into our homes the comforts everyone craves: the twenty-four-hour Puppy Channel, the Sky Channel, the Ocean Channel, the Baby Channel—showing nothing but frolicsome puppies, placid sky, tumultuous ocean, and big-headed babies. It never happened. And yet cable TV did indeed get cut up for small pleasures, in the advertisement of more utilitarian interests, on the Food Network, the Style Network, and Home and Garden Television (HGTV). (Natural beauty took hold on cable only in the pious slideshows of the Christian channels, where Yosemite is subtitled by 1 Corinthians.)
The meaningful history of technology turns out to be a history of its fantasized uses as much as of the shapes it actually takes. Our cable-box dreams finally rested on one beautiful notion: the participatory broadcasting of real life. With such a ludicrous number of channels, companies would just have to give some of the dial over to the rest of us, the viewers—wouldn’t they? And we millions would flow into the vacuum of content. We’d manifest our nature on channels 401 to 499 as surely as do puppies, ocean, and sky. We’d do it marrying, arguing, staring at the wall, dining, studying our feet, holding contests, singing, sneezing. Hundreds of thousands of us had cameras. Well, we’d plug them in and leave the tape running for our real life.
In this underlying dream, we were neither exactly wrong nor right. The promise of the five hundred channels went to waste. The techno-utopians’ fantasies shifted to the Internet. Nothing like the paradise we hoped for came to fruition on TV, that’s for sure. Instead we got reality TV.
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The assessment of reality television depends first on your notion of television; second, on your idea of political community.
Here is a standard misconception: since the noblest forms of artistic endeavor are fictional and dramatic (the novel, film, painting, plays), it can be assumed that the major, proper products of television will be its dramatic entertainments, the sitcom and the hour-long drama. I think this is wrong, and very possibly wrong for a whole number of reasons. Drama has a different meaning in a commercial medium where “programming” came into being as bacon to wrap the real morsels of steak, the sixty-second advertisements. It means something different when it exists in a medium we switch on to see “what’s on TV” rather than to find a given single work; when the goal is more often to watch television than to watch a particular drama and then turn it off.
From its beginnings in the early 1950s, TV has been blamed for encouraging overindividualism, for hastening consumer suckerdom, for spurring passivity and couch-potatoness, and for making up the sensational bread-and-circuses of mass-culture tyranny. That pretty much covers it. And yet when opponents tried to divide the wretched things flickering inside the idiot box into categories, they made excuses for quite unnecessary forms that they felt they recognized (high
brow TV dramas) while deriding unique and far more important items that didn’t suit their vision of dramatic art (game shows, local news, now reality shows).
The real principled problem ought to be with drama. The modern form of the long-standing Western philosophical argument against placing drama at the center of a republic was articulated twenty years before the American Revolution. Rousseau insisted in his Letter to M. D’Alembert that a republic (in his case Geneva, circa 1758) was correct to keep a theater out of its public life. To Rousseau, a republic is a political community in which each person is equal and sovereign—as it should be to us, today, living in the American republic. The citizen is not sovereign alone, but sovereign through his activity in a community of peers. The drama, when it was given too much power, crowded out the true entertainments of any republican political community—entertainments whose delights must be rooted in that self-regard and free judgment in daily activity that strengthens the bonds of citizen to citizen. (Bear in mind that Rousseau, in ancien-régime Paris, loved the theater: “Racine charms me and I have never willingly missed a performance of Molière.” A corrupt order, of nobility and monarchy, could hardly be made worse by drama and might be made better. But the philosopher loved a republic more.)
Rousseau expected that a republic’s civic entertainments would be displays of what people already do. Singing, building, decorating, beauty pageantry, athletics, and dancing gave pleasure and “entertainment” because the participants not only accomplished the acts but became spectacles to themselves—and to others, their equals and fellow citizens, who had done just the same activities. Republican entertainments might often take the form of the contest or the demonstration. But they might also be the special celebration of ordinary living itself—the “festival”:
Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; let them become actors themselves; do it so each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.
“Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves”: a part of TV has always done this. It has meant, at different times, local programming, Huntley and Brinkley, the national news at six and local news at eleven, talk shows and talent shows, This Is Your Life and the regional tours of Wheel of Fortune. Accept, though, that television’s most important function might always have been to let citizens see each other and be seen in their representatives—in our only truly national-universal medium—and you’re left to ask what will accomplish it best today. Reality television may furnish its dark apotheosis—a form for an era in which local TV has been consolidated out of existence, regional differences are said to be diminishing (or anyway are less frequently represented), and news, increasingly at the service of sales departments, has forfeited its authority to represent the polity.
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We need myths, not only of our ideal, and our average, but of our fallen extreme. Since the establishment of informed-consent rules in the 1970s, the golden age of social psychology is gone. No more Stanley Milgram’s proof that ordinary citizens will push the voltage to the red zone while the electrocuted actor screams—so long as a lab-coated tester is there to give the orders. No more Philip Zimbardo’s proof that fake guards will brutalize fake prisoners if you arbitrarily split Stanford students into two groups, lock them in a basement, and leave them to their own devices. No more Harold Garfinkel’s demonstrations that testers can drive strangers berserk if they stare at other riders on the elevator or if children refuse to recognize their parents. Today we are reliant on elimiDATE, Punk’d, and Survivor. Watching reality television is like walking one long hallway of an unscrupulous and peculiarly indefatigable psychology department.
The first ideal-type of reality TV is the show of the pure event. Cops represents one end of its spectrum, the low-budget dating shows (Blind Date, elimiDATE, 5th Wheel, EX-treme Dating) the other. You discern patterns in each—the effect on the watchful viewer is of a patterned repetition of wholly singular encounters. In the endless scenes of arrests, traffic stops, drive-by warnings (“OK, you ain’t going to do it again”), domestic disturbances, and interviews with complainants (“Calm down, ma’am, just tell me what happened”), it becomes clear that justice, at the level of the arrest, has less to do than you might have thought with the code of law. Between cop and civilian, everything is determined by personality; each word is a step in a negotiation; the tools each side possesses seem arbitrary and confused, in the wheedling or vagueness of the suspect, the mock-authoritativeness and lack of information of the cop. So you make notes to your criminal self: never voluntarily submit to a search. But it doesn’t take long to realize that, in the situation, you wouldn’t remember all you’d learned watching Cops; politeness and hustling would take over. In the immediate interaction between two people, each staring into the other’s eyes and trying to persuade him toward escape or incrimination, drugged by fear when not hazy with narcotics, you see the hidden face-to-face interactions of your countrymen.
And on Blind Date and EX-treme Dating and 5th Wheel, with wary daters eyeing each other over pasta dinners, leglessly drunk in a hundred indistinguishable neon dives and, afterward, on the best dates, mumbling vulgar blandishments in hot tubs, you see that romance is not angelic recognition or simple animal lust but a negotiation—the same as in the Cops arrest. The blind date and the traffic stop become on late-night TV the two paradigmatic experiences of American encounters between strangers. Homogenous America is instantly disproved by bizarre America. It is reassuring to watch this openness and fumbling. Finally you see without intermediary dramatization the landscape of tanning salons and restaurants and aikido studios in every corner of the country, the still-distinct accents but universalized, television-influenced behaviors, the dilemma of what to say and which personality to project, as if the social relation were being rebuilt, in a cutaway scale model of our society—a great televised Ark of a changing civilization—two by two.
So even though evidently all women look for “a sense of humor” and all men want someone “I can have fun with,” even though all good girls say they are “wild” and all good boys avow that they are “players,” this has only an equivocal effect on individuals’ relentlessly erroneous attempts to approximate trends and manners learned from TV, which seems to be what’s really going on. Yo-yo-ing modesty and immodesty (“I’m a bad girl. I mean, I’m mostly bad in bed”); frank talk about penis size and boob jobs but wildly variable estimates on the morality of kissing on a first date; shy clumsiness masked under pornographic aspirations (“Have you ever had a threesome?” “No, that’s more, like, a goal of mine”)—this, the cameras prove, is the current American performing reality. Everyone tries to play someone else on TV, but still feels so many tethering strings from the prosaic, deficient, and plain polite that conformity becomes chaotic and imitation idiosyncratic.
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“Voyeurism” was never the right word for what it means to watch these shows. You feel some identification with the participants, and even more sympathy with the situation. “And if I were pulled over—or if I were set up on a blind date—how would I fare?” But primarily—and this is the more important thing to say about reality TV—there is always judgment. You can’t know the deeds your countrymen will do until you see them; and once these deeds are seen, you won’t fail to judge and retell them. Reality TV is related in this respect to the demimonde of The People’s Court, Divorce Court, Judge Hatchett, and Judge Judy. Classy critics hate these shows too, or claim to. I think that’s a mistake. The way in which all reality TV—and much of daytime TV—can be “real” across social classes is in its capacity for judgment. The “friends” on Friends were an ideological group, propagandists for a bland class of the affluent in a sibling-incest sitcom. The show didn’t allow you to take their idiocy to task, or ever to question the details of how they paid their rent or their hairdresser’
s bill, or how they acted on the “outside.” If only Judge Judy could sit in judgment of them, once! If only Cops would break down their door and throw them against the wall! Monica, you ignorant Skeletor, eat a sandwich! Ross, you vainglorious paleontologist, read a book! You mortuary creep! Truly, the judge shows have a vengeful appeal: they gather every inept, chiseling, weaseling, self-focused sort of person you meet in your daily life and, counting on each one’s stupidity and vanity to get him up into the dock, they yell at him.
This is one way to come to terms with your fellow citizens. Much reality TV, by contrast, communicates a relative openness of judgment, though judgment is its one constant—and does so also by its wider identity of situation between the viewer and those before the cameras. (Nearly everybody has dated, and, from rich to poor, nearly everybody fears the police when driving and will call on them when threatened.) Reality TV’s judgment falls on “another oneself,” however much one retains the right to disown and ridicule this nitwitted fellow citizen. Nowadays, at every level of our society, there is a hunger for judgment. Often this becomes summary judgment—not so much the wish to know the truth, but the brutal decisionism that would rather be wrong than stay in suspension. This is the will not to deliberate but to sentence. In the political realm, it has influenced the shape of the current disaster. Its soft manifestations own the therapeutic talk shows, in the sniffling and nose wiping of a Dr. Phil, where the expert is never at a loss. He will not say: “No, your situation is too messed up for me to advise you; I have a similar problem; think for yourself.” Whereas the cheapest and rawest reality TV offers you a chance to judge people like you, people who do lots of the same things you do. It is cheap, it is amoral, it has no veneer of virtue, it is widely censured and a guilty pleasure, and it can be more educational and truthful and American than most anything else, very suitable for our great republic.
