For her Sketchbook pieces, Holländer explores the subject of balance, a theme that she tells Zócalo has become increasingly important in her life. Her playful collages reflect on the space between work and play, routine and spontaneity, hard and soft. “It is not an either/or,” she explains, “it is a balance between poles, sometimes a wobbly act on a thin rope.”

Consider how each composition takes what could be a strict juxtaposition and rearranges competing symbols into precarious Jenga towers of philosophy. It’s an everyday balancing act that aptly captures life in the year 2024.

The post Nature’s Balancing Act appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Affixed on jewelry, tattoos, fabric, and home decor, and even in the pattern of wrought-iron fences in places like Washington, D.C., and Savannah, Georgia, is a heart-shaped symbol with curly circles at the top and bottom, almost like the mirroring of two S’s to make a heart.

It is one version of the popular Adinkra symbol Sankofa.

Sankofa literally means “return to your past” or “go back and fetch it.” It can also mean “it is not taboo to go back and fetch it,” which is useful as an apology (e.g., “I invoke Sankofa and wish to go back and correct what I did at yesterday’s meeting when I incorrectly accused you of wrongdoing”).

Also commonly symbolized by the outline of a bird whose head and beak are pointed backward, toward its tail, often with an egg either in the beak or nestled in the tail, Sankofa has become a cultural phenomenon. It gives a name to the African diaspora’s concerns for heritage, legacy, authenticity, and dignity—in the U.S. and beyond.

Sankofa belongs to a communication system called the Adinkera, or Adinkra, which comes from present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast—key West African regions from which African Americans’ ancestors came.

After Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957, the country’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, instituted a national policy to revive and celebrate the Adinkra system, particularly the concept of Sankofa. Nkrumah also welcomed the descendants of enslaved Africans to repatriate, or at least visit, the nation. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and many other artists, activists, and culturally curious African Americans began making trips to Ghana in the late 1950s, where they would have likely encountered Adinkra symbols and philosophies. Scholarship around the Adinkra started to become more visible stateside, too, beginning in 1983 with the publication of Ivory Coast anthropologist Georges Niangoran-Bouah’s The Akan World of Gold Weights.

The concept of Sankofa resonates with core aspects of African American culture and life. The ideas of “return” and “back-to-Africa” anchor African American nationalist thought. Even more pervasive in Black people’s consciousness is the endearment of Africa as a homeland. By reflecting folk narratives presenting flight as self-emancipation and escape from enslavement and oppression, Sankofa embodies a sense of love, affection, respect, and sacred remembrance that affirms African American cultural uniqueness and celebrated difference. The principle of Sankofa is a reminder that “flight” and “return” go hand in hand. Just as peace can only come from knowing one’s legacy as well as the healing power of cultural memory.

Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima’s 1993 resistance-themed feature film Sankofa helped introduce the proverb to a wider audience. The multi-award-winning independent film begins in contemporary times, with a culturally unaware African American model doing a photoshoot on the same Ghana beach where the historic Elmina enslavement fort still stands. The model then travels through time to the enslavement past and discovers the sacredness of how her ancestors survived through revolts and sacrifice. Rich in themes of communalism, revolt, Pan-Africanism, and intellectual agency, Sankofa is a revolutionary vision of enslavement courage. In the years since its release, it has attracted a cult and cultural following.

The Sankofa cultural explosion continues in high schools and colleges today. In Black Studies classes, teachers introduce Sankofa to newer generations through the film and as an example of African philosophy. For many, it is a new and inspirational experience that reinforces the educational goals of historical recovery and presents the rich intellectual tradition of the African world. In practices of Black psychology, Sankofa grounds wellness and renewal in ancient wisdom. And in literary analysis, Sankofa is a paradigm that asks readers to map the ways characters of African descent travel and explore heritage homelands. This travel is often multidirectional and involves not just Africa, but also the Americas, the Caribbean, and even Europe.

But Sankofa is most visible outside of academia, in the explosion of businesses, schools, and community engagement projects that have embraced the name “Sankofa.” Represented by familiar icons (a heart, a bird) rather than some of the less familiar geometric shapes in the Adinkra, Sankofa holds immediate, recognizable visual appeal. While community institutions may not necessarily have a deep understanding of Sankofa’s precise Adinkra meaning, Sankofa has also been embraced by some as a general African/Black legacy concept that communicates that they are proud agents of a global heritage.

Consider just a sampling: Sankofa Kitchen (Dallas); Sankofa Arts Lounge (Dallas); Sankofa Research Institute (Houston); Sankofa Village for the Arts (Pittsburgh); Sankofa African and World Bazaar (Baltimore); Sankofa Church (Atlanta); Sankofa Community Discount Card (Atlanta); Sankofa Initiative (Jacksonville); Sankofa Creations Spalon (Jacksonville); Sankofa Jazz Festival (Miami); and Sankofa Soul, the sponsor of music festivals in St. Lucia, Curacao, Brooklyn, and Coney Island.

For hundreds of years, African Americans have used everything from storytelling to art to religion to keep their heritage alive in a hostile U.S. In 1991, African American archaeologists even discovered Sankofa symbols in a colonial-era African burial ground during a high-rise construction project in lower Manhattan; that site is now a national monument. Such relics from the past, like the Akan gold weights that fueled commerce for 500 years, show the depth and longevity of the ancient traditional West African roots of African Americans.

The knowledge imparted by African ancestors—an inheritance forcibly taken away, though never completely lost—has endured, yet African Americans revel in the more recent awareness of the vast Adinkra system because it is specific amidst a cultural history that largely has been a generic remembrance.

Imagine the possibilities for cultural reclamation and enrichment if the African American and diasporic communities continue to utilize not just Sankofa but the wealth of philosophies shared within the entire Adinkra system. Because among its symbols lie universal wisdom around the human capacity to heal, to repair, to renew, and to return.

The post What Can Sankofa Teach Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’re a prisoner, held in a dark cave. Your hands are tied behind you and you can only look straight ahead at the cave wall. Your captors keep you occupied by putting objects on it. To pass the time you and your fellow prisoners play games. Who can be the first to shout out the name of the object? Who can correctly guess which object will appear next?

You feel pride when you’re right—because being right about the objects is the only thing of value you have.

One day a fellow prisoner escapes their chains, and looking around the cave, realizes that what you’ve all thought were real objects on the wall were only shadows cast by a fire that’s burning behind you. The escaped prisoner manages to find a ladder, climbs out of the cave, and rushes into the blinding sunlight. As their eyes adjust to the brightness, they realize that the cave isn’t reality at all; it is only a dungeon for the mind.

They decide to go back into the cave to rescue you and your fellow prisoners by telling you the truth about the world as it actually is. But when they try to explain about the shadows and the sunlight and the colorful world outside, you and your fellow prisoners refuse to believe them. When the former prisoner urges you all to come to terms with your delusions and free yourself, you band together and kill them. Rather than follow your liberator out of the cave, you collectively turn your attention back to the shadows.

This story is, of course, Plato’s “allegory of the cave” from his book The Republic, written in the second half of the 4th century B.C.E. But it’s also us, today. Our 21st-century cave is our modern media system, where truth is a spectacle controlled by propaganda. Some of us are prisoners, some of us are creating shadows, and some of us are escapees. All of us are vulnerable to manipulation.

In Plato’s allegory we’re supposed to conclude that the deluded prisoners are both victims and villains and that the escaped prisoner is a tragic hero, motivated only by pure knowledge of the truth. But it’s equally plausible to draw different conclusions about the cave and its prisoners.

What if the escaped prisoner didn’t have noble goals? What if they only claimed they’d escaped the cave and can now reveal the “real” truth—but are instead just selling a dangerous, fraudulent fiction? What if, for example, conspiracy clowns, manipulators, or demagogues (or conspiracy clown manipulator demagogues) tell us they’re the hero freed from the cave’s shadows? If you’re imprisoned in the cave, is it better to believe the “truth” of the shadows or the “truth” of the escapee?

How could you tell the difference? The uncomfortable truth is that you can’t. That’s why we’re all equally vulnerable. We ought to beware of the shadows on the wall, but also, we ought to beware of anyone who claims that the shadows are shadows.

Most Americans cannot have direct, first-hand experience with political events, either in our state capitals or in our nation’s capital. If we want to know anything at all about the decisions that affect us, we have to trust some source of news or another. Those sources “cultivate” political reality for us. None of us really know if we’re looking at shadows or if we’re blinded by the sun. We only know what we think we know through the media we consume.

There used to be a consensus around this political reality because there was a common news agenda set via mainstream media organizations. Like the prisoners looking at the cave wall, most of us agreed on a basic set of facts, and we mostly trusted the government and accepted its policies. That consensus was achieved via the “manufacture of consent” model of propaganda, where political and business elites used media to shape our opinions so that we’d passively accept elite decisions.

When we think of propaganda, it’s usually that top-down “manufacture of consent” model. Examples of this model could be 20th-century war films, posters, and leaflets created by the government and disseminated to the masses; patriotic symbols and slogans, and monuments to political leaders; or messaging foreign governments use against their citizens (in schools, in the news), and more recently, against the U.S. and its elections.

But over the last two decades, the rise of the right-wing media ecosystem and participatory media has enabled a new form of propaganda in our public sphere. Called the “manufacture of dissent” model of propaganda, it uses communication as a weapon to attack established institutions, norms, and the government itself. Its major premise is that politics is war and the enemy cheats. Those who produce dissent propaganda circulate endless conspiracy theories, accusations of hypocrisy, ad hominem attacks, and ad baculum threats. It’s the politics of creating fear and turning people into hate-objects.

This “manufacture of dissent” model of propaganda has challenged consensus media’s ability to control our political reality. It screams that the old propaganda is “propaganda,” while claiming that its own twisted messaging is the truth. All of this has led to a historic crisis of distrust in our government institutions, with an entire political agenda built around dismantling government power.

But whether propaganda is manufacturing our consent or our dissent, both are a kind of force imprisoning our minds—and both are fundamentally anti-democratic.

Propaganda, after all, is communication as force; it’s designed for warfare. It uses strategies like fear appeals, disinformation, and conspiracy theories to deny our ability to consent. It erases complexity and nuance, and it encourages groupthink and partisan discord. It asks us to think too much like others on our side while preventing us from thinking with others on their side.

The powerful point to the things that divide us rather than the things we agree on and use those differences as a wedge. Or, even when we can agree on the problems, the way that the powerful frame them prevents us from agreeing on the solutions. We don’t have a common reality that can help us mediate those differences.

In The Republic, Socrates, the narrator, solves this problem by advising the escaped prisoner not to return to the cave at all. The cave-dwellers, who only perceive the world through their senses, would not be able to absorb the bright light of truth, and the newly enlightened former prisoner would look foolish, Socrates thought. Worse, the escaped prisoner would harm themselves by trying to commune with the deluded—after all, they no longer agreed about reality, how could they find common ground?

Plato thought that the enlightened ought to rule over the cave dwellers as philosopher kings, but Plato’s solution won’t work for us in the 21st-century (and it didn’t work for Plato back then either).

There isn’t an obvious solution, except for people to agree to communicate for the democratic way of life. That means using persuasion instead of propaganda.

Persuasion is a dialogic meeting of minds in which one person asks another person to think like they do, to value the same values, to remember or forget history in the same way. It doesn’t force. It affirms human dignity by inviting. A person who seeks to persuade gives good reasons and formulates arguments in the best way they know how, always affirming that the recipient of the persuasive message has a mind, values, and experiences of their own and may not change their mind.

Unlike the fast, exciting, and entertaining work of propaganda, persuasion is slow, difficult, and unsexy. It doesn’t make good TV or internet content. But until we’re willing to persuade, and are open to being persuaded, we’ll stay in our 21st-century cave, which provides us with a never-ending propaganda spectacle to imprison our minds.

In today’s era of ubiquitous propaganda, the shadows aren’t real, but the sun blinds. We want to know the truth, but it’s hard to know who to trust to tell us the truth. Most of us throw up our hands and give up—avoiding political news altogether—but some of us dig into one version of the truth or the other, motivated by the status and prestige we get as rewards for being right.

There are those of us in the cave smug in the fact that what we believe—what we’re motivated to believe—is actually true. Simultaneously there are those of us standing outside of the cave looking down at the cave dwellers smug in the fact that what we believe—what we’re motivated to believe—is actually true.

One or both of us are wrong, and it’s tearing our nation apart.

The post What Is 21st-Century Truth? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Years ago at a conference, French theorist René Girard faced a tough question about his unconventional methods.

The Stanford professor’s research involved a close reading of archaic and classical texts from Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere—which is to say, a close reading of ancient stories.  In these stories, he discerned hidden patterns of rivalry, and how we use collective violence to end strife, an unending sequence throughout the long night of humanity.

“Given that we can’t entirely trust the veracity of ancient writings,” one academic asked him afterwards, “how would you measure the success of your theory?”

Girard’s answer was a thunderbolt: “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor.”

That is one unpleasant, but practical and productive, takeaway from Girard’s theories. It should give us pause and prod a moment of self-reflection.

Girard’s writing was seasoned with humor and insight—for he had learned something about himself along his journey, and so didn’t offer himself as a hero or an answer. He saw an ominous world of scapegoats and persecutors. His worldview has important implications for each of us, and how we live every day of the rest of our lives.

Girard, who died in 2015, has been resonating with large swaths of the culture, because his messages about envy, competition, and violence are timely and timeless. References increasingly pop up in unexpected places, from the HBO show The White Lotus to a recent New York Times crossword puzzle.

Girard, who didn’t crave the limelight, would have been amused by this posthumous attention, which is sure to compound with the celebrations marking his 100th birthday, on Christmas Day.

Already, in June, he was fêted at an international centenary conference for more than 250 people at the Institut Catholique de Paris. Other events are planned in other cities—Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Over at Stanford, where Girard was the inaugural Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, a seminar on the campus in July is being organized by the University of Chicago’s Lumen Christi Institute.

The most enduring souvenir of the centenary year may be this: Three years ago, Penguin Modern Classics invited me to create a volume of his essential writings; All Desire is a Desire for Being was published in June. He is the only Stanford scholar to be so honored since Wallace Stegner almost four decades ago. The volume has been heralded with hundreds of preorders, Facebook posts, and retweets on Twitter.

William Johnsen of Michigan State University Press—which published Girard’s final book Battling to the End as well as my 2018 biography, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard—said at the Paris conference that the book marks a turning point: “Penguin books has been the most successful venture in gaining a wide audience for serious books in English for the last one hundred years. Nothing else even comes close … this is a big deal, so buckle up.”

Girard’s public life began in literary theory and criticism, with the study of authors whose protagonists embraced self-renunciation and self-revelation. Eventually, his scholarship crossed into the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, psychology, and theology.

Let’s review some of his more important conclusions.

René Girard at a colloquium in 2007. Courtesy of Wikimedia commons. Public domain.

Girard overturned three widespread assumptions about the nature of desire and violence: first, that our desire is authentic and our own; second, that we fight because of our differences, rather than our sameness; and third, that religion is the cause of violence, rather than an archaic solution for controlling violence within a society.

Where does conflict begin? According to Girard, it begins with envy. We think our desire is something innate, that comes from ourselves, but it’s not true. Others show us what to want. Desire is a social phenomenon, and it is contagious. We want what others want. We want it because they want it. And we will admit to almost anything before we admit to our envy, which is a confession of our inner poverty. Girard marveled at how little we talk about envy. He said: “You cannot talk about your envy. I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy. The real repression is the repression of envy.”

But not always. The American novelist Gore Vidal expressed it wryly this way: “Every time a friend succeeds, something dies inside me.” That’s one good remedy: Laugh at it. Strip envy of its power. If you can make a joke of your envy, some part of you isn’t under its sway.

Envy puts us in competition with others. We are drawn to those whom we imagine are more of what we long to be—and the more we are attracted to them; the more they sense our covetousness, our competition, and up the ante, or push us away. Shakespeare’s comedies abound in these plots.

“We move always to the greatest strength in the direction of the desire we envy most,” Girard said. “We do so because that power is greater than ours—and it’s probably going to defeat us again.” Hence, we are pulled into masochistic relationships with each other.

Our competitive and covetous quest for jobs, sex, power, perks, political clout, or an entrée into the elite clique spread contagiously through society—everybody imitates, and so they want the same things. This leads us to conflict and ultimately escalation—snubs, sackings, social banishment, and violence.

It’s easier when the models for our desire are far away—when Don Quixote becomes enamored of Amadís de Gaul, a chivalric knight of old, there is no chance of violent confrontation; the fictitious knight was long dead, and never existed anyway. But the closer a rival is to us, a brother or best friend, the more heated the competition, the less one can remain aloof, and the more the other resists our attempted appropriation. Our exchanges become prone to vendettas and reprisals.

Hence, Girard observed that we fight not because of our differences, but because of our sameness. Entire communities can be absorbed into the escalating competition and retaliation. Think of our political parties. Think of our wars.

That imbroglio is resolved, since time immemorial, by a scapegoating event that finds a target in someone or some group that cannot or will not retaliate, those who can plausibly be blamed for all the troubles. The target is someone marginal, an outsider who cannot fight back, or someone so far above us that they stand alone. A beggar or king, a president, a zillionaire, a foreigner, or a persecuted minority.

That target is killed, exiled, or otherwise eliminated. This murder expels enormous energy and restores social calm. The scapegoat has the seemingly magical power to bring peace, and becomes seen as a sort of deity, the foundation of new community. “There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture,” Girard said. He claims that the memorializing of this scapegoat—who brought peace after all—is the birth pangs of archaic human culture, but it is also a page from the diary of our everyday lives. We are all persecutors, after all.

So, what is the way out? Girard’s books offer an answer. We must not retaliate; we must declare unconditional peace with our neighbors. The last sentences of his book The Scapegoat put it even more urgently than that: “The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough.”

To enter the cultural mainstream, as Girard has now, is an important landmark. But in his own words, the stakes are much higher than that. How do we deepen and extend the conversation he has started?

The final frontier is not outer space or artificial intelligence, but the space within us, our inner intelligence, what is most deeply human in us. René Girard made a call for universal forgiveness, for that unconditional peace with our neighbor. What does that even mean? How do we go about it? It’s a question I have pondered myself over the years, as I have wrestled with my own deep and ineradicable resentments.

“History is a test. Mankind is failing it,” he said. It sounds like apocalyptic, end-of-the-world stuff, but it has in fact immediate ramifications for all of us here, today, and in the coming century of Girard’s unfolding legacy.

The post Are We Ready to Listen to René Girard? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Work is boring.

I expect many of you will disagree. You’ll offer your job as a counterexample. Or, if yours isn’t much to brag about, you’ll come up with hypothetical scenarios that show that work isn’t always boring. Spectacular as they may be, mental gymnastics of this sort prove nothing of consequence. I rule out the possibility of some exotic work that’s meaningful, enjoyable, stimulating, and not boring for a simple reason: It doesn’t exist.

Work—all of it—is boring.

Work is enforced labor, required by our needs and demanded by others. To work is to do what one does not wish to do. Or more carefully stated: Work involves doing things that we wouldn’t have otherwise chosen to do. What we do at work (and, importantly, how we do it) isn’t what we would have done if we didn’t have to work. Work is a sacrifice, the forced choice to give up the pursuit of our possibilities.

Decades ago, the Existentialists tried to convince us that life is a perpetual project of reinventing oneself. To live is to be free, and our existence is an ongoing, personal project of growth and self-discovery. What was uttered by lips holding cigarettes in Parisian cafés was eerily similar to popular articulations of the American dream today. We’re told that existence is ours for the taking. We’re asked to believe that life is a tree that continuously grows—each branch, twig, and leaf a choice that we can in principle make.

But such a conception of human existence proves no match for the harsh realities of capitalism. The necessity of work that’s born out of the global system paints a much grimmer picture. Because of our material needs, work forces us to give up our freedoms. Our life is no more—if it ever were—a flourishing tree of possibilities. Work is destitute, the death of choice. Thus, if life is choice, as many seem to think, then “working life” is an oxymoron. The more we work, the less we get to live. This is the real reason why work is harmful. Even if isn’t physically or mentally taxing, work hurts us existentially. It restricts our freedom to be anything but bored.

Boredom is the emotional realization that we are not properly cognitively engaged. Boredom, in other words, is what we experience when we wish to, but are unable to, find satisfactory engagement. Lack of proper cognitive engagement could occur when we have absolutely nothing to do. But such poverty of stimulus is rare. Most of the time, we have things to do. In fact, it’s in the midst of those doings that boredom most commonly arises. There are requirements and deadlines. There are objectives and quotas. There are commutes, emails, and Zoom meetings. There are bosses and colleagues. There’s extra work and unpaid labor. We push boxes, make lists, serve people, answer phones, send emails, and drive around. All while wishing that we were doing something else.

When U.S. adults are asked by researchers about their emotional experiences, they report that they commonly experience boredom during work. Survey after survey corroborates this conclusion: disengagement, dissatisfaction, and ultimately boredom are basic constituents of our working life. For instance, a Gallup survey dedicated to understanding and improving employee engagement found that 85% of employees worldwide are either not engaged or are actively disengaged at work. Another survey conducted in 2018 by Korn Ferry, a global consulting firm, found that boredom is, in fact, the top reason why employees seek a new job.

If you need further proof of boredom’s reach in the workplace, just visit the infamous r/antiwork subreddit— an active online community of more than 2 million users dedicated to exposing and undermining the exploitative and hierarchical relationships that define contemporary labor.

All of this demonstrates a clear pattern between work and boredom: the former curbs our freedom; the latter is our emotional reaction to our inability to pursue our freedom. Work is thus thoroughly characterized by the presence of an unfulfilled desire. While working, we crave something other than what is available to us. Our tasks and activities don’t cognitively engage us. They aren’t meaningful to us. They don’t capture our attention. In short, they aren’t what we want them to be. And so, we are bored.

But though boredom is a fact of working life, boredom with work is often, if not almost always, misunderstood. We are made to feel that boredom with (or during) work is our fault—the workers’ fault. “You’re just not doing enough.” “You’re not doing it the right way.” “You’re not being creative.” “You’re not thinking like a leader.” “You’re lazy.” We are told everything but the truth. The problem isn’t us; it’s work. Boredom isn’t a sign of laziness or apathy; it’s what it feels like to emotionally reject a situation that constrains our ability to be free.

So, what are our options when faced with the inescapable boredom of work?

We can submissively accept it. The need to work isn’t going away and not everybody can afford to quit their job or reach FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Work is many things. It is tiring, stressful, depressing, painful, and even dangerous. So what if it is also boring?

Or we can try to make work less boring. We can take breaks, change our routines, spice things up, or gamify our tasks. We can even demand distractions, entertainment, or a Google-like workspace with pool tables, bowling alleys, and other perks. Even if we can’t get rid of boredom altogether, we could at least try to experience it sparingly and between activities that are fun.

But there’s a third option—the most radical of them all—to actively accept that work is undeniably and unacceptably boring. This plan begins with a willingness to wallow, at least temporarily, in our boredom and allow it to wash us over. We don’t avert our gaze. We focus on it and acknowledge it. We experience it. We allow it to inform us that our opportunities for meaningful and satisfactory engagement are being blocked. We let it impress on us that we are currently incapable of actively and effectively pursuing our freedom.

The lack of satisfaction that is endemic to boredom is its greatest tool. We are pained by boredom and precisely because of that, we are pushed to undo its cause. Boredom, in other words, is a powerful motivator. It’s a catalyst for change: an emotional force that propels us to pursue projects that could eventually relieve us from the absence of satisfactory cognitive engagement and the suffocating constraints that work imposes on us. This is no small feat, of course. It demands tremendous effort, both at the individual and collective levels. Collective and often disruptive action is key. Better and fair pay, reduction of working hours, and better working conditions are the victories of hard-won battles that involved coordinated action, pain, and sacrifice.

A revolt against work requires that we recognize work for what it really is: an exploitative social structure that harms us existentially, psychologically, and physically. The revolution demands that we accept that work is not the origin of self-worth, value, and meaning. To systemically transform work and to protect ourselves from its harms, we must first undo its false allure. What better way to do that than by acknowledging that work is profoundly and inherently boring?

The post Work Is Boring—Use It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Forever,” with its catchy “oh-oh-oh, ooh” refrain, and the HBO teen drama it was composed for, Euphoria, share a big, aching quality that has made the show, which wrapped its second season this week, a phenomenon. From glitter eyeshadow to moody neon pink and blue lighting, Euphoria’s carefully curated look, mood, and sound have led its Gen Z audience to engage with it on social media not just as a show but as an aesthetic in its own right.

Internet aesthetic trends, like Euphoria, function as a kind of highly stylized form of self-expression. Their rise is commonly traced back to Tumblr, the visually friendly blogging platform that launched in 2007; today, they have become even more widespread on platforms like Instagram and TikTok in our increasingly digital world.

Even if you aren’t super versed in youth culture, you’ve likely come across at least one or two of the most pervasive of these aesthetic trends, whether it’s cottagecore, a nature-based romanticization of domesticity, heavily influenced by English countryside (think straw hats and peasant dresses), or dark academia, a Gothic upper-crust liberal arts academic experience replete with secret societies and tweed jackets. (Aesthetics Wiki catalogues many more and even suggests how you can find your own aesthetic.)

While the way people engage with online aesthetics may appear superficial, they—like their eponymous branch of philosophy, which explores the nature and appreciation of art, beauty, and taste—can have a deep impact on the way we live.

Aesthetics influence everything from “our choices regarding romantic partners, where we wish to live, how we dress, which objects we surround ourselves with, and the activities we pursue in our leisure time,” as a recent journal article asking why cognitive science should care about aesthetics argues. Because of this, aesthetics can also be used as a political tool.

That is something that the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin warned about nearly a century ago in his most well-known treatise, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

There, Benjamin first introduced the concept of the aestheticization of politics, linking it to the ascendancy of fascism.

“The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he wrote, asserting that in the hands of fascists, aesthetics could be made to distract people from their worst impulses, thus making inhumane acts palatable.

Benjamin was writing in 1935, during Italy’s nationalist war of aggression against Ethiopia, an invasion that is now seen as one of the episodes that led to World War II; his essay is a sobering read today, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Notably, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin cites the 1909 futurism manifesto, written by its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the charismatic Italian poet.

The manifesto, which was published on the front page of the newspaper Le Figaro, sets out to glorify the aesthetics of war. “War,” Marinetti asserted, “is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks.”

Historian Selena Daly, an expert on futurism at Royal Holloway, University of London, explained that literal war and metaphorical war “underpin a huge amount of futurist ideology right from the very beginning.” And it was through this enmeshing of art and politics that Marinetti sought to wage it.

“The idea is this is not just the reinvention of cultural life,” Daly said of futurism, but rather nothing short of “the complete reconstruction of the universe.”

In turn, no aesthetic space was left untouched—from poetry to art, fashion to furniture, ceramics to yes, even cooking. In The Futurist Cookbook, which was published in 1932, Marinetti called on Italians to abolish pasta because they needed to use imported wheat to make it. “We can see here how something that is ostensibly aesthetic—cookery as an aesthetic performance of pleasure—also has this really important link [to the policy Marinetti advances],” Daly said.

Aesthetics, of course, can also be used for the political good. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works shows, for instance, how aesthetics have subverted harmful status quos. Citing an analysis of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” from musicologist Ingrid Monson, Stanley writes that in the hands of Coltrane in 1961, the show tune from The Sound of Music turned popular Christmas song became “a way of taking a white aesthetic ideal and using it to represent the Black American voice and experience.”

Rosa Crepax, a cultural theorist at University of Hertfordshire, who’s written about how aesthetics on Instagram are informing the feminist movement, studies how aesthetics in the digital space continue to enmesh the serious and surface in the present day, and what that means for all of us.

Over email, she explained that today we’re living in a time where “everything, from politics to friendship and mental illness, is becoming aestheticized on social media.” Amid this, she sees that “the aesthetic distraction that Benjamin talked about is very much alive.” However, she added, “digital culture also opens up new possibilities for active participation, and an engagement, through aesthetics, with potentially radical forms of creativity.”

Of course, there is also something to be said for just engaging with aesthetics on social media simply as a way to relax. And for that, some comfort might be found in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, of all people.

Northern Michigan University philosopher Antony Aumann chuckled when I asked him what the 19th-century Danish philosopher would make of the way we’re engaging with aesthetics online today.

Kierkegaard was critical of the aesthetic experience—his writings encouraged people to move away from the aesthetic sphere of beauty and enjoyment toward a more ethical, ultimately more religious way of life. So, if Kierkegaard saw our embrace of these contemporary aesthetic trends as a way to avoid civic mindedness, he likely would disapprove.

At the same time, Aumann thinks the Dane would approve of using aesthetics as a way to promote social good. “If people are using it to capture the attention of the masses and then redirect it toward a moral or political agenda, that would be like a deeply, deeply Kierkegaardian way of going about doing things,” he said, pointing to the fact that Kierkegaard himself used literature to inspire people to behave more ethically.

But there’s a possibility that Kierkegaard could even see the value in engaging in escapist aesthetics purely to unplug.

“We experience so much stress in our modern lives from the demands of work to the demands of morality, even, that we’re overwhelmed, and we need a moment away,” Aumann said. Observing that aesthetic trends function “kind of like a dopamine-based escape from the stress of modern life,” he mused that Kierkegaard might see it as a means to his end, “because it gives you a moment of relaxation, to recover and then return” to the mission-driven work.

In other words, if you need a beat, it’s OK—go ahead and break out that soft neon lighting filter and try out that Euphoria makeover tutorial, if you haven’t yet. Just make sure you don’t stay in that one-hour loop of “Forever” forever.

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Since becoming fully vaccinated, I have found the opposite to be true. Instead of paralyzing me with awkwardness, returning to normal social life has been a profound relief—not only in terms of relieving my boredom and isolation, but by finally giving me the clear social norms that I have been lacking for the past year. While it is admittedly the least of our worries, this pandemic year has been one of the most awkward periods of my lifetime. And that awkwardness, however uncomfortable, has a lot to tell us about the state of society’s social fabric.

We tend to view awkwardness as something that afflicts individuals. Either they behave awkwardly in a certain situation, or—in extreme cases—they seem to be inherently awkward people. In reality, though, awkwardness is a deeply social phenomenon that arises when our social norms or expectations break down. We can see this in the way that the feeling of awkwardness spreads. If we notice an awkward situation, we begin to feel awkward, too—even without being directly involved.

In its simplest form, awkwardness occurs when someone acts in a way that is inappropriate for a particular context. Jokey familiarity at a formal event can be awkward, for example, just as over-formality can be awkward in a more casual setting. When that kind of violation occurs, we often don’t know how to respond; the (mostly tacit) rules governing social situations do not provide guidance for totally unexpected human behavior.

This feeling of uncertainty gives rise to discomfort and anxiety, leading us to scapegoat the person whose faux pas has made us feel so awkward. But only seldom is the awkward person simply screwing up. Usually they are acting according to different norms or expectations based on a different view of the situation. Someone who shows up to a house party in a tuxedo is probably not doing so to make others uncomfortable—they were expecting a different kind of event, with different social norms.

These social norms help us make sense of our world, they clarify our place in it, and they guide our actions. Aristotle famously declared that man is a political animal, meaning that we are hardwired to create rules and institutions to govern our lives together. Some contemporary evolutionary theorists have come to similar conclusions. Our more sophisticated brains are largely devoted to learning how to navigate our social environment. In place of in-born instinctual patterns of behavior, humans have society. In one sense, this is a good thing for the human species as a whole: Social evolution is much quicker and more reliable than biological evolution, allowing us to adapt to a huge number of environments. But it’s not necessarily useful for each individual. Once learned, social norms are often harder for us to disobey than biological demands. Perhaps most dramatically, the average adult human being will hold their urine to the point of poisoning themselves rather than wet their pants.

Being deprived of the comfortable framework of social norms, especially suddenly or unexpectedly, is a painful experience—and that is exactly what happened to all of us last March. But unlike an everyday flare-up of awkwardness, which can normally be resolved fairly quickly, pandemic awkwardness lasted 15 months and counting, as we have had to navigate a continual churn of unfamiliar and constantly changing social expectations.

I remember vividly how the most mundane of actions suddenly became minefields of awkwardness. Going to the grocery store became a minor nightmare every week. We were told to keep six feet away from others, but nothing in the layout or capacity of the store was changed to make that possible. Trying in good faith to maintain our social distance, we wound up hovering around our fellow shoppers—until everyone agreed, tacitly but seemingly spontaneously, that quickly darting in to grab something from the shelf was acceptable. No sooner was that settled that we then learned, quite suddenly, that we should all be wearing masks—which became the most common and confusing source of awkwardness.

Early in the pandemic, the CDC and other health authorities recommended against masking for the general public, only to reverse course shortly thereafter. President Trump resisted and then undercut these guidelines with his refusal to wear one—resistance which was adopted by his followers.

The expectation of indoor masking became the closest to an unambiguous, universal social norm we had in many parts of the country; yet instead of relieving awkwardness, the masking norm often exacerbated it. The problem was one of enforcement, which largely relied on persuasion and social pressure, putting retail and restaurant employees in exceedingly awkward positions. For the masked, the closest thing to a solution—other than shouting matches or threats to call security—was simply to avoid unmasked people whenever possible.

On one level, the fact that masking became such a highly charged issue—even a sign of personal morality—reflects the extreme political polarization of American society. But it also reflects how desperate we were for some kind of stable norm, some way to know for sure that we were doing the right thing. Conservatives talked themselves into believing that refusing to mask was an important moral issue. Meanwhile, liberals reacted to the CDC guidance allowing the vaccinated to go unmasked almost with regret.

Awkwardness is always a sign that something has gone wrong, but we should not let our haste to relieve our discomfort and anxiety lead us to misdiagnose the problem. That guest who shows up to your house party in a tuxedo may not be an idiot who needs to go home and change. The problem may be that your invitation was unclear. In the same way, the social awkwardness that we experienced under COVID, and our clumsy responses to it, reflect more than the inevitable effects of an unexpected catastrophe. Rather, they show us that our norms were already inadequate to help us navigate serious social problems.

Part of the issue is that many American social norms are, paradoxically, anti-social. There is a strong norm against anything but the most superficial conversation among strangers: At no point in the pandemic did my fellow shoppers and I think to talk through how to coordinate our dance amid the aisles. The emergence of masking as a, quite literal, “virtue signal” also fits this pattern—allowing the masked to simply stay away from the unmasked, and vice versa. We successfully avoided awkwardness, but also missed any opportunity for collaboration or persuasion.

The supposed land of the free is also a deeply hierarchical society. The anti-maskers who got into fights with waiters and retail clerks were reacting not just to being told what to do, but to being told what to do by someone they believed should be serving them. For their part, liberals present themselves as some combination of educator and preacher, proclaiming the truth from on high. Few of us have developed the habits and skills required for meaningful discussion on truly important issues. Such conversations tend to devolve into either a monologue or a shouting match—outcomes that minimize awkwardness by either giving one person full control over the situation or allowing everyone to walk away from the encounter altogether.

Overall, what the awkwardness of pandemic lifestyle has shown us is that American society isn’t awkward enough. In our haste to avoid awkwardness, we have cut ourselves off from each other. We treat our fellow citizens as servants, as students, or simply as obstacles—choosing the comfort of clear hierarchical norms over the awkwardness of open-ended and unpredictable encounters with our equals. What is most important in life—and what we desperately need more of as a society—happens in those awkward in-between spaces that the rules did not anticipate.

The real danger is not that we will forget how to behave in “normal” society, but that we will use our discomfort with awkwardness as an excuse to return unthinkingly to our anti-social social norms. To rebuild our life together in a truly human way, we need to get past snap judgments and risk the painfully awkward dialogue that is the unavoidable prelude to real change.

The post America Isn’t Awkward Enough appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But before getting into the meat of the conversation, Joe Mathews, co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy and Zócalo’s California and innovation editor, handed the mic over to the discussion’s sole speaker, Central European University president Michael Ignatieff, author of The Ordinary Virtues. “We have a couple of fewer panelists than we expected at this event, and I wanted to give you the floor to talk about that,” said Mathews.

The event’s co-sponsor, the University of Toronto, is currently under censure by the Canadian Association of University Teachers Council for canceling the appointment of Dr. Valentina Azarova to its law school under outside influence. The censure asks members to cancel speaking engagements with the university, but Ignatieff, after saying he respected the decision of the other panelists not to come, explained he chose to take part because even “in an entirely legitimate censure and protest against a university for getting its fundamental values wrong, there is a risk that if you … have no public events at the U of T where external people can come in, the consequence may actually endanger the value you want to defend, namely academic freedom.”

A Toronto alumnus, Ignatieff is president of a university that was forced out of its Budapest home by Viktor Orbán’s government. “What does academic freedom depend on? It depends on the public square,” he said. “It depends on discussion and debate, and that’s why I felt, respectfully, that I should show up, and I would welcome comments and criticisms.”

“Thank you for that explanation,” said Mathews. “Now, let’s go into it.” His first question for Ignatieff: Can we define good?

“A Canadian’s answer to the question, and my answer to the question, is let’s not talk about good, let’s talk about better,” Ignatieff responded. While the “platonic ideal of the good” is not easy to define, he said, “we can all think pretty clearly about what can be better.” But, he asked, how do you think about better “in a realistic way that doesn’t sound simplistic and stupid and needlessly hopeful?”

As a journalist, Mathews said he can see the silver linings in the global pandemic, such as the American government’s stimulus checks positively impacting the economies of some very poor places. Still, “in the midst of this kind of crisis, to be looking for the good, is that the right use of my time and intention?” Mathews asked.

“I don’t want to take cheerful messages from this, but we need to because otherwise it’s just pure loss,” Ignatieff said.

While writing his forthcoming book, On Consolation, Ignatieff explored “the unconsolable,” spending time with people who have experienced losses from which they cannot fully recover. “Let’s honor that and respect that and not walk past it,” he said of the losses of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, he said, the pandemic featured remarkable scientific achievement. “We have to hold two very complicated thoughts,” he said. “There is consolation from historical progress that science has made because it’s literally saved some of the lives of people watching this program. But it doesn’t console people who have lost someone.”

Ignatieff does think we’ve learned things over this period that are taking us “closer to the good,” including the necessity of investing in healthcare for all, as well as demanding full disclosure in our political conversations. “Truth is good,” he said. “We’ve had some lamentable, dangerous lying from political leaders that we should never forget. It’s really taught us a lot.”

Do you need to see the good in existential threats like climate change, asked Mathews, or is the good a distraction from these kinds of emergencies?

“I hate the environmental pessimism around me that says you’ve got 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. I hate all this stuff that says all the little things we do like recycling and shifting away from meat to vegetarian dishes—none of these little activities matter because we’re all going to die, and we’re all doomed,” said Ignatieff. “The good we need to focus on is the capacity of human beings to master and control fate.”

But, he continued, “good is political.” When he was in politics, he recalled his bid for a carbon tax that ended up losing seats for the Liberal Party in Canada. “I still think it’s the right thing to do. I’d do it again,” he said. “But we lost, and we have to understand that [achieving environmental goals take] tremendous work of political persuasion.”

Speaking of Ignatieff’s time as a politician, Mathews asked Ignatieff if he sees the good in democratic politics.

Yes, said Ignatieff, “you meet people with radically different life experiences, radically different religious, ethnic, racial histories, and you have to somehow bring everyone into the tent to believe a few things together and get a few things done together.”

At the same time, Ignatieff offered a cautionary note on the “politics of enemies,” where political figures from Trump to Orbán rally bases around scapegoats. “Ultimately this is the force that destroys any capacity we have to find the good,” said Ignatieff, calling it fatal to democracy.

Having covered everything from climate change to COVID, Mathews then turned to the subject of religion. Citing the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke, Mathews asked, are such ideas outdated?

“We’re in such deep trouble in this world, is my view, that we need all the help we can get, and that help includes the great religious texts,” said Ignatieff, whether it’s the Torah, the Bible, the Qur’an, or the Adi Granth. This ancient wisdom needs to be constantly recirculated and reused, Ignatieff argued. “The conversation you and I have been having is 21st century, but it’s been going on for 3,000 years, so we might as well listen to some of the smarter people who went before us, and who paid, often in terrible suffering, for what they learned and we know.”

Because of these texts, he said, he never feels alone, adding, “If we all had a sense that there’s a usable archive of ancient wisdom, I think that would help us, and it would narrow some of our disagreements. We would discover commonalities of origin, commonalities of inspiration, that run beneath our differences.”

Audience questions flowed in for Ignatieff in the YouTube chatroom, including his recommendations for books, films, or works of art that offer particularly interesting insights into the good.

“I can think of 100,” said Ignatieff. But the first that came to mind was Rembrandt’s self-portraits. “They don’t elucidate the good, but they show a process of a great man, a great artist, a heroic artist, trying to find out what it means to be to be a human being.”

The post This Period of Crisis Can Help Lead Us ‘Closer to the Good’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But if things seemed broken then—before 9/11, before the pandemic, before January 6th—what does that make things now? Is there anything beyond broken? And among all of this, how are we supposed to live?

Some have sought comfort, enlightenment and meaning in a therapeutic ethos—that familiar modern-day fare of mantras, nostrums, and retail therapy that caters to self-focused impulses and ends up expanding perceived needs rather than sating modest desires. But since the changing of the millennium, more and more are looking for answers in older approaches, mining ancient philosophies of the art of living—from the Stoics to the Epicureans to the Cynics—to transcend modern woes.

The quest appears in scholarship and in popular culture. The movie Gladiator, for instance, draws on the ideas of the ancient Greek practice of Stoicism, which taught emotional restraint so that individuals could focus solely on what was actually in their control. In telling the story of Roman general Maximus (played by Russell Crowe), who reined in wrathful vengeance for vicious wrongs he had endured, the film posits the possibility of a New Stoicism as a guide to living under demanding circumstances. Driven by the credo “strength and honor,” a fictional Maximus followed in the footsteps of real Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard Harris). Instead of wallowing in the weakness wrought by a culture of pampering, the New Stoicism asks, in part, what would happen if we raised the inner bar for ourselves?

And then, today, there’s Bridgerton: a voguish Netflix show that also carries strong resonances from the philosophical past. The show, like other contemporary cultural offerings, doesn’t always—or even often—make its wisdom and arguments clear. But tuning in to the frequency of these resonances, it reminds us that we still try to seek answers, however inchoate, to the ancient question—one we cannot outrun even if we try—of how to live.

It is no wonder that Bridgerton has broad appeal: It would be difficult to find a starker contrast to the grim tableau of suffering and turmoil facing the nation and world today. Bridgerton is unabashed romantic fantasy, a story of intrigue and courtship that serves up its melodrama with a feast for the senses. Scene after scene brings color and light, fabric and food, architecture and art. Dresses rustle, whisper, drape, and float alongside topcoats that caress with velvet a strong arm outstretched and a muscular back rigid with good posture. In the modulation of voices, the arrangements of furniture and flowers and melodies, and just about everything else, pleasing reigns supreme.

It is worth asking to what end. Is this just fluff and escapism, dainties and distraction? Might something else come along with this frolic in opulence, besides the 7,500 costume pieces delivered, according to Vogue magazine, for the first eight episodes alone?

Suggestions of a tie-in to the ancients are obvious. Bridgerton’s time stamp places it in the Regency Era, between 1811 and 1820—part of the longer Georgian period, which was marked by a revival of interest in classicism. Viewers of the show can observe this in the symmetry and balance of the architecture, which drew in spirit and specific design elements from Greek and Roman styles. From architect John Nash’s neoclassicism to Jane Austen’s Aristotelian examination of the ancient moral virtues in novels such as 1813’s Pride and Prejudice, the era of Bridgerton was steeped in classicism in nearly every realm.

Bridgerton is an interesting case because it alludes to ancient schools of thought, but unlike great works like Austen’s—which explore competing moral philosophies with heft, putting them in dialogue with one another to contemplate how one should approach life in all of its aspects—it does not explore these ideas in much depth. The initial scenes of the show assume the familiar postmodern ironic tone—a kind of ironism, so different from irony, that evades the glare of committed judgment. This pose stands in tension with the show’s views of race and women, just as its views of race and women often stand in tension with themselves. (We are to believe that women are at once oppressed and calling all the shots.) Bridgerton walks a fine line between nostalgia for innocence and obligatory self-mockery. It seems to veer off-script from its establishing scenes, sometimes toward earnestness and sometimes quite the opposite. Its intent has not been worked out.

Its references to deeper philosophical themes, too, can seem accidental, unconscious, or indirect. For instance, the frowning demeanor of the romantic hero (or anti-hero?) Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, (played by Regé-Jean Page), offers glimmers of Stoicism, as though he is all about emotional control. But Hastings’ reserve is explained less as result of deliberate decision than as residue of a difficult past—an attribute of personality rather than character. This better fits the modern therapeutic culture’s tendency to see such behavior as the result of psychological influences beyond a person’s control, rather than an inner leap toward self-determination and resilience in the face of outside challenges.

More obviously, Bridgerton reflects a renewed embrace of Epicureanism, the pleasure-focused philosophy par excellence, which posited that life was best led as the pursuit of pleasure. This ancient school of thought placed the senses at the center of what made for a good life. In place of the common tendency to spend one’s life dreading what might happen in the future, such as death, inevitable in any case, Epicureans focused on life’s enjoyments, such as a good meal, long conversations, and the company of friends. Lingering over the leisured class’s immersion in just such activities, the show’s cinematography pays ample attention to this side of life. But here, too, Bridgerton may miss the mark. Ancient Epicureanism taught moderation and simplicity. Its founder Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 BC, was said to prefer a simple supper of bread and water—as a way to ensure that a measured pleasure could be sustained over the course of a lifetime. Bridgerton is more about excess: of fabric, of food, of drink, of music, of drama, of all the senses and emotions.

So, as a model for the good life, does a superficial free-for-all like Bridgerton, which so clearly emanates from the dominant culture, offer hope or harm? If its guilty pleasures save even one person from desperation in the dark night of the soul, in this time of plague and distress, it sits on the right side of the scale.

Still, it is worth looking at cultural expressions and the philosophy of life they inevitably express, knowingly or not. The omnipresence of advertising today, not only for consumer goods and services, but for politicians and everything else, has made manipulative speech and imagery expected modes of human interaction, eroding trust and fostering isolation, disconnection and loneliness. This manipulative mode is one of the costs of the therapeutic culture: When individual needs or wants are the measure of all things, common ground for agreement falls out from under us. Self-focus divides us, rendering other people mere stepping stones on the quest for satisfaction. In the absence of a shared moral framework, critics such as sociologist Philip Rieff and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre have observed, determining how to live falls to the individual’s emotional preferences, which defines social relations as all about manipulating others to get what we want and think we need.

Emotional manipulation in the service of fantasy satisfactions, the calling card of our therapeutic consumer culture, appears here too. For those not imbued with a love of the romance genre, Bridgerton’s protracted bedroom scenes alone detract from aspects that edge it just the slightest bit toward a semi-serious drama confronting lived experience—a particularly inspired bit of acting, perhaps, or another precision of detail.

Some of the show’s so-called steamy scenes can be ignored, but others cannot. For our purposes here, we might see them as signs of a different ancient school creeping in: a thwarted expression of a new Cynicism. The ancient Cynics followed Diogenes “the Dog,” who lived in a wine barrel shamelessly performing all of his bodily functions in the public square, believing in baring it all literally and figuratively as a way of truth-telling against the hypocrisy of the social conventions of the rich and powerful. Today’s cynicism emphasizes base motives yet, lacking the ancients’ ethical grounding, can veer toward acceptance of such manipulations as a realistic description of the way things are.

Cynical touches appear in Bridgerton when, in separate scenes, both the Duke and his new Duchess (Daphne Bridgerton, played by Phoebe Dynevor) viciously use sex as a weapon against the other. It is difficult to know what to think of these characters. Simon (the Duke) is initially cast as a superior—stone-hearted hard-to-get cad one minute, and desirable catch the next. His sparring partner, Daphne, appears to be an innocent, criticized by her more liberated sister for naïve acquiescence to the marriage market. Any sense of her intrinsic sweetness evaporates in a disturbing scene in which she seduces the Duke—they are now married yet all but estranged—to trick him into making her pregnant.

Everything is smoothed over with the aid of terms from the therapeutic culture. Once Daphne learns Simon’s fear of fatherhood stems from childhood trauma and not lack of desire for her, her self-esteem is restored, and all is well. For anyone glimpsing the potential for a genuine alternative in a new popular classicism—a path to ways of thinking and living that resist the me-first mentality, and the manipulative social relations it fosters—Bridgerton’s scenes of manipulation at the most intimate level are sure to disappoint. It eschews the moral clarity of any of the ancient schools for paparazzi-like attention to the machinations of the royal self-as-celebrity.

Even if renewed interest in ancient philosophies of living has reappeared on the horizon, this does not mean new references or allusions resemble anything more than bits and pieces, no longer recognizably related to a conversation about how to live a morally good life. While Bridgerton, like many other expressions of all kinds, might refer vaguely to Epicureanism, anyone reading the ancient texts, or about them, will see the difference.

Given the pervasive problem of manipulation as a mode of social interaction today, do signs of renewed interest in ancient philosophies of life suggest any kind of meaningful alternative? In the case of Bridgerton, the jury is still out. Most of its resonances from the ancient schools seem to miss the most important value at their core: moral goodness. The Platonist school of thought, which inspired all the others, deemed it sacred. After his teacher Socrates, Plato envisioned beauty as an inner quality of the soul and real love and friendship as deeply spiritual. So far Bridgerton prefers surface dwelling.

But one never knows what the next season might bring—and shows like Bridgerton do offer hope of a certain kind, and not only because they provide a few moments of pleasant distraction. They provide glimmers of an ancient conversation whose snippets and sounds have not faded out altogether, a conversation that takes as its very starting point that humans must find a way to live in a world in which not everything, perhaps, but a great deal at any given time, is, when not actually broken, at risk of breaking.

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The question might seem daft, given how gravely privacy is endangered in our digital age. Spies in government and the private sector routinely devour data for insights into our behavior, insights that may be used to manipulate our behavior. And privacy’s advocates contend that freedom and democracy are unthinkable without it. As philosopher Michael Lynch puts it, privacy affords us control over our thoughts and feelings, which is a “necessary condition for being in a position to make autonomous decisions, for our ability to determine who and what we are as persons.”

This idea—that privacy is an enduring, universal, even sacred virtue—is seductive. But it is wrong, and in a few ways: Privacy is a relatively recent institution, and less than essential to democracy. What’s more, privacy has never been secure; vulnerability is its native state.

Americans may be forgiven for assuming that privacy is a foundational institution in our democracy. You might have read that the nation was spawned, in part, by privacy concerns: colonists rebelled against British troops occupying their homes and invading their warehouses and workplaces. Privacy may not have been quite so central to our founders’ concerns, however. The term is not mentioned in the US Constitution—a right to privacy is never spelled out. In American constitutional law, this right wasn’t articulated until a century after the Revolutionary War, by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article. And privacy only earned a robust legal defense in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court under Earl Warren held that a right to privacy is presumed by the Bill of Rights.

It actually makes sense that privacy was a late arrival to democracy. It seems privacy was more revered, at least early on, as a spatial virtue, rather than a moral one. Historians indicate privacy was conceived as a bourgeois value in the 18th and 19th centuries, born of relative wealth. Premodern homes had few rooms, and certainly few that were designated for single—private—use, like a bathroom or bedroom. People all over the world generally lived in common spaces, which were also quite narrow.

This changed toward the end of the 19th century when a growing middle class demanded homes with multiple rooms into which residents could retreat. As industrialized societies became wealthier, the working class looked to enjoy the same benefits as the wealthy—including privacy. The English ultimately considered it a basic human right for laborers to have homes with private gardens in front and back.

The development and expansion of suburban architecture, especially in America, reflects the gains privacy made in the 20th century. You might say privacy is the central organizing principle of suburbia: houses are removed from the street; sidewalks are a rarity in many suburban neighborhoods, thus limiting intrusion by strangers; socializing happens in fenced-in backyards and spacious basements. Since, the 1970s, the average suburban home has grown by a third, even while the number of its inhabitants has fallen, meaning that suburbanites are practically swimming in private space, which seems to be a basic need.

It is easy to forget how new such standards of privacy are. In 1972, the British government formed a committee to report on the state of privacy. The committee found that “the modern middle-class family … relatively sound-proofed in their semi-detached house, relatively unseen behind their privet hedge … insulated in the family car … are probably more private in the sense of being unnoticed in all their everyday doings than any sizeable section of the population in any other time or place.”

But even as the “Younger Report” (so named because it was chaired by Sir Kenneth Younger, an experienced politician who led several commissions reporting on the state of British society) was claiming that privacy had been achieved in the 20th century as never before, democratic governments were finding new ways to infiltrate their citizens’ lives. In the U.S., historian Sarah Igo explains, that included surveillance of home populations during World War I, public health initiatives that invaded and exposed the homes and lives of the poor, and a growing bureaucracy that aimed to address a host of social ills, from retirement to unemployment to homeownership.

Said bureaucracy ballooned mid-century when the Social Security program was enacted, and assigned identifying numbers to all citizens, rendering them transparent to the government in the process. Many critics and commentators issued dire warnings that echo current concerns for privacy.

“[Our] wage-earning citizens … may well resent a system of surveillance in which every individual among them is kept under the eye of the Federal Government,” one of Social Security’s detractors claimed. “Our people have been accustomed to privacy and freedom of movement.” Likewise, a newspaper column warned readers that “your personal life would be laid bare,” “your life will be an open book,” and “you are to be regimented—catalogued—put on file.”

Such concerns soon evaporated, however. The dangers of lost privacy were unclear, uncertain, unproven; the tradeoff for being documented—namely, you gained a secure retirement—was evident.

In the digital age, these tradeoffs—often made with the active participation of the public—have so thoroughly routed privacy that people now have little expectation of it. Digital spies do not have to work hard to monitor us; this is a new era of sharing. Over the last two decades, consumers have become accustomed to divulging their data in exchange for the conveniences offered by technology. Many people expose intimate and once embarrassing details on social media, as a matter of course. Digital citizens increasingly live their lives in public, for all to see.

This may not be the tragedy that privacy advocates suggest.

I don’t mean to minimize violations of privacy, or to say that it’s not important or cherished—because surveillance does open the door to being taken advantage of, manipulated, or coerced. But I wish to offer this caution from history: privacy has never been essential to human liberty and flourishing; and it has always been threatened, and exceedingly hard to achieve or secure.

By understanding the history of privacy, we can better look to its future, and better evaluate proposals about data control. We should be skeptical, for example, about any law’s ability to protect our privacy—and about our own individual commitments to protecting it. We also should be careful not to oversell privacy as eternal and universal and vital.

If anything, privacy might prove to be a dangerous distraction from more important values. In this digital age, privacy itself can be dangerous when, isolated behind our computer screens, we are swayed by, and moved to magnify, all manner of conspiracies and untruths that undermine democracy. It is not surprising that autocratic regimes have thrived on digital communications, and the division, confusion, and alienation they produce.

The health, welfare, and vibrancy of democracy rely more on the public than the private realm—this has always been the case. How citizens organize in public, how they demonstrate, how they muster the tenacity, courage, and creativity to capture the attention of the populace, and sow the seeds of moral persuasion, this is the basis of our common liberty. We would be wise to relearn and apply this lesson.

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