Late Night Comedy and Midafternoon Philosophy

Tina Fey in a "philosophical" mood.

I am loving the recent Tina Fey essays in The New Yorker, in which she talks about motherhood, working, comedy, all the important stuff.

And I have to say that I had a frisson of ... recognition?  anxiety?  pleasure?  when I read her essay on late night comedy and men and women, and it occurred to me:  many of these things apply equally well to my own work of being a professional academic philosopher.

Fey:  "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity." 

Wow, right?  Because believe me, in philosophy, an obedient white girl from the suburbs -- a girl of any kind from anywhere -- definitely counts as diversity.  We're, like, one of the least gender balanced disciplines in the university.

Fey:  "There is a difference between male and female comedy writers, and I'm going to tell you what it is:  the men urinate in cups."

OK OK obviously no philosopher that I know pees in cups, and certainly no one leaves it around, as Fey puts it, "to evaporate back into his body through the pores on his face."  Of course not.

And yet, I feel like there is something about doing philosophy that  -- well, that encourages guys to be extra comfortable in their guyishness, in a way that doesn't seem to happen in other, more gender-balanced disciplines like English.  Like, philosophy guys feel comfortable taking off their shoes at talks.  There's a lot of rough-and-tumble style vocal arguments and trash-talking.  Mountain climbing, scuba-diving, and hiking are high on the list of philosopher hobbies.  It's a blue-jeans-wearing, Star-Trek-watching, electric-guitar-playing kind of discipline.

Fey:  "You have to let people see what wrote.  It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated." 

Probably all the academic disciplines are like this, but it can be a hard lesson to learn, just as it was for Fey.  A maybe brilliant essay that isn't written down is no use at all; a pretty good one that's been published and read is.  So:  Don't fuss.  Let it go.

The process of evaluation is also parallel.  Some people gather in a big room; everyone listens to stuff being presented; those people judge whether the stuff is good. It's a lot like a colloquium -- though, I'm grateful that for the time being at least whether you look good isn't supposed to be part of the evaluation (Lesson number 5:  "Television is a visual medium")

As I said, I had a mixed reaction to these similarities.  Mixed partly because in a way I think it would be good if philosophy could become more like comedy.  I mean, more accessible, more interesting, more fun.  More like something your average person would enjoy watching/listening to/doing over a couple of cocktails.

But in another way, I think philosophy is a little too much like comedy already.  Engaging personal presentation style is really valued, and lots of the most highly regarded scholars really "wow" their audiences with clever power-point slides and cute quips.   Just reading an intelligent and interesting paper isn't enough any more -- you're supposed to have the chops to get up there and really put on a show.

And because philosophy is so abstract, there isn't much in the way of a standard of evaluation beyond "other philosophers thought this was good."  I mean, the heart of our work isn't usually archival, or experimental, or textual ... it's having ideas.  Whether the ideas are good is always evaluated by whether other people think they're significant, interesting, and clear. 

But the thing is that, unlike in comedy, those evaluations have to be made by other philosophers -- indeed, by other specialists.  So there's never any chance to check out what you got on a bigger playing field, to be vindicated in a way that doesn't fit with what the other "experts" think.  It's the kind of thing that, if you've already got a gender imbalance, tends to encourage a gender imbalance.

Fey tells a great story about wanting to do a skit about "Kotex classic" -- an imagined return to the bulky belted maxi pads of the 1960s.  The guys, she says, couldn't really picture it -- because, she suddenly realized, they didn't really know what those pads were like, because they were guys.  But they listen, they do the skit, it's a success.  She was, in a sense, proven right.

For me, it's one of the hardest things about philosophy:  there is never any "proven right."  Other philosophers either like your ideas or they don't; if they don't, there's no experiment, no proof, no live audience that's going to come along and prove them wrong. 

It's just:  sorry, game over.

Down With Optimism, Healthy Living, And A Positive Outlook On Life

Rumpole  of the Bailey, all dressed up for court.

Optimism, Healthy Living, And A Positive Outlook On Life:  I'm sick of all three.

You know, a couple of years ago, I was feeling depressed about getting older and being middle aged and all that sort of thing and I happened to pick up those books by John Mortimer about Rumpole of the Bailey.  Maybe you know the Rumpole character?  He's an old British defense lawyer, always complaining, always angry, but always struggling to get his client off and somehow always conveying a kind of interest in the important things in life.

The genius of Mortimer is that he makes you think Rumpole is an appealing guy with a kind of nice life, even though the list of particulars is staggeringly grim.  Rumpole -- or so he says -- doesn't like his wife.  He likes his kid, but his kid lives a million miles away in America.  He's not a very successful lawyer.  He is overweight and has health problems.  It sounds like the grimmest thing ever.

But it's not.  What Rumpole loves is a glass of cheap red wine -- or well, let's say three to four glasses of cheap red wine.  He drinks in a pub after work where he often jokes around with his colleagues -- both the ones he likes and the ones he doesn't.  He also obviously loves his work, and is proud as a peacock when he pulls out a surprise win.  And he has a kind of ... I don't know but a kind of honesty.  Rumpole is actually a man with integrity, who says what he thinks and fights for what he thinks is right, usually against forces of inanity, bureaucracy, superficiality, and petty-mean-spiritedness. He doesn't usually win, but so what?  He goes and has his cheap red wine and then goes home.

This cheered me enormously.  Because I thought Oh yeah, whatever else you got, as long as you got a glass of wine after work with friends and some people to joke around with, that's an OK life all on its own.  You don't have to be optimistic, striving, struggling to improve, to live the good life.  You just have to find some stuff you enjoy and enjoy it.  If what you enjoy isn't really good for you health-wise, well, big deal.  You're going to die eventually anyway.

Healthy Living and a Positive Outlook on Life, it turns out, are also overrated.  As Susan Jacoby points out in her new book, it's a myth that by healthy living we're somehow guaranteed to have a healthy active time in later years.  Lots of people get sick for no reason, and by the time you really get old, odds are excellent you won't be in good shape whatever you do.  All the sacrifice? not worth it.

Astonishingly, even the church of A Positive Outlook on Life is crumbling.  Actual empirical research showed that the people who live longest aren't the happiest most positive ones; they're the conscientious ones.  That's right:  worry, and don't be happy.  Happy people took risks and died.  Worryers made plans and stayed alive. 

I was listening to BBC comedy show The News Quiz the other day and the always awesome Sandi Toksvig (she's Danish and a lesbian! With a commanding voice and a dry wit! How cool is that?  I love her) said that her father always carried around a copy of a Punch cartoon in which two old guys are sitting around doing nothing in some old-guy-chairs and one says to the other, To think that if we hadn't given up drinking and smoking we'd have missed all this! 

Yeah, exactly. 

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go have some wine, waste some time, and do some quality worrying.

Sexism And Misogyny Are Not The Same Thing

What would a post on women and France be without a picture of Catherine Deneuve?

I just returned from a short trip to Paris, France.  To me, one of the most puzzling things about Paris is that even though it's a bustly city with a ton of people, crowded subways, and -- let's face it -- somewhat uncomfortable and cramped interiors, being there is somehow relaxing.  Why is this?

There are a few obvious things.  Like, Paris is well-organized and beautiful.  Signs tell you not only when the next subway train is coming but when the one after that is coming as well.  Just walking along one of those tidy streets, with those lovely building facades, all a little different but sort of the same -- very relaxing.  When there are a lot of people somewhere, you can guarantee that someone has thought out how it should work.

The ads are interesting, and pretty, and they aren't everywhere.

There are things that are less obvious, though, and I think one of them is that while French culture may be sexist, it isn't really misogynist.  That is, while men and women are treated and regarded differently, and women do a lot of the domestic duties (often in addition to working) and there are the same kind of gender imbalances we have here in North America, in France, people basically like women, feel warmly toward them, and enjoy having them around.

This liking of women -- it's something that seems on the wane here in North America.  There's this whole guy thing here that I don't really understand but that seems to catch us in this double-bind.  If you're a woman who doesn't put a lot of effort into pleasing men with your appearance, then men are hostile on grounds that you're not pleasing them -- or, sometimes, you're just invisible.  But if you're a woman who does put a lot a lot of effort into pleasing men with your appearance, then you're either some kind of tease -- and men are hostile over being baited -- or you're a slut -- and men are somehow even more outraged by that than by being baited.

Talk about a no-win situation.

Now, I don't mean "all guys" or "most guys" do this -- certainly not.  But there's enough guys expressing these views, in the right contexts, for it to be a real thing.  Think about women who are on TV.  If they're not dressing up, forget it.  But if they are dressing up, forget it on the other side:  they're "inappropriate" or "slutty" or whatever.  And if you're dressing up and you look really good and you're unavailable, that's it:  you have to be brought down a peg.

Actually I was thinking about this the other day when that annoying article came out in the New York Times about how these studies had "shown" that attached men find women who are ovulating less attractive than non-ovulating women, even though for unattached men it's the reverse.  This was based on attached men rating some woman questioner as less sexy if they were attached and more if they weren't.  The conclusion the researchers came to was something like, See how mother nature makes it possible for us to be in long term steady relationships!

I'm always so irritated by articles like this.  I mean, consider the very first paragraph of the article:

"The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt."

Are you seriously telling me that these guys think that being quiet and keeping your eyes down can't be a way of flirting?! Do they live under rocks, these people?  I mean, I get that for the purposes of the study, all that matters is that she acted the same way with each guy, but honestly, can't you just say that?  And that jeans-and-a-simple-ponytail business.  As if the whole Playboy empire wasn't based on the sexiness of the girl next door.  How stupid.

And then the conclusions, geez.  I mean, sure, maybe that's what made the guys rate the woman lower.  But couldn't there be a bunch of other hypotheses?  Like, they found her more attractive, but because they felt not free to flirt with her, they wanted to take her down a peg?  "Meh, big deal, she's not so great."  Really, who knows? But isn't this at least as plausible?  How come we always have to leap to these stupid conclusions about What Mother Nature Intended?

OK OK back to the theme.  My point is just that you can have sexism without hostility toward women, and that for whatever reason, we seem to have some hostility toward women 'round these parts.  I haven't even mentioned the most uncomfortable hypothesis lurking here:  that we have more hostility because we have less sexism, that somehow it's the demand for equality that is making everyone so mad.  I haven't discussed it because I don't know if it's true, and I don't even know how one would figure out whether it's true. 

But as to the hostility itself, trust me, if you're a woman, it kind of wears you out.

Genius, Danger, And The Meaning Of Life: What's Wrong With Boring?

Gaugin, Still Life With Three Puppies.

I try be generous in spirit when people start talking about the meaning of life.

The reason I have to try to be generous is that it's so hard to say anything interesting and plausible about this question that I'm always annoyed by the answers people give.

The reason, though, that I do try to be generous is it's so hard to say anything interesting and plausible about this question that ... well, I feel like critcizing is like shooting fish in a barrel.

But I had to really struggle to be generous when reading Ronald Dworkin's discussion of the question in a recent New York Review of Books. 

It wasn't so much Dworkin's idea of life as a kind of attempted performance that got to me -- though, indeed,  I had some difficulties there too -- but more the idea that to live a good life requires some kind of striving, achievement, a rising to the challenge.

He puts it this way:

In my own view, someone who leads a boring, conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements, marking time to his grave, has not had a good life, even if he thinks he has and even if he has thoroughly enjoyed the life he has had.

Later, he talks about the good of accepting risks in a good life.  The kind of case he mentions has become a standard philosophical example -- though people seem to disagree about what it's an example of, exactly.  The example is the Great Artist who has to decide whether to Sacrifice His Family to Pursue His Great Art -- something like what Gaugin supposedly did when he left his wife and five children alone to go off to paint full-time.

It's commonly thought -- and Dworkin agrees -- that when the Great Artist really does produce Great Art, the sacrifice is vindicated.  It's somehow worth it.  Dworkin goes further, though, and says that not only does the success of such a venture make for a good life, even the attempt at such a venture makes for a good life.  We might value daring in life, even if it risks making our lives worse, just as entrepreneurs and dare-devil skiers do.  So the Gaugin types -- they're really onto something.

But look, we can't all be special, can we?  It really bugs me, the idea that to have a good life you have to be trying really hard to create something special and magical, bucking convention, striving to really make it something distinctive and unusual.  Like, it's not enough to be a nice person and good parent and generally helpful kind of guy or gal.  No, to have a good life you have to climb Mount Everest, or travel among some undiscovered tribes, or fight in some war, or discover some new type of beetle or something.

Can we just pause to tally up the problems that have arisen from this way of thinking?  Places like Mount Everest are becoming overrun with adventure seekers; the poor undiscovered tribes who just want to be left alone have had their habitat ruined by oil-seeking outsiders; young people around the world are set to fighting against and killing one another, and other young people who aren't all that interested in beetles are full of self-loathing and worry because, really, all they want to do is have a nice time, maybe have a beer and watch the game.

It seems to me what we need around here are more models for the good life that aren't full of adventure and striving.  Models that show us how to celebrate the ordinary day to day things, like eating dinner with people, going for a walk, and looking at interesting stuff in a museum or a field or whatever.

Sure, you can turn any of those activities into a striving for achievement:  "I'll make adventurous or gluttonous food! I'll walk faster, harder, longer than anyone else! I'll learn all the paintings by heart!"  But doesn't that sound horrible and depressing?

As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the meaning of live, no one has really improved on Voltaire's Candide instructing us that "we must cultivate our garden."  Engage yourself in a practical pursuit, and the boring will be transformed to interesting, the flowers will entertain you, the vegetables will grow for eating, and you'll forget about all these stupid questions like what is the meaning of life.

Imaginary Diseases I Think I Have

According to this site, this is a photo of Freud's actual couch.  Looks kind of cozy, actually.

 
1.  Attention Surfeit Disorder.
Attention Surfeit Disorder is, of course, paying too much attention, and being unable to stop concentrating.  This happens to me a lot.  I'll be driving, and scanning the scene, and something will catch my eye in the rear-view mirror.  I look, I'm interested, I can't turn away.  My attention lingers.  What's happening to that person?  Is she yelling at that guy?  I wonder what's going on.  The most common thing is that I'm concentrating on something in my own mind, and in that case forget it:  I'm in another world.

2.  Alloism.
Alloism is over-involvement with other people and what they are thinking and feeling.  It's being too good at reading the expressions, faces, and emotional cues of other people.  The main problem with alloism is that it wears a person out.  Guy on the subway, woman at the check-out desk, kid giving me a funny look, I don't want to know what y'all are feeling; I got enough problems of my own.

3.  Repression deficiency.
People with repression deficiency can't repress the uncomfortable truths that everyone else seems to just ignore all the time.  Hey, everyone, did you forget that we are all going to die in the not so far away future?  And we're either going to die young, or get old?  And this is going to happen not just to you but to your kids and all the people you love?  When I look at all the healthy repressing people out there, living their lives and not thinking about these things, I'm amazed.  How do they do it?

4.  Antidisposophobia.
Some people can't throw anything away.  I have the opposite problem.  I can't keep anything around.  I hate clutter, and I fear it.  I wrote about this before, how I throw away not just "real life" things but digital things too, and how I even throw away old letters and actual mementos, and how I often get carried away.  I learned today that fear of throwing things away is called "disposophobia" and thus the name "antidisposophobia." Fear of clutter is evidently so much less common than fear of throwing things away that when you Google the former, what comes up is about the latter.  Weird.

5.  Nostalgiaphobia.
Self-explanatory.

6.  Introversion.
Given that I enjoy spending time alone, often in a completely quiet house with no TV and no twitter account, and given that I get kind of worn out being with people, even when I'm very fond of them, I guess you can call me an introvert.  Introversion used to be a personality trait.  But these days I feel like people treat it more like a disease.  Every workplace is all about being a "people person," and everyone seems to get bored and antsy without minute by minute status updates from the people they know.  Even in the library people are determined to be communicating.  Makes me feel like a freak.

The Modern Sad Castration Of Operatic Comedies

I didn't see it at the Met, I just thought this poster by Chagall was too cool not to use.

I went to the opera, and I saw The Magic Flute.  Of course it was great.  It's a Mozart comedy.  What's not to like? 

At the same time, I gotta say that staging-wise, I got issues.  My complaint is this.  Going to modern productions of operatic comedies, you'd think that somehow irrationality, sex, sexism, and sexual inappropriateness were, like, so over that the audience would be mystified by their appearance.  Everything weird and difficult and touchy about sex gets staged in a way to make it completely ... completely foreign.  Like silly.  Like, not comico-serious, as these things were clearly intended, but just comical.

In The Magic Flute, the comico-serious elements include:  the idea that trusting women gets you into trouble, because women are irrational and lie; the idea that learning to become a full male adult means learning how to be cold and cruel to your girlfriend, the idea that some people are unlucky enough to never have love and sex and that's just the way it is, and the possibility that some of those unlucky people will, like the "lustful slave" Monostato, force others to have sex with them.

Can we all agree that these are all difficult and troubling things?  Can we also agree that they're not at all irrelevant to modern life? 

Like all great works of art, The Magic Flute doesn't tell you what to think about any of these things; it just puts them into a certain kind of context so you see them and have to think about them in a certain way. 

But the production I saw just short-circuited all of that by making it unreal.  In this case the unreality effect was achieved by staging the action of the opera as if it were a play-within-a-play, a cute play at an eighteenth century garden party.  We're not watching Monostato; we're watching some nice young man play at being Monostato.

This way, the troubling things aren't real at all; they're rendered completely distanced from us and harmless.  Now the story isn't, "Yikes, Love And Sex Make People Crazy," instead, as my friend said, the story is more like "Oh, Those Eighteenth Century People Were So Weird, Isn't It Cute And Funny?"

Right.  Because now that we've had feminism and the sexual revolution everything's like hunky dory and men and women just come together with perfect understanding and part with perfect peace and nobody feels left out of the sexual lottery. Uh-huh. 

Obviously I know that the distancing isn't really because people think that but probably has to do with things like "Oh, people going to the opera want a Nice Evening Out and for most people nowadays A Nice Evening Out is incompatible with thinking about things like the rape of a young beautiful woman by an ugly, unloved, and unwanted man. 

Sure.  But that can't be the whole story, because the operatic tragedies don't seem to run into this problem, only the comedies do.  We have no problem, it seems, with the other big themes in opera. I went to see Aida last fall and it was staged in such a way as to heighten the tension about war and enslavement.  

Violence is OK; it's sex we seem to be upset about.  It's funny, here we are, willing to post our sex lives and love lives on Facebook and share the most intimate details, but we can't manage a post-adolescent engagement on the operatic stage.

I guess it just means in three hundred years people will be saying "Oh Those Twentyfirst Century People Were So Weird, Isn't It Cute and Funny?"  Plus ça change and all that, I guess, but it seems a little sad.

I Like Human Frailties

From Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  These guys are cute too, don't you think?

I like human frailties.  There are certain aspects of people that we sometimes treat as weaknesses, but that from a certain point of view are really endlessly endearing.  It's like, if we were the pets of some super-advanced race from another planet, these are the qualities they'd see in us and say "Awww.  Isn't that sweet?"

I don't know if it's because I  have a more extraterrestrial outlook than your average person, but I have that feeling about people a lot.  They act, and I think, OK, dumb, partial, not far-seeing, but  ... somehow really sweet and endearing in their humanness.

Humans -- at least the humans we live among right now -- are obsessed with self-improvement.  We're all about breaking bad habits, eating more fruits and vegetables, wasting less time on the internet.  We're pretty bad at it though.  Resolutions fail; self-help books don't help; a couple of months and we back in the candy drawer, munching on the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups while we look at Cute Cat Pictures on the web.

I guess there's a sense in which this is bad or discouraging, but there's also something so nice and reassuring about it.  I think what's nice about it is that the reason we keep going back to these things is that we really like them.  Our love of sweets, of lounging on the sofa, of cocktails, of YouTube -- it's obviously deep and profound.

And somehow it seems to me really touching and nice and sweet that among our deep and profound loves are things like foods, and idleness, and just playing around at nothing.  That humans, for you: loving, pursuing, and even being made happy by, the very simplest things.  It's like the sweetness of dogs when they understand they're about to go for a walk.  A walk? We're going for a walk?!  That is adorable, and it's nice, rather than the opposite, that we're a little like that too.  It's like the way people can't stay off their cell phones.  Sure, annoying, but hey -- people really really want to talk to other people, a lot.  Which is sweet.

I was reminded of this reading the New York Review of Books recently.  There was a review of a book by William Dalrymple called Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.  The reviewer, David Shulman, says one theme of the book is that among all the weird kitschy parts of religious practice in India there is also a lot of genuine, non-kitschy, religious devotion.

To illustrate, he tells a story of his own, of visiting a conference of veteran Yogis in Hyderabad.  He finds that these men, who he expects to have profound insights, instead obsess over the reception of various worldly honors and go on and on like chatterboxes with their own favorite platitudes.  He then says there is one exception, an old man who speaks with long silences between sentences, "as if, after all these years, he was still searching intensely for an important truth, which he may have glimpsed once or twice." He is really disappointed and saddened by the group and their worldly behavior.

I have to say, I had pretty much the opposite reaction to this story -- at least as it was told.  I'm thrilled to hear that when they get together, people who spend all their time reflecting have the same human qualities we all have -- craving love and recognition, liking to hear our own voices.  It's like, Yogis, they're just like us!  That's so much more life-affirming than knowing that someone who reflects a lot has to speak with long sentences in between, which in turn sounds just pompous and annoying.

So next time you're being irritated by some member of humanity who can't seem to get it together, try to take the extraterrestrial view.  Humans:  maybe annoying, but where would we be without them? It would be so lonely and sad.

The Andy Rooney Hour, Platitudes Edition

You know what I hate?  Platitudes about how to live your life.  I especially hate it when people spout platitudes that they obviously don't even really believe in. 

Some platitudes are kind of OK because they function as a kind of anaesthetic when bad things happen.  When people say, "Well, really it's for the best," it's often not true, but I'm willing to cut them a little slack, because what they really saying is "there's no use getting all upset about it now" -- something that is true but can sound so cold when you come right out and say it.

No, the platitudes that piss me off are ones like "Live every day as if it's your last" or "Follow your bliss" or "Live in the present."  Because here's the thing.  The people who really do those things and don't worry about how it turns out -- they're a real problem.  It's only the people who do those things and make it work that we admire.  It's just a lot of hypocrisy.

Think about it.  The people who really follow their bliss and don't worry about where it ends up are the ones who never help clean up, who insist on the most impractical ways of doing things, who don't cooperate or take other people's feelings into account.  They're the ones that when you call them because you need a ride home, they're busy at Pilates and can't help you out.

But when people imagine following their bliss, they don't imagine being a jerk, or "just a child" like Harold Skimpole.  What they imagine is more along the lines of an opera diva.  You know, someone who does what they love all day, and, because they're successful at it, can pay others to take care of the practical side of life.  Because they're successful, you don't notice how unhelpful they are.  But without success, they'd just be annoying self-centered jerks.

Now, now, lest you think me overly dark and cynical, of course it's nice to do something in life that makes you happy.  But as I've gone on about before, there is more to life than happiness.  Many things we value, like caring for children, are proven to make us less happy.  So can't we have a little moderation?  The platitudes are always expressed as if, you know, the more the better.  Gee, if a little doing what you like is good, then more of doing what you like must be better!

Obviously doesn't follow.  And interestingly, the fact that it doesn't is borne out in another platitude:  the importance of work-life balance.  The same people who tell you to find a job that follows your bliss are the ones that will tell you how important it is to have work life balance.  It doesn't make any sense.  If the work is the bliss, why would you want to balance it with something else?

The answer of course is that the work isn't bliss, at least for the vast majority of us.  Some work has fun aspects but most jobs are things you get paid for because they have aspects that are annoying and difficult.  If they didn't have annoying difficult aspects people would just do them for free and for fun. 

I'd go on about "Live every day as if it's your last" but isn't that a little like shooting fish in a barrel?  "As if it's my last, you say?  Bartender! Martinis for everyone, on me!"

I don't hate all platitudes.  Almost once a week I say to myself, "First world problems, I have them."  Great platitude.  Reminds me that as crisis inducing it may feel when the internet doesn't work, the bus is late, or my favorite sweater is at the cleaners -- really, these are the problems of an almost utopian existence.

Why Don't We Have Better Designer Drugs?

Just one of the millions of cool pictures of pills you find when you google images of pills.  I got the image here but I don't know where they got it from or what it means.

Do we, or do we not, live in the most advanced consumer culture ever?  We do.

Has there ever been a world so focused on, and so successful at, meeting the immediate desires of its citizens?  There has not.

So why, exactly, am I still relying on caffeine and white wine as my go-to recreational drugs?

It's weird.  In most domains we have far transcended the idea that for something to be worth buying it has to solve some problem.  No one thinks shoes are just for keeping your feet from the ground; no one thinks cake is pointless because it's empty calories; no one thinks that "having a high quality TV" means you can't buy a higher quality, HD TV.  We make and buy stuff that we expect to enhance our well-being, not just treat our difficulties.

But in the drug domain, we don't use this approach at all.  Instead, you got two kinds of drugs:  those to treat medical conditions, and those that are illegal.  OK, we have three kinds of drugs:  treatment, illegal and "alcohol and caffeine."

What is surprising is that the taboo against recreational drugs persists even in the face of a tidal wave of free-market, desire-satisfaction, if-it's-something-you-are-willing-to-pay-for-someone-will-make-it  commodity approach to virtually everything else.  I mean, you're telling me it's less weird to pay someone to carry your baby than it is to pay someone to develop some feel-good drugs?

I think the prohibition is really a lingering effect of some kind of puritanical you-shouldn't-be-having-too-much-fun kind of thinking.  But there are two kinds of arguments that get trotted out for why people shouldn't take relatively harmless drugs.  The first is that they're bad for you:  they're addictive, they have side-effects, they'll hurt you in the long run.  The second is that being fucked up is, like, somehow "letting other people down" and "not being there for them."

I hope it's obvious that the first kind of argument isn't an argument against recreational drug use, it's an argument for better recreational drugs.  It's true that a lot of drugs -- recreational and therapeutic -- can be addictive and harmful, but clearly this means we need more research and better recreational drugs, ones that aren't bad for you.  It's funny.  I mean, in this past week's New Yorker there's a story about saving the banana from some huge blight by genetic engineering, like putting the genes of some animals and other plants into bananas so that they don't respond to the virus by killing themselves.  And I'm thinking, You mean, we can put worm genes into bananas but we can't come up with an anti-depressant that doesn't cause a page of fine print conditions like decreased libido?  Very strange.

The second kind of argument -- that you're letting people down -- is more complicated.  Sometimes it's a sensible thing to say, like if someone is zonked out on some narcotic all day, then it's probably true that they're not really cutting it as a parent or sibling or friend or even pet owner.  Even a dog can't live with someone who is out of it all the time.  But here, of course, we're just back at point one, because if there were subtler recreational drugs we could feel good without being all zonked out.

Other times it's a less sensible thing to say, like when people make the claim that there's something wrong with having four glasses of wine on the weekend because gee, if something happened you wouldn't be able to drive someone somewhere, like, to the hospital.  I'm sorry but that is a really weak argument.  For one thing, it actually is possible to live where you don't have to drive.  And secondly, Hello, You're supposed to call 911 in an emergency, not try to drive.  The idea that we have to be in driving condition all the time is like driving-mania taken to an absurd extreme.  Forget drug addition; that is like driving addiction.

Anyway, I was thinking about our need for better recreational drugs just the other day, when I woke feeling really tired, and also kind of sad.  And on thinking it over, I realized that the reason I felt kind of sad was that I was so tired.  I'm a person who really likes being involved in projects and doing stuff, and when I don't have the energy to get all involved in things, I start to muse on the pointlessness of life, and then I get depressed. 

I think on this given day, I just had a bit of a cold.  But it was a powerful reminder of how much a mood or feeling depends on physical elements of the body.  I mean, you may be feeling sad, but maybe you're just physically worn down.

And if that's true, then wouldn't a harmless pick me up drug be a wonderful thing?  You could have a whole day of being happy instead of unhappy.

Most of the recreational drugs consumer culture needs are familiar, because people have wanted them for a long time:

1.  We need a kind of caffeine-like drug that has a higher quality high and doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

2.  We need a drug that mimics the effect of alcohol but doesn't have any calories or bad health effects.  Preferably one that doesn't make you feel bad or hungover when it wears off.

3.  We need a kind of Adderall-for-everyone drug.  A drug that makes you concentrate better, but doesn't have bad effects and doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

4.  We need a good aphrodisiac.  Don't we?  Am I wrong?  Preferably one that doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

5.  How about something like nicotine?  Almost perfect as is, except for the bad health effects.  Oh, and the addictiveness.  And make sure it doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

The common theme, of course, is that we need the upsides of drugs without the downsides.  Shouldn't that be possible?  I mean, we can put a man on the moon, yada yada yada, surely I can have my cake and eat it too?

Can't I?

Remembering The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

When I was in high school, my teacher played us a record of T. S. Eliot reading his poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  It made a big impression on me.  I'm not a poetry person.  But there was something about it.

If I'm remembering correctly, I interpreted the poem as being about getting old, and about sex.  As a sixteen year old girl, I was much concerned with both of these topics.  I remember feeling acutely the sense that sense that as a girl, I would only really be youthful and attractive for a few more years.  I remember the feeling every adolescent has, of how it can not be horrible to become an adult, being boring, losing one's hair, knowing one has lost the vitality of youth.  How could that not be the worst thing in the world?

And I also remember identifying, to some extent, with the women in the poem, who "come and go," and with whom Prufrock has such a complex relationship, wanting their attention but somehow dismissive of them at the same time.  It was one of those moments of girlhood when one is reminded of the ways in which being a woman can mean having something men want, even by doing nothing but existing, which is weird when you're young and stays weird as you get older.

I don't remember what, if anything, the teacher taught us about the poem.  But I do remember vividly the sadness the poem made me feel, and the way "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" seemed the bleakest and saddest thing ever. "Well," I thought, "that's no way to live."  A message reinforced by other art experience, and of course, by rock and roll music.

But of course, now that I'm older, I know that there really is no other way of living.  Even Keith Richards has stopped taking drugs and lives a quiet orderly life.  Because eventually the opposite of a quiet orderly life isn't fun, it's poverty and chaos.  Worse, as they say, than the alternatives.

This way of seeing things, of course, makes the poem seem even bleaker and sadder than I found it when I was young. 

In the interest of science, in preparing to write this post, I checked out what other people think the poem is about, and of course it turns out there's all this complicated stuff about modernity and living the self-conscious existence of modern life that I hadn't understood at all, and about how Prufrock can't be a hero because he's worried about what other people will think of him.  Which is all fine, but as usual seems to me such a guy point of view.  I mean, people who don't care what others think about them aren't heroes, they're assholes, and people who aren't self-conscious around others don't know the first thing about love and infatuation.  A life without the intense self-consciousness and anxiety of a crush?  No life at all. 

Probably I am oversimplifying something elegant and complex, and probably this is what my teacher was trying to talk about while I was daydreaming the class away imagining the women with their bare arms and bracelets and thinking about the old man walking on the beach in his cotton trousers and brooding on the tragedy that we couldn't all stay sixteen forever.

A tragedy, by the way, that I still haven't gotten over.  How the rest of you are so easy-going about it, I don't understand.