Another Week Ends

1. That Barbie. So hot right now. My daughter turned one last week, and at her birthday party, two of the gifts she received were Barbie related. Did you know they made Barbie-style Little People driving pink sports cars? So hot right now … I’m planning to add to the movie’s blockbuster pot this Monday when my wife and I steal away from the kids on a date.

Which begs the question, courtesy of #MbirdNYC19 speaker Leslie Jamison in the New Yorker: if Barbie is so beloved, why is it that every single Barbie doll becomes a ragged, torn, and disfigured shell of its boxed self? Why do so many girls imagine their dolls to be sick, maimed, or dead? Why is their hair eventually pulled out? Why are so many dolls straight-up headless? Jamison suggests that, for some girls, the answer is deeper than mere child’s play:

My childhood Barbies were always in trouble. I was constantly giving them diagnoses of rare diseases, performing risky surgeries to cure them, or else kidnapping them — jamming them into the deepest reaches of my closet, without plastic food or plastic water, so they could be saved again, returned to their plastic doll-cakes and their slightly-too-small wooden home. (My mother had drawn her lines in the sand; we had no Dreamhouse.) My abusive behavior was nothing special. Most girls I know liked to mess their Barbies up; and when it comes to child’s play, crisis is hardly unusual. It’s a way to make sense of the thrills and terrors of autonomy, the problem of other people’s desires, the brute force of parental disapproval. But there was something about Barbie that especially demanded crisis: her perfection. That’s why Barbie needed to have a special kind of surgery; why she was dying; why she was in danger. She was too flawless, something had to be wrong. I treated Barbie the way a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy might treat her child: I wanted to heal her, but I also needed her sick. I wanted to become Barbie, and I wanted to destroy her. I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be.

It’s not that I literally wanted to become her, of course — to wake up with a pair of hard plastic tits, coarse blond hair, waxy holes in my feet betraying the robotic fingerprint of my factory birthplace — but some part of me was already chasing the false gods she spoke for: beauty as a kind of spiritual guarantor, writing blank checks for my destiny; the self-effacing ease afforded by wealth and whiteness; selfhood as triumphant brand consistency, the erasure of opacity and self-destructive tendency. I craved all of these — still do, sometimes — even as my own awareness of their impossibility makes me want to destroy their false prophet: Barbie as snake-oil saleswoman hawking the existential and plasticine wares of her impossible femininity, one Pepto-Bismol-pink pet shop at a time.

The doll’s infamous perfection highlights one of the reasons why the dolls are so beloved and loathed, but it goes beyond this, too. 

Hearing my daughter first say the word “Barbie” felt like a foreshadowing of all those tyrannical tenets of feminine existence I wanted to shield her from: punishing ideals of beauty, whiteness and its fantasies of innocence. What I fear about my daughter’s attachment to her Barbies is something I fear in myself: that I serve the wrong gods, false ones. But we can’t simply reject our false gods. We must figure out what they’ve done for us. As a wise shrink once told me, “You’ll never get over your anorexia until you figure out what it does for you.”

My own mother, I know, went through her own version of this Barbie grief — when I requested my own Barbie, for the first time, thirty-five years ago. For more than sixty years, in fact, daughters have wanted Barbies that their mothers did not want them to have. This, too, was part of Mattel’s vision for the doll, and part of the reason it was the first toy company to market directly to children, via television, rather than parents. There’s nothing a girl wants more, perhaps, than a toy it seems like her mother does not want her to have.

I understand there’s a level to Jamison’s analysis that I don’t experience or understand; G.I. Joes just don’t quite elicit the same archetypal struggles in men. But this father of a daughter still appreciates Jamison’s review of the complexity of parenting in Barbie’s world. Gift her the doll she wants, and she receives an idol, a plastic Aphrodite to love and to loathe. Refuse to give her the idol, and she’ll only want it more, rebelling against a law given in love. Who will deliver us? Indeed — who will deliver her?

2. Let’s stick with the Greeks, specifically, Aristotle. Two new reflections on the philosopher’s famed Nicomachean Ethics dropped this week, and they could not be more different. The first comes from The Mockingbird Magazine interviewee Arthur C Brooks, whose How to Read a Life column offered 10 Aristotelian virtues that create the metaphorical landing strip for happiness to, perhaps, land (complete with small list to cut out and affix to an office cubicle or refrigerator):

[Aristotle] defined happiness as eudaemonia, which means ‘good spirit.’ To us moderns, this might sound vaporous, like the superficial happy feelings that so many people (incorrectly, in my view) chase. Instead, the philosopher meant that happiness was a divine state that would visit each of us as it pleased. Our only responsibility was to open the door to it. And we do so by living well.

Simple enough: we create the conditions for happiness to thrive, and happiness is more likely to come to us. Be courageous, generous, temperate, and forgive, and eudaemonia will likely come calling. It’s one way of reconciling the fact that happines and virtue often, but don’t always, respond to our efforts to attain it. Unfortunately, a deeper dig into Aristotle reveals that his ideas are not so simple after all. In the New Yorker, Nikhil Krishnan questions the effectiveness of distillation of Nicomachean Ethics to a self-help checklist. In fact, Krishnan argues that the very act of condensing Aristotelian ethics into a top ten list goes against the key how of Aristotle’s vision for a happy life:

The book, though it purports to be about the question of how to flourish, is desperately short on practical advice. More of it is about what it means to be good than about how one becomes it. And then much of what it says can sound rather obvious, or inert. Flourishing is the ultimate goal of human life; a flourishing life is one that is lived in accord with the various “virtues” of the character and intellect (courage, moderation, wisdom, and so forth); a flourishing life also calls for friendships with good people and a certain measure of good fortune in the way of a decent income, health, and looks. Virtue is not just about acting rightly but about feeling rightly. What’s best, Aristotle says, is “to have such feelings at the right time, at the right objects and people, with the right goal, and in the right manner.” Good luck “figuring out what the “right time” or object or manner is. […]

Treated as a serious request for advice, the question of how to flourish could receive a gloomy answer from Aristotle: it may be too late to start trying. Why is that? Flourishing involves, among other things, performing actions that manifest virtues, which are qualities of character that enable us to perform what Aristotle calls our “characteristic activity” (as Meyer renders the Greek ergon, a word more commonly, but riskily, translated as “function”). But how do we come to acquire these qualities of character, or what Meyer translates as “dispositions”? Aristotle answers, “From our regular practice.”

Which is to say, we grow in generosity by being generous. We grow in temperance by being temperate. We become courageous through acts of courage. After a lifetime of practicing these virtues and we begin to reap the benefits of happiness. And yet, Krishnan goes on to write about how Aristotle warns “We need to have been brought up in noble habits if we are to be adequate students of noble and just things.” Good parents, health, good looks, family wealth — these all play a part in the happiness equation, but remain out of reach for many. What are the odds of learning to forgive if one is raised by an unforgiving family? How can one practice and reap the benefits of generosity if they’re poor? What the Greeks called “fortune,” and what moderns call “luck,” plays an important role in Aristotle’s thinking, and the uncertainty of fortune does not sell in the self-hep section. Krishnan concludes:

We have long lived in a world desperate for formulas, simple answers to the simple question “What should I do?” Some of my contemporaries in graduate school, pioneers in what was then a radical new movement called “effective altruism,” devised an online career-planning tool to guide undergraduates in their choice of careers. (It saw a future for me in computer science.) I’ve had bemusing conversations with teen-age boys in thrall to Andrew Tate, a muscled influencer who has as many as forty-one “tenets.” My in-box is seldom without yet another invitation to complete an online course on the “fine-grained etiquette of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” (Certificate awarded upon completion of multiple-choice test.) But the algorithms, the tenets, the certificates are all attempts to solve the problem — which is everybody’s problem — of how not to be an asshole. Life would be a lot easier if there were rules, algorithms, and life hacks solving that problem once and for all. There aren’t. At the heart of the Nicomachean Ethics is a claim that remains both edifying and chastening: phronesis [good judgment] doesn’t come that easy.

Augustine had the better answer by the way. Fix the desires of the heart so that people want to be virtuous, and everything lines up nicely for the gift of a happy life. And thankfully, Augustine knew someone really good at fixing the desires of the heart.

3. Krishnan’s pop-psychology bubble burst is matched by Ross Andersen and his neologism “Foomscrolling.” Mimicking the sound of a fast burning explosion, “foom” is a word that AI enthusiasts use to describe the incredibly rapid pace that they expected the technology to progress. Andersen takes the word a step further, and describes “foomscrolling’ as the opposite of “doomscrolling,” a social media dopamine hit that comes from psychologically positive science news clickbait. While doomscrollers flick through their feeds to read about climate change, the war in Ukraine, or a COVID resurgence, foomscrollers read about new creative uses for AI, breakthroughs in cancer research, or, in Andersen’s case, the LK-99 room temperature superconductor (fake) news that broke last week. 

Not every emerging technology will lead to foomscrolling. When its extraordinary powers can be demonstrated in some immediately recognizable visual form — two-tone chat screenshots, say, or floaty rocks — the behavior is more likely to occur. More important, to be eligible for foomscrolling, an emerging technology needs to be the kind of thing that could plausibly level up the species. (The Apollo missions would have led to endless foomscrolling; imagine 1 million reposts of the Earthrise photo captioned we are so back.) GLP-1-receptor-activating drugs, like the one that’s in Ozempic, provide an instructive counterexample. Despite constituting a long-hoped-for miracle — a weight-loss medicine that works — they address only certain problems. No one is posting that these drugs will end up solving climate change; Ozempic won’t prompt anyone to foomscroll. […]

Peak superconductor foomscrolling may have already passed. But the cultural desire that fueled it — the hunger for a new tool that will lift us out of our human frailty and onto some smooth exponential trajectory to a shimmering and deathless future — that looks to be quite resilient. That collective longing may have been with us since Olduvai, in one form or another. The internet only magnifies it into a kind of searchlight. I imagine that its beam will soon find something else to lock onto, something new for the world’s insomniacs to Google in the dead of night, in the hope that maybe, this time, the foom will be real.

4. Tara Isabella Burton is making the rounds in promotion of her new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. This excerpt over at Plough magazine details the American Gilded Age shift in popular life toward the mythos of the self-made man. A mix of technological innovation, social Darwinism, and spiritual determinism allowed the culture of the time to bless success and demonize the poor. The whole essay is worth a read, but the two anecdotes below from Rockefeller and Carnegie are as eye-opening as they are shocking. David Zahl might call it “peak #Seculosity,” the gilded age’s attempt to find self-justification and righteousness in wealth:

John D. Rockefeller, at one time the country’s richest man, was also a regular churchgoer and Sunday school teacher at the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church, where he frequently sought to justify his own wealth on religious grounds. In one Sunday school address, Rockefeller summarily informed his young and impressionable listeners that “the growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest” and thus a fully appropriate subject to discuss before church. The Christian squeamishness about the less fortunate had to be squashed. After all, he insisted, “the American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.” This wasn’t, he hastened to add, an “evil tendency” but rather “the working out of a law of Nature and a law of God.”

Likewise, another of the Gilded Age’s most successful self-made men, Andrew Carnegie, understood his dizzying wealth as the justified reward of following natural law. In his autobiography, Carnegie describes the first time he read Herbert Spencer on social Darwinism in language that sounds uncannily like a religious conversion. “Light came in as a flood,” Carnegie recalled, “and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I have found the truth of evolution.” That truth was that human beings like Carnegie were supposed to be rich. “Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation,” Carnegie rhapsodized, “nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. His face is turned towards the light.”

5. In humor this week, yours truly got a kick out of this one from the Hard Times: Help! Jesus Took the Wheel and He’s Hogging the Aux. Surprisingly, not as irreverent as you’d expect. Also, Man Relieved Sounds of Trumpets Echoing Through Town Is Start of Apocalypse, Not Some Ska Band. Reductress continues the music theme with I Went to a Concert and the Fans Were Annoying, Which Made Me Realize I’m Annoying. And please also enjoy Winston Churchill Quote or Taylor Swift Lyric.

6. Remember trigger warnings? If it seems like the practice of adding trigger warnings to essays, presentations, and media has fallen to the side, you’re not wrong. It was a decade ago, recalls Jill Filipovic in the Atlantic, that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning,” but the impacts of the practice and the societal assumptions that surround it are now being called into question. Filipovic writes:

My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it. 

Feminist writers were trying to make our little corner of the internet a gentler place, while also giving appropriate recognition to appallingly common female experiences that had been pushed into the shadows. To some extent, those efforts worked. But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

Shifting through the latest research on trauma, Filipovic writes about the damage that our perception of an event can have. The stories we tell ourselves about our victimhood or resilience and our suffering can dictate our self-understanding, whether they are true stories or not.  

“A person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,” [researcher Martin] Seligman told me. “But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”

Filipovic genuinely wonders whether a generation of young women have internalized victimhood and, as a result, become less convinced and capable of navigating life’s harder challenges. The question to ask, then, is how do we make our young women (and also young men!) more resilient? It’s no easy answer, that’s for sure. Mirroring her observations, David Brooks articulated this week that the problem isn’t exclusive to left leaning and progressive circles:

The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators — from Senator Josh Hawley to an army of masculinist influencers. This coalition seemed at first like a bunch of rugged individualists telling the snowflakes of the world to toughen up and stop whining. But you didn’t have to hang around this world long to see that they merely represented the flip side of the fragile victim mind-set.

The right-wing victimologists feel beset by hidden forces trying to oppress them, by a culture that conspires to unman them, dark shadowy conspiracies all around. Donald Trump sets the world record for whining about how unfair the world is to him.

As the historian and anthropologist Danielle Carr wrote in an essay in New York magazine, recent right-wing narratives, even J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” often follow the trauma formula: “Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name.”

Left or right, apparently we’re all victims now.

The instability of the self has created an immature public culture — impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day.

St. Paul weighed in on the question of resilience too, by the way, in a different time addressing a different problem. The early church certainly had a stronger claim to victimhood than anyone in the modern west, and so the apostle needed the newborn church community in Rome to become resilient in the face of targeted social and political attack. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Rom 5:3-5) Resilience, according to Paul, comes from endurance, character, and hope, all of which is buttressed by a foundation of love against the dissolving impact of shame. Love, says St. Paul, is what ultimately leads to resilience. Fix that, and everything else should fall into place. In light of love, suffering becomes the manure that grows hope, character, and endurance. Yeah, it stinks, but the end result is beautiful.

Strays:

• Mbird writer Jason Micheli just dropped his new book,  A Quid without Any Quo: Gospel Freedom according to Galatians. You’ll notice a pair of Mockingcast related blurbs on the back of the book, including this one: “Take a deep dive with Jason Micheli into why grace frees us to live actual Christian lives. Jesus didn’t come as a moral obligation but as a merciful consolation. And since the church lives in theological crisis on the distinction, this book couldn’t have come at a better time.”
• Speaking of Mockingbird friends, the team at Storymakers just released their second Teen Zine! Take a look at their exploration of identity in a 300 page journal, reflection, and doodle book. 
• Bluey fans – don’t miss the celebratory Threads post from earlier this week, offering one-post reviews of every new episode that dropped in the U.S. Stories, Tradies, and Dirt are highlights.
• Sympathy for Johnny Football? The new Untold documentary on Netflix goes behind the scenes with college football prodigy Johnny Manziel to talk about mental health, substance abuse, suicide, and the like. See this interview from Pat McAffee’s youtube show, clipped to the relevant passage.
• Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and songwriter for The Band has been released. See David Zahl’s appreciation of The Band and Levon Helm here, and Robertson’s unexpectedly blessed Christmas Tune, Christmas Must Be Tonight, here.