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Freddie deBoer has a new article out in which he argues that our society has become overly permissive (without ever actually using the phrase "the permissive society"). He uses a few recent articles to set the scene (an increasingly defeatist sense among the laptop class that there's no option but to be extremely online; a qualified defense in the New Yorker and New York magazine of the notion of being an iPad parent), before getting into the meat of his argument. Where before our society expected people to behave in a certain way most of the time, increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid; that there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life; and that people who do hold people to higher standards of behaviour than the bare minimum are being toxic in some way. Where before the expectation was to dress formally in the office, now "smart casual" rules the day (if that); where before it was only profoundly autistic and unemployable men still playing with Lego and cosplaying as Star Wars characters in their thirties, now such behaviour has become entirely normalised among the gainfully employed. The boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore, or if they are, it's the same YA slop their teenage children, nieces and nephews are reading. If modern Anglophone society has a telos, it's "umm, let people enjoy things??"
Freddie's point is well-taken and I agree with most of it: Disney and Marvel adults are contemptible, as are adults taking out second mortgages so they can follow Taylor Swift on tour. Grown adults who don't know how to cook proper meals and eat fast/convenience food for every meal should feel ashamed, even if they don't. Some examples of the trend are conspicuous by their absence: it's interesting that Freddie brings up "adult men who proudly eat nothing but chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese" and women wearing snuggies in public without once alluding to the body positivity/health at every size movement, even though it's a perfect example of the relaxing of standards across the board. (I mean, these people spent years complaining about the "toxic and unrealistic beauty standards" promulgated by the fashion industry and social media, and apparently succeeded in replacing them with - nothing, no standards at all.) But one of the specific examples he cites seems oddly in tension with the others:
I agree with him that, in the modern Western world, there's no longer much of an expectation for people to live and present themselves "authentically": among sufficiently online women, using Instagram filters on your selfies is the rule rather than the exception; cosmetic surgery (in both sexes) is more common than ever; the less said about LinkedIn, the better.
But it occurred to me: for all of the other examples of the trend towards relaxation of standards, isn't this precisely how the people engaging in these lifestyle choices would defend them? "I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin wearing a tie to the office - wearing a hoodie and sweatpants makes me feel more like myself." "I used to read boring grown-up books because that's what was expected of me and people would make fun of me for reading Harry Potter on the tube - I like that now I can read Harry Potter without shame." And so on.
What do you think?
Hey, you don't have to call me out like that!
I do often feel like an odd man out on the motte sometimes in terms of my low-brow-ness; with the exception of video games, the motte seems quite opposed to geekery. (And I don't even like video games very much!)
I can certainly see the detraction of people who seem to eat up whatever they're fed by corporations with the mouth-wide-open meme face, but this just doesn't describe the fan communities I've participated in, particularly those that include a decent helping of straight men. If anything, fan communities of pop culture are more critical of bland, soulless corporate output than outsiders! If you don't believe me, go find a not-woke straight man into Dungeons and Dragons, comic books, or yes, anything owned by Disney, and ask him what he thinks about how things are going.
This is also true about theme parks. To use an SAT analogy, if you want to see the thing that is to the Disney-theme-parks what the motte's wellness wednesday thread is to dating apps, you should take a look at the WDWMagic rumors forum and bask in the straight male annoyance.
In fact, old-school Disney World fan communities have a term for people who uncritically accept every change, believe every new ride is the greatest thing ever made, worship Disney the company instead of appreciating the product for what it is -- they call them "pixie dusters." And they imbue the term with every ounce of contempt with which you use the phrase "Disney adult." (I think you both are talking about the same people!)
(And if you want to see what data nerds get up to when they like theme parks, you should look up Len Testa, who has made a ton of money selling subscriptions to his model of Disney World crowding.)
I guess I've never understood the contempt the Disney company seems to generate -- yeah, the classic movies are fairy stories, and yeah, they're watered down folklore, and yeah, that's not a real castle, and I get it, no real country looks like how it's represented in EPCOT, and absolutely, small towns don't really look like Main Street. But they're all idealized, with the goal of delighting and inspiring; they're mythical, in the positive use of the word. And we (used to) have a term for idealized depictions of things created to delight and inspire: we called it "art."
This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of the recent discussion about McMansions -- I don't exactly find the 'mcmansion style' great, or anything, and definitely find them excessively and cheaply ornamented. But I don't know, I can't find it in my heart to get angry or contemptuous about the styles in which people build their houses. Eh, I guess, is my response.
My view is that highbrow culture abandoned normies, not the other way around -- before some fuzzy time in the 1900s, much of the literature people read were enjoyed by both the high and the low. Shakespeare once drew crowds of everyone from the groundlings to the Queen, and wrote everything from profound monologues about the human condition to sex jokes. Do you think I meant country matters? (That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.) Charles Dickens drew crowds with each chapter, yet remains studied by scholars to this day. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Bible, which (whatever your views on its divine inspiration or literary quality), has inspired intellectual reflection and interpretation by everyone from uneducated slaves to legendary philosophers.
But at some point things changed, poetry became irrelevant, literature became self-referential and obtuse, high fashion became crazy, and anyone uninterested in participating in the intense status competition of the highbrow world retreated to pop culture, because it was the only thing left that didn't have status hierarchies and impenetrable entrance requirements that make reddit gatekeeping look welcoming.
In fact, reddit gatekeeping-like things are important in this conversation: what's happened in our culture, IMO, isn't that everything's gotten so lowbrow because the people became awful, though some element of that is real. What's happened is that the middlebrow, and the on-ramps to highbrow, collapsed. If you want to start on fashion, or literature, or culture of any kind, your choices are now fast fashion/pop culture, or chasing the elusive and always-changing status hierarchies optimized for status signalling and not for human flouirishing. Your options are DeviantArt or photographed urinals; your options are Marvel or French films with no plot. There are no more coffee pots: there are Keurigs or there are artisanal espresso machines. Which way, western man?
(MaiqTheTrue had a good post on a similar topic a while back; people feel like there's no option other than perfection or avoidance, and so avoid being mediocre at things that might give them meaning. The internet and mass media has a lot of blame for this.)
Your point on things like cooking at home, healthy diets, and work attire is well-taken. But critically, these are matters of health and professional culture, not personal eccentricity or hobby. People should cook at home because it's more economically efficient and better tasting, in a sense that could gain ubiquitous agreement. People should eat a healthy diet because obesity and metabolic disease leads to a great many health problems. People should dress professionally at work because it psychologically leads to a higher regard for oneself and one's colleagues, in an environment where personal eccentricity and interest not only is but should be less important.
But I just can't make the mental leap from this to placing a great deal of moral importance on what people do in their garages or basements. Sometimes people just have interests that are obsessive or low-status -- they aren't harmful, they aren't impure, they aren't violating the law or the commandments, they're just doing their silly things at home with their spare cash. I'll agree readily that doing things like taking out a mortgage to follow Taylor Swift on tour is a bad expense, and there are more productive things that people might do with that kind of money. But ultimately, people need their weird hobbies -- even in the old days, rich people did odd things like selectively breed and arbitrarily evaluate various kinds of dogs on standards that have nothing to do with actual canine health or capability. Hobbies are odd sometimes, and that's just how it is. I suppose this is the "just let people enjoy things" argument, but... just let people enjoy things, I guess?
Most of what Freddy seems to care about doesn't strike me as central parts of social permissiveness -- in fact I would argue he focuses on the cultural elements he does because he agrees with the broader sense of permissiveness that's causing problems in society. Scratch the surface of any of his posts, and you see that he's not only not a conservative, he's an all-in progressive, with some areas of strategic disagreement with progressive politics. I would argue that, like many things, this is Mr.-Intellectual-Marxist Freddy DeBoer arguing against things that average people like to signal his great intellectualness and refined taste.
There are absolutely areas where our society has become so obsessed with non-judgment that we've permitted people to fall into deep holes from which we don't know how to rescue them. But I don't know... there's just so many things of moral relevance to critique out in the world, I don't know that pop culture hobbies that are somewhat childish or obsessive would hit my radar even if I did consider them immoral.
But that's enough on that, I have to go finish a LEGO set.
The middlebrow was cultivated and developed by the 00s hipsters, which would indeed probably be what Freddie deBoer's tastes probably run towards, considering not only his social status and age group but also his various stated preferences on his blog. Then the hipster culture either collapsed on itself or was mercilessly attacked from various sides and slunk back to forced poptimism or dumb contrarianism or whatever the evolutions were, and we now have what we have now.
I suppose hipsters could be said to be middlebrow, but not in a way that is ideal; they established all sorts of arbitrary status hierarchies and positioned themselves as better than others because of their tastes. The point of a real middlebrow is that it's confident in itself, realistic, and for the many people: it needs to be accessible and yet thought-provoking, like an iceburg that invites participation but also offers deeper exploration to those who are interested. My point is that these two elements, once united, have been separated; you either get something designed with "enigmas and puzzles" to keep people lost in a maze, or you get something accessible but shallow. It's hard to blame people for reading all sorts of depth into pop culture, when their alternative is things that are designed to be impenetrable.
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