Lorenzo Warby on emasculated entertainment; Frank Furedi offers a perspective on a Drag Queen; Rob Henderson on Eric Hoffer; Wilcox and Wang on Marriage and Happiness
Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the free love party to show that marriage should not be normative? Why, after millennia of marriage norms and laws that are similar in every civilized context from China to the Middle East to Europe, does the pro-marriage party have to show that it is better? Why should the burden of proof be on the defense here? Why would happiness be the measure of whether or not marriage was good? Could not marriage be preferable even if it makes people more unhappy?
The happiest people are opium addicts in the midst of a high. Really, nothing compares to it. Being high feels really really really really really good.
If we really wanted to maximize social happiness, we would create a great mechanism for introducing children to opium, and then guiding them to a steady adulthood of functional addiction. Opium users achieve heights of happiness that are unimaginable to people in the straight life. We could even euthanize users who are at some problematic stage in their addiction to preserve their happiness at its peak. Hence the problem with picking pleasure as something to optimize for at the societal level.
Regarding a presumption that something that has existed (and worked) for thousands of years should be given priority, remember that another theme of this post is the attitude that everybody in the past was bad. Or, at least, that people now are so much better than those in the past.
Well, "We have always done it this way" is a pretty poor argument, both epistemically in the sense of "is continuing to do this good?" and rhetorically in the sense of convincing people who doubt that continuing to do it is good. Tradition and standardization of a norm across groups is decent evidence that something is good and adaptive, but it isn't proof: many things can be both traditional and common yet morally wrong, or simply no longer adaptive given changes in reality. The question becomes more "This seems to have worked before, but does it still work now?" The presumption should be "Yes" I suspect, but by the time you are asking the question as a cultural issue, most people have apparently already started to doubt that, so more evidence is needed.
Funny your description of opium, it immediately made me think "Isn't that what we did with alcohol for a very long time?" :D Functional alcoholism to keep people going, trying to avoid the overly damaging excesses.
Of course the problem with maximizing social happiness is not happiness, but trying to maximize it from on high. The "right" amount of happiness, and how to achieve it, what tradeoffs to make with what time horizon, etc. is a quintessentially individual decision. No one can manage that for someone else with any degree of success, much less manage it for a society of different people. Some people care more about happiness than others, and everyone has pretty different paths to happiness that change over time. A society that is good at "maximizing happiness" is a society that allows people the breadth of freedoms to manage their own happiness well, without impinging on the rights of others, and offering good advice on how to do so. The first two involve the state perhaps, but the last probably is mostly a social issue.
It's not a bad argument when we are talking about the law. Nearly every legal argument can be characterized as "we have always done it this way, so you are bound to continue doing it this way." Even legal arguments that attempt to propose an alternative are often "if you slant your head at juuust this angle, we've actually always been doing it my way; or rather, the text of the law you are bound to follow says you must do it the new way and not the old way, and you have been reading it all wrong this whole time." As marriage is generally a legal issue, it's worth arguing about it as a legal issue.
In contemporary philosophy, yes, tradition holds no weight, but no one sensible trusts their life to a philosopher. When the chips are down, we trust our freedom and our lives to professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants, all of whom have skin in the game and are bound by traditional requirements and some measure of evidence-based methodology. The doctor cannot suddenly say "the reasonable treatment for an infected wound is a course of antibiotics, but I think rhythmic chanting at a specific frequency will work better for you" and not expose himself to serious liability. We do lose out on some innovation from this (what if such a method really is better?), but the way things have worked out, in practical philosophy, the masses prefer the tried and tested to the novel and experimental.
>The "right" amount of happiness, and how to achieve it, what tradeoffs to make with what time horizon, etc. is a quintessentially individual decision. No one can manage that for someone else with any degree of success, much less manage it for a society of different people.
Well, let's look to Washington D.C. and see how many people who live there agree with these statements. There are a whole lot of those people who believe quite fervently that they exist to manage the happiness of our entire society from up on high, and employ a vast apparatus of legal control and taxation to achieve those ends. They also don't care about success... it's really more about the journey than the destination for them.
A tradition is a solution to a problem that works so well that the original problem has been forgotten. Sometimes the problem has gone away. Sometimes it hasn't.
"I refuse to cite happiness research, even when the researchers support my positions."
It's even worse when they do cross-country comparisons. The word's meaning is vague enough even for people in the same culture using the same language. But some researchers still publish surveys purporting to compare attitudes of Russians, Japanese, Mexicans, Nigerians, etc. and that's just totally nuts.
Still, it raises the question of what evidence would you accept in support of a claim to provide advice in the form of "on average, if people choose to follow this life-script, they tend to end up happier."
Regarding what one might accept: Suicide rates show revealed preferences pretty well, although only above a certain threshold, and again causality is a mess. That might be about it though... it is very difficult to imagine survey questions that don't fall prey to the surveyed interpreting both the question and the answer differently.
Substance abuse is a little tricky, since the line between “life enhancing use” and “life damaging use “ is a bit fuzzy and different for everyone. For instance you can’t just count alcoholic drinks a day to see whether someone has a problem, you’d have to actually look closely at their life. Additionally, you have examples like me: I don’t drink or use anything at all, but I am not happy.
Now things like hard drug use, heroine and crack, maybe meth, that’s probably a pretty good proxy if you can get accurate counts.
Emasculated entertainment: British tv drama serials can teach Hollywood a thing or two about non-binary gender, race hustling etc forms of 'entertainment'.
To pick just one example: 'Collateral' was a 2018 BBC fictionalised expose of Britain's dark underbelly in which human-trafficking is orchestrated not by shady foreign mafias but by quintessentially British businessmen and ex-military types. Illegal immigrants are mostly nice people whereas it is hard to find any decent and sane white people in Britain apart from a few who have the courage to spout some much needed left/liberal outrage at the state of this “nasty little country”. And as for decent and likeable people; these are most likely to be found in the ‘lgbt community’.
Tv schedules are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick....Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick...Gay Couple included – Tick.... (Post 2017 update: transgender characters urgently needed). More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course). By its final episode Collateral had ticked every box." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
Philosopher A: “I wish we could disperse happiness to mankind.”
Philosopher B: “I’d rather we could disperse common sense.”
I’ve always liked this exchange because it helps point out the fallacy of pursuing happiness, a state of mind/emotion that is ineffable and, as many point out, is so subjective that it’s nearly meaningless to measure.
Your opinion on happiness measurement seems entirely anti-science to me and you use at least one strawman in your argument.
First, while I agree happiness measurement has all the weaknesses you state and that bad measurement can be misleading, if one understands its limits, it can be more useful than no measurement.
Assuming women are happier because they are married rather than married because they are happier in the absence of evidence corroborating the cause and effect is bad science, not bad measurement.
Second, we get better at measurement by first doing it poorly and gradually learning to do it better. We rarely get anything in science right the first time. Incrementalism is inherent in almost everything humans do. As a conservative, I'm surprised you don't see the importance of this.
I made an unsupported statement about the usefulness of happiness measurement. Taking the case of married and single women, the measurement provides an excellent prod to trying to figure out why married women might be happier.
Are drag queens mocking women, or trying to be them because they want to be the stereotype? That seems like the distinction there. My impression of black face was that it was to make fun of blacks and black culture, not a desire to live as a black person (if even for an evening) and be treated as one, whereas drag queens seem to genuinely wish to be women, or at least the strange stereotype of a woman they have in mind.
The difference between mocking and imitation as flattery seems to be the case here.
This is a strawman. I suggest the correct question is whether blackface/drag causes harm to the imitated group. I don't have an answer to that. I don't know how much harm there is to either and I don't know how much is too much. That said, I'd argue blackface did more harm than drag does.
Drag Queen. Two questions to ask about "offensive" behavior. Is anyone actually offended by it. Did the performer of the action reasonably know that someone would be offended.
My guess is that few women feel offense by men in drag and that the men in drag are not doing it to "mock" women.
I've never been tempted to actually read his stuff at full length, but through these links lists I have come to associate the name Lorenzo Warby with poorly evidenced free associating observations worthy of Freud himself.
"Again, I’m all for marriage and children. But I’m all against happiness research. I refuse to cite happiness research, even when the researchers support my positions."
No less middlebrow a publication than National Geographic (you've come a long way, baby!) posits that "... many modern drag queens credit drag balls as the true origin of their art form. Held in secret, these competitions were pioneered by Black and Latino performers ..."
The "Latino" part seems to be pro forma, the article makes no further mention of it, and as the article mostly concerns the 19th century, it's nonsensical.
As you can see from the below excerpt, objection on the basis of misogyny has in some degree been anticipated. Also: objection based on drag's ties to the minstrelsy tradition generally. The phenomenon may now be attributed to private parties that were subject to raids; the performers, or guests, were "vogue-ing" as the white women of the plantation, a political act.
Nat. Geo. has saved drag! It has apparently not saved itself however.
"Who was the first drag queen?
Few traces remain of the earliest drag balls because participating in them was extremely risky due to gender and social stigmas.
But Lady J says that drag balls can be largely credited to Black and Latino performers. Excluded from or prevented from winning pageants held for white drag performers and female impersonators, Black drag artists began to host their own competitions.
Some scholars believe that annual galas held in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood paved the way in the late 1860s. But others argue that William Dorsey Swann’s dance parties in Washington, D.C. are the first concrete evidence we have of drag balls.
Born enslaved in 1858 in Maryland, Swann began to host drag balls as early as 1882. He was also the first in history to describe himself as a “queen of drag,” a precursor to the modern drag queen.
(12 historic LGBTQ figures who changed the world.)
Swann’s story came to light in 2005, when Channing Joseph, a writer and historian, found an 1888 report in The Washington Post about a police raid on Swann’s home. The report said Swann’s guests wore satin dresses and fascinators and likely competed in a cakewalk, a dance resembling voguing that enslaved people had invented to mimic plantation owners. Swann tried to prevent the police from entering, which Joseph writes allowed a few guests to escape before he was arrested.
These parties had been going on in secret for years, with invitations whispered among men—each facing the possibility of arrest for charges related to prostitution or homosexuality. As Joseph wrote in a 2020 essay for The Nation, Swann’s home had also been raided in 1887, and he had also served a short jail sentence in 1882 after he was caught stealing party supplies.
Swann and his drag balls were also pioneers in another sense: as defenders of the queer community’s right to assemble. Not only had Swann attempted to fight the 1888 arrest, but in 1896, he also wrote to President Grover Cleveland to demand a pardon—but he was denied."
"Blacking Up" and the whole culture that surrounded it for 120 years was more than mockery. It was an opportunity to inhabit negro stereotypes and enjoy the freedom of blackness, without the risks. Nineteenth Century American mocked the Germans and the Irish mercilessly, but there was nothing like an Irish or German equivalent to the super-popular blackface minstrel shows. In the same way, male transvestitism can be a parody or mockery of female stereotypes (especially when it is undertaken by gay men), but in it's current faddish form, it also offers a temporary escape from the responsibilities of maleness for young heterosexual men who are afraid they may not be up to what society expects of them as adults. Older male transvestites probably have complex psychiatric issues along with genetic quirks. In any case, in today's simplistic pop-cultural world of tit-for-tat cancelling, it would seem to be perfectly correct, as Arnold says, to disapprove of transvestitism on the same grounds that we frown upon blackface -- in any case, it's time we grew out of both.
Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the free love party to show that marriage should not be normative? Why, after millennia of marriage norms and laws that are similar in every civilized context from China to the Middle East to Europe, does the pro-marriage party have to show that it is better? Why should the burden of proof be on the defense here? Why would happiness be the measure of whether or not marriage was good? Could not marriage be preferable even if it makes people more unhappy?
The happiest people are opium addicts in the midst of a high. Really, nothing compares to it. Being high feels really really really really really good.
If we really wanted to maximize social happiness, we would create a great mechanism for introducing children to opium, and then guiding them to a steady adulthood of functional addiction. Opium users achieve heights of happiness that are unimaginable to people in the straight life. We could even euthanize users who are at some problematic stage in their addiction to preserve their happiness at its peak. Hence the problem with picking pleasure as something to optimize for at the societal level.
Regarding a presumption that something that has existed (and worked) for thousands of years should be given priority, remember that another theme of this post is the attitude that everybody in the past was bad. Or, at least, that people now are so much better than those in the past.
Well, "We have always done it this way" is a pretty poor argument, both epistemically in the sense of "is continuing to do this good?" and rhetorically in the sense of convincing people who doubt that continuing to do it is good. Tradition and standardization of a norm across groups is decent evidence that something is good and adaptive, but it isn't proof: many things can be both traditional and common yet morally wrong, or simply no longer adaptive given changes in reality. The question becomes more "This seems to have worked before, but does it still work now?" The presumption should be "Yes" I suspect, but by the time you are asking the question as a cultural issue, most people have apparently already started to doubt that, so more evidence is needed.
Funny your description of opium, it immediately made me think "Isn't that what we did with alcohol for a very long time?" :D Functional alcoholism to keep people going, trying to avoid the overly damaging excesses.
Of course the problem with maximizing social happiness is not happiness, but trying to maximize it from on high. The "right" amount of happiness, and how to achieve it, what tradeoffs to make with what time horizon, etc. is a quintessentially individual decision. No one can manage that for someone else with any degree of success, much less manage it for a society of different people. Some people care more about happiness than others, and everyone has pretty different paths to happiness that change over time. A society that is good at "maximizing happiness" is a society that allows people the breadth of freedoms to manage their own happiness well, without impinging on the rights of others, and offering good advice on how to do so. The first two involve the state perhaps, but the last probably is mostly a social issue.
It's not a bad argument when we are talking about the law. Nearly every legal argument can be characterized as "we have always done it this way, so you are bound to continue doing it this way." Even legal arguments that attempt to propose an alternative are often "if you slant your head at juuust this angle, we've actually always been doing it my way; or rather, the text of the law you are bound to follow says you must do it the new way and not the old way, and you have been reading it all wrong this whole time." As marriage is generally a legal issue, it's worth arguing about it as a legal issue.
In contemporary philosophy, yes, tradition holds no weight, but no one sensible trusts their life to a philosopher. When the chips are down, we trust our freedom and our lives to professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants, all of whom have skin in the game and are bound by traditional requirements and some measure of evidence-based methodology. The doctor cannot suddenly say "the reasonable treatment for an infected wound is a course of antibiotics, but I think rhythmic chanting at a specific frequency will work better for you" and not expose himself to serious liability. We do lose out on some innovation from this (what if such a method really is better?), but the way things have worked out, in practical philosophy, the masses prefer the tried and tested to the novel and experimental.
>The "right" amount of happiness, and how to achieve it, what tradeoffs to make with what time horizon, etc. is a quintessentially individual decision. No one can manage that for someone else with any degree of success, much less manage it for a society of different people.
Well, let's look to Washington D.C. and see how many people who live there agree with these statements. There are a whole lot of those people who believe quite fervently that they exist to manage the happiness of our entire society from up on high, and employ a vast apparatus of legal control and taxation to achieve those ends. They also don't care about success... it's really more about the journey than the destination for them.
A tradition is a solution to a problem that works so well that the original problem has been forgotten. Sometimes the problem has gone away. Sometimes it hasn't.
"I refuse to cite happiness research, even when the researchers support my positions."
It's even worse when they do cross-country comparisons. The word's meaning is vague enough even for people in the same culture using the same language. But some researchers still publish surveys purporting to compare attitudes of Russians, Japanese, Mexicans, Nigerians, etc. and that's just totally nuts.
Still, it raises the question of what evidence would you accept in support of a claim to provide advice in the form of "on average, if people choose to follow this life-script, they tend to end up happier."
Regarding what one might accept: Suicide rates show revealed preferences pretty well, although only above a certain threshold, and again causality is a mess. That might be about it though... it is very difficult to imagine survey questions that don't fall prey to the surveyed interpreting both the question and the answer differently.
I was thinking along these same lines- suicides, substance abuse, etc.
Substance abuse is a little tricky, since the line between “life enhancing use” and “life damaging use “ is a bit fuzzy and different for everyone. For instance you can’t just count alcoholic drinks a day to see whether someone has a problem, you’d have to actually look closely at their life. Additionally, you have examples like me: I don’t drink or use anything at all, but I am not happy.
Now things like hard drug use, heroine and crack, maybe meth, that’s probably a pretty good proxy if you can get accurate counts.
I think you look at ODs and liver disease statistics.
"If you and I fill out a happiness survey".
Here's a survey question: "Are you the kind of person who would take part in a survey?"
Emasculated entertainment: British tv drama serials can teach Hollywood a thing or two about non-binary gender, race hustling etc forms of 'entertainment'.
To pick just one example: 'Collateral' was a 2018 BBC fictionalised expose of Britain's dark underbelly in which human-trafficking is orchestrated not by shady foreign mafias but by quintessentially British businessmen and ex-military types. Illegal immigrants are mostly nice people whereas it is hard to find any decent and sane white people in Britain apart from a few who have the courage to spout some much needed left/liberal outrage at the state of this “nasty little country”. And as for decent and likeable people; these are most likely to be found in the ‘lgbt community’.
Tv schedules are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick....Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick...Gay Couple included – Tick.... (Post 2017 update: transgender characters urgently needed). More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course). By its final episode Collateral had ticked every box." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
Philosopher A: “I wish we could disperse happiness to mankind.”
Philosopher B: “I’d rather we could disperse common sense.”
I’ve always liked this exchange because it helps point out the fallacy of pursuing happiness, a state of mind/emotion that is ineffable and, as many point out, is so subjective that it’s nearly meaningless to measure.
Your opinion on happiness measurement seems entirely anti-science to me and you use at least one strawman in your argument.
First, while I agree happiness measurement has all the weaknesses you state and that bad measurement can be misleading, if one understands its limits, it can be more useful than no measurement.
Assuming women are happier because they are married rather than married because they are happier in the absence of evidence corroborating the cause and effect is bad science, not bad measurement.
Second, we get better at measurement by first doing it poorly and gradually learning to do it better. We rarely get anything in science right the first time. Incrementalism is inherent in almost everything humans do. As a conservative, I'm surprised you don't see the importance of this.
I made an unsupported statement about the usefulness of happiness measurement. Taking the case of married and single women, the measurement provides an excellent prod to trying to figure out why married women might be happier.
Are drag queens mocking women, or trying to be them because they want to be the stereotype? That seems like the distinction there. My impression of black face was that it was to make fun of blacks and black culture, not a desire to live as a black person (if even for an evening) and be treated as one, whereas drag queens seem to genuinely wish to be women, or at least the strange stereotype of a woman they have in mind.
The difference between mocking and imitation as flattery seems to be the case here.
"why do we like men mocking female stereotypes"
This is a strawman. I suggest the correct question is whether blackface/drag causes harm to the imitated group. I don't have an answer to that. I don't know how much harm there is to either and I don't know how much is too much. That said, I'd argue blackface did more harm than drag does.
Good stuff. Happiness research is a total joke from top to bottom and suffers from serious, probably fatal, philosophical and methodological problems.
Ta muchly for the link and excerpt!
Drag Queen. Two questions to ask about "offensive" behavior. Is anyone actually offended by it. Did the performer of the action reasonably know that someone would be offended.
My guess is that few women feel offense by men in drag and that the men in drag are not doing it to "mock" women.
Thanks once again, Arnold - I'm sure Lorenzo will be along shortly (it's very early in the morning in Australia).
I've never been tempted to actually read his stuff at full length, but through these links lists I have come to associate the name Lorenzo Warby with poorly evidenced free associating observations worthy of Freud himself.
"Again, I’m all for marriage and children. But I’m all against happiness research. I refuse to cite happiness research, even when the researchers support my positions."
This statement makes me happy.
No less middlebrow a publication than National Geographic (you've come a long way, baby!) posits that "... many modern drag queens credit drag balls as the true origin of their art form. Held in secret, these competitions were pioneered by Black and Latino performers ..."
The "Latino" part seems to be pro forma, the article makes no further mention of it, and as the article mostly concerns the 19th century, it's nonsensical.
As you can see from the below excerpt, objection on the basis of misogyny has in some degree been anticipated. Also: objection based on drag's ties to the minstrelsy tradition generally. The phenomenon may now be attributed to private parties that were subject to raids; the performers, or guests, were "vogue-ing" as the white women of the plantation, a political act.
Nat. Geo. has saved drag! It has apparently not saved itself however.
"Who was the first drag queen?
Few traces remain of the earliest drag balls because participating in them was extremely risky due to gender and social stigmas.
But Lady J says that drag balls can be largely credited to Black and Latino performers. Excluded from or prevented from winning pageants held for white drag performers and female impersonators, Black drag artists began to host their own competitions.
Some scholars believe that annual galas held in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood paved the way in the late 1860s. But others argue that William Dorsey Swann’s dance parties in Washington, D.C. are the first concrete evidence we have of drag balls.
Born enslaved in 1858 in Maryland, Swann began to host drag balls as early as 1882. He was also the first in history to describe himself as a “queen of drag,” a precursor to the modern drag queen.
(12 historic LGBTQ figures who changed the world.)
Swann’s story came to light in 2005, when Channing Joseph, a writer and historian, found an 1888 report in The Washington Post about a police raid on Swann’s home. The report said Swann’s guests wore satin dresses and fascinators and likely competed in a cakewalk, a dance resembling voguing that enslaved people had invented to mimic plantation owners. Swann tried to prevent the police from entering, which Joseph writes allowed a few guests to escape before he was arrested.
These parties had been going on in secret for years, with invitations whispered among men—each facing the possibility of arrest for charges related to prostitution or homosexuality. As Joseph wrote in a 2020 essay for The Nation, Swann’s home had also been raided in 1887, and he had also served a short jail sentence in 1882 after he was caught stealing party supplies.
Swann and his drag balls were also pioneers in another sense: as defenders of the queer community’s right to assemble. Not only had Swann attempted to fight the 1888 arrest, but in 1896, he also wrote to President Grover Cleveland to demand a pardon—but he was denied."
"Blacking Up" and the whole culture that surrounded it for 120 years was more than mockery. It was an opportunity to inhabit negro stereotypes and enjoy the freedom of blackness, without the risks. Nineteenth Century American mocked the Germans and the Irish mercilessly, but there was nothing like an Irish or German equivalent to the super-popular blackface minstrel shows. In the same way, male transvestitism can be a parody or mockery of female stereotypes (especially when it is undertaken by gay men), but in it's current faddish form, it also offers a temporary escape from the responsibilities of maleness for young heterosexual men who are afraid they may not be up to what society expects of them as adults. Older male transvestites probably have complex psychiatric issues along with genetic quirks. In any case, in today's simplistic pop-cultural world of tit-for-tat cancelling, it would seem to be perfectly correct, as Arnold says, to disapprove of transvestitism on the same grounds that we frown upon blackface -- in any case, it's time we grew out of both.