The Kinkade-Zeppelin post got my blog more hits than it's ever had in a given period -- thanks, Apostropher! But on a more substantive plane, I wanted to flesh out some thoughts on a question raised by the popularity of Kinkade, and the almost religious fervor of the Zeppelin fans' outrage. The question: Why are Americans so eager not to think?
Musing about this question led me, naturally, to the Wikipedia entry on anti-intellectualism. Bouncing around that page, full of worthy articles and angles, I discovered a little gem of an essay, "Why Nerds are Unpopular". Written by one Paul Graham -- obviously a confirmed nerd himself -- the essay dives deep into the sociology of middle school and high school, and finds at the root that nerds are unpopular because they are too busy with their intellectual pursuits to play the necessary popularity games.
High school is, according to Graham, a court hierarchy, like that of Louis XIV. For complicated political and social reasons, American schools lack external pressures to educate kids well. This means that education becomes largely a sham: content is taught in such a way that it can be memorized by rote, with maximum testability. With a few notable exceptions, teachers base their pedagogy around this fake learning, and students follow their lead. Neither students nor teachers take their education very seriously. In the absence of solid educational criteria that would create a hierarchy among students, a court system develops, one in which "one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank".
Graham identifies several causes of this faux educational structure. To me, the most convincing is the ripple effect of the increasing specialization that comes with modern life. As modernity chugs along, we all become more and more specialized, and the time necessary to educate us increases. But you can't just drop twelve-year-olds off in an automotive repair school or a nursing school and hope they'll thrive; to learn the trade properly they have to be older. This means that you need a place to park them out of their parents' way until they're eighteen or so. Voila, high school is invented, and becomes an enclosed prison space in which incredibly complicated popularity contests are paramount precisely because there is nothing else to do. Here's Graham reflecting on his thirteen-year-old self:
I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.
This passage rang a bell in my head: Suburban exclusion of anything potentially harmful carries an echo of Milan Kundera's famous passage, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, on the nature of kitsch:
Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. ... Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
Put this together with Roger Scruton's excellent definition of kitsch:
What makes for kitsch is not the attempt to compete with the photograph but the attempt to have your emotions on the cheap -- the attempt to appear sublime without the effort of being so.
And there you have it: the interlocking connection of suburban existence, education, and the kitsch imperative. They're all grounded in the put-on, the fake, the sham: deep in our isolated and specialized lives, cocooned in safe suburban sterility, far away from any existential difficulties, we feel a need to invent competitions and emotions to replace that which we have lost. Ergo, kids devise contests around who wears what, and their parents embrace kitsch so they can have an apparently sublime experience that is both shared and unchallenging.
Is there a causative correlation here? Do teenagers grow up into kitsch-lovers because they have been inculcated in the process of shamming education? Or are they educated that way because their parents are accustomed to it? I suppose it must work both ways. Whatever the causal direction, the connection is palpable. Bored beyond belief by a life that lacks any real challenges, teenagers fall into a "crazy time" that is a perfectly rational response to their situation. Hence their obsessive focus on clothes, music, manners of speech -- nearly all centering on a variety of mass-produced consumables. As they become adults, the process continues, but the edges are softened, and the particulars change. The goods change, but the essential urge does not. We must buy, that we do not feel.
Here's Scruton again:
The American funerary culture, so cruelly satirized by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, attempts to prove that this event, too -- the end of man's life and his entry into judgment -- is in the last analysis unreal. This thing that cannot be faked becomes a fake. The world of kitsch is a world of make-believe, of permanent childhood, in which every day is Christmas. ... Death demands grief and dignity and suffering. It is therefore kitsched into a sweeter and slushier condition, a childlike slumber that brings sentimental tears.
The kitsch of Kinkade and the anti-intellectual Zeppelin adoration, then, are two sides of the same coin: they are both protective moves that shield a person from difficulty. At the same time, they are responses to a lack of challenge. Without existential troubles faced head-on and eyes-open, we are prey to the easy, saccharine satisfactions of kitsch. Without critical listening and a voicing of opposed opinions, we are tempted toward uncritical hero-worship. Faced with few real threats to our existence, we become more threatened by small ones. Kundera's second tear -- "how nice to be moved, together with all mankind" -- drops with the desire and expectation that all should share exactly the same tastes. And with that tear, another minor threat -- that someone somewhere might disagree with us -- is eliminated.