My Culture 11 column today defends "Mad Men" from critics who say it's self-indulgent Boomer sentimentality; rather, as I argue, it's a particular kind of American tragedy about the myth of the self-made man. It's a show that in some ways validates the traditionalist conservative critique. Excerpt:
"Mad Men" explores the human cost of keeping up appearances, which is to say fulfilling prescribed social roles. There's the closeted gay man who's lost in a marriage. There's a rich young twerp who struggles to act the part of a swaggering man of means, based on his fraudulent father's crippling example. There are the suburban housewives, dying of loneliness but terrified of losing what they have. So much sadness underneath, and a gnawing hunger for happiness, for self-fulfillment, for authenticity, for liberation.Who can blame them? Surely conservatives don't want to be in the position of defending a social order that degraded women, subordinated blacks, marginalized Jews and shamed homosexuals into invisibility. Surely conservatives can admit that there was a significant price paid to maintain conformity and collusive silence in the face of hypocrisy and injustice. Surely conservatives can agree that at least some of the Fifties' false ideals deserved rebelling against.
Surely conservatives can recognize that the Sixties came from somewhere.
But here's the thing: For unreflective liberals, "Mad Men" is only temporarily tragic. It has a happy ending. Deliverance from all this sexism and repression and cigarette smoke draws nigh. It's always darkest before the dawn, as the saying goes, which Father Gill's naïve folk song brings to mind:
Well early in the morning, about the break of day,
I ask the Lord, "Help me find the way!"
Help me find the way to the promised land
This lonely body needs a helping hand
I ask the Lord to help me please find the way.Conservatives, though, appreciate the fullness of "Mad Men"'s American tragedy, because we know what's really coming next. It's not the promised land, but rather a wasteland, a desert of dislocation and despair in which we've been wandering for over 40 years.
The genius - perhaps accidental - of setting "Mad Men" in an advertising agency is the role the real-life mad men - and now women - play in manufacturing fantasy in a mass-media age. The most potent and destructive fantasies advertisers market are the related convictions that the self knows itself through its individual choices, and that it can reach fulfillment by choosing to purchase particular things or experiences. Advertising as soulcraft had an easy time of it in America, a culture that has always been individualistic and rootless. Still, social custom and tradition served as a countervailing force to the ethic of hedonistic individualism that advertising thrives on - and that would come to characterize post-1960s America.
Indeed, in The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt pinpoints the critical cultural nexus of the period in which the ad agency drama is set. "The difference between the 1950s and [today]", wrote Ehrenhalt, "is to a large extent the difference between a society in which market forces challenged traditional values, and a society in which they have triumphed over them."
The problem is -- and this is something that postmodern conservatives have to ponder -- is that there is no obvious way out of the paradox. How do you unlearn the habits of the individualistic heart? As I mention in the piece, we are all anti-authoritarians now. Even conservatives. Which is more or less A. MacIntyre's point. What a mess. Read the whole thing.
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I said 'more like'. Not so much that their lives were realistic...
But that they were adults IN that time.
Some of the nostalgia, in other words, isn't so much about the times, but the age the person was during the time, as well.
I haven't seen all the episodes, but Don is such a pathetic man when dealing with his wife and adultery, but I find myself respecting him on some level. There's an episode where an older man has an accident and the other men in the office are joking about it. Don will have no part in it and confronts the men about it. I respect that. I just don't know why he's not consistent in other areas of life.
"Surely conservatives don't want to be in the position of defending a social order that degraded women, subordinated blacks, marginalized Jews and shamed homosexuals into invisibility."
Uh, I'm not so sure about that, especially the last one, if those actions are what it took/takes to maintain a certain power structure. Actually, many of today's conservatives ARE in the position of defending just such a social order and its natural outcomes.
The right's utopia of choice is "the golden age," while the left's utopia of choice is "the brave new world."
I'm generally against utopian thinking, unless the utopia in question is one that's recognized self-consciously as such, as a "no-where" whose value is as an imaginative image of what it would be like for one's desires to be fulfilled.
That said, I think the right's utopian thinking -- its dreaming about "the golden age" -- is rather less destructive than the left's utopian thinking -- its dreaming about "the brave new world," if only because the right's utopian thinking can be *falsified* by historical hindsight, by the concrete evidence of actual historical experience, while the left's utopian thinking can *never* be falsified.
Communism, for example, did not turn out as those on the left who formulated it, promoted it, and supported it had intended it to. But nothing about the failure of communism or any grand project of the left has done a single thing to dissuade those on the left from engaging in more of the same utopian dreams of "the brave new world" that will magically emerge if only we behave like bulls in a cultural china cabinet smashing up every tradition that we've been handed down by a past full of people who were no less intelligent and no less righteous than we and in certain cases rather more so.
The coming Lightworker presidency will be the fullest fulfillment we've had of the dream with which the left has consoled itself since 1968. Will everything be a-ok if we just put a non-white, non-Middle-American, progressive child of the Aquarian Age -- a child "taught well" in the terms set out by Crosby, Stills, and Nash -- in charge of the country? Well, we're about to find out.
The only question is what will happen when the brave new world fails to transpire as it certainly *will* fail, just as all such utopias have.
Will we all be encouraged to pretend that it actually has? Will the failure be blamed on some rearguard conspiracy of "Christianist" and "rednecked?" revanchists? Will the "dream" be "deferred" until such time as a *homosexual,* *atheist,* and *female* non-white, non-Middle-American child of the Aquarian Age appears to lead us all toward the *really* brave and *really* new world?
The next few years will be interesting times.
I'd like to think that they'll be put-up-or-shut-up time for the left.
But I doubt that they will be on either count.
Reganite, I'll have to disagree on the "The one and only answer, of course. is Christ."
Your point is completely valid as His life is a firm option to inspire, but it certainly is not the only one. Religion, or rather spiritual understanding, in general can provide some very powerful motivators to expanding one's self; but don't count out the rest of human understanding. On can break such behaviors through internal reflection not necessarily from spiritual guidance. It is my personal belief that we have a natural tendency to gravitate towards the cornerstones of moralistic principles which are typically attributed here in the west to Christianity.
Look across the globe and you'll see many civilizations developed with similar tennants to virtue. Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islam, etc. all share some very fundamental guidelines on how one should live and cultivate body, mind, and spirit. But beyond religion, I'll admit the area is gray when arguing how religion may or may not have affected non-religious people in positive ways. Such as a grown person who was raised catholic but does not identify with Catholicism may still carry the virtues taught at a very young age. Would she or he have gotten that education without the catholic influence? What if it was the influence of a different religion or spiritual philosophy, would there be major fundamental differences?
I think the recent economic difficulties may have some positive impact on humanity (read: western civ.) as people increasingly look for satisfaction beyond typical consumerism. What I've noticed in my community is some people learning that they get a lot more out of helping neighbors put a roof on a garage or volunteering at a homeless shelter than they would simply providing economic support for such things. Does religion typically embrace these ideals and offer a catalyst for charity and success? Of course.
It's certainly difficult and sometimes necessary to live a depressed existence (young children in certain situations); but I don't see any reason to maintain the status-quo simply to save face. Furthermore it doesn't mean you have to consent to it. Do what you think will make you happy. You have to at least give it a shot. As a financial conservative politically, I have a difficult time understanding why some social cons fear social change. It's completely inevitable and I don't think the (recent) expanse of socially acceptable perversions stems from a tendency toward "liberal" social acceptance. I think it's more fundamentally a lack of voluntary education on many levels and a lack of personal accountability. Many people never bother to learn that lesson. You can't be responsible for people who refuse to help themselves. The Christ knew that, the Bodhisattva's knew that.
Just my opinion.
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