What is wrong with isms?

In one famous scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the titular hero remarks to the audience,

[My history test is] on European socialism. I mean, really. What’s the point? I’m not European. I don’t plan to be European. So, who gives a shit if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists and it still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car. Not that I condone fascism. Or any “isms”. “Isms”, in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an “ism”. He should believe in himself. John Lennon said it on his first solo album. “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” A good point there. After all, he was the Walrus.

Bueller, the ostensible epitome of libertine individualism for the materialist eighties, gracefully sweeps aside all ideologies -isms- as being distant, impractical, and destructive to the dignity of an individual’s ego.

Twenty years later, South Park echoes very nearly the same point. In one especially far-fetched episode, the character Cartman freezes himself to skip the following weeks because he cannot wait until the Nintendo Wii comes out. Unfortunately, he doesn’t awake for another thousand years, during which Earth is embroiled in a civil war – between different factions of atheists. The atheists fundamentally agree with each other. but are fighting the war over what the name of the atheist organization should be. Through a series of convoluted and equally far-fetched situations, Cartman eventually changes the past from his place in the future, keeping the world from becoming universally atheist.

Cartman:      Wait… Isn’t… everybody at war over atheism?
Shvek:     Atheism? No. We’ve learned to get rid of all the isms in our time.
Medic:     Yes. Long ago we realized isms are great for those who are rational, but in the hands of irrational people, isms always lead to violence.
Cartman:     So there is no war now in the future.
Blavius:     Of course there’s war. The stupid French-Chinese think they have a right to Hawaii.
All:     Yeah!

The events of the episode can best be seen as a criticism of Richard Dawkins (who is featured and satired extensively during the show) and Christopher Hitchens. Coming from very different directions, Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, and Hitchens, a political pundit, independently published two similar books shortly before the episode aired (namely, The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively). Part of their theses is that war and irrationality is an inevitable result of any form of theism, and that atheism will bring an end to so many of our troubles. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker retort that the problem lies not in the specific doctrine of any form of theology, but rather in the very concept of an “ism” itself. People are irrational and their irrationality is amplified when arbitrary, rhetorical lines, such as “atheist”, “agnostic”, and “theistic”, are superimposed over them. Just as “Christendom” Europe fell into an unending war between Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists in the early modern era, any unified atheism will eventually deteriorate into an equally irrational insurrection between rival atheists.

Bueller’s off-quoted observation and the anti-ism sentiment of Stone and Parker dovetail to form a very specific brand of anti-intellectual populism (which of course, is an ism itself). Each human is indescribable on a very base level. If people consciously accept any particular ism, they stop thinking for themselves and lose part of themselves. Socialism, atheism, capitalism, and theism are arbitrary constructs dreamed up by academics unconcerned with the practical concerns of the everyday lives of individuals. This position has perhaps not been articulated rigorously, but it has a certain common-sensical appeal.

However, contrast this with the collectivist-historicist schools of the nineteenth century to see just how great of a departure such a paradigm is from the mainstream thinking of not so long ago. According to thinkers such as Hegel and Tolstoy, the events of the history, led by isms, determine the choices of individuals. Attempting to escape from the grand scheme of history is pointless, as whatever occurs in one’s life is brought about solely by forces outside one’s control. Even a reasoned desire to escape from or remain ignorant of isms can be construed as an inevitable historical movement itself. Above, I mention that I believe it to be best understood as a form of populism and individualism. If anti-ism becomes a more complete source of thought, there is nothing keeping us from giving it a real name.

With the historical radicalism of rejecting the ascription to any ism in mind, consider what isms are more literally. Merely, they are words and a method of categorizing people and ideas. Ultimately, any legitimate criticism of isms must be a criticism of categorization. If we categorize everyone by two sets of political beliefs, Conservativism and Liberalism (as defined in the US), we lose a tremendous amount of information. Yet, don’t we gain more in this perverse oversimplification than if we had done nothing at all? Neoconservatives, the religious right, and paleoconservatives all share strands of similar political beliefs, however strained the relationship between the groups may be this moment. In categorizing, we give ourselves the ability to communicate abstract ideas rapidly without the need to lay out every political opinion one has. To say that one is a conservative is to say that one is probably against abortion, probably in favor of the War in Iraq, probably in favor of smaller government, and so on. If we open our vocabularies beyond such a false verbal dichotomy to our full range of named isms, we only are all the better able to quickly communicate our complete array of political preferences. Isms are the vehicle allowing us to do that.

All of this on a certain level is completely banal, but it must be said. To say that you don’t believe in an ism and that you only believe in yourself sidesteps what the ism actually is. An ism is not a set of sworn precepts to which one must adhere. It is merely a signpost pointed roughly in one’s political direction. Refusing to use signposts because they are not a perfect representation of who you are is nonsense. Socialism, fascism, and anarchism will not get Ferris his car, but they are useful for understanding history.

In the jargon I just used a second ago, South Park creators Stone and Park argue that isms cause people to swarm around sets of core beliefs and become irrationally fanatical about them. For example, the existence of the Republican and Democratic parties in America in effect arguably pushes their members towards the party lines and causes them to hate the other party all the more. The factual validity of this is mixed.  Compare such a generalization to religious history. On the one hand, the Catholic Church once required strict adherence to its dogmas with the very real threat of excommunication and interdiction… only to have its powered neutered by the continuous splinter groups who first disagreed on specific issues and later were demarcated with an ism (Lutheranism, Calvinism, etc) representing those beliefs. Again, for example, it is strange to view the ism in Lutheranism as what caused the German nobles to revolt against the Holy Roman Empire when the word “Lutheranism” scarcely existed, even as they used Luther as a pretext. Collectively, they radicalized, but the root of that has been established historically as the nobles’ desire to decentralize authority, rather than their consciousness as a separate group known as Lutherans.

In general, religions and political parties are far more plural than the ilk of Stone and Park give them credit for. History, especially recent history, is only oversimplified by thinking in terms of “Christians attacked Muslims in Holy Land; Muslims eventually won”, or “Muslims attacked Christian/Atheist West; West retaliated”. The Muslim community is diverse in its opinion and tolerance of the West, from the fully acculturated to those living peacefully in Turkey to some burning American Flags. Even the arguably most dogmatic of the Christian sects, Catholicism, has a broad array of theological view points, from the ultra-conservative curia or the liberation theology socialists. The lushness of such dissent in both groups greatly undermines the notion that the creation of the ism caused the sins of their members. We would expect singlemindedness, not schism.

While a certain validity remains in the idea that collectivizing individuals causes chaos, a “mob mentality” does not inevitably develop in every ideology. Any number of factors at any particular time in history determine whether that will take place. Bigotry has been the status quo for much of world history, but for that bigotry has only spordically coalesced  into widespread virulent fanaticism. That is to say, hatred and insularity is widespread around the world, but genocide is not. It takes an extreme set of circumstances to get us from mistrust and prejudice to the Holocaust, Bosnia, or Sudan. No evidence is offered as to how isms gets a society over that “hump” from prejudice to genocide. If you wish to blame isms on prejudice itself, that is again impeached by history, where isms have nearly always existed merely to represent pre-existing differences in religious practice, political opinion, or what have you. The history of the very concept of nationality, the most basic “ism” of all, demonstrates this most emphatically; we have always been fearful of those different from ourselves, even before we had a name for those who are different.

Categorization and generalization are essential communicative cornerstones without which our basic abiliy to think inductively is destroyed. While I focused on the pop culture examples of Ferris Bueller and South Park, similar arguments have appeared elsewhere. Specifically, the well-recieved 2005 film, Kingdom of Heaven, portrayed a very analogous message. Former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges wrote the semi-popular I Don’t Believe in Atheists, which provided many strangely parallels to South Park (it was published after the episode aired, in case you jumped to the conclusion that South Park simply transplanted Hedges’ ideas).  This fear of isms has ingrained itself on certain aspects of our culture, but the fear is unfounded. While we should by no means pigeonhole ourselves where unnecessary or uncritically follow any ism with which we generally agree, our ability to discuss any abstract matter intelligently is severely impaired if we renounce isms altogether.

The Problem with Kitsch

Video game “purists”, many of whom have now passed forty, insist on a Golden Age of arcade games that took place in the late seventies and early eighties. During this era, young companies bombarded young fans with hit after hit, from Centipede to Asteroids to Defender to Donkey Kong. As games becomes more complex, the old guard aged and ended their interest in later hits like Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog. I have gradually slipped away from playing new games myself after devoting my early teen years to eagerly awaiting the next big thing. At twenty-two, Mario Kart 64 holds my interest more effectively than anything else that has come out lately.

On the one hand, this is natural. I have better ways to spend my money and free time than I did when I was 13. On the other are those who insist that “retro” games, which tends to mean whatever games came out when they were between the ages of eight and fourteen, are the best games in the history of the world. Still there are other who were born five years after Joust was published and play it on an emulator and will mention that fact whenever given the opportunity.

This is bizarre and peculair. Consider what differentiates “classic” or “retro” from contemporary ones. Technology. “Retro” games have poorer graphics, sound, controls, and pretty much everything you could measure objectively. Now, while many of these games may possess excellent gameplay or other je ne sais quois, no evidence is offered to suggest that they, as a rule, monopolize such subjective factors. Nothing, beyond such non-sequiturs as “they’re too complicated” (so was Donkey Kong compared to Pong) or “they’re commercial” (it was always about the money if you read the history), are offered to dispute that. Even if one assumes that such qualitative, subjective factors have not improved in twenty years -an awkward assumption given the improvements everywhere else- new games are still better. The consumer can pick the subjectively superior ones AND get graphics improved by twenty-five years of development. Any presumption that “retro” games are somehow better than contemporary games for reasons outside of nostalgia is completely false.

While this is a subject I’m far less familiar with, I believe the same carries over with film. Dated comedies are no longer funny because they are dated. Dramas from the fifties are painful to watch due to ancient cinematography and wooden actresses with unnatural, high-felutant accents. Watching them is something for academics or professionals do, not something to watch casually and enjoy.

I say this because people do choose retro games and classic movies over their contemporaries, and consciously, for reasons besides nostalgia. They do so while knowing the graphics or acting sucks, but think that it adds to the “charm” or makes it more “genuine”. This is what I mean by kitsch. Many have the need to choose entertainment that is objectively worse so that they can feel better.

“Hipster irony” is an analogous concept to this particular to a certain subculture with society. “Hipster” males might wear, say, ugly, thick rimmed glasses and an overly-tight fitting sweater. They then feel superior to people who wear proper clothing because they are self-aware of how ridiculous they look. This brand of style and sensibility has been satirized to death pretty effectively at the now-famous blog, Stuff White People Like. Its author points out the ludicrous motivations of “white people” (hipsters) who drive the Toyota Prius, eat organic foods, get arts degrees, and identify with the movie Juno. Some of their environmental concerns may be valid, but the overriding theme of their choices is to appear superior by consciously choosing poor options “ironically”. In a speech at google, the author says,

What [Stuff White People Like really is] about is that “white people” is more of a class than a race thing [...], a different generation of people who still have the same desire for status and competition among neighbors, but unlike in the past when that status was determined by material wealth like the size of your house or the size of your diamond ring, it’s been replaced by “authenticity”, [and] environmental awareness, [...]. It’s about this sort of shift [all the while] we are still as competitive as ever.

To that I add, when choosing environmentalism or indie rock or classic movies or retro video games for reasons of aesthetics rather than substance, there is something wrong. It is especially difficult to pull apart what is what or which choice is genuine since, well, “white people” (or movie aficionados or retro gamers) get very defensive if questioned.

Really -and any entry from Stuff White People Like argues it better in any one of its entries than I can by essay- choosing genuine or environmentally conscious options really boils down to feeling superior. Going to farmers markets or jumping headfirst into another culture is more ostentatious than effective by any measure for those goals. I’m not overstating or misrepresenting these attitudes; for example, there is literally a raw foods restaurant with a sign outside that says “conscious food for conscious people”. All too often (while not always) the end goal of purposely putting annoying restrictions on one’s self, whether that be spending a lot of money on a Toyota Prius, not eating cooked food, or only playing video games with pixels the size of my fist is too congratulate one’s self for doing so.

But still, let’s be honest here.

When I first read Stuff White People Like, I thought it was amazing. It perfectly described the irrational aesthetics of my friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Certain entries, like Arrested Development, The Daily Show/Cobert Report, and traveling, especially resonated with me. Some of my friends went through the list and counted all the entries that defined them- many. I went through the list and counted all the entries that defined me- few. I liked this fact.

It took me a few weeks to grow sick over the fact that I like that I’m not a “white person”.

Choosing kitsch for the sake of kitsch, whether that is playing thirty year old video games or going to farmers markets, is wrong because it is dependent on feeling unique and superior to others. By acting counter-culture to the counter-culture movements of kitsch, I was doing the same exact thing. Even now, I question my awareness of that as further evidence of trying to trick myself into feeling superior. I really don’t know; is my repulsion to traveling and The Colbert Report out of my objective opinion or only to feel superior to kitsch? Conversely, do I only try to form “objective opinions” so that I can feel superior?

These are the types of realizations that make me want to throw up. Please join me in my bulimia.

And again, I cannot separate in my mind whether that invitation is true or a way to feel superior to the reader.