Articles
A Cosmetic Culture – Reflections on Sense and Semblance: An Anatomy of Superficiality in Modern Society
It is difficult to defend the proposition that all is well in western societies. Despite unprecedented material prosperity and virtually limitless freedom, surveys reveal people as discontent with their lives and evidently disturbed by what they regard as a coarsening of public culture and deteriorating standards in private and public life. This disquiet, which cuts across generations, is not assuaged by the perception that political and social direction seem dominated by a breed of largely unaccountable elites, driven principally by the desire for self-preservation and harbouring a cynical disdain for public concerns and sensibilities.
How has such disillusion come about in an age of intellectual vigour and technological achievement where, by any objective standards, we are markedly better off than our forebears? Amid the progress, it is possible to identify several destabilising trends which coalesce around what I term the ‘Superficial Society’. We appear to be sleepwalking into mediocrity and, worse still, into widespread social upheaval.
Superficiality – a willingness to accept presentation at face value and to mistake Appearance for Reality – is at the heart of the issue. Some examples: it is inviting to take the trappings of education (degrees, certificates, exam results) as proof of good education, but these are revealed for their true value when the demands of competence kick in; western social security systems designed to help the needy in fact encourage welfare dependence and we hear much of the rights of ‘communities’ – e.g. gay, overweight, single parent – which don’t exist in any real sense, while genuine communities disintegrate. Acceptance of what is superficially attractive without undue scrutiny is reinforced by education systems which have entrenched an unsustainable notion of equality. The result, for a variety of reasons, is that for many the pursuit of perfection and the ambition that frequently accompanied it have been displaced by an overriding desire to impress and by a dislike of intellectual effort.
Superficiality has also promoted mediocrity which is too often taken as defining excellence and thereby determining value. This applies as much to plausible politicians with implausible policies as to much ‘cutting edge’ art or to cosmetically perfect but flavourless tomatoes. In particular, our obsession with celebrity and an almost reverential attention to its pronouncements, however vacuous or ill-informed, has distorted values and made role models from material that is devoid of talent or virtue. Brushing off graceless behaviour among the elite doesn’t help, in that it suggests either that high status absolves one from the normal social constraints or that these are outmoded. The cult of celebrity has led to an obsession with ‘lifestyle’ and status which dominates many minds and it is such trivialities that allows the shallowest levels of popular mass culture to determine concerns and priorities.
In many spheres, the desire to ‘feel good’ has replaced the need to ‘think straight’. The ‘feel good’ ethos drives many topical social platforms – notably the anti-globalisation movement, social debates (for example, on multi-culturalism, minorities and human rights) and the current irrational hysteria surrounding climate change. Presenting issues in dramatic overstatement (saving the planet, species extinction etc.) merely debases the argument. Appealing to sentiment on such matters – one might talk of politics by rock concert or celebrity endorsement – well suits cults and trendy social movements. These achieve penetration though a potent mix of moral indignation and populism, often based on a few deceptively simple propositions. They deflect rigorous scrutiny of their beliefs and tap into human emotion in preference to logic which has an inconvenient habit of exposing intellectual sham. In the popular mind, it seems that frequent repetition of an idea – however unjustified – is sufficient to confirm it as true, a phenomenon which today’s opinion formers are not slow to exploit. While people are indeed entitled to their own opinions they are not entitled to their own facts, and it is these which should ultimately determine public policy. Debates of this kind provide a reminder that institutions of whatever kind are only as good as the collective intelligence that holds them to account.
Unfortunately, deciding what is and is not fact has been blurred by spin and Political Correctness; the one seeks to camouflage unpalatable or otherwise awkward realities while the other attempts to prescribe limits on discourse. Much PC traduces good sense and compromises values; as it becomes entrenched in public institutions, it has also acquired unwelcome coercive power. The mentality that turns ‘Christmas’ into ‘Winter Festival’, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ into ‘Baa Baa Grey Sheep’ or misconstrues the distinction between titles and descriptions to insist upon ‘Chairperson’ rather than ‘Chairman’, suggests a loss of public confidence in its own good sense. Such systematic manipulativeness sustains an impression of intellectual fraud which corrodes trust and corrupts public life. It is generally felt unsafe to discuss socially contentious ideas publicly at any but the most superficial level for fear of offending or inciting reprisals.
Inclusivity, equality and tolerance – the shibboleths of the age – enjoy almost unquestioned acceptance and an apparently unlimited licence. In their name, attitudes and opinions which would have been derided a generation ago are taken seriously and societies and movements once considered less evolved than our own are granted equal status. There is a pathological hatred of elitism, especially in education, which leads people to the belief that all opinions, however ill-informed or nonsensical, deserve respect and that all social structures and religions are of equal value. The idea that societies come in various degrees of refinement and opinions in various degrees of sophistication are threatened by modern notions of equality. Discouragement, often with legal intervention, from judging others’ opinions or behaviour allows the rights and fragile sensibilities of minorities to trump established precepts and robust good sense. This concerted assault on accepted values has inflicted incalculable damage to the point at which social cohesion is vulnerable and order is only maintained by ever more intrusive legal intervention. In Britain you may murder, drive dangerously, assault your doctor or abuse your neighbour with relative impunity – while underage drinkers, smokers or parking violators are pursued relentlessly. Such distorted priorities point to social fragility and suggest that while the hardware in the form of social structures remains the software (social cohesion) is disintegrating.
One prominent dividend of 1960s liberalism is an expectation of virtually unrestricted personal freedom. This has bred a selfish, arrogant individualism characterised by a state of affairs where the demands of the individual, bolstered by a litany of contentious ‘rights’ without responsibilities, regularly confront those of society and threaten good order. Societies have become markedly coarser, less well-ordered and more aggressive to the extent that nations and communities are now required to devote disproportionate resources to containing disruptive elements as the social control historically exercised by communities in the form of manners, shame and blame has been dismantled.
In many western societies these problems are compounded by a state-sponsored dilution of personal accountability. Much aberrant behaviour – e.g. loss of self-control in eating or pupil disruptiveness – has been reclassified as a medical condition and thereby removed from the ambit of blame, while the ‘victim’ mentality has re-assigned responsibility for many personal misfortunes. Tripping over a misaligned paving slab is now the fault of the agency that laid it, rather than of someone not looking where they were going. This conveniently sidesteps the need to make awkward personal judgements or deal directly with the failings of dysfunctional people. Transferring responsibility in this way also erodes personal moral agency which is a prime plank of dignity and self-esteem. In such an environment, emergence of the self-centered ‘I don’t care’ and ‘Whatever’ cultures should come as no surprise.
We are invited to believe that such anomalies and aberrations can be rectified by legislation – social problems solved by ceaseless social engineering – and, by implication that regulation fails not because it is defective or misguided but because we do not have enough of it. This is superficial thinking mis-applied to serious problems. These problems are in part the product of modern materialism, but are not to be solved by economics alone.
There is much that is remarkable in modern western societies. What is unfortunate is that social quality and genuine social progress are being undermined by a culture driven by mediocrity and superficiality. Until we develop an intellectual climate which offers an effective challenge to political correctness, incompetence, contrived sentimentality and perverse notions of liberty this situation is unlikely to change.
Based on an article published in the UK in May 2007