On condescension

Having finally finished the current sprint of algorithms (bleh...I never want to see another dynamic programming problem, although given that what I face next are complexity problems, the former might start looking damn appealing again...), I can go back to focusing on the important things: unsubstantiated opinions vehemently asserted as facts.

You know...blogging.

So, I read this David Brooks piece in the NYT (sorry, it's a TimesSelect thing...I'm a bit too much of a pussy to actually post the text as I fear people do, in fact, go looking for such things), and it was thought-provoking.

I actually kind of like Brooks. He's the closest I can think of to a conservative whose opinion I can actually respect. I have been desperate to find such people as I do think there is a coherent, informed conservative political opinion to be expressed, but it's being drowned out by politicized evangelicals and the idiots that pass for Fox News commentators.

But, I digress. Brooks' point is that we've entered an era of institutionalized condescension. There is a wave of both humor and documentaries lately, he argues, that plays off condescension to, I guess, the non-cosmopolitan segments of our population. Similarly, there is an air of the rest of America becoming simply a sociological specimen for our academic and comic amusement. Think of the interviews on the Daily Show. Think of Jesus Camp. Think of Simon on American Idol. And quintessentially, think of Borat.

To some degree, he has a point. Why didn't Borat make fun of the pretension of coffee aficionados, wine connoisseurs, Starbucks frequenters, and Whole Foods crunchy-granola types? Would it have been too jarring? Would it have jolted us out of our comfortable position of cultural superiority?

And yet, I don't buy it. To me, this is a reaction, not an action. For one thing, this is often less about cultural condescension than it is an assault on pretense. Simon from American Idol doesn't really fall in this mold...he really is a condescending prick, in my opinion, and I never really found it that entertaining. But people like Daily Show, Colbert, and Borat are picking precisely on people who take themselves too seriously. Yes, Borat makes fun of the rednecks at the rodeo, but let's remember he also subjected himself to tumbling around naked with a morbidly obese guy, and in the end, he found true love with a prostitute. Not to be too glib, but I seem to recall Jesus spending most of his times with beggars, whores, and criminals. I don't see the moralizing, supposedly anti-elitist masses that attend rodeos and hold supercilious dinner parties where they attempt to "culture" a supposedly uncivilized brute from Kazakhstan doing very much of that. In fact, I distinctly remember them running away screaming when a prostitute did show up at their door. Is it Borat that is condescending, or is Borat merely focusing a giant microscope on the willfully ignorant middle-American culture snobs?

I see this phenomenon as simply taking the gloves off in a culture war we didn't start. Well, okay, I guess technically we did if you regard the 60s as the beginning, but personally I don't regard returning to a world where we hide our problems and the ugly truths of existence under artifical social structure, illusory decorum, and contrived social protocol as a particularly good idea. The last 6, and arguably 12, and arguably 26 years, we have been subjected to a cultural revolution that sought to simultaneously throw out the window both the notions of meritocracy and social responsibility and replace them with cultural cronyism and egocentrism justified as divine providence. Gone is any notion that someone actually trained for and who studies a discipline might actually be better at it than your "plain spoken" buddy Ed whose only qualification is that you know him. Gone is the notion of social responsibility, replaced by a blind faith, one increasingly institutionalized, that one's material status in the world is directly compensation (or lack thereof) for one's moral worth and behavior.

The paramount achievement of this effort has been putting idiots in charge of the most powerful government on the planet. We literally have idiots running the country in almost every aspect of its operation. And we had to have a perfect-fucking-storm of disastrous results, corruption, and hyper-visible hypocrisy for the idiots to be just _barely_ nudged out of power. Is it any wonder that it has been in these same years that we have begun to see people (comedians, documentarians, etc.) finally willing to stop being polite and say, "Look, these people are ignorant, arrogant morons. And they're running things."

So Brooks will excuse me if I don't get too upset by this phenomenon. When the willfully ignorant with cripplingly narrow fields of vision and experience stop trying to run things they don't understand, then we can talk.