The culture of misplaced sympathy
Cheerleaders, Terfs, Free Jazz, and where all those cowboys went...
Observing the currents of social collapse can take us to some previous uncharted territory. For me this week, my thoughts turn (surprisingly) to cheerleading.
Earlier this month the internet was awash in stories of youth cheerleaders who competed solo in various major team competitions. One story involved Katrina Kohel, who competed solo when her team quit on her. She bravely took the stage by herself and apparently did well, earning applause and admiration along the way. The second story involves an eight year old who followed Katrina’s brave lead, competing by herself when the rest of her team couldn’t arrive. She, too, apparently did a good job. And she won the competition.
Yes. She won the competition.
Somewhere in Florida, a room full of adult judges, drunk on sympathy and compassion, handed the top prize in a team competition to a single individual, and demonstrated a central intellectual illness of the west in the process. In order for this single girl to win, these supposed adults ignored the rules of their own competition, along with the prolonged efforts and preparation (and feelings) of every other legitimate team there. They ignored the fact that a single individual leading a cheer is not akin to the complex choreography of the team effort, or that this is a team event in general. Misplaced compassion and the emotion of the moment allowed a single determined individual to subvert a long-established process. And apparently everyone cheered and nobody protested, lest they be outed as a grump.
Does this sound familiar? Because it is the impetus driving the entire culture war at this moment.
Like it or not, we are a hyper-pluralistic society which has collectively agreed to shelve the metaphysical assumptions which once bound us together in a functional diversity. As any system of standards will automatically creates margins — and areas outside of these margins — societies must decide what to do with those who cannot (or will not) hold to these general standards. Yet our own society is in the process of not only embracing those individuals on the margins with a fired-up compassion, but also of shelving the reasons for standards altogether while insisting that every moral expression is ok, no matter what. It it compassion sans reason, and acceptance without any insistence of reasonable standards. As right reason has fled the room, those who suffer with narcissism increasingly dominate the conversation, engaging in an ecstatic glitter-fueled dance, hand in hand with individuals who cannot help but feel sorry for them to the point of self-paralysis.
Any decent parent reading the preceding words would recognize that basing your rearing methods on excessive compassion is bound to create an entitled, narcissistic, mealy-mouthed punk who will also lack the ability to deal with the brutal exigencies of life the moment their fluffy support structures are removed.
This is why children - who mothers felt sorry for - in our era so often “fail to launch”, or why universities are being overwhelmed by the mental health demands of a near majority of their student populations. This is why the solo performers - who mothers felt sorry for - are winning team competitions. This is why little boys - who mothers feel sorry for - are having their genitals cut off.
Of course we can’t blame the mothers, when it is the fathers who fled the room and have ceded their natural territory, upsetting the natural balance in the process. Child-rearing is a complex game, and it is best carried out when two equal but different parties - and the compassion of motherhood and great strictness of fatherhood - engage in a dance of disagreement and compromise. Nor is every family this way: in my own, my wife (the ER nurse) is the stricter individual, and I (the artist) am more prone to bouts of excessive compassion (which my adult students know and take advantage of regularly). Yet between us, a balance is achieved, and thus-far we’ve succeeded more than we have failed as parents as a result.
It’s a major irony in our time that it is indeed feminists - derided as “Terfs” - who are increasingly against the encroachment of biological males onto the domain of legitimate women. While their opposition is clearly welcomed, it should be matched with a realization of how their ideology clearly set the stage for the usurpation of male roles in society. Indeed, what began as a legitimate call to equal rights and dignity for women turned into “we don’t need men” and then “men should curb their toxic masculinity”, and now this. Already in 1997, singer Paula Cole sung “Where have all the cowboys gone?” And yet in 2021, Ms. Cole was interviewed about her “divergent thinking” about “gender bias” in Psychology Today and the “hardcore humanism” podcast. I kid you not:
"Over the course of her career and life, Cole has consistently written and spoken out about the harmful effects of sexism in our society. And in our conversation, Cole talks in particular about how sexism has interfered with her ability to find her authentic voice both personally and professionally. She shares a story that unfortunately is common for many female artists, in which she was encouraged to “tone down” her passionate and energetic stage performances. This criticism is consistent with sexist stereotypes that suggest women should be more docile and controlled in order to be accepted and appreciated. This type of stereotype has the potential to be not only horribly damaging to people who are trying to express themselves and find their place in the world, but also some of our best artists are the ones who specifically refused to abide by these absurd and arbitrary societal biases.
Cole explained how she understands and confronts this bias. One of the things that was really interesting to hear about was what Cole refers to as her “jazz self.” And that is something that is a deep and enduring yearning to be improvisational. It is a drive to explore new forms of expression and ways of looking at the world. It’s the exact opposite of the limits that stereotypes and bias have put on her. Cole’s embrace of jazz as an open-minded and expressive art form gives us a really in-depth sense of how jazz as a style and culture influenced her worldview and music. Whatever music or musical culture we enjoy, there is almost always a strong part of it that comes from open-minded, exploratory and divergent thinking. If we can take a cue from our favorite artists like Cole and think about how we can be open-minded and creative in our own life, we can challenge the biases that others have for us as we shatter barriers and pursue our purpose in life.”
And there it is.
The cowboys are all gone, Ms. Cole, because your type of militant feminism has chased them off. Nor will the moment of crisis — or your own various needs — suddenly summon these “cowboys” out of thin air. Once a good is gone, it cannot be easily recreated: it is easier to destroy than to build.
One also enjoys the naive reference to jazz as somehow being a freer music and therefore a metaphor for an unfettered life. The implied presupposition is that jazz is somehow the open-minded music, as opposed to perhaps the more stultified form of classicism. And yet as anyone who has studied jazz and jazz improvisation can tell you, it is a deeply intellectual enterprise wherein the glorified bouts of improvisation only work so far as the performer understands works lucidly within the boundaries of the set harmonic and rhythmic conventions — inherently classical in structure — of the chart. Jazz is classical structure with room to play, but one must play by the objective rules of the game or your solo will simply stink. It’s not “jazz self” to do whatever you want: successful jazz performers are some of the most dedicated musicians alive, and they practice ferociously. They can talk about the theoretical structures of music with the best of them, and (external appearances aside) are often joked about as some of the most intense and uncompromising personalities to grace any conservatory building. Yet the fact remains that the jazz solo which sounds to the listener like the most gloriously free expression is not only firmly rooted in a pre-determined structure, but even its perceived flights of fancy were worked out in processes of trial and error for hundreds of hours in a practice room.
Jazz is really a wonderful metaphor for a functioning diverse society: limits are set, acknowledged, and heeded, even as genius may play at the margins. Jazz became a metaphor for American freedom not because it did not have limits, but because it dealt with its (good and precise) limits in a very creative way. And yet once the margins are removed and you get “free jazz” or “acid jazz” or “atonal jazz”, folks stopped listening.
So both musically and socially, what exactly in the 20th century took us from this:
to this?
As it so often does, music provides a fitting metaphor for what happens in our society. When the boundaries are removed, the margins are no longer blurred: they are eradicated. In the process, not only does a society lose the structures that it so desperately needs, but those living along (and beyond) the margins of these structures lose the very structure against which they were reacting, thrusting them into a crisis of identity. I do suspect that this is what is fueling the cultural domination of narcissistic perspective in our time, along with the narcissistic rage directed at anyone who would dare to suggest that we pump the brakes on this social experiment.
Twenty years ago, the idea that we would be doing invasive surgery on pre-pubescent children in order to satisfy adult ideologies would not strike us as absurd, because nobody had imagined this dystopian reality yet. Indeed, those who raised objections to the supposed “progressive” movements in our society were told that they were paranoid or (in slightly more intelligent circles) subscribing to a “slippery slope fallacy.” Never mind that no such fallacy actually exists: we’ve long since rumbled past the fears that individuals sensitive to the slippery slope presented, into utterly uncharted territory.
Years ago while still a grad student, I was gifted a book called: “Once Upon a More Enlightened Time: More Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.” It’s a funny short read, and I suggest getting a copy just to see where we’ve come since 1995. Not long after, inspired by this little tome, I began to sketch a book of short stories which would have been called “Views from the bottom of a Slippery Slope.” I often workshopped ideas with friends, jokingly imagining the silliest results of where progressive leftism was leading us way back in the (very naive) early 2000’s. One of my favorite stories involved the insistence of a woman - a proud dendrophiliac - that she could marry a tree in the local park, and that the damned dendrophobes could not stop her. Alas, this, along with almost every other hypothetical situation in the book, has already occurred in our time.
In the years since, I’ve debated revisiting this book idea. The problem is that my imagination can no longer follow the path being set by us: I cannot conceive of what else might be possible, as we’ve already ridden the avalanche down the slippery slope, way past the worst projections I could have imagined. Anything I write now would necessarily change from comedy to dystopia, because when children are being harmed, we are way past laughing matters. There has to be a way to compassionately deal with what happens at the margins of a society, without destroying that same society in the process. Either our moral and political leaders find and pursue such a vision, or the harming of children will only be the beginning of this new dawning age of swirling confusion.