Isegoria

Steve Sailer calls Mad Men a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups:

For Baby Boomers, it’s hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better!

Like the eleven-hour 1981 British adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel about the elegance and indolence of post-Great War Oxford undergrads, Mad Men’s languorous 13-hours per year pace affords viewers the time to wallow in the visual details and manners of a more adult age than our own.
[...]
While Waugh wore his reactionary heart on his sleeve in Brideshead, Weiner maintains plausible deniability in Mad Men by methodically depicting how unenlightened the upper-middle class WASPs of a half century ago were. We in the audience are scandalized to note, for example, that even the most respectable parents in 1960 devoted more time to socializing with other adults than to obsessively overseeing their offspring’s next leap up the steep slope of the meritocratic pyramid.

Moreover, many families in 1960 can afford a home on just one income. As Betty Friedan noted, housewives are imprisoned in their suburban homes, escaping in Mad Men only, well… any time they feel like it.

Worse, firms pay married workers more than equally productive single ones, in violation of all the tenets of Friedan and Friedman. Employers back then felt they had a “duty to society,” a concept with which our advanced cultures are no longer familiar.

Even more shockingly, the employees at the Sterling Cooper ad agency knock off work right at 5:15 PM each day. They appear to have some weird Depression-era relic of a notion of solidarity among American workers: that if the bosses want more work done, they should hire more workers.

Didn’t they understand back then that cheap wages and expensive land are what made America great?
[...]
While watching Mad Men, Weiner affords us ample opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made. For example, most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact, black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24 percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus 25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.)
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As a social commentator, Weiner is on the winning side in the culture war. Yet, as an artist, he senses a void in the brave new America. While he may lack the vocabulary to articulate it, this longing helps give Mad Men its romantic aura that lifts it above its own soap operaish and soft porn tendencies.

In 1970, the newly hatched Public Broadcasting Service aired a 13-part TV series called Civilisation: A Personal View, which had already been a high-brow hit for the BBC the year before:

“The very simple thought I started from,” said David Attenborough, the BBC executive who dreamed up “Civilisation,” “was to get on the screen the loveliest things created by European man in the past thousand years.” When Clark was invited to serve as its host and writer, he added an urgent imperative of his own: “It’s worth trying . . . to make people realize how fragile civilisation is and how easily it might slip from our grasp.”

By “civilisation” Clark meant Western civilization, and the first episode, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” made it clear that he was no less firm a believer in the primacy of high culture and the genius of great men. In the opening sequence, an unseen organist thunders out a toccata as the camera pans across the face of Michelangelo’s David, the façade of Chartres Cathedral and other icons of Western art. Then Clark reads the stately words of John Ruskin: “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.” From there he embarks on a discursive tour d’horizon devoted solely to the doings of dead white giants: Charlemagne, Raphael, Bach, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Byron, Rodin. If you think Michael Jackson was a musical master, you’ve come to the wrong shop.

Much of the effect of “Civilisation” arose from the witty flair with which Clark conducted this highbrow travelogue. “Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well,” he proclaimed in one episode. In another he described opera as “one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.” But for all his charm, you were never in a moment’s doubt of his passionate belief in the power and significance of Western culture.

Four decades ago, Time magazine declared “Civilisation” to be TV’s “most distinguished (not to mention only new) cultural series” of the year. Those words have a hollow ring today. For years PBS has been trimming back its high-culture programming, partly because it doesn’t do well in the ratings and partly, I suspect, because such lofty fare has lost favor with the intellectual elite. The notion of devoting a 13-hour TV series to the glories of Western art would now be thought comical—or contemptible—by those well-placed eggheads who regard the West as the source of all evil in the postmodern world. Among such enlightened folk, “Civilisation” is regarded as an embarrassing relic, painfully slow-moving and politically retrogressive.

I doubt that Clark, who died in 1983, would have been surprised to hear that. In “Civilisation” he warned that Western culture rested on a thin crust of ice: “Advanced thinkers, who even in Roman times thought it fine to gang up with the barbarians, have begun to question whether civilization is indeed worth preserving. . . . It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.” The day that PBS replays “Civilisation” in prime time is the day I’ll breathe a little easier about the prospects for the preservation of the art that Kenneth Clark championed so eloquently—and unapologetically.

Behold the first six minutes of the first episode:

The whole series is available on DVD.

The most recent episode of South Park mocks inconsiderate f–––––s:

I wasn’t expecting them to run with the whole question of what The F Word — not the F word, the other one — even means, but they handled it well — dialing the vulgarity to 11, yes, but also including some nuanced subtext.

Sam Anderson describes Mrs. Logic with verve:

Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new — an acolyte who’d traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novel — she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth — the whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. She’d start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windows — a shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle.

Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think we’ve reached bedrock, there’s almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned?…?What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is — and oh so flagrantly! — is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”

No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand. Few fellow creatures have had a more intensely odd personal flavor; her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces. She was proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash. (One former associate called her “the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions.”) But she was also idealistic, yearning, candid, worshipful, precise, and improbably charming. She funneled all of these contradictory elements into Objectivism, the home-brewed philosophy that won her thousands of Cold War–era followers and that seems to be making some noise once again in our era of bailouts and tea parties. (Glenn Beck and Ron Paul are Rand fans; Alan Greenspan, once a member of her inner circle, had his faith in the market’s rationality shaken by the crash.)

It’s easy to chuckle at Rand, smugly, from the safe distance of intervening decades or an opposed ideology, but in person — her big black eyes flashing deep into the night, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and amphetamines — she was apparently an irresistible force, a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock who converted doubters left, right, and center. Eyewitnesses say that she never lost an argument. One of her young students (soon to be her young lover) staggered out of his first all-night talk session referring to her, admiringly, as “Mrs. Logic.” And logic, in Rand’s hands, seemed to enjoy superpowers it didn’t possess with anyone else. She claimed, for instance, that she could rationally explain every emotion she’d ever had. “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive,” she once wrote, “and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” One convert insisted that “she knows me better after five hours than my analyst does after five years.” The only option was to yield or stay away. (I should admit here my own bias: I was a card-carrying Objectivist from roughly age 16 to 19, during which time I did everything short of changing my last name to Randerson — a phase I’m deeply embarrassed by, but also secretly grateful for.)

Rand insisted, over and over, that the details of her life had nothing to do with the tenets of her philosophy. She would cite, on this subject, the fictional architect Howard Roark, hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” But the things she thought, it turns out, were very much dependent on her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelings — or at least on her relative lack of all that.

Anne Heller’s new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, allows us to poke our heads, for the first time, into the Russian-American’s overheated philosophical subbasement. After reading the details of Rand’s early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at all — it looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood. This is the comedy, the tragedy, and the power of Rand: She built a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.

This anecdote says so much:

Toward the end of her life, Rand listened as a prominent psychologist stood onstage and dismissed her fictional heroes — those idealized steel barons and physicists and composers — as implausible. Soon she’d had enough and stood up in the crowd, outraged.

“Am I unreal?” she shouted. “Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?”

She intended this, one suspects, as a refutation. It strikes me as maybe the most profound question she ever raised.