Gnothi Seauton For Some, But Not For Others?
Having complained about the “ruralist” takeover of the Republican Party, Helen Rittelmeyer is not someone you would not immediately with praising “red state” culture, but then the way that she goes about it almost makes you wonder whether she is delivering a left-handed compliment in her response to this:
Let’s put aside the question of whether or not New Yorkers really question their moral assumptions (although if someone else wanted to take up this line of argument, I wouldn’t stop them) and simply look at the end result of this Blue State skepticism. Most of the time, it’s some variation on the harm principle under which the most important ethical question becomes “Does it increase everyone’s happiness?” What could be less sophisticated?
Contrast this with the moral decision-making of a Red Stater who has unquestioningly accepted a truckload of inherited traditions (the clod!). He has to weigh love of country against love for his brother serving in Iraq, not to mention Christian morality, which has a thing or two to say about war. Or he might have to consider family loyalty versus the desire to do something about his sister’s alcoholism. Or loyalty to his wife versus passionate love for another woman. Cheating songs are a sign of moral sophistication (insofar as they take seriously both the sacred vow and true love), and I dare you to name one Blue State genre of music that can boast as many cheating songs as country [bold mine-DL].
Moral philosophy is hard. If every ethical question could be boiled down to some hedonistic or utilitarian calculus (I’m looking at you, cultural libertarianism), it would be easy. Maybe Red Staters don’t respect Socrates as much as they should, but that doesn’t change the fact that, in a world where urbanity is synonymous with cultural liberalism, they’re the only side of the culture war that needs him.
If I read this right, Ms. Rittelmeyer is saying that it is lack of utilitarianism, competing obligations and an abundance of temptation that confer moral sophistication. She has taken the social disorder and family instability that drives many lower-middle class people in “red states” towards the politics of order and stability and turned it into a kind of complex moral reasoning. For the sake argument, assume that New Yorkers, Angelenos and Chicagoans and the rest do not question their moral assumptions–how many people ever really question their moral assumptions? Having cross-cutting obligations and complicated relationships is not the same as reflecting upon the nature of justice and knowing oneself. If it was absurd to say that an unexamined life was worth living, as the “red state” correspondent claimed, it is perhaps even more absurd to say that a complicated life full of conflicts is one that has been examined. It is also not clear that all “blue staters” are simply utilitarians, but almost certainly have their own sets of conflicting obligations and their own “truckload of inherited traditions,” which may include utilitarian ethics and liberal politics. Consider: she says that “red staters” have unquestioningly inherited their traditions, but she says this by way of illustrating how unquestioning “blue staters” are, so which is it?
On the music question, I am no expert but it seems to me that hip-hop and R&B must have a large number of songs that address the question of infidelity, and if they do not compare to country songs in this respect they are probably close. Are these “blue state” genres? I am not sure that they are, since you can find listeners for them all along the old Route 66 corridor, but they seem to fit the bill. Turning to film, we can find cautionary tales about infidelity set in metropolitan areas in the oeuvre of Michael Douglas, and I think if you turn to television you will find other forms of entertainment that have great fun mucking about in the swamp of moral turpitude and conflicting obligations (e.g., Nip/Tuck, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, etc.). If these are the criteria for a culture that prizes self-knowledge, “blue” America is likely to meet them as well as “red,” but I think all of this misses something important.
Worldliness and competing loyalties do not define moral sophistication, but simply define our condition in this world that all of us share. Whatever moral sophistication we are going to find, it is not going to be found in questioning assumptions but in fulfilling our obligations.
9 Responses to “Gnothi Seauton For Some, But Not For Others?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I know this is besides the point, but why are “the sacred vow” and “true love” treated here as mutually exclusive, and fidelity in marriage as nothing more than loyalty? That seems uncharacteristically cynical from a political movement so concerned with marriage’s sanctity.
And for that matter, in how many cases is infidelity really a question of “true love,” as opposed to, say, fleeting physical desire for this year’s (usually much younger) model? I don’t see the “moral sophistication,” sorry.
Those are great points. I should come back to that in another post. You’re right. Infidelity is principally an expression of selfishness, not love, whether true or not, and indeed reflects the degree to which the person cheating is incapable of the real trust that love entails. I don’t see the sophistication, either. Thanks for drawing attention to that.
I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about blue-states and red-states as opposing cultural groups. All states have liberal areas and conservative areas; the determinant is often (but not always) the urban/rural split. Upstate New York is a very conservative place and Austin TX is a very liberal place. The analysis might make more sense with a much finer level of granularity where one compared blue counties to red counties or some such, but it still seems questionable: one would have to work hard to control for the effect of wealth. How much of MA or CT’s very low divorce rate is related to the fact that these states have very high median incomes and divorce (along with many other social ills) becomes much less likely as income goes up? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m pretty sure that unless one knows the answer, one has no business making comparisons between red-state and blue-state populations.
Of course, you’re just responding to the piece so this isn’t your fault at all.
The music genres are completely different. The blue states sing about drugs, sex, and violence. The red states prefer drinkin’, cheatin’, and fightin’.
On the music question, I am no expert but it seems to me that hip-hop and R&B must have a large number of songs that address the question of infidelity, and if they do not compare to country songs in this respect they are probably close. Are these “blue state†genres?
I’m no expert on American music, either, but I listen to enough country to know that Rittelmeyer is misrepresenting the way it tends to deal with infidelity. It doesn’t tend to be about trying to balance loyalty to a spouse against love for another woman. It doesn’t even tend to be about the singer’s infidelity at all. It’s more often about the singer’s girlfriend’s (or wife’s) infidelity. The responses range from despair and imagined bad consequences (“your cheatin’ heart will make you weep”) to murder (“If I hadn’t shot poor Delia I’d've had her for my wife”).
In that respect–once you account for the profanity and the more explicit descriptions of sex and violence–some country music is thematically quite similar to some gangsta rap. That’s the music of some of the “bluest” areas of the country. I’m sure Snoop Dog (who raps, in B***hes Ain’t S**t, about kicking down his girlfriend’s door, gun in hand, to catch her cheating on him with his cousin) will be glad to know that Rittelmeyer thinks he’s engaged in a morally sophisticated enterprise.
To be less flip: gangsta rap is a great example of your point that music that describes chaotic, unhappy and violent circumstances is not necessarily morally serious.
I suppose Rittelmeyer could counter that “black” music should be excluded, since she’s just trying to use music as a means of insulting well-off white liberals. Fair enough, but if she’s arguing that white liberals don’t write and listen to music about infidelity, romantic dilemmas, etc., then she’s failed to listen to any indie rock, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, etc., etc. These situations and feelings are constants of the human condition across time and space, and singers everywhere are going to sing about them within their own personal and cultural contexts.
Rittelmeyer is romanticizing country music because she already has a romantic view of the people who listen to it; she isn’t genuinely using different musical genres as a window into the moral universes of the people who listen to them.
Rittelmeyer is romanticizing country music because she already has a romantic view of the people who listen to it; she isn’t genuinely using different musical genres as a window into the moral universes of the people who listen to them.
Spot on.
Ms Rittelmeyer says of liberal moral reasoning:
Mr Larison replies
I take Ms Rittlemeyer to be referring off-handedly to the work of Jonathan Haidt on the moral psychology of conservatives and liberals. In summary, he finds that liberal moral reasoning is simpler (at least in one sense) than conservative moral reasoning. Liberals tend to rely primarily on balancing the harm principle and fairness; whereas, conservatives additionally balance concerns of loyalty, respect, and sanctity. These findings are of an “in general and on average” character, of course, not of an absolute character.
That liberals, in general, have a simpler moral framework which they express in a more complex way seems kind of obvious to me. I wonder if Mr Larison is confusing complexity of description with complexity of the described underlying process? Or confusing characteristic, aggressive liberal claims of sophistication with sophistication itself?
The music claim is strange, though. Thomas Sowell would claim (I conjecture) that hip-hop and country are similar in their themes because black culture is derivative of redneck culture.
Charlie – There are a fair number of songs from the point of view of the guilt-ridden cheater (usually male) – “The Long Black Veil,” “Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn,” “After the Fire Is Gone,” “Don’t Take It Away,” “If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right” (actually a song recorded by a male R & B singer and later covered by a female country singer), “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away,” “Lady Down on Love,” and “On the Other Hand” are prominent examples. The last named is probably the one that most closely matches Rittelmeyer’s Platonic ideal.
In the early 1990s there were two songs about male cheaters from a detatched but critical third-person observer (also male, and in the latter case confessing with guilt to his own past infidelities): “The Thunder Rolls” and “Pocket Full of Gold.” More recently, there have been plenty of songs (too many to list here) of the type you alllude to, but with the sexes reversed: female singer furious at male infidelity.
Certainly the type you mention is historically not uncommon, of course. “You Win Again” and “The Cold Hard Facts of Life” are perhaps the two most powerful (in very different ways) examples.
I always thought that a truly distinguishing feature of country was that it is the only genre that commonly has songs about divorce. Other genres have songs about break-ups, but the marital status of the participants is left vague or outright stated to be single (in the old sense). These days that actually reflects the marital patterns of the “red” and “blue” states, but it even predates that.
“Country music is all about being cheated on, rap music is all about doing the cheating.”
I listen to neither and prefer instrumental music.