If the central character isn't an anti hero then he's a ...?

The answer is that he's a hero. I'm going to argue that Don Draper is a hero and that we cannot understand him or appreciate his appeal if we don't recognize that. My big challenge in convincing anyone of this is going to be that a lot of people believe that he is an anti hero.

Don Draper is the apotheosis of the antihero. He’s a selfish, self-destructive womanizing drunk who stole another man’s identity, but the character’s elegance and eloquence — coupled with Hamm’s sleek good looks and subtle performance — made it all OK, and typically quite interesting to watch.

On the flip side we have Draper's primary creator Matt Weiner who insists he isn't.

If you watch the video of Matt Weiner at that link you'll come away wondering what exactly an anti hero is. The definition that comes up first when you Google "anti hero" is, "a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes". That's not much help for all heroes have flaws and some of them have a whole lot of flaws such that there are lots of heroes who at least start of lacking conventional heroic attributes. If Achilles isn't a hero then no one is and he spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent.

What makes a hero a hero is action. He's the guy you can depend on to act effectively when it really matters. That's what makes Achilles a hero despite all his negative qualities and the same is true of Don Draper. Often times, a story will open with someone who seems deeply unconvincing as a hero but whom we find heroic by the end.

Okay, but what is an anti hero then? I think an anti hero is someone whom we we continue to resist accepting as a hero even after the story is over.

But that isn't helping my case much. Lots of people, starting with Robert Rorke quoted above, resist very strongly the notion that Draper is credible as a hero and advance all sorts of reasons for that. In fact, there are no shortage of people who feel a need to dismiss the character completely. He becomes just a peg to hang social criticism on, and mostly male bashing at that.

What I want you to consider is what Weiner doesn't quite get around to saying: that Don Draper is a hero! That he's a man worth emulating.

This requires an esoteric reading of the series. That is to say, it requires us to see a meaning that is in the series that is not merely hidden, that isn't just a "deeper meaning" but is deliberately hidden by writing that appears to say the opposite while laying clues that make it possible to dig out a different meaning. Not da Vinci Code style with all sorts of mysterious symbols and secret codes. That sort of thing can happen, of course, but most esoteric writing is more mundane than that.

Teddy the Greek

To get a grasp on it, imagine that you meet a child who has a villain—a sports figure, a pop star or fictional character. This child asks you if you too fear and dislike their nemesis. Only a jerk would crush the child's worldview but you actually quite admire the character. So you find something affirming to say. Okay, but let's further complicate the problem. The child has a hot older sibling and you want this hot older sibling to know that you're cool; that you don't have any illusions. You need to find a way to say something that will feel genuine and sincere to the child but will be just enough off that the older sibling that they get it.

It's my contention that Mad Men did this all the time. It fed the childish illusions that many want to believe about who the heroes and villains of the 1960s were while making mistakes that more thoughtful people would notice and begin to wonder about. One of these illusions is central to the way we tend to think about the period and that is that any positive aspects we might see in the 1960s and the 1950s before are obliterated by the racism and sexism of the period. Nostalgia, for modern liberals is an illegitimate and distorting emotion to be resisted. This is especially true of any nostalgia for the period before the sexual revolution, the antiwar and civil rights movement and feminism. A show like Mad Men challenges that simply by exiting.

The show's writers face the problem squarely in the final episode of the first season.

There is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job. I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most idea in advertising is 'new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.  

He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, "nostalgia". It's delicate. But potent. 

Teddy told that , in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain from an old would."

Now, the interesting thing here is that Don reverses the way our era treats these things. For our era, nostalgia is the easy sell. It creates the itch and then you give the people La belle epoque, American Graffiti, Animal House, Happy Days, The Waltons or some other nostalgic entertainment as a sort of calamine lotion and everyone is happy. Everyone except the professor teaching popular culture at the local university. He/she wants you to know that there were problems with that era that should trouble us because she/he doesn't want anyone admiring any of the values of that era. The professor wants you to embrace "new".

And Don Draper represents the past. He never changes. He always embraces a set of old values. They aren't mainstream values of the period to be certain but they are old. They could be loosely described as 'the hobo code". And he creates a nostalgia for a certain kind of man; a man who is secretive, strong and independent; a man who can cut his losses and move on, not without pain but he can and will do it whenever necessary.

That Don represents this challenge is no problem. He can be dismissed. He is easy to hate. The problem is that he is also easy to love and millions did and do.

The hint that there might be something esoteric going on is in the last line where Don gives a definition of nostalgia. It's not just wrong, it's very wrong. "Nostalgia" uses Greek components but it was coined by A German speaker to describe a condition where people were incapacitated by a desire to return home. The Greek words combined to make it literally mean "aching to go home". As conceived by Johannes Hofer, nostalgia means the exact opposite of what Draper says it means: it means a desire to escape a new wound into a safer past.

But this is where it gets interesting. Right from the beginning, nostalgia has been very compelling. Hofer's definition, echoed by the many who criticize it today, makes nostalgia into a childish emotion, an escapist fantasy. Don Draper gives us a more interesting option: that nostalgia isn't about wanting to escape but a way of confronting loss. And the show appears to back this up by giving us to aspects of the man: Don who deals with situations masterfully and Dick who runs. Those who see Don as an anti hero take that "inner Dick" as the real man. Those of us who admire him take the teleological view, that the man Don wants to become is the real man.

If we take this second option, we'll see the way events spin out in the rest of the story different. The common interpretation of the ending of that first season was that Don did such a good job of selling the men from Kodak that he sold himself too and returned home hoping to find the very thing he'd sold others on.

It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... back home again, a place where we know we are loved.

But "a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone" isn't real so much as it is religious. "Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in thee."

Donald Draper did not, as Robert Rorke and many others claim, steal another man's identity. He used his dog tags to get out of the army and he kept up that deception to break ties with his past as Dick Whitman but he does not adapt the identity of the other man. Think of the man who pretends to a famous actor to get sex or who pretends to be someone else so as to apply for a credit card and then leave this other person stuck with the bill. That is what "stealing another man's identity" is. What Donald Draper does is more akin to giving a false name so as not to be arrested.

You may say, "So what, it's still illegal" and that it most certainly is. But it's still important to get a correct grasp on what is happening. Donald Draper is not a assuming another man's identity, he's a man running away from a shameful past. He's running away from "death". We might well say he is running away from sin.

The first man

Why does Adam commit suicide? "Because he finds his brother whom he thought was dead but his brother rejects him." Okay, but why would that dictate suicide? Adam has seen the loss of his mother and his stepfather. He's had to make it on his own and he has managed. Why would he kill himself? It doesn't make sense.

If I'm right, it doesn't make sense because it isn't supposed to make sense.

Adam, at least according to a flashback and I think we should treat these as mythology not history, was named so by his mother "after the first man". If you know your Saint Paul, however, you'll know that there is a second Adam who follows the first Adam and yet existed before him. I'll grant you that's an odd bit of mythology for a Jew such as Matt Weiner to seize upon and yet I think he does just that. Unlike a believer like myself, this mythology is just like any other mythology for Weiner. Adam is important, not as a real character, but for what he represents to Donald Draper, a past he flees but also a loss.

That's all for now.

Virtue signalling (2)

I do not know whether the term virtue signalling will catch on or not. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it describes something human beings actually do. On the other hand, it was quickly appropriated by the perpetual outrage community as a cheap and easy put down.

The key fact is this: virtue signalling is a normal and unavoidable thing that all human beings do. It's not evil. You, me and everybody else we know will, under most circumstances, express the values the we believe the people we are with want to hear. It's a normal, and even productive, thing to do.

A friend of mine is pregnant with her second child. She noticed that her first child has started to grunt when he bends over. He does this because mummy, heavy with child, grunts when she bends over. That's virtue signalling. He's expressing a value, bending over is hard, because his mother expresses that value. In her case, it's actually true. In his case, it's not. He does it because he, like all human beings, is hardwired to learn by imitating others and because his very life depends on his mother.

That is true of us too. Our very life depends on the community around us. If you find yourself stuck with people you don't know well for an extended period of time, you will begin to mirror their behaviours and attitudes.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. The most commonplace one is the that it takes courage to speak up for your values. Most of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in the presence of someone who brashly says things we deeply oppose but found ourselves unable to respond. We just sat there while things we found hateful were said. But there is a deeper and more important lesson here and that is that our expressed values are often at odds with our real values.

Think of the example I give above in a slightly different light. Imagine you are in a group and someone says things you deeply oppose and you do not object at first but soon notice that the others in the group do. And now you join in. Or maybe you wait a little longer to see if a few others also join and then you join in. Perhaps you wait until it's obvious that the person is rejected and reviled by the rest of the group and then you join in (perhaps "pile on" would be a better term by that point).

We've all done these things. What this tells us is that fitting in is a value we treasure deeply.

To return to the previous example, let's consider a further hypothetical: if the group started to be angry with the person who had expressed offensive opinions, at what point would we pull back? We hope that it would be sometime before someone got a rope to lynch them with but who knows what we are capable of.

We live in a deontological culture. That is to say, we live in a world where morality is largely defined in terms of duty defined by rules. Be tolerant. Don't use violence. Recycle. Don't have sex with teenagers. Be faithful to your spouse. Don't text while driving. And many more. Each of these rules comes accompanied with a justification in terms of duty. "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling."

This is a very compelling morality. It's clearly expressed and relatively easy to understand. Compared to utilitarianism, Do what will give the greatest happiness to the largest number," or virtue ethics, "Act in a  way to train yourself to be a better human being, " there is clarity and ease of application to be found in, "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling." You know what to do and you can easily figure out if you've done it. It's also liberating in one sense—once you've done what the rules tell you to be your duty, you can stop. "I've recycled, I can get a beer and watch television." That's nothing to sneer at, although we all do sneer at it.

But, at the same time that we accept deontology, we also reject it because we cannot and do not fully internalize these values. My real attitude toward recycling is something like: "I will do this up to a point but if I just have to get the place cleaned up because guests are arriving or because I've been getting depressed at the kitchen being so messy and I know I'll feel better if I can clean it up quickly then those plastic containers are going straight into the garbage and I don't think that will do any real harm so long as I don't do it too often but, at the same time, I don't want everyone thinking this is okay so I will continue to hold the hard line when expressing my attitudes towards people who don't recycle."

It's not that we have some alternative set of values that we really follow. It's more that we are willing to make a whole lot of exceptions that we aren't honest with ourselves or others about. And that is why we fear and love the expression "virtue signalling". We fear it because we know it can be justly applied to what we do. We love it because it can be justly applied to what other people do and that makes it a useful tool for making others talk and behave in a predictable fashion.

What do we do about this? I'll try and come back to it.

A rum thing

In this we are victims of our own antihistorical bias. The dizzying pace of change in the last hundred years has left us stranded. We somehow think that the way things are is the way they have always been; that the Present is the same as the Natural Order. 

And yet our culture knows better. Buried in the way things are is a long chain of used-to-be's. If we get out the shovels and go below the surface a bit, we find five parallel stories that tell us why X matters.

The X, for which the above was written is rum. The book I quote here is a Short Course in Rum: A Guide to Tasting and Talking About Rum by Lynn Hoffman. His point, however, could applied to a lot of things, not the least of which is Catholicism. Much of what people declare to be the "unchanged teaching of the church going back two thousand years" is really the product of the last few centuries.

Virtue signalling (1)

From On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society, 1840

By Thomas Carlyle

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. 

By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. 

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. 

Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Skepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? 

Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.

Praxis and theory

Melzer and, I assume, Leo Strauss, argue that esoteric writing arises from a perceived conflict between theory and praxis. The ancients believed that there was always such a conflict because "the many" would never be able to appreciate philosophy. The moderns, beginning with the Enlightenment leaders, believed that there was a temporary gap between theory and praxis but, once praxis had been reformed according to theory, it would disappear. On this modern account, esoteric writing is only a temporary thing until social practices had been reformed.

If that Enlightenment notion puts the stink of Auschwitz in your nose, go to the head of the class.

The ancient view also has its problems. Commenting on the Seventh Letter attributed to Plato, Melzer writes,

The passage begins, for example, with the classic Platonic view that philosophic knowledge is the supreme good of life and that helping others to acquire it, where possible, an act of highest beneficence.

There is something about this reading of Plato that has more in common with religious mysticism than with the kind of philosophy I like to do. I, like Wittgenstein, see philosophy as something we do on a temporary basis in response to puzzles that arise and we do it not as an end in itself but in order to be able to go back to leading our lives. That is not to say, as some have misread Wittgenstein, that all philosophical puzzles can be made to go away but rather that we should not be bewitched by the language. The central mysteries of life will always be there and one of the best things about doing philosophy in a Wittgensteinian manner is that we can face these mysteries as mysteries much as a good Catholic doesn't claim to comprehend the Trinity. We will recognize mysteries through ritualistic behaviour rather than try to dissolve them through analysis.

This approach puts praxis ahead of theory. To put it in ordinary language, it's more important to live well than to be able to say what living well is. And that reverses the order of esoteric thinking: we will now be esoteric in order to protect our praxis from theory, our own theory as well as that of others.

Encountering another as a person definitely does not mean "dissolving" that person, taking him or her apart psychologically and thus seizing power over the other, but seeing the other in his or her difference, even strangeness. Whoever wants to truly recognize another as a person must expect to encounter the unexpected and be led into a new world of which one previously had no idea—a world whose strangeness fascinates but also frightens.

That's Gerhard Lohfink and the primary example he has in mind is Jesus who needs to be protected from our ego which would reduce him to a concept. But the same is true of us in our encounter with social groups beginning with our own families. Others will always want to reduce us to their idea of what we should be. And this would lead to something like the reverse of what Arthur Melzer and Leo Strauss have in mind when they speak of esoteric writing: it would be a way of appearing to go along with theory so as to be able to protect a praxis that is at odds with that theory.

This will be more than what is implied by the common expression "lip service" for we will want not only to provide lip service but also to communicate with others who share our values not as expressed in some theory but as actually lived.

Violet-le-Duc on restoration

Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to rebuild it; it means to re-establish in a completed state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.

Violet-le-Duc is a controversial figure, a fact that wouldn't bother him at all. What impresses me about that quote is the courage it shows. Courage that the man demonstrated in the work he did.

It seems to me that this attitude applies to more than just restoring buildings. To restore anything at all means to take the risk of creating something new in the process. To think that anything else is possible is delusional and the risk of paralysis is very real.

Psychological reactance

An excerpt from a NYT article about the appeal of Donald Trump:

Haidt describes reactance as

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

The theory, first developed in 1966 by Jack W. Brehm in “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” is directly relevant to the 2016 election, according to Haidt. Here is Brehm’s original language:

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy. This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior. Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy.

I thought of something I wrote myself a short while ago:

If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter.

Family does that to you.

I've been rereading Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur Melzer. He lists a number of reasons why someone might engage in esoteric writing. All these are either to avoid evil or to attain some good. On the avoidance end:

• We might write esoterically to protect ourselves from condemnation by the larger society.
• We might write esoterically to protect the larger society from truths it cannot bear.

We might also write esoterically:

• As a form of propaganda aimed at similarly minded people.
• As a way of teaching for the reader will be obliged to figure things out for themselves.

I think psychological reactance raises another possibility: that we might write, indeed live, esoterically in order to gain a private sphere for ourselves. We could get this, of course, simply by locking ourselves in our rooms alone for long periods of time. Indeed, just about every teen does this when puberty comes along and they are suddenly subject to needs and desires that would cause extreme shame if they were not kept private. Ultimately, however, this privacy will be empty. We need a private sphere that includes other people, a world we can share with others, that also excludes people who "try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you".

The word "perceive" carries a lot of weight here. You might simply be wrong in your perception and you can never completely shake the feeling of doubt that comes with that. Combine that with a family member who has authority because they are a parent, or who is self righteous in their anger and is threatening you with exclusion, or, and this is gruelling, is both of those things, and you will crack. Thus the need to carve out a sphere where you can express thoughts esoterically that others might suppress.

The good news is that everyone feels this need and you will find others playing the same game and it, like most games, is more fun to play with others. And, because all games have an implied teleology, that teleology will become the basis of your personal mythology. You will have a notion not of who you are, which is what your family bombards you with, but of who you should be trying to become.

That creates tensions within the family. Seeing you develop independence as a consequence of having this teleology, some family members will try and reign you in. Mothers are particularly prone to this, which is why I advocate that every man and woman intentionally blow up their relationship with their mother at some point. There is another danger, however, and that is enablers: these are family members who set themselves up as the unofficial police for the family mythology. They do this largely because of fears and insecurities of their own but that doesn't mean they won't make you hurt.

Another subject about which there will be more to say.