Gotham Diary:
A Modest Thought
17 July 2014
It’s disappointing, really. Neil Genzlinger doesn’t really tell us how awful the new VH1 show, Dating Naked, must really be. There’s only one hint.
The shows are taking what used to be the long-term goal — getting married or seeing someone naked or both — and making it the starting point. As Chrissy, one of the geniuses in the first episode of “Dating Naked,” notes: “It is awkward meeting someone naked. I mean, usually you wait till sex.”
Yes, I remember when that is how it used to be. But Genzlinger doesn’t even tell us if Chrissy, philosopher that she is, is a contestant. It makes a difference, no? I mean, when Chrissy makes this “ingenious” observation, what is she wearing? Context is everything.
I don’t want to see this show for myself, but I want to how grindingly mortifying it must be to watch, to imagine what must be (or what ought to be) going through the contestants’ minds as they paddle their kayaks into the sunset. I want an assessment of pixellation as virtual costume. I want to read about this sink of depravity in all its gruesome detail. I want to see someone’s moral lightbulb burning.
Instead, Neil Genzlinger riffs about the jobs that are going to be lost, as nudity sweeps small-screen shows.
All-bare TV, while certainly clickbait for 14-year-old viewers and those who wish they still were, will be a net loss for at least some series. I, for one, am not watching “Naked Downton Abbey.” Without those costumes, it just won’t be the same.
Ha ha. But what can you expect from a man who watches television for a living?
I do wish that there was more to know about the history of being fourteen years old. When did it become so rancid? I suspect the conversion of tradition-bound young men into sex-crazed pervs began with the breakup of agrarian culture in the Nineteenth Century and the associated increase in mobility, which put so many people in the company of strangers. It was completed by the mediatization of sex, which began with the nickelodeons and their filmstrips of young girls combing their hair and getting ready for bed. These displacements offered the promise, basically, of anonymous sex — sex with people you didn’t know; sex, even, with people you couldn’t touch. This frictionless contact (frictionless because it isn’t really contact) can become as addictive as any drug, and, like drugs, make “normal” gratifications impossible. (For a diverting but humane tour of this sordid problem, see Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s illuminating Don Jon.) It is possible nowadays to become a sex expert without ever having brushed against love or caring. This is what our traditional strictures against exposing children to carnal matters beyond their full understanding were intended to prevent.
Not only is that horse out of the barn, but the barn has burned down. We can’t go back, and there’s no point dreaming that we might. But we have to be candid about the mess underfoot, and find some new way of dealing with it. There ought to be counseling, for example, for men who wish they were still fourteen.
***
On Monday, Roy Jenkins’s Churchill arrived, and I began reading it yesterday. I’ve never read a book about Churchill, strangely enough. It is, of course, impossible to read at all widely in modern history — modern Anglophone history, I should say — without encountering Churchill with frequency; the man lived a very long life, was already a statesman at the beginning of World War I, became the statesman in World War II, and wrote a lot of highly literate books. The eloquence of his detractors was often memorable as well. He even had his own room in the Roosevelt White House. I have picked up the broad outline of Churchill’s colorful career in much the same way that you might learn about celebrities from the pages of Vanity Fair.
Jenkins’s book presents a more polished and better-organized portrait, but, in its first hundred pages at least, it hasn’t taken me so much as an inch closer to Churchill’s interior life. This is not a disappointment, because I don’t expect that Churchill had an interior life. He had a private life, of course, more or less grubby as every mortal being’s, but he didn’t inhabit it so much as visit it, when necessary, as you might visit a sick relative in hospital. A therapist might charge Churchill with repressing or suppressing his inner life, but I believe that he simply ignored it, and that ignoring it was never a problem for him. Indeed, what is Churchill’s story if not a magnificent instance of “acting out”? He was, from the very beginning of his military career, a man in the world; indeed, I can think of few men who more closely fit Hannah Arendt’s idea of the citizen. Between his military and his political exploits, he embodied the ancient Greek ideal that Arendt still found unbeatable — and all without depending on slaves!
The glittering extroversion of Jenkins’s Churchill reminds me of a recurring comment in the background of John Campbell’s biography of Jenkins. Praise of Jenkins was often qualified, it seemed to me, by the reservation that he was not “of course” a deep thinker. I find myself wondering what a deep thinker is. Is it someone who thinks about “deep” things? A philosopher, in other words. Schophenhauer, Nietzsche. Or is it someone who has a “deeper” way of thinking. In other words, a poet. John Donne, Wallace Stevens. Is it a mathematician, or an engineer? An analyst, someone who patiently breaks things down to find their irreducible elements? Roy Jenkins was, indeed, none of these things, but I can’t can’t fault his thinking (as reflected in writings, from histories to budgets to Parliamentary speeches) for shallowness. Jenkins thought about important things for most of his life (even when he was enjoying his claret, I expect), and was far more inclined than Churchill to do so without the inducement of urgent excitement. Like Churchill, moreover, he pursued a life-long career of improving the quality of his thinking. Continuing education, for both men, was a vital part of everyday life.
The antithesis to “deep” seems, in the end, to be “worldly.” A difference to perpend.
Daily Blague news update: Flying Cars.