Being Evil

Some great writers are terrible editors of their own work—and, at times, terrible custodians of it. Walt Whitman is a famous case of this, defacing Leaves of Grass with later revisions. The franchises built around Silence of the Lambs and The Addams Family each operate at a less rarefied literary level and involve many authors beyond the original creator, but there is a similar dynamic at work in the Netflix series Wednesday, about which I have a few specific observations that are well short of a full review.

Trust me—there’s a relevant point beyond television recommendations.

Thomas Harris was a kind of pop-fiction one-hit wonder, but his hit was not a particular novel (though The Silence of the Lambs made him a rich man when the film was made) but a particular character, that of Hannibal Lecter. I don’t hold one-hit wonders in low esteem: Most musicians, writers, and artists never even produce one hit, and if “Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t quite as deeply imprinted on the musical mind as the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, it isn’t all that far behind, either—limited success is scorned most intensely by those who have known no success at all. But Harris ultimately lacked the confidence to take Hannibal Lecter’s best advice: In The Silence of the Lambs, there is a very memorable passage in which Lecter mocks FBI trainee Clarice Starling for attempting to explain away his monstrous crimes in psychotherapeutic terms: “You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism. … You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants”—“dignity pants” are adult diapers, if you are wondering—“nothing is ever anybody’s fault.” He holds in especial contempt the notion that his outrages are the result of some childhood trauma: “Nothing happened to me,” he proclaims in the novel’s most poetic line. “I happened.” 

Great pulpy stuff, right up there with the best of Mickey Spillane. But Harris eventually supplied Lecter with precisely the thing his character did not need: a traumatic, cannibalism-explaining backstory, the absence of which had been a big part of what made Lecter such a terrifying and interesting character to begin with. Harris also made considerable efforts to morally rehabilitate Lecter, having him murder, disfigure, and eat characters who—we guiltily concur—kind of deserve it. The presumably innocent Princeton students and census-takers are replaced by a series of monsters, or at least very rude people—the “free-range rude” as Lecter calls them—whose suffering is, in the moral universe of Harris’ novels, excessive but not entirely unmerited. One of the big differences between the novels and the films is that, in the books, Starling ends up running off with Lecter after having finally decided that in a world as ugly and corrupt as ours, Lecter’s way is the right way. 

Evil is at its most interesting and most seductive when it is mysterious rather than banal—there is a reason that Catholic baptismal vows demand that the initiate “reject the glamour of evil.” Hannibal is a more interesting character when we get only a glimpse of him than when his internal life is dragged out into the unsparing fluorescent light of psychology. 

In a smaller way, the writers of Wednesday make the same mistake. Wednesday Addams is introduced with a pithy observation about her high school: “I’m not sure whose twisted idea it was to put hundreds of adolescents in underfunded schools run by people whose dreams were crushed years ago. But I admire the sadism.” The word “underfunded” there turns out to be an unfortunate portent: Wednesday isn’t full of spontaneous malice—she is a budding social-justice warrior. But she starts off being a lot of fun: When she narrowly avoids being charged with attempted murder after releasing a school of piranhas into the swimming pool as rough justice for the water-polo players who bullied her brother—resulting in a spectacular cloud of blood but no fatalities—her mother asks how such a charge would look on her permanent record. “Terrible,” she replies. “Everybody would know I failed to get the job done.” But, unfortunately, Wednesday gets a traumatic backstory, too—bullies killed her beloved pet scorpion when she took it out for a walk—and, like Hannibal, she is given victims who deserve what’s coming to them. In Wednesday’s case, the victim-villains are literally dead white men and the modern inheritors of their privilege who are attempting to “whitewash” the sordid history of the Hogwarts-style school she attends after being kicked out of public school following that attempted murder. There’s even a bit where she defaces the statue of the school’s founder in a clumsy nod to our imbecilic campus politics. She begins the story as a dangerous loner and eccentric, an aspiring novelist who uses a manual typewriter because she does not want to be a slave to technology. By the end, she is hugging her bestie and texting her boyfriend on the iPhone he gave her. (I assume it’s an iPhone—could be Android, I suppose.) Which is to say, she has been fitted for her moral dignity pants. 

This is a subject for a much longer essay—I get into it a little in The Smallest Minority—but my belief is that we live in a world of piddling moralistic conformism because in the greater sense we live in a world of moral chaos. The small-ball moral hysteria, and, in particular, the conflation of morality with etiquette (language-policing, “misgendering,” etc.) is a natural and possibly inevitable reaction to the terror induced by the prospect of living in a society that is essentially amoral and predatory—which is the kind of society we live in. Megan McArdle observes this in the specific context of expectations around sex and courtship. Many young women, she notes, are profoundly unhappy in their romantic lives, for obvious reasons, but they also seem, from McArdle’s point of view, to have some difficulty making distinctions between vicious behavior and merely boorish or clumsy behavior—think of the way Harvey Weinstein and Aziz Ansari ended up in the same barrel. McArdle writes:

These women express a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, even though they are not being threatened, either physically or economically. How has the most empowered generation of women in all of human history come to feel less control over their bodies than their grandmothers did?

Let me propose a possible answer to this, suggested by a very smart social scientist of my acquaintance: They feel this way because we no longer have any moral language for talking about sex except consent. So when men do things that these women feel are wrong—such as aggressively pursuing casual sex without caring about the feelings of their female target—we’re left flailing for some way to describe this as nonconsensual, even when she agreed to the sex.

The various sexual-liberationist movements of the 1960s and 1970s were, in effect, the marketing department for moral and social chaos, and their sales pitch was, is, and always has been a lie: that this chaos will make people happy. Of course it doesn’t: Declining marriage rates and crashing fertility, incels, abortion wars, puberty blockers, the life and times of Lena Dunham—how much evidence do you need? The sex stuff always commands the best headlines—the newspaper business can be tough, as they know over at the Washington Post—but the chaos is wider and deeper than that. To take one example: Many people in the rich world are profoundly unhappy with economic life, and with working life in particular. There is much to like and to celebrate about having a dynamic and innovative economy with highly mobile labor and capital, but we also long for the richness and connection of a life marked by mutual obligation and cooperation rather than one in which labor law and market forces provide the only mediation between employers and employees. The dissatisfaction is particularly urgent among those who feel that the results produced by our laws and market forces are at odds with their sense of their own proper status, their aspirations, the character of the communities in which they live, etc. But as with McArdle’s observations about sex and courtship, we lack the moral language and the moral cultivation to approach these questions in a useful and sophisticated way; instead, we end up engaged in shrill, hysterical conversations about the top marginal corporate tax rate, as though that were really the fundamental issue.

The Christian minister Tim Keller has observed (in his sermon series on wisdom and elsewhere) that while much of our political life is spent fighting over moral questions, what is missing from much of modern life—including modern religious life—is wisdom. It is not that issues such as abortion or homosexual marriage don’t matter—of course they do—but what most perplexes and vexes many of us are questions that are only partly moral in character: Whom should I marry? What kind of work should I do? How should I think about this friendship? Should I move to a new city or stay where I am? Am I approaching my finances the right way? Our sense of wisdom and our sense of morality both are diminished because we live under what Michael Oakeshott called rationalism, the misbegotten belief that an authentic and organic society can be organized and managed by means of abstract formal models and that the complexities of social life can be approached as though they were geometry proofs. Life lived that way is life lived in all things and at all times de novo, life lived in an eternal Year Zero. Culture is a kind of accumulated wealth that lives in our minds and sensibilities, and we have found ourselves through our own actions culturally—intellectually, spiritually—disinherited. It is not as though we have blown through our cultural savings account in some kind of spendthrift spree—more like that we have forgotten where the bank is located. 

To get back to where I started, this elective poverty shapes our popular culture as much as it shapes our political discourse. Because we are operating from a position of moral insecurity bordering on moral terror, we demand a very simplistic morality from our entertainment: the white hats triumphing over the black hats, and variations on that theme. We cannot endure the moral discomfort imposed on us by stories in which the protagonists—even Hannibal Lecter and Wednesday Addams—are not entirely on the side of the angels. (Angels as we understand them.) In a similar way, the insistent hysterical conformism of campus life that has spilled over into corporate life and entertainment is, I think, moral insecurity masquerading as moral certitude. The result is a world that is in many ways more sterile—it was inevitable that the liberationists themselves would become the most narrowminded of scolds. You can see it in city life: From Hollywood Boulevard to Provincetown, there are a lot of yoga studios and juice bars in the spaces where people once drank too much and made bad decisions, not because there was some great social victory over vice but because we have replaced goodness with wellness. Even Las Vegas has been scrubbed up and put under corporate discipline. 

And there is something in us that rebels against that—something that wants the world to let Wednesday Addams be Wednesday Addams. 

Economics for English Majors

This being Christmastime, I have been thinking about the economics of gift-giving—an interesting subject, I think. 

For a certain kind of Ayn Rand-worshiping weirdo, gift-giving is baffling. The obvious explanation for gift-giving—that man is not Homo economicus and that classical economics was never meant to be a comprehensive model for all human behavior—just won’t do for some people. They demand a self-interested model for gift-giving. 

There are some of those, of course. One is that sharing is part of an evolutionary strategy: While it may be in the best interest of the lioness to keep every last morsel of that wildebeest for herself and her offspring, human beings as social animals and, as such, individual humans have an interest in the overall flourishing of the community. The evolutionary math in that situation holds that our chances of survival and flourishing are better when we share some of our resources with the group than they would be if we kept all our resources to ourselves and let the group suffer. I know approximately squat about evolutionary science as such, but that seems like a pretty plausible story to me. I have long meant to write a little book arguing that the division of labor is in a nearly literal (and maybe even literal) sense the meaning of life for human beings, i.e., that it is our cooperative social nature that really defines us. 

There is another slightly different account of gift-giving, adjacent to the evolutionary theory but not entirely identical with it. The idea in that case is that we give gifts as a way of developing social bonds, particularly with people who are outside of our kin group. The expectation of reciprocity is baked into that cake and informs a large part of our assumptions about what is fair or just in community life. The element of explicit self-interest in that case comes with the expectation that gift-giving creates mutual obligations that will be useful to us during difficult times: It is a kind of insurance policy based on the assumption that we’re not all going to have bad luck at the same time and that by spreading around the blessings in the good times we can take some of the edge off of life’s volatility. Gift-giving is also a way to purchase loyalty and cooperation (as in the old Roman patron-client politics—or in the modern American patron-client politics, for that matter) and a way to demonstrate one’s wealth and/or superior social status. 

Some economists take a different view of gift-giving: that it is economically inefficient. You can read a fun debate about that over at the American Institute for Economic Research:

If there is one thing that can make the dismal science even less appealing, it would be an economist telling the nation that holiday gift-giving generates unacceptable deadweight loss.  Bah, humbug.

But this is precisely what Joel Waldfogel did in a famous article for the American Economic Review that spawned numerous op-eds and the popular book Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Gifts for the Holidays. Prof. Waldfogel had a good point, which we will explain below. However, economics need not lead us to Grinch-like conclusions. Gift giving is not as awful as some scholars think. Indeed, exchanging presents may even have virtuous effects on the economy, but many of them show up outside of quarterly measures of Gross Domestic Product.  Exchanging gifts often creates trust and forms community. We explain how.

Before ringing in the good news, we should first explain the bad. Prof. Waldfogel argued that giving gifts generates a great deal of social inefficiency (expressed in deadweight loss) because we often give gifts that other people don’t want. Moreover, we waste an inordinate amount of time in the malls shopping for these unwanted items – time that could be spent on more productive uses.  

This isn’t difficult to understand for most people because everyone has a story about “that one gift” they received from a friend or relative that now sits in the closet taking up space. Admit it.  You probably have that quintessential “ugly cat sweater” that your Aunt Lucy gave to you even though you dislike cats and are allergic to wool. This gift is a deadweight loss because the material resources and labor that went into producing it provide you with no value, and those resources could have been employed elsewhere.  

Asymmetric information and mismatched preferences are the culprit here. You know best what you like, but your aunt can only guess and she often guesses wrong. A sweater that could have made someone else happy now sits at the bottom of your dresser taking up valuable space needed for more desired clothing. Moreover, to make Aunt Lucy feel good, you wear the sweater once a year at the family gathering and endure the incessant giggles from your nephews and nieces who realize how awful you look. Annual holiday humiliation is a cost no one should have to bear.

The pro-gift authors invoke the reciprocity-building argument mentioned above:

The answer to this puzzle becomes clear if one considers gift giving not to be a one-time exchange of worthless items, but an ongoing practice of reciprocity that builds and enhances social networks and promotes trust amongst individuals. Social networks and trust are essential for peaceful societies, and enormously important for market economies to function well.

To understand this, think back to the Hobbesian state of nature where life was solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. In order to make life less nasty, brutish, and short, we as humans need to cooperate. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, understood that by extending the market (i.e., building cooperative networks of human relations) we could leverage the division of labor and grow richer for it.  

But as markets expand, and networks grow, we enter into a world of (quasi-) anonymous trade where it is difficult to know the intentions of other individuals. How will I know if this new person I am about to interact with is honest or plans to exploit me? 

Here is where gifting presents itself as an ingenious solution to instill broad-based societal trust and build ever-larger cooperative networks. If I am unaware of your intentions, one of the best ways to assure me that you can be trusted is to sacrifice valuable resources when seemingly unnecessary. In some ways, it is similar to posting a bond to enhance credibility.

Good points on all sides, I’m sure—but I’d rather tell children about Santa Claus. 

Words About Words

The word glamour, as in “glamour of evil” above, is an interesting one. Though there is some question about the truth of the claim, it has long been believed to have been derived from the same root as the word grammar. In the medieval period, grammar was sometimes used to mean any kind of scholarship, particularly that related to artfulness with words, and, by extension, came to be used to describe occult practices, such as spellcasting. The Scottish gramarye, meaning spell, ends up in the English phrase “to cast the glamour,” meaning to cast a spell. Glamour meaning a kind of magical beauty or charm dates to the 18^th century, whereas our modern sense of glamour—the kind Virginia I. Postrel writes about so intelligently—dates only to the middle of the 20^th century. In glamour there is a connection between magic or mystery and desire, present elsewhere in English: Spell once meant to desire to possess something, as in “I spell for a Ferrari Dino.” (My source for that is an 1860 book with a wonderfully long title page: A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the Houses of Parliament; the Dens of St. Giles; and the Palaces of St. James; Preceded by a History of Cant and Vulgar Language with Glossaries of Two Secret Languages Spoken by the Wandering Tribes of London, the Costermongers and the Patterers, by a London Antiquary. Second Edition, Revised, with Two Thousand Additional Words. London: John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, 1860.”) So, something Mephistophelian from way back. 

Glamour must have been pretty slangy until recently: In my 1841 Webster’s, the word does not appear at all. 

Also  … 

The various episodes of Wednesday all have titles containing the word woe—“Quid Pro Woe,” etc.  This is, you don’t need to be told, a nod to the “Monday’s Child” nursery rhyme, a famous example of the genre of fortune-telling poems. Why should Monday’s child be fair of face, and Wednesday’s child full of woe? Nobody really knows. I long assumed—probably wrongly, I now know—that the attributes were puns derived from the namesakes of the days of the week. Monday is “moon day,” and the moon is poetically described as a fair face; Friday’s “loving and giving” child is born on the day dedicated to Freyja, the Norse version of Aphrodite. Saturday’s hardworking child is born on a day dedicated to Saturn, whose name was long (and probably wrongly) thought to be derived from the Latin word meaning to sow, an association no doubt reinforced by Saturday’s being the last day available for work before the sabbath. Etc. Wednesday’s “woe” might be a simple nod to Woden, for whom the day is named. You can make a good case—except for the fact that older versions of the poem over the years apparently associated different characteristics with different days. It once was Friday’s child that was full of woe, possibly an echo of the superstition that Fridays are unlucky. (Friday is the day of the Crucifixion, but the suspicion of Fridays apparently is pre-Christian.) So, good theory, probably not true. 

Elsewhere

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In Closing

I recommend to you Bobbi Dempsey’s tragicomic account of being plagued by a $2.57 medical debt. There is something wrong with our credit-reporting system, though I haven’t sorted out entirely what I think about it yet. 

This is very much on my mind this week because of a bizarre episode of my own. When I was in my 30s, I lived, briefly, in the New York City bedroom community of Norwalk, Connecticut. I am now in my 50s, and I have just received a tax bill from Norwalk—demanding payment of $2,000 resulting from penalties and interest on a $200 vehicle-registration fee the city is demanding from a period when I did not live in Norwalk, having moved into New York City. Of course, I’ll pay it and fight it on the back side rather than have a bad debt show up on my credit report, which could end up costing me a lot more than $2,000 if I should take out a mortgage or something like that. That’s an easy decision for people like me, who have the resources (financial and otherwise) to deal with these issues, but it could be a real burden for someone without such resources. 

I have a couple of competing theories. I moved out of Norwalk about 14 years ago, and the Connecticut statute of limitations on such tax-collections is, you will not be surprised to learn, 15 years. As tempting as it is to assume that this is a matter of mere incompetence on Norwalk’s part—the sum in the collections letter and the sum on the city’s website are different by hundreds of dollars—it is more likely a revenue-maximizing scheme. In which case—gross. 

I’ve been in touch with Norwalk, of course, and they say that this situation results from the fact that I neglected to return my license plates to …  whomever one returns license plates to … when I sold the car. I am sure I am guilty on that front, although, this being a decade-and-a-half ago, I don’t really remember. I didn’t know taking the license plates off a car when you sell it was a thing. Here in Texas, where I live, it isn’t. Here is the Texas DMV’s charming advice to those who move out of state:

We are sorry to hear that you left Texas but hope that you are settling into your new home. Your Texas license plates are yours to keep. Consider them a souvenir from our great state and something to remember us by. Should you choose to recycle your old Texas plates, cut them into pieces and place them in the recycle bin. This will prevent fraudulent use of the plates.

I told the Norwalk people that I’d like to come by and discuss this in person, but I’m afraid that if I park my car in the town for 20 minutes I’ll be getting tax bills for 20 years. 

Funny little story. Irritating, too. I’ll update you as it develops.