If Martians landed on earth and they turned out not to be invaders but anthropologists, we can be certain that they would find many human activities rather puzzling. Head hunting and strange initiation rituals would surely seem bizarre to them, but perhaps nothing would seem so odd as millions of people sitting glued to their televisions watching obese people try and lose weight. “Look! She is exercising! Look! He is changing his diet! This is so gripping, I can’t wait until next week.”

It isn’t only weight loss; as far as I can tell, any sort of personal transformation makes for compelling television. Addicts who try and get clean, dumpy dressers who try and improve their wardrobe, heck, even the transformation of houses is irresistible. But weight loss is probably the most satisfying form of transformation, both because it’s easy to measure and because so many viewers identify with the challenges of losing weight. Nevertheless, that doesn’t fully explain why stories about transformation are irresistible to so many Americans.. A few weeks ago, a formerly overweight woman won a State Beauty contest, and of course this made the national news.

For many viewers, I suspect, watching people be transformed provides hope that they too can escape the parts of their own lives that are making them miserable—whether that is their weight, their appearance, their addiction, their poverty, etc. But more broadly, personal transformation touches on something that is absolutely central to American culture—after all, “the American dream” is about being transformed into the person that you have dreamed of being.

And this brings me to psychology, because one of the reasons that psychotherapy is so popular in this country is also that people are fascinated by the possibility of transforming themselves. Where does this come from?

America is, and has always been, a deeply religious culture. Our national origin myth assigns special importance to the Puritans who formed many of the earliest colonial settlements, and these Puritans—as well as other brands of Protestants—were concerned above all about their state of salvation. For all practical purposes, all Christians of the colonial era believed that all human beings are bound for either eternal salvation or damnation (and of course, this belief persists today). Naturally, these people were interested in the question of their fate after death, and from the earliest days of Protestantism a strong “conversion” experience was felt to provide the best evidence that one was bound for glory.

A strong conversion experience typically had a particular format that began with a state of sinfulness, a period of despair as the believer acknowledged that he or she was trapped in their evil condition, and finally an experience of bliss as the believer received release from this state via the saving grace of God. In short, the best proof of salvation was a re-birth into a new life, a profound personal transformation. Today, this has become part of American culture, and even those who are not Christians continue to see personal transformation as somehow the very purpose of life.

That’s why we can’t stay away from stories of transformation. But there is at least one downside. Suppose I were to say that I’m basically the person I want to be, that although I have ample flaws I don’t see any reason to strive to be something different. Doesn’t that sound sort of smug, lacking in self-awareness, complacent? That’s the downside. On some level, there’s a widespread cultural assumption that everybody could use a transformation, which means that nobody is ever good enough as they are.

Photo by Tony Alter

We live in an entertainment culture. The most obvious indication of that is that much of what people care about is entertainment: Lady Gaga, the NBA, American Idol, Charlie Sheen, etc. An obvious question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and usually I’m reluctant to try and answer that question. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of fans and celebrities and Americans riveted to their televisions watching obese people exercising and getting weighed, but who says people have to engage in serious activities all the time? If we look at what most people have been doing most of the time throughout human history, it’s probably not discussing moral philosophy and inventing calculus. And part of the reason for that is that people need rest and recovery time and enjoyable activities: without some sort of stress relief we would self-destruct.

Yet there are some serious questions we should ask about people’s engagement with entertainment. One of them concerns those who seem to get so deeply immersed in entertainment that they begin to neglect the possibilities and responsibilities of the rest of their lives. Whether or not we want to use the word “addiction” to cover this sort of possibilities, the results of an overuse of entertainment can be much the same as an overuse of a drug: A person can become so obsessed with a form of entertainment (such as an online game) that it begins to destroy his or her life.

And that leads us back to the question of whether an entertainment culture is a good thing or a bad thing. Recently Anthropologist Jeff Snodgrass and his colleagues have published research that is intended to answer this question in one specific context, that of the online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW). As anyone who has played these games knows, they can be extremely absorbing. Players often report that they lose track of time, even of their everyday surroundings and identities and feel like they become the characters they portray in the game. And of course—as I point out in my book Caught in Play–such experiences occur in many different forms of entertainment, from reading a romance novel to watching an exciting movie.

Snodgrass leads a team of researchers who are themselves long-term WoW players. They have interviewed many other players and have posted online surveys that have been completed by hundreds of WoW enthusiasts. The research team has discovered a complex web of relationships that help us to get a handle on the “good or bad” question. But if we simplify it all down to a bottom line, the answer is that becoming deeply immersed in WoW can be both and good thing and a bad thing. WoW—along with many other forms of entertainment—can be an effective form of stress relief, for it allows the player to so completely forget real world problems and thus relax for awhile. But precisely because the experience can be so relaxing and pleasurable, some players—by their own admission—overuse it. One of the valuable results of this research is that maybe it can help us put an end to the debate over whether entertainment is good or bad, and get down to the more interesting question of exactly what factors produce positive and negative mental health outcomes for entertainment users.

Photo by Ran Yaniv Hartstein

Photo by Minke Wagenaar

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Europe where, among other things, I visited some of the world’s greatest art museums. Standing among some of the most renowned treasures of Western civilization, I felt… miserable and bored. Ten minutes in a museum seems like an hour to me. By some strange arrangement, 15 minutes in a museum make my feet hurt so much I can barely stand, whereas out in the world I can walk for hours. All this proves that I am a Philistine, it is nothing to be proud of. But as I looked around at my fellow museum goers, I could have sworn that many of them were as desperate to get out of there as I was. So maybe a few other readers will have some idea what I mean when I ask “why are museums supposed to be so wonderful but in fact, so exhausting?”

Well, museums are supposed to be educational, and as an educator I should be all for them. But I find it next to impossible to learn anything in a museum, whether about art or history or dinosaurs. Even if there are little placards packed with information about the exhibit, I don’t have the patience to read it all (remember about my feet?) nor the background to put it in context. I have no doubt that those who majored in art history in college can be fascinated by the differences between Tintoretto and Botticelli, but I majored in math.

The paintings suggest another reason for museums: contemplation of great art is a pleasure in itself. I can buy this, because I am capable of sensing beauty in music or a landscape, I guess I’m just sort of challenged when it comes to paintings. Or maybe it’s the elbows and nudgings from the crowds of tourists who are trying to contemplate the same beauty as I am that sort of sours the experience for me.

So, I’m saying the unspeakable: Everyone agrees that museums are a fabulous cultural treasure, a sign of our refinement. I’m saying that I find them a source of torment and I suspect I’m not the only one. So why are great museums so packed that people are willing to stand in line for hours just to get in?

Many of us Philistines, I suggest, don’t get much education in museums, nor do we successfully contemplate the beauty of great art. Rather, we want to go the museum to see the famous things that are in the museums: The Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, etc. And given that perfectly good pictures of these art works are in fact widely available, it’s clear that for many the motivation is just to get close to these famous objects. It’s no different from the desire to see a movie star or other celebrity in person. By some weird logic of the contemporary mind, famous things are so exciting that getting close to them makes us cool by extension (“And of course we saw the David, it was magnificent.”)

And that brings me at last to my point, a point about the values promoted by a culture of entertainment. Many of us come to understand much of the world in terms of the values of entertainment, even though we are reluctant to acknowledge this. We may claim we attend the museum to appreciate or learn about art—and surely some do—but really what most of us are after is to indulge our unfathomable fascination with fame.

Photo by Annia316

I was a late bloomer. There’s some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we’ll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn’t start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Maybe most important, it was when I was around 17 when I rather suddenly gained some self-confidence and awareness of who I was.

That’s enough self-disclosure for now, in fact for the next year or so; now I’ll turn to late bloomers more generally. We regard late bloomers as somewhat odd, they are not typically the popular kids in high school, they seem a little lost, often they are rather nerdy. In fact, to say that someone is a late bloomer is usually a nice way of saying they are sort of a loser.

But here’s a counter-intuitive spin on late bloomers: Rather than being slow to mature, maybe in fact they are actually ahead of their peers. Maybe they don’t fit in because it takes several years for their peers to catch up to them. Because if you think about it, the sorts of things that late bloomers don’t fit into are not exactly mature and adult behavior: an overwhelming concern with how you are seen by your peers, conformity to prevailing social norms, participation in fads, precocious sexuality, fanatic competition for position in the social hierarchy.

I don’t really mean to suggest that early or middle bloomers are immature, that’s a generalization that is surely unwarranted. But I’m interested in the fact that people kind of look down on late bloomers, which suggests that our cultural standards in fact encourage those behaviors I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, because when somebody doesn’t act this way he or she is considered a weirdo.

Now we’re back to something that I have often pointed out in this blog, the fact that our values are not always what we claim they are. Our society (and probably other societies as well) has a set of shadow values—behaviors that we officially we claim to deplore, but actually we do much to promote.

So why should our society encourage teen-agers to be highly conformist, obsessed with popularity and the latest fads, and to flaunt their developing sexuality? The reason is that these behaviors are in fact highly compatible with a culture based in entertainment and consumption, as ours is. Children who are very concerned with displaying how they are in touch with the latest trends are fabulous and dependable consumers, and their concerns drive the larger economy of trendiness. And children who are highly oriented to physical arousal are going to pursue it where they can find it, in drugs, entertainment and sex. The fact is that our social and economic system encourages a number of values and behaviors we claim to deplore. Our mild disdain for “late bloomers” is just one more example of this.

One of the puzzles faced by those who think about human evolution and our relationship to non-human primates is this: If we look at the social organizations of our closest relatives, the great apes, they are typically marked by strong dominance hierarchies. This is especially clear with our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. They live in groups in which dominant males rule the roost and monopolize access to breeding females and other goodies such as choice foods.

The puzzle—which has been raised by anthropologist Bruce Knauft and others—is this: If dominance and submission are built into our genetic code, why is it that early social groups of homo sapiens were (as it is widely agreed) egalitarian? How in the world could early humans have overcome their deeply rooted instincts for dominance and submission and begun to treat each other more or less as equals?

The anthropologist Robert A. Paul has recently suggested an answer to this question, based on one of Sigmund Freud’s more controversial theories. And of course, since many now regard Freud’s theories as little more than speculation, you have to know that his more controversial proposals don’t have a big following these days. Nevertheless, Paul does a good job of defending Freud’s thesis of “the primal crime.”

Freud asserted, in his book Totem and Taboo, that truly human creatures were born in rebellions led by groups of junior males in proto-human groups (still ruled by an alpha male). These junior males banded together to kill the dominant males in their groups, and having done so became free to mate with the heretofore inaccessible females of the group. However—according to Freud’s theory—these junior males were also likely to then feel guilty about what they had done. Thus the characteristic result of these rebellions was that the group of males instituted some new rules aimed at minimizing both aggression and mating within the residential group, and in so doing created the first fully human social groups.

Paul argues that, with some relatively minor modifications, this scenario is quite compatible with recent understandings of human evolution. First of all, evolving tool and weapon technology would indeed have made it difficult to sustain chimpanzee-style dominance in proto human groups, because weapons are equalizers. As an organization based on such dominance became less workable, something was needed to take its place. Human communities are indeed always based on powerful cultural mechanisms that sustain a certain level of peace and cooperation. These mechanisms include ostracism and ridicule, the moral rules of religions, and the range of probably uniquely human emotions such as guilt and shame that help keep us in line.

However, these powerful mechanisms do not erase our biological heritage, so that we retain strong tendencies to try and dominate, to be willing to submit. Thus our history—especially in the last 10,000 years or so—provides plenty of good examples of the re-emergence of brutal competition and hierarchical groups following dominant leaders.

This argument is interesting because it provides a fresh perspective on the age-old question of the dual character of human nature: Are we competitive or cooperative, peace-loving or warlike, democratic or authoritarian? The answer is that being human is precisely a matter of having tendencies, based in both biology and culture, that lead us to be all these things at the same time. When you look at the world today, this makes a certain amount of sense.

Photograph provided on flickr by Threepin.  No animals were armed in the production of this picture.

We live in a culture of entertainment, a society in which being entertained is so highly valued that at times it seems that if something isn’t entertaining, it should be avoided or ignored. The demand for just about everything to conform to the standards of entertainment has, in the last few decades, extended to the person. You have to be entertaining, or you will be avoided or ignored.

Therefore a small industry has arisen to help you develop your personal brand. As you know, big corporations spend millions to develop brands with flashy logos that encourage consumers to view the corporation and its products as exciting, cool, edgy, etc. Well,, if products need brands, why not individuals? Inevitably, “branding coaches” have started popping up offering advice on topics such as “Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me, Inc.” Most of the advice comes down to this: figure out your strengths and then figure out how to market them, thereby creating a public relations image for yourself.

This approach is generally oriented toward career management, but there is also a much larger (and somewhat harder to spot) process of self-branding going on in contemporary society. People have always used consumer products such as their cars and clothing to advertise who they are, but in recent years that process has accelerated. These days many high end houses are built not only to display the owner’s wealth, but also to assert claims about who the owner is: “I am the master of a Tuscan villa”, or “I am royalty” (I see lots of houses these days with turrets, which I suppose might be useful if you need to defend your house in a siege, otherwise they are just a way of saying, “I own a castle”).

Or , to take a different sort of example, I don’t listen to much country music, but I get to hear it sometimes at the gym, and these days it seems to me that a lot of it is about the sort of people who listen to country music: “I’m proud to drive a tractor and salute the flag” etc. Back in the day country music was about things like cheating spouses and drowning your sorrows at the bar; now a popular theme seems to be “I’m the sort of person who listens to country music.”—more self advertising. My final example is one that is so obvious it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned: social media. What is Facebook other than a vast platform for creating brand you?

Why do people feel they have to shout so loud to establish who they are? My answer would be: This happens for the same reason that movies get louder and brighter and more violent each decade: there’s a competition going on for people’s attention, and the competition will be won by whatever is the most stimulating. And increasingly that holds for people as well: people who are able to put together an impressive and eye-catching brand will be more likely to get noticed, get hired, be popular, etc.

I do have one question, however: What’s the difference between marketing yourself and simply being yourself?

Photo provided on flickr by austinevan.

Much of the discussion of the controversy over drawing images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad is framed in terms of rights, such as the right to free expression of one’s religion and the right to free speech. As I understand it, Islam prohibits drawings of the prophet for similar reasons that Judaism and Christianity prohibit idolatry: a physical image of a divine figure is at odds with the fundamentally spiritual nature of the divine in the Abrahamic tradition. So, any image depicting Muhammad is blasphemous to some Muslims; practicing their religion entails objecting to such images. Americans (and many other Westerners) hold free speech as a sacred right; for them, any prohibition on, say, drawing an image of the Islamic prophet is an infringement on their sacred rights and is objectionable.

I’m not sure this conflict can be resolved when approached in this way. Sure, plenty of non-Islamic Americans will say there’s an easy solution, namely: “Muslims don’t have to look at these images.” But in fact that’s not really a solution, because Islam defines the images themselves as morally offensive. Suppose Joe enjoys looking a child pornography, and when we object Joe says, “if you don’t like it, don’t look at it.” The problem with Joe’s response is that our society regards child pornography as morally offensive in and of itself. If you find something deeply morally offensive, you want to eliminate it, not just look the other way. The fact is, there is a direct conflict here between religious and free speech rights, and this conflict is not going to go away.

That is why I suggest approaching this as a matter of politeness rather than rights. Yes, Americans and Danes have the political right to draw pictures of Muhammad, but doing so is insensitive, inflammatory and rude, and those are perfectly good reasons not to do it. Another analogy: Suppose you have a friend who has recently lost a child to cancer. You have every right to make cancer jokes to your friend, to rib him about his tears, to tell him to just get over it. But you don’t choose to exercise these rights (I hope) because to do so would be insensitive, inflammatory, and rude. In short, even if you have the right to do so, there are plenty of other reasons not to say or do certain things.

When people have strong feelings about something, it is simple human decency to try and respect those feelings. Of course, it could happen that one person’s strong feelings seriously impinge upon the rights of others, and in that case politeness is not the most important consideration. These matters have to be considered on a case by case basis. But for my money, exercising the right to draw somebody else’s prophet is not worth being rude to them.

Photo by Lecates

It is sometimes said that America’s leading export to the rest of the world is its entertainment. If we take a broad view of entertainment—movies, television, popular music and food products (yes, food can be entertaining)—this is undoubtedly true. Why is America such a leader in the production of entertainment?

The answer to this question is linked to a topic I’ve been writing about lately, the American concept of person. As far back as the time of the Puritans, many Americans have been focused on examining and perfecting their lives and themselves. The Puritans had good reasons for such activities: they were concerned about their state of grace (saved or damned?) and they scrutinized their lives for signs that they were among the few destined for glory. As generations passed, this focus on the qualities of the self gradually became a broadly-based cultural conviction that with effort and time, persons can perfect themselves. In contrast to virtues like forbearance and humility, Americans have tended to cultivate virtues like self-examination, social mobility, and fame.

When, in the 19th century, our contemporary institutions of entertainment and advertising began to take shape, producers quickly learned about the American fascination with stories about how a person’s life was transformed into something more meaningful. These stories were first of all fictions—tales of how a young couple found happiness, a detective solved a murder and returned order to the world, or superhero staved off an alien invasion. But these fictions could also be presented as real possibilities: If you have no friends, it’s probably because you need our mouthwash. If you have no fun, it’s probably because you need our car.

Americans have been the world’s leaders in developing entertainment and advertising because entertainment and advertising fit so perfectly with our culture’s ideas about the world and the people who live in it. Entertainment turns our dreams into realities. This is also what we try and do with ourselves, it is what we call the American dream. We love entertainment because it is fun, of course, but it is fun in part because the stories we engage through books and films and TV are little moral fables about one of our most basic beliefs, the possibility of realizing our fondest wishes. When we export our entertainment to the rest of the world we are at the same time exporting something of our view of the world and of persons, our conviction that our dreams can be turned into realities.

Krystn Palmer Photography

Disney’s most recent animated film, “The Princess and the Frog,” attracted attention in part because it featured, in the familiar “Disney princess” role, an African-American. In one sense, this is evidence of increasing acceptance of diversity in our society. The Disney corporation is not going to risk the bottom line, and obviously the folks in charge were confident that white audiences would not stay away from the film because they could not identify with a black heroine. That is, it is probably true that our society has moved far enough from the prejudices of the past that many whites no longer see a black person as “inherently different from me.”

But there is other news from the movie that is less encouraging. The film is set in New Orleans, and various aspects of this environment are rendered in Disney-esque stereotypes—the food, the music, the Cajun population. This stereotyping can be relatively benign, but it can also be virulent, as occurs in the way the film depicts the “Vodoo” religion. For some reason, it remains acceptable to depict certain African-American (and Afro-Caribbean) religious practices in overtly racist and offensive terms.

Vodou is a religion based both in Catholicism and West-African religious traditions. It is no less worthy of respect than any other religion; like most varieties of Christianity and Islam ( for example) Vodou is deeply concerned with promoting moral uprightness among its adherents. Yet for some reason it remains acceptable, in Disney movies and other contemporary media, to depict Vodou as a practice of conjuring with evil spirits, as essentially a form of devil worship.

Yes, Vodou does accept the possibility that people may be possessed by spirits. That possibility is also embraced by millions of Christians in the United States—the Catholic church still trains exorcists, by the way. So it can’t be the belief in spirit possession that makes it okay to portray Vodou in stereotypes that echo—for example—extreme anti-Semitism. No, it is acceptable to portray Vodou as evil for the simple reason that people regard it as African and primitive. In other words, this is an example of good old fashioned racism, right there in a family-friendly Disney movie.

This situation alerts us to something about entertainment in general. Entertainment, by its very nature, presents stereotypes of people. Some high quality entertainment can make us think about things, but that’s not its basic purpose. The basic purpose of entertainment is to provide fun. The stories of entertainment are usually fun because they confirm the things we most want to believe. The use of stereotypes in stories is a time honored way of engaging people’s emotions and creating a meaningful imaginary world in which the troubling ambiguities of real life are absent.

The problem is that emotional stories that confirm our expectations and prejudices about the world may be satisfying, but they can also be dangerous. Entertainment has a cousin named propaganda, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart.

Photo by Mark Sebastian

Our society’s fascination with stimulating experiences of entertainment—3D movie spectaculars, glamorous celebrities, fat-and-sugar enhanced food, etc.—has a few downsides. One of them is that experiences that aren’t entertaining no longer seem very compelling. If you are used to highly processed foods with a lot of fat and salt, simple whole grains are likely to taste like cardboard. And when a product or experience is not compelling to people, less of it is produced, which is likely to mean that it costs more. Continuing with the food example, today feeding a family with fresh, non-processed foods is likely to be more expensive (in money and time) than picking up pizza and other fast food.

This is what I call “the logic of entertainment,” although I could also borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin: As he spoke of the “survival of the fittest,” today we could speak of the “survival of the most entertaining.” Whichever phrase one uses, the point is the same: when someone figures out how to make a product or a process entertaining, it’s a pretty good bet that over the long run the entertaining form of the product or process will survive and the less entertaining forms will not.

In recent posts I have applied this idea to sports in contemporary society. Increasingly our society is investing its resources in sports as entertainment and withdrawing resources from participatory sports. Why? In part because participatory sports aren’t very entertaining. We have evidently decided, for example, that there isn’t much point in providing sports opportunities for kids who are never going to be stars.

The same argument can be applied in a number of different areas. Take for example intimate relationships. When people talk about the head over heels experience of “falling in love,” they are talking about finding entertainment in an intimate relationship. “Falling in love” means experiencing highly arousing emotions as you interact with and even think about your partner: longing, sexual desire, happiness, etc. etc. In fact, the experience of falling in love is suspiciously similar to the joy of becoming lost in a game or a story: you forget yourself in your fascination with the partner, time seems to be suspended, your interest in the world outside fades.

Historians and anthropologists tend to agree that people from other times and places have not placed the same value on romance—a form of entertainment—that we do today. As a matter of fact, in both Europe and America the idea that marriage should be based on “falling in love” is quite new, having found wide acceptance only in the 19th century. It’s probably not a coincidence that this was also the period in which romantic novels started to be widely read.

Thus today we can see how the logic of entertainment has come to dominate our thinking about intimate relationships, so much so that other ways of thinking about these relationships just don’t make sense to us. We expect our partner to provoke strong emotional responses like those described in novels. Other ways of evaluating intimate relationships—compatibility, friendship, financial considerations, etc. seem almost offensive. And of course, many relationships end because one “falls in love” with someone new, and that makes the relationship one shares with one’s spouse seem dull and boring by comparison. Entertainment in relationships can be a lot of fun, but the idea that it’s the most important aspect of a partnership is also the source of a lot of suffering.