Saturday Links
The illusion of moral decline, "Hamlet" today, Cold War brain science, the aesthetic turn in criticism, and more.
Good morning. I haven’t formed an opinion yet on this article in Nature on morality but wanted to share it with you. Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert argue that the perception that morality is in decline is an illusion. From the abstract:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born).
In other news, Anastasia Berg writes about the “aesthetic turn” in criticism in The Point:
The critical tide is turning, once again. The professional critics—and not just the old, curmudgeonly ones—are fed up with moralizing, and they are willing to speak about it in public. From Lauren Oyler’s observation that “anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism” to Parul Sehgal’s exhortation against the ubiquitous “trauma plot” that “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and … insists upon its moral authority” to Garth Greenwell’s lament about a literary culture that “is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime”—the critical vanguard has made its judgment clear. For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
The extent of this shift in critical sensibility is hard to measure, but what some have labeled the “aesthetic turn” is not limited to the literary reviews. The rise of “postcritique”—a mode of scholarship that finds meaning in the full diversity of our personal and social responses to art—signals a similar pivot in some English departments, while in the broader culture the aftermath of the Trump years has been marked by a steady retreat from feverish activist critique and a new hunger for style, humor and frivolity (TikTok, not Twitter; Red Scare, not Rachel Maddow).
Read the whole thing. I wish I could be as sure as Berg that this is actually a shift. I don’t think we’re quite there yet given the number of works of criticism that are still overwhelmingly preoccupied with the morality or politics of art, but still, there is some movement away from this as Berg notes.
In the Washington Examiner, I write about an odd approach to Hamlet in some contemporary films and TV shows: “The moral dilemma Hamlet faces, his self-doubt, and what Nietzsche called his ‘nauseating reflections on the ... absurdity of existence’ are all swept under the rug to give us a much cleaner Hamlet. Instead of the play’s tragic view of life, we get one that is naive, where ‘bad’ people get what they deserve and everything turns out all right in the end.”
How do pirates fit into the Enlightenment? That’s David Graeber’s question in his book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia. Anthony Comegna reviews: “Value is established on the margins. That is a central insight of both Austrian and neoclassical economics, but it is useful in thinking about history as well. Consider the ostracized, marginalized pirates who settled in 18th century Madagascar, married local women, and birthed one of the lost wellsprings of the Enlightenment. With Pirate Enlightenment, his final book, the late anthropologist David Graeber has given us the best attempt to date to integrate these pirates into the wider world they occupied, drawing them in from the margins to see their contributions to modernity—and to liberty.”
Robert Erickson reviews Jane Clark Scharl’s verse play Sonnez Les Matines, “a tidy and clearly fictitious account of an evening passed by John Calvin (here Jean Cauvin), Ignatius of Loyola and François Rabelais in 1520s Paris”: “Sonnez owes a good deal to Browning, as it happens, not just as a verse play (as all serious dramas were in his day) but in its psychological acuity and its dramatic expression of the mutability of human will. During the Shrovetide revels, the three protagonists stumble over a slain body in a back alley, not all of them unwittingly. At different points in the evening, each of the three is suspected of the murder. The whodunit plot, however, is less a source of the drama than a platform for it. The real interest lies in how each character acts under suspicion: apparent shock, wily denials, hints of guilt, tergiversations, grudging concessions and abject grief, in every which order and all over again.”
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