Transcript 0:00 [gentle music] Welcome to the liberalism.org show. I am Aaron Ross Powell. I am Senior Director of Liberal Projects at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I am joined by Chelle Mariotte. 0:15 She's a PhD student at McGill University in political science, where she studies the intersection of aesthetics, politics and pluralism. Welcome to the show, Chelle. Thanks for having me. 0:27 We're talking today about a piece you published recently on liberalism.org on a topic that's a little different from what typically appears on sites about political ideas. So 0:44 what does liberalism have to do with sitcoms? What a fun question to ask. 0:51 It's always a pleasure when your writing can take you out of the dense history of political thought and towards television shows like "The Simpsons," and that's indeed what I like to spend my time doing. 1:01 So in the article, I wanted to suggest that there are two ways that we might think about the relationship between liberalism and sitcoms. 1:09 We can also imagine numerous other forms of popular culture, like music, for example. 1:15 Sitcoms are just a salient example 'cause most people at some point in their life have engaged in a binge-watch of, let's say, "The Office" or "The Good Place." You can't help yourself. 1:25 And the first way that we might think about the relationship between liberalism and, say, a television show like "The Office" is in the explicit characterization of liberal values and liberal principles. 1:36 So the example I use in the article is that Leslie Knope from "Parks and Recreation," uh, Alexander Lefebvre argues that she's a paradigmatic classical liberal. 1:46 The values, the principles we might associate with the princip-- with John Locke, rather, are seen in her character. But we might say that that's true of any political ideology. 1:56 Conservatives love their spy novels for some reason. Marxists could find their preferred television show and see their principles there. 2:03 And I want to say that there's more than that, and this leads me to my second reason, and that is what we're doing when we're watching a sitcom. 2:12 So to my mind, uh, if we want to care about and cultivate a liberal disposition, a liberal character, by engaging with a television show that millions of people have watched, we're learning about what millions of people think are interested in and are curious about, and this expands our horizons for understanding who people are, and that, I think, allows us to appreciate them more. 2:35 There's a lot there. Um, I wanna zero in on this notion of its ties to pluralism. Sitcoms tend to, by their nature, not be about exactly the kind of people we encounter in everyday life. 2:50 Um, they, they just f-- ratchet it up for dramatic and comedic effect, um, or they're just funnier than the people that we know. Um, but so they're different, and often dramatically so. 3:05 I'm thinking of, like, a show like, um, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." It's, like, wildly popular and is the kind of people that we probably actually wouldn't wanna know in our daily lives, right? 3:16 But you get an insight into them. And so pluralism, the, the problem with pluralism is it means we have to live with a lot of people who are different from us. Um, 3:28 and so I wanted to dig into that, of, like, what is this mechanism by which we watch people and we laugh at them or with them on these sitcoms? But that's not, like, the way we interact with people in real life, right? 3:42 Like, we don't-- It-- If you a- if you s- if you acted like a laugh track in real life, people would think you were weird probably. 3:51 Um, so what is, like, that mechanism for you're watching these people, you're laughing with them, you're laughing at them, they're dramatically different, that pushes us in a liberal direction versus just, like, these are characters on my screen who happen to be funny, and then I turn the TV off and go on with my kind of intolerant, anti-pluralist ways? 4:16 Uh, so it's really helpful that I just watched "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" for the first time a few months ago, uh, so I can actually reflect on what you mean when you say they're people you wouldn't really want to meet in everyday life. 4:30 I think that for characters to be compelling, and especially for them to be popular, for people to get an It-Always-- It's Always Sunny reference, there has to be something about them that's relatable nonetheless. 4:43 They might remind us of a friend or someone we've encountered. And the immediate example that comes to mind is that I think many of us have experienced rejection like Dee has. 4:54 The fact that she's viewed as less than perfect as a woman, as unwanted, as unable to get a date, many of our dating lives reflect that at one point or another. 5:04 Or at least there's something that, as hyperbolic as it is, speaks to some kind of a truth that we can sort of understand and bring home to ourselves. 5:14 So the benefit of comedic hyperbole is that it takes things to the extreme, but things which nonetheless we can bring back to ourselves and see some truth and some value in. 5:25 But I also wanna pick up your point about what it means to be a liberal is it means living with people we may not necessarily like, and I think that there's definitely some truth to that. 5:36 Judith Shklar, who really starts to motivate my research and this piece in particular, in her work, "Ordinary Vices," talks about the fact that to be a liberal means there's going to be a lot we have to tolerate. 5:47 And I wanna push it a step further and say not only tolerate, but that we ought to appreciate. I think pluralism can't merely reduce down to the fact of toleration. 5:57 There has to be something that allows us to say, "And we value the diversity of voices, of characters, of people we might not like or might not be to our taste are there nonetheless and are present and are part of the conversation." 6:10 The characters in It's Always Sunny, although I certainly wouldn't agree with many of the antics they get up to, they reflect a kind of culture of being at a bar, spending time talking to your friends, and I would be very interested in hearing their views and thoughts on p- the politics of everyday life. 6:26 Like, what do they think about democratic backsliding? I'd like to know. 6:30 Is this then how it's different or it's specifically liberal in its framing, the what it's teaching us, the way we're engaging with it, versus y- you could have, you could have pro-fascist content that introduces you to 6:45 different kinds of people or pro-communist content. You can see that, like, the, you know, there's, there's television shows made in the Soviet Union that pushed a communist line and had different characters. Um, 6:59 there's a wonderful show, uh, um, 7:02 set in Romania called Citizen Comrade that's a parody of '80s Soviet police dramas, um, where all of the, the antagonists are these, like, capitalist criminals, and the cops are, like, good communists. 7:17 Um, and it's very funny and, but kinda gets at that, like, it's pr- pushing this line. Uh, so is the, the difference then why this pushes in liberalism is that appreciation? 7:29 That it's not just you're being exposed to difference, but you're coming to, like, enjoy that difference. Is that the core of it? 7:37 And it centers on the idea that it's how we engage with these works that allows us to be better liberals. 7:44 So in some sense, if you're not at the offset interested in improving your skills of being a better liberal, this article might not necessarily be for you. 7:53 But if you're interested, and indeed what your project's interested in is thinking about what liberalism is and what it can be, its possibilities, one of the things that I think liberalism needs to get better at is saying not only that we appreciate diversity, but we're excited by it, um, that we get to engage in divor-- diverse perspectives and voices. 8:15 And so when we're watching sitcoms, far from merely being escapism, I think we can see it as an opportunity to think about who other people are, what their interests, what their likes and dislikes could be, um, and to gain a sense of developing our own capacity to appreciate it and to empathize with them in a more thoroughgoing way. 8:35 Yeah, I've discussed this kind of thing a fair amount in prior, uh, on this show. This show's brand new, but in other shows that I have hosted and other writing. Um, and that... 8:46 A, a way to talk about it is there's, it's the, the ancient Pali word for it is mudita or sympathetic or vicarious joy, that we can just, we can take delight in others' happiness, others' achievements, others' differences, others', um, scopes of their lives in a way that, like, we feel pleasure in. 9:05 It's not like it's good for me. It's not like I have benefited from their joy, therefore I take pleasure in it, but just, like, the fact of, um... 9:16 And that sounds similar to what you're describing, that we're just appreciating these people, and, like, the fact of their difference, the fact of their antics is, like, a constituent part of our own happiness. 9:28 It makes us better off, and that that is... Yeah. So that's different than just mere tolerance, which is, "These people are different from me. I might not like it, but I'm gonna put up with it." 9:39 And what kind of a defense of pluralism is it just to say, "Oh, you're here, and that's fine"? Like, I don't think that's much of a defense at all. 9:46 But rather to say, "You're here, and my life is better for it, and our lives as a political community benefit from it," I think is a much richer way to defend the value of pluralism. 9:59 And what you're saying is very resonant with the history of liberal political thought because that's what Adam Smith's claim is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, of course, right? 10:09 The fact that we take joy at the happiness of others, and that although we want to spend time with our close little knot of companions we want people to gossip about Adam Smith with, there's also an entire world that we're exposed to, we benefit from, and we partake in, and appreciating that world as well as our own little bandoms, we might say, is part of what's crucial for the liberal project. 10:32 Does this mean, then, shifting a bit of how we might think about what liberalism is? 'Cause a lot of the way, like, if you read political philosophy, liberalism is a set of rules. It's a set of institutions. 10:44 It's a set of principles. It's like, it's con- It exists at this, like, conceptual level. 10:49 But what you're describing is not your relation to a sitcom and those characters and the appreciation of them, the pleasure in that, is not happening at the level of conceptual argumentation. 11:00 It's happening almost at a phenomenological or just experiential level. And so is, is the argument then that, like, part of liberalism is just 11:12 the way we see the world, the way we experience it, the way we engage with it, and not just, like, okay, there's, there's rights that say this, and there's institutions that say this, and there's principles that say this? 11:25 Absolutely, and they're not mutually exclusive, right? 11:28 We can have a kind of liberalism that simultaneously says we need the structural requirements that allows individuals to be free to flourish, protection of a scheme of basic rights and liberties, a measure of equality, and that there's value in a world with governments in ensuring those governments protects those rights and freedoms however so defined. 11:49 But I want more from that in a conception of liberalism, and I think liberalism requires it because it's also in, and here I'm thinking of Plato's conception of politics, the affairs of the city. 11:59 We live lives with other people, and we're engaging in those lives as members of a political community, and so how we treat one another is a huge part of that. And again, if we have this- Principle of equality. 12:13 But we don't treat people as equals. How can we truly be saying to want a society where equality is an operative principle? I don't think we can. 12:21 Liberalism requires not merely structural conditions, but that people actually believe in liberal values and act like they believe in it. 12:29 Um, and really at the, the heart of why I'm so interested in aesthetic forms is I think it gives us a recourse to do so. 12:35 It allows us a way to think about how to treat one another better, to learn to celebrate diversity, and then to embody that in practice. 12:44 So practice, I think, is the important term here, 'cause that's what you're describing is a practice, right? Like, we can, we can talk about, you know, like the practice of playing baseball, say. 12:56 And you can read a book about how to throw a pitch. 12:59 Like, you can read lots of books, and you can watch lots of YouTube videos, and you can, like, know at this kind of conceptual level, like, what the principles are that go into throwing a good baseball pitch. 13:08 But that doesn't mean that you, like, know, that you know how to do it in a meaningful sense, or that you can do it, or that it beco- it is a natural process to you and so on. There's a practice learned. 13:20 Um, and when you're doing it, you're not thinking through that. Just like it sounds like being a good liberal isn't just always having all the rules and principles in mind and going back to them at every moment. 13:29 It's more of just a lived... It's a, at least in large part, it's like a learned set of habits and dispositions. Um, so then how do we, how do we develop that through... 13:47 Is it that, that sitcoms and literature and other aesthetic experiences give us a space to practice? Like, practice the practice, I suppose. 13:58 Yes, and to recognize that practicing the practice in reality can be a difficult thing, where the stakes feel really high. 14:09 To constantly be talking about the current political situation in the world right now is bleak and exhausting, and the stakes feel so tremendous because there are lives at stake. 14:20 But to watch a television show and to think about what it means to understand one another better, to treat one another with respect, with the dignity that's lacking in political discourse, you can turn off that show whenever you want. 14:34 You can walk away from it. It's not lives on the line. And so by taking that pressure off, we can see where we struggle, where we fail. 14:44 I don't take toleration for granted, something that many people grow up in communities where they're not exposed to different views or perspectives, and it takes time, and it's a privilege to gain that exposure, I think. 14:57 But popular works offer us a way into exposure towards differences without it immediately being confronted with them and then having to, um, have something to say about it in an immediately pressing political moment. 15:13 So by lowering the stakes, by creating a fictional way to think through and consider, we're able to, as you say, practice the practice. Is it always good practice, though? 15:27 I mean, I, I'm imagining if I'm pushing back on that thesis, right, of you should engage more with these pop cultural artifacts as a way to experience this difference, get used to it, come to accept it, and then come to 15:40 take pleasure in it, um, in a low stakes environment, which all sounds right. But I'm imagining, like, the kind of people who got really upset about violence in video games or got really, like, the, 15:55 mad about those comic books corrupting the youth and so on, pushing back on that and saying, "Look, no, like, when you're watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you are coming to identify with and take pleasure in really reprehensible behavior." 16:10 That's, like, the show's brand, is people being reprehensible. And you're laughing along. Isn't that just training you to be reprehensible? Training you to overlook the reprehensibleness of others? 16:25 Like, it, it seems like it could, could it push in the other direction of inculcating bad habits, bad perspectives, whether those are anti-liberal or unvirtuous, whatever it happens to be. 16:36 I think it requires us to think about what we're doing when we engage in a television show or a comic book. Uh, I have in mind Watchmen when you mention, like, the dangerous nature of comic books. 16:50 Uh, and if you walk away thinking that destroying the entire universe is a way out of the current political problem, I think you're perhaps not reading it critically enough. 17:01 Um, so we might say, on the one hand, that when people are engaging with something like sitcoms, the risk is thoughtlessness. They're passive viewers. They're not really thinking about it. 17:10 And I think that could potentially avoid your concern because in that sense, they're not really taking much away. It's just something to do to relax at the end of the night. It's some easy laughs. 17:21 But if you're engaging with it thoughtfully, then I think the dramatic nature, the hyperbolic nature of, say, reprehensible characters, um, actually gives us insight into being more critical, not less of it. 17:35 Um, but again, in a way that doesn't then dismiss it altogether and to say, "Actually, what we need is a world closed off. Like, we should be shutting down all the bars in Philadelphia if this is what's going to happen." 17:46 But instead, appreciate that despite the reprehensibleness, there can be something valuable in it, but that doesn't inadvertently condone it. 17:57 I think we can be critical viewers and critical listeners, but I guess what I'm saying is that it requires a lot on people to just think about what they're engaging with, not merely to passively consume it. 18:10 So liberalism requires a degree of discernment in our engagement. I would think every ideology requires discernment in our engagements. Is that demanding? 18:23 It sounds like we're asking a lot of people because it's not just-- I mean, we started this as the paying relentless attention to the contemporary political world right now is exhausting, anxiety-inducing. 18:37 The doom scrolling is just, it's not great. Um, and so people turn to sitcoms and other material partly as an escape. Like they-- Well, like you want to turn off your brain for a while. Um, 18:54 but it sounds like you're asking them to, like, critically engage now with this. Like, I guess, is there a, is there a passive way that this gets across? 19:06 Because you bring up like Bewitched in your essay and, and you have this really nice perspective on it as showing how-- I think the way you describe it is, 19:20 um, Samantha, that's, that's the name of the witch, and, uh, doesn't fit the accepted sixties, like, role of a wife. 19:32 She doesn't play that role the way that society, and there's frustrations that causes for her husband because she's not doing the things that, like, he expects her to do for the social situations. 19:43 But the response to it is not, um, it's not therefore she needs to learn to be a good sixties wife. It is that the world kind of adapts in, like, a positive way to her difference. 19:58 Um, and that's the message that's coming across. And so I guess what I'm getting at is, like, does getting that, which is a liberal message, it's a, like, a socially liberal 20:10 there can be difference, and it can be good message. 20:13 Does that require this degree of critical engagement, discernment, like paying attention for the I am practicing liberalism-ness of the twenty-two minutes that you're watching Bewitched? 20:25 Um, or is it something that, like, all the people who are probably watching Bewitched the way most people would have, um, like, are just picking up, so like an osmosis, I suppose, to this. 20:37 The nice thing about Bewitched is it's such an explicit example of a liberal princ-principle in practice, uh, and one I grew up on as a kid. Like, I watched Bewitched when I was maybe seven or eight years old. 20:50 I thought Samantha was such a cool example of what it meant to be a woman, like someone who can't cook but who nonetheless has strong opinions. 20:57 I suspect that navigated how I thought about growing up, uh, in a really lovely way. And it's one where you don't have to discern so closely because the liberal principle you might be looking for is there. 21:12 But when we take cases where it's not obvious or you're-- to go back to the concerns you raised about illiberal forms of art and the demanding nature of discernment, 21:21 part of what's nice about habits is eventually they just become the background operative conditioning you live your life in, right? So we might think, or an example that comes to mind is meditation. 21:32 People who don't meditate find it very hard to sit still for five minutes and leave your mind blank. People who have been doing it for five years find it really easy. It's just a part of their day-to-day routine. 21:42 And I think in some sense, our lib-- our cultivation of liberal values can follow a similar sort of format. 21:48 So people who are newly engaged in liberalism, who perhaps find the values difficult but worthwhile, who find the trade-offs hard, because every ideology has trade-offs, and certainly liberalism does. 22:00 You have to tolerate a lot of things you may not like or appreciate, but you have to learn, on my telling, how to value them. 22:08 But eventually, working away, practicing that discernment becomes second nature, such that you may not worry as much about watching a show with a liberal gaze, so to speak, because it's just the water you swim in. 22:21 You're already being drawn to picking out and appreciating, uh, the liberalism in those, those works of art. So I guess yes and no, and it depends on the show. 22:34 I'm thinking now of someone who's involved in making these kinds of things listening to this and, and be like, coming away with like, "Oh no, I suddenly have a lot of responsibility." 22:47 Like I'm, you know, what I'm doing, what I'm making, what I'm putting out into the world is training people's perspectives. It's, it's a practice that they're engaging in, and now I need to, um, I need to have that 23:02 in mind as I'm building this stuff. So is this, is this an argument that like there's an underutilized tool here of promoting liberalism? 23:12 I'm thinking of, you know, like so many of us who have, say, dedicated our careers to advancing these ideas or, um, our, our studies to advancing them. We're scholars in it. We're activists. We are think tankers. 23:29 We're journalists. Whatever it happens to be, right? Um, tend to focus on promoting it through argument, um, through evidence marshaled and so on, and all that's important. But is this 23:43 saying to some extent, like there's this underutilized tool of pop culture that we can, we can bend the world in a more liberal direction through like the stuff that a lot of people are just dismissive of as kind of pop cultural junk? 23:58 So I, I don't want the upshot of this to be that liberals should go and write spy novels like the twentieth-century conservatives did. Um, I have never read William Buckley's spy novel. It's on my eventual reading list. 24:12 Uh, because I'd be curious as to whether or not conservatism appears there. Um, but I don't think that liberals need to be doing creative writing unless they want to be, or creative television production, as it were. 24:22 And I don't want to instrumentalize aesthetic works too much in service of politics or liberal politics 24:29 So on my telling, sitcoms, works of popular culture, they offer us an avenue into exploring political ideas and thinking them through and cultivating a liberal disposition towards pluralism. 24:42 But on the other hand, part of the appeal of aesthetic works is because they're emotionally compelling and they remind us first and foremost that we have to live an actual life filled with actual people. 24:54 This is one of the points that Judith Shklar makes about 1984. It's the tendency of political theorists to talk in a vacuum as if their version of their 25:04 thoughts about politics are far removed from the everyday ordinary masses. And that's simply not the case, right? Like politics has to do with who people actually are, the way they think, the way that they feel. 25:17 But that doesn't mean you always have to be thinking or feeling about politics. Sure, there's something political about Hallmark film. 25:24 It also reminds us of what we don't want from relationships or what we do, depending on how you're struck by it. And there's also more simply just a pleasure in partaking in aesthetic works. We get to laugh at these 25:40 very questionable people doing questionable antics for half an hour. I think that that just makes us appreciate our lives more. It gives us an opportunity to bond with others more. 25:53 It takes us away from politics as much as it has the opportunity to ground us in it. And so I don't want to say that aesthetics is like a tool we ought to be using for politics. 26:05 And I think overtly, like works that are too overtly political lose something affective, emotionally resonant in what they do. 26:16 But at the same time, yes, there are principles and ways in which we can relate to them, which allow us to be better politically. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chelle. 26:25 And thank you all for listening to the liberalism.org show. Again, I am Aaron Ross Powell. If you enjoyed this show, share it with friends. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. 26:37 And visit us on the web at www.liberalism.org where you can find Chelle's article and a lot of other great stuff about liberal ideas. And you can sign up for our mailing list to get them all in your inbox. 26:54 I will talk to you next time.
