“Principles? I don’t understand this. Just make money. No principles.”
I was on a date with a woman at this posh wine bar in downtown Denver. She was being completely honest with me about her dark, materialistic worldview, which–expressed by her thick, Eastern European accent–made her fascinating.
Sometimes, dating is more of an anthropological exercise. At least, that’s the perspective you need to adopt to avoid public confrontation. So when my companion said she believed money was the only thing that really mattered in life, the interview began.
“What do you mean? You don’t think ethics matter?” I asked.
“It depends how much I’m getting paid.”
I gave her what I thought was an extreme hypothetical, and she doubled down.
“For $50,000 a week? Yes, I’d do that.”
I’d previously given my whole spiel about being opposed to sponsored content in the magazine, and this stance had confused her: “Principles?...”
She was rich (working rich). A successful executive. A real jetsetter. Brilliant. She’d fly to Europe and South America to deliver keynotes in multiple languages on ad tech engineering. Needless to say, we came from different worlds. But she wasn’t the first person I’d met from this caste, nor the first to admit to a belief system revolving around a winners vs. losers game of limited resources.
From what I’ve seen, that philosophy is becoming more prominent, especially among younger people. I could speculate as to the reason. Perhaps it’s the real-time apprehension of how culture and values are manufactured. You can now see (and even have access to) the mechanisms that influence people toward one belief or another. With enough money, you can buy headlines, documentaries, fans, even boxing matches. And when you have a front row seat to how media can sway people toward purchases, idol worship, political fanaticism, love, hate, etc., are you really going to believe in objective truth, or a morality with rules that exist beyond the ones being bent and recrafted right in front of you?
If wisdom makes you more of a slave (that is, if you risk losing out on more leisure time and personal freedom because you won’t play the game), why pursue it?
And morality? Well, morality certainly gets a lot of play in the movies. But most of the time our heroes also just happen to embody genetically desirable traits–so what are all those stories really about? Sure, the villain will speechify about how evil he is, but, all the while, he’s got a limp, a scar, a deformity, a low IQ, or maybe he’s not even human to begin with. I’m trying to think of a movie where the roles are reversed–where a group of genetically disadvantaged but righteous human beings takes on a beautiful, intelligent, evil villain. Maybe you’ve got one for me, but they’re extremely rare. Why is that? What do we use our stories for? What are the more important lessons? What are we, really?
All of this is to say that I wasn’t completely baffled by my date’s dismissal of good & evil. I’ve also learned to take nihilism and materialism more seriously, the older I’ve gotten. When you’re a kid, yes, those are comic book villain tropes, but when you grow up, you appreciate how formidable (and tempting) these concepts can be, especially when they’re expressed by an arresting femme fatale sitting across from you, armed with a glass of red wine and a life, you sense, that’s infinitely more put together than your own.
Of course, maybe you’re wrong about that. Maybe her life is a nightmare. Maybe everyone who embraces that more reptilian, winning existence is dealing with their own private hell. We certainly like to think so. And the squabbles and scandals of these people playing out in the political theater (or on social media or reality TV) seem to confirm that theory.
However, whether it’s hell or not (and this might be the most important point), there’s a future there. Even now, as I type and think this thing out, I am performing an anachronism. I’m a dinosaur, holding on, just barely, to things that seemed essential to me but that, let’s face it, were never essential for the majority of the species.
I continued to grill my date, but she soon turned things back on me. For her, I too was an exotic creature. She was genuinely curious about me and began to ask point blank what made things like writing and literature so great. What was their purpose, their value? Why spend any time engaged with these things at all?
She asked me these things in good faith. There was no sarcasm. In fact, the innocence of her questions surprised me. She genuinely wanted an answer. Overall, there was something uniquely candid about her. Blunt, to be sure, but she didn’t seem duplicitous. She also had a way of projecting strength and vulnerability at the same time–a skill I’ve observed but never been able to replicate.
So I didn’t phone it in. She respected me enough to ask, and I wanted to do my best to answer. So here’s the summary. My best defense for the written arts:
Written language remains our best technology for reading minds. It allows human experience to be shared among radically different classes and groups, even among varying intellectual capacities. You may not be a genius, but you can touch genius by reading Shakespeare. And, what’s more, as an artform, literature demands that Shakespeare do his best to reach you–to communicate his ideas and feelings as intelligently, engagingly, and accessibly as possible.
Literary fiction, plays, and poetry are the highest written art forms, because they have the most potential for conveying our thoughts and experiences honestly. The stories (for fiction) and the rhythms and rhyme schemes (for poetry) are conventions writers use to smuggle ideas and perceptions into our brains. You don’t have to agree with them. That’s all up to you. But the more you’re exposed to, the broader your understanding of the human condition. And, ideally, this ability to inhabit other people’s minds will grant you some wisdom about how to handle this whole thing.
That is power of literature! Magic!
My date listened. She smiled at me. She had these deep, dark eyes. I could tell she wasn’t convinced, but that she’d appreciated the fact that I’d given the question a real shot. She was a lot smarter than me, I could tell.
You know, I’ve met people like her before. And sometimes I think I can detect a flicker of respect in them for all of us bleeding heart types out here, kicking our feet in the gallows. Maybe it’s a respect for the damned–the same respect a wolf has for the rabbit in its jaws. Regardless, at least for that night, the two of us were able to understand each other.
-Paul M. French
