“Awesome and Asshole”
For the rest of “Bullshit and Assholes” week, I was going to cover the notions of “asshole”, “jerk”, “awesome”, and “suck”. The “asshole” part involved comparing Aaron James’ account of an asshole, Eric Schwitzgebel’s account of a jerk, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ account of an asshole – using YouTube videos and Aeon pieces and blog posts to try to make it manageable. Still, the discussion of "asshole" did not go well, due to the (retrospectively now obvious) total overload of material. Also comparing three subtly different definitions of the same account is not a great idea for intro. Maybe one of you can come up with a better lesson plan for this.
But the “awesome" and “suck” class was fantastic, and students were far more into it than I expected. I taught Nick Riggle's Aeon piece on defining "awesome", "down"," and "suck". This piece later spawned a book, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck. Reading the book definitely enriched my teaching, but everything you need to know is in the Aeon piece. Here, if you want it, is my lesson plan for that:
His basic theory is: we are typically on role-based social scripts. We're on social autopilot for most of the day. Sometimes, though, we break script, in order to create a "social opening": a moment in which we're off script, and can interact as creative individuals, and appreciate each others' individuality. In the background is Nick's view that we're trying to create a special kind of community, of mutually appreciative individuals, who appreciate and support each other for their individuality.
His definitions:
- To be "awesome" is to create such social opening in order to nurture such community.
- To be "game" or "down" is to respond positively to such social openings and participate.
- To "suck" is to smack down such social openings for no good reason, and thus squelch the mutual development of such a community.
Here's stuff I know because I've read the book and because I’m friends with Nick and know about his larger project: in the background for Nick is some Kantian aesthetics, about how aesthetic life encourages the harmony between free individuals. (I didn't mention the Kantian stuff explicitly, but it helped to shape some of my comments.) I taught it like this:
- You could have an anarchy of individuals each doing their own thing.
- You could solve that anarchy through strict conformity, but then you lose individuality.
- The middle ground is a community of mutually supportive individuals.
And what Nick thinks is that the new use of "awesome" and "suck" are attempts trying to pick out the values and disvalues associated with supporting and squelching option 3.
What's neat about this is it gives you access to all sorts of interesting topics that don't normally come up in philosophy class. You can riff here on Erwin Goffman and social roles, which a lot of my students, at least, have never encountered and find eye-opening. The students were super interested in the notion of "being on social autopilot," and wanted to explore it. We also got into the reasons you might often want and need social autopilot. And student's loved Nick's diagnosis that we are talking about "awesomeness" more because we feel the pressure of social scripts more and more - in the workplace, etc.
I also focused the end of the class on this wonderful passage from the piece, which I love, and which the students found revealing:
"The deepest suckiness comes from a kind of bad faith, from a false sense of culture and community as a static or grey thing, simply there whenever you need it, your bottomless source of connection. The sucky person doesn’t understand that social bonds need light and water and nutrients. They aren’t something you can just pay for and find waiting on Netflix. This kind of existential disposition to suck is the kind that can do more than cast a pall over a party or add a sour note to an otherwise beautiful connection. It can actually make *others* feel that the spirit of awesomeness is not worth tapping into, that being game is not essential, or that you can just let others bring everyone together. It can make one cynical and unenthusiastic. It’s the black hole of the suckiverse."
Also: students also really appreciate knowing the fact that Nick Riggle was, before he was a philosopher, one of the world's top pro rollerbladers. There are videos.
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