How Will Smith showed us that we are all just a bunch of judgy little monkeys.
“The fact that humans have done horrible things is undeniable. The universality is in the judging part, not in the doing part.”
Welcome to The Experiment, where this week, unlike Saturday Night Live host Jerrod Carmichael, we are going to talk about it. Actually, we’re going to talk about why for the last week American society has done little else than talk about it, and if you’re expecting a condescending analysis of The Discourse about how we really should be talking about more serious things, then you might be in for a surprise. Frank A. Spring is back again with a new chapter from Regulator, and of course we’d appreciate your vote for Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth in the Best New Book by an Austin Writer category of The Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin 2022.
You’ll have to wait for your mid-week newsletter to get our recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, but first, go back to that moment a week ago. Do you remember where your head immediately went?
You’re sitting there and have just seen Will Smith slap Chris Rock for joking, “Jada, I love you. ‘G.I. Jane 2,’ can't wait to see it.” Maybe you saw the Japanese television clip circulating online that revealed an upset Smith twice telling Rock to “keep my wife's name out your f*cking mouth.” You saw Rock regain his composure to hand out an Oscar. More facts are to come — Jada has a medical condition that causes hair loss, changing the algebra of Rock’s joke, Rock declined to press charges, Smith either did or did not refuse to leave the event — but right now, sitting on your couch, you know the basic facts: Rock told a joke, Smith hit him and then yelled at him, and the show went on.
We talk a lot here about how stupid our brains are. Do you remember what your idiot brain did that very second? Here’s a hint: Everybody’s dumb brain was doing the same thing.
It was just a joke well he offended his wife don’t you ever hit anyone because they insulted me what he should have done was talk to Rock privately shouldn’t a celebrity sitting in the front row of the Academy Awards expect a little ribbing Will Smith looked like an out-of-control Black man he should have been arrested been asked to leave apologized in his acceptance speech What about Jada she could have left by sitting there she is condoning violence but is it fair to make the woman morally accountable for a man’s mistakes Chris Rock should apologize Chris Rock is a comedian who was telling a joke Chris Rock’s job was not to comfort celebrities but to entertain the audience Chris Rock was insensitive should apologize was morally wrong to mock her condition Will Smith was wrong to hit but Chris Rock was wrong to joke about his wife’s medical condition….
Every new fact that entered the chat — Rock’s history of joking about Jada Pinkett Smith at the Oscars, Lee Daniels and Denzel Washington counseling Smith during a commercial break, Smith kneeling at his wife’s seat right after that — complicated the moral equation which The Discourse then rebalanced. The Academy announced it would be investigating the incident, and The Discourse examined what the proper consequence should be. Smith apologized. Did he, asked The Discourse, properly express contrition?
For one week, America has been building in real time an ethical rubric that updates moral philosophy’s famous “Trolly Problem.” Whether we’re talking about a streetcar running over five pedestrians or one pedestrian or about an actor slapping and threatening a comedian, the facts seem almost immaterial, at least to The Discourse. What happened has only been important to us as a means for us to judge whether the actions were good or bad.
Mark Manson, whose The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck would have come in handy this week, wrote recently about the life cycle of outrage: first up is Moment Zero, which we just relived, as well as the First Hour, when journalists and the Twitterati are scrambling to figure out what the hell happened so they can provide the hottest of takes. In this, the “Primary Viral Wave,” a million and a half more people tuned in to watch the rest of the Academy Awards broadcast.
That first hour started the clock on the First 24 Hours, when, writes Manson, “There is a gold rush … to cash in on the Primary Viral Wave. Thousands of journalists, bloggers, influencers, celebrities, and politicians put out their "take" on the Significant Event.”
This is when I was sent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s blogpost condemning Smith. I was assured that this was the Last Word I would need on the matter, so accurate was the moral judgment.
There were many other Last Words, from comical to psychiatric to tonsorial to Mark Manson himself, since he co-write Smith’s memoir, as we moved through the next 48 hours until the Primary Viral Wave achieved saturation, at which point came the annoying pedantry of moderation. It’s at this point that the Outrage Cycle witnessed the Reactionary Viral Wave that brought us the scolding instruction that the couple we really should be paying attention to is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his seditious wife.
A corollary to this is axiom is when we’re told that we’re only upset about something because someone is trying to distract us, but the outrage, whether manufactured or organic, is nevertheless sincere. By now, though, the outrage cycle slows as conditions match the Stanford’s Third Law — for every action, there is an equal satisfaction. Did you feel it, too? By Saturday night, we’d had all the outrage we needed, and Carmichael’s monologue felt perfectly apt.
“I'm not gonna talk about it,” he began. “I've talked about it enough. Kept talking about it. Kept thinking about it. I don't wanna talk about it. You can’t make me talk about it...Aren't you sick of talking about it?”
But do you ever wonder why we have an outrage cycle to begin with? And before you say “well, actually, social media has accelerated the…,” just shut it. Let me rephrase, because obviously social media has weaponized our tendency to rush to judgment on matters geopolitical (Putin should face trial for war crimes for … /gestures vaguely at the front section of the newspaper/…) and jurisprudential (Free Britney!). But why do we rush to judgment? Why do our dumb brains immediately put on robes, grab a gavel, and say, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Supreme Court of my Inerrant Morality, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting.”
Marc D. Hauser is an evolutionary biologist who used to teach at Harvard. He came up with something called the the Moral Sense Test that argues that humans are hard-wired for moral judgments much in the same way that Noam Chomsky says we have an innate instinct for language. Hauser says that people who were able to perceive intentions had a survival advantage over those who could only see consequences.
“You can imagine the evolution of morality as a series of steps leading to a moral system,” he said.
His Moral Sense Test juxtaposed the Trolly Test (a runaway trolley is going to kill five people, or you could redirect it to kill one — what do you do?) with asking whether it’s OK to kill one healthy person so doctors can transplant the organs into five sick persons who would otherwise die. More than 150,000 respondents in 120 countries had remarkably similar answers regardless of sex, religion, or age, leading Hauser to conclude that while human behavior is widely varied, our moral code is universal and therefore a product of evolution.
“The fact that humans have done horrible things is undeniable. The universality is in the judging part, not in the doing part,” he said.
This also means we have power over this. If we’re basically unevolved apes, scratching our butts and making moral judgments about who stole a bunch of bananas, we’re also capable of more. We can opt out. “We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind–for things have no natural power to shape our judgment,” writes Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, 6.52.
But as we all know, Marcus Aurelius was a terrible father who was killed by his son, Joaquin Phoenix, who went on to win Best Actor for a truly bad movie and then gave what might be the worst Oscar speech in this history of the Academy Awards until Smith said love made him do crazy things.
And if you’re wondering, nearly everyone responding to the Moral Sense Test said that while they would choose killing one person with a trolly instead of five, they were not cool with killing one healthy person to save five. Later, Professor Hauser, whose work on morality continues to be influential, resigned from Harvard after a 2010 investigation found him guilty of research misconduct, specifically fabricating and falsifying data. Two years later, a federal investigation ruled that he fabricated data, manipulated experimental results, and published falsified findings.
A year after that, he published his last book, Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. I’m probably not going to pick it up.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Vote for Forget the Alamo
Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, is a finalist for The Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin 2022 for Best New Book by an Austin Writer. Voting is open through April 18. You can vote here even if you don’t live in Austin.
