How I Came to Hate Oprah

I did something that even as contrarian and controversial as I can be at times, I was embarrassed by. I wrote a comment on a website that I like very much called Black Art In America, where I criticized a perfectly talented and well intentioned artist who had organized a commemorative book of art for Oprah Winfrey. I did this with the following comment, among others “Oprah succeeds based on a basic and I believe dangerous delusion that fame and riches (or even happiness) can be achieved through magical thinking, like that which is promoted from books like the "Secret". This is relevant to artists, as the success of an artist would appear to be in the sole power of the artists' thoughts. This discounts so much of the great art that has not made the artist rich and famous, or even happy. “

After being spanked by many members of the website community, and even my friends for insensitivity, I was asked by a very close friend if any of this has changed my mind on Oprah, and I had to reply no. What it has done though is to make me think about myself a bit more, not likely the goal of the creators of this book.  Would the sensitive Oprah crowd want to see a vehement Oprah hater turned into a narcissist? Though it is nothing to be proud of, that is indeed what has happened.

Oprah represents more to me than I think I have let on in my blogging blasts of her, or my family fights with my Oprah adoring mom around the Thanksgiving day table. It  actually goes back to high school for me, where like most adolescents, my ideas emerged from intuition into full fledged viewpoints. Oprah’s show was new when I was in high school, and though I am of a different generation than Oprah, her show was aiming in many ways to find its identity as I was aiming at discovering my own. I have looked through some of those early season topics and can understand why every day in the Winter (as the Fall and Spring I was going to Cross Country and Track Practice) I would curl up on the sofa and watch Oprah at 4:00. Titles like “Trouble Getting a Date?”, or more provocatively “Snobby, overbearing, or just plain hard to deal with...Rude, obnoxious people turn off their friends”. I had both of these issues as a teenager, as many teenagers do. To hear an adult have a serious forum to discuss those issues legitimized my anxieties. There is no wonder that my generation has helped to make Oprah a billionaire. She was there for us when we needed her.

In the Television business when a television drama has lost its original intention it is said to have “jumped the shark”. Examples of this can be seen everywhere from “House” dating Cutty, to “Chuck” hooking up with the pretty FBI girl. This is why HBO and Showtime remain so good. They never Jump the Shark. In the “Sopranos” Tony never leaves the mafia. In the “Wire” drug dealers still kill, and cops still get drunk and drive around town hurling Bourbon bottles from their cruisers. Oprah on the other hand was not happy with connecting to us anxious, but rather normal rational people. Instead she jumped the shark in the most flagrant of ways. She started moralizing. She grew a heart, but that heart was so bogged down by superstition, and a realization that her every word would be followed, that the show became a religion. The problem in my view came in 1998 when she made an announcement that she would de-tabloid  her show. This is not such a bad thing, but instead of de-tabloidization she created a new type of sensation, which I would call pseudoscientification.  Oprah became the equivalent of L. Ron Hubbard who went from writing sci-fi novels to founding Scientology. America followed her down that path, and they enriched her along the way. By 2000 she had fermented her spiritual quest, and that evangelism became the focus of her career. The Wall Street Journal called this effect" Oprahfication", and explained that Oprah had embraced a public form a therapy.

What I hadn’t realized is that what she also did but jumping the shark, is left the rest of us in a tank full of piranhas. She had perfected a type of TV, but when she left to become a cult icon, we were left first with Jerry Springer, and then a myriad of reality show hell. There was no room for a 16 year old sitting on the sofa listening to honest, and interesting people talk about not being able to get a date. Instead it is now Oprah telling the world how to find an elusive inner being. Or giving credit to that now proven fraudulent anti-vaccine movement. Or Oprah guiding a delusion of free will and personal success, while the viewers are growing in frustration with their own unresolved lives. Perhaps this is why I am so anti-Oprah. She has left a void where there was simple questioning of normal issues to a disaster of false hope and naivety. That said “Skins” did not exist on MTV when I was 16, so perhaps I would have had something to watch after all.

Thinking of Oprahfication as a new cultural norm has become an excuse for me, and by its very popularity made me an elitist. It is tempting to think that this was not the case.  Oprah programming of old was mainstream programming. Still it is not those early programs but the extremity of Oprah's success and popularity in the days since that separates me from large portions of American society. In fact, tracing my own personal development I can start in 1991 when Oprah had the dating, and fighting friends episodes and watch as my life has unfolded in direct opposition to hers. Of course she has become a billionaire, but that is only the most obvious of the divergences. The greater one is a move away from banality towards two opposing, yet strongly profound world views that separate my psyche from an Oprah psyche more than politics, class or even religion.

Aging is of course different for everyone, but the struggles of acknowledging physical limitations, and how we deal with illness and fear is what may be the biggest divide in the Oprah worldview, and in my own. Like most people I have faced sickness, and tragedy, to a greater extent than some, but to a much lesser extent than others, Oprah included, who suffered so greatly as a child that I can’t even fathom the pain and repercussions. Still, these sicknesses and anxieties have shaped me, as I am sure her suffering has her. The difference is that for her they have given her a belief that everyone has a power that extends beyond themselves. For me, I am everyday humbled by the opposite. I am humbled by the fact that I am powerless, yet still loved and alive. I don’t need an inner strength, or a strength from God. This is where Oprah’s world and mine differ. We both want to conquer fear and mortality, but I think that the only hope comes through physics and material action, she believes it comes from spiritual and supernatural strength. These views are so different that they are a line in the sand of existence, which Oprah herself has helped to draw, and I am happy to take my place on the other side.

I titled this blog, “How I came to hate Oprah”. This is meant to be provocative, and a little ridiculous. There is no reason for me to hate Oprah, and I don’t. She is clearly a deeply sensitive and caring person. Maybe a better title would have been “How I came to hate Oprahfication”, but that is too sociological, and not personal enough. So in retrospect I think the best title should be “How I came to know myself in the age of Oprah.”

Will Thinking in Pop Culture

I have felt pushed into a prison of disconnect with pop philosophy. This can lead down paths so promising, only to be destroyed by pseudo-science, superstition, and religiosity. Most obviously this is “The Secret”, that best seller of self delusion, and Deepak Chopka, the man most responsible for teaching the world the the words quantum mechanics, without having the slightest idea of what he is talking about. I know that I, and thousands of bloggers, make this complaint so often that we have become like street corner preachers, who are unheard even though they boom their voices through megaphones and amps. This blog however is not about this, but rather about signs that American culture may be as polarized as American politics. This is actually a relief to me, as I have not heard scientific reason applied to popular culture in any major way in a long time. The practitioners  of the movement I mention above I will refer to as the willful thinkers. They tie various unrelated elements in science, which they don’t understand, into a basic theory that puts free will in a more powerful place in society than it has ever been historically. Never before have people connected neuro-science, physics, and free -will in such broad ways as this. This type of self determination likely has some commercial motives, like convincing people to use a lot of credit on useless books, because they are capable of earning enough money to pay it back. Or it could be politically motivated in order that people feel they are never stuck in despair, but instead vote for candidates that promise that they will change things. It basically puts the responsibility for happiness and success on the individual by some spiritual connection with a universal energy. The reasoning goes that even if your individual energy is limited, your will can allow you access to a larger life force that can aid in success. This is a lot of science-like talk which really is just explaining free will the same way it is explained, rather unconvincingly to me, in the Bible.  

There are books that I consider rational alternatives to this thought, but they have significantly less readership. Just this week though I had two examples, one light of substance but entertaining, and the other much more profound. "Fringe" last week had this compelling plot line, where (in a parallel universe, but that is not so important) a man was on a drug trial designed to increase the intellectual range of very low IQ people. The trial worked better than expected, and this particular man ended up being hundreds of times more mentally capable than other humans. I know that already it seems hypocritical for me to blame the will thinkers for scientific faking, when the entirety of “Fringe” is so clearly unscientific. This is the case with this episode, as I don’t feel that there is a superpower capability of the human brain, but still this provided a nice metaphor on free will. The character was not only smart, but extremely proficient in probability, so much so that he could predict the future of events. In other words he understood the deterministic nature of existence and to connect the dots from the past and present out into the future.  This is more thought provoking than the average prime time sci-fi episode. It makes us think about a relevant question: how much information would we, or a computer, need to have in order to statistically know future events? That then leads to the question of whether, if such events can be mathematically predicted, there is any role for free-will.

The other deeper look at free-will, is the large, and brilliant new novel “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen. It is  the story, through various perspectives, of a woman, a family and the the ideals of recent generations. There is too much here to talk about, other than to refer back to the title “Freedom” where we see Franzen’s characters forever unable to escape the past in order to create an independent future. They are, like all of us, trapped by causality, and therefore freedom itself alludes them.

It may be that the answers, such as will thinking, are the most satisfying, which is why they may always remain in society. That said, a slow enlightenment seems to have risen on the horizon of mainstream culture, at least enough to start making us all question what it means to be free.

Longevity in a Time of Certainty

The big news last week in science was the discovery of a gene that is believed to be linked to longevity. Though there is some disagreement about this finding, for the sake of this blog I will assume that it is valid research, and that indeed it is possible to find out if we carry the genes necessary to live to be over 100 years old.  On a personal note, while I would have this test or any genome analysis which would give me insight into my inner cellular self, I can be nearly certain that I do not have this enviable gene. I have had far too many illnesses which don’t seem to be purely environmental. Because of these illnesses I have wavered between two cliché philosophies on how to live. The first is the hedonistic, and second being the hypochondriac.  These may be opposites as one involves living only for the moment, and one is obsessed with having a future, yet both stem from my intimate acknowledgement that life will come to an end. The uncertainty of when it will end is what leads to the fluctuation of healthy and destructive habits. If for instance I knew that if I didn’t drink alcohol I would live to be 90 and that if I did drink alcohol I would die at 40, there is no question that I would not touch another drink. Unfortunately there has not been such information available. I may know that drinking is not great for me, but I also know that most people who drink fairly moderately do not die from complications related to drinking, so I continue on, as my inner risk assessment tells me that it is not so bad. All of my behavior including hamburger eating and stress probably does make a difference though; it is just that those differences are not quantifiable. That is they have not been quantifiable in the past. Genomics may change this.

I attended a wonderful World Science Festival event called Our Genomes Ourselves, which explored the state of the art and some of the philosophical implications of understanding our own genomes. This was before the longevity gene discovery of last week, but the concept of genetic information informing decision making was still a focus. A prime and rather moving example involved a family of women who had been tested for a genetic pattern responsible for breast cancer. It was a mother who had the cancer gene (and the cancer I believe) with three daughters in their late teens and early 20’s, all of which were tested for the genetic defect. The results would not only tell them the strong likelihood of whether they would develop breast cancer, but just as importantly give them options. They could for example make the radical choice of having double mastectomies before even having the cancer, guaranteeing that they would never get it. This is interesting in itself, but something even more psychologically intriguing to me happened when the daughters received the results. Two of them had the breast cancer disposition, and one did not. Immediately the one without started crying uncontrollably. She was apparently feeling a sense of survivor’s remorse, before the others had even gotten sick. This is touching and encouraging as it shows the power of human empathy. It is also an indicator of things to come as more such genome analysis reveals our futures.

I have spent a lot of time on the question of free-will and my belief that we essential live in a deterministic universe. I am involved in a movement called Applied Naturalism, the application being that by recognizing humans as a part of an ordered and determined part of nature, we can approach justice, politics, science and psychology differently. Essentially in my view it is the opposite view point of books such as The Secret, where power is assumed to be in the individual. I find The Secret model of existence to be harsh rather than compassionate, as it places a responsibility for action in humans which is impossible to achieve.

It is easy to see how Applied Naturalism and Genomics can be viewed through the same philosophical lens. That is, the breast cancer is predetermined. The young women tested could be said to have freewill to decide what to do with that information, but it could also be argued that the personalities and predispositions that they have will predetermine the action. Some people are just more likely to have extremely invasive preventive surgery than others. The issue of the longevity gene however is even more deterministic. The knowledge that you have a gene to live to be very old may keep you off of motor cycles with a knowledge that if you don’t die in an accident you will be around for a long time, but I think that is unlikely. People generally don’t ride motorcycles, nor goes skiing or any other dangerous activity thinking that it will kill them. More likely the information gained by knowing the longevity gene is more important in an existential context. 

The most profound aspect of Heidegger’s “Being in Time” in my view is when he describes the core difference between the authentic and inauthentic self (Dasein). There are many aspects to his long description but the one which remains for me is that the authentic self acknowledges life and death. This is not so different from the Buddhist key principle of emptiness. It is acknowledging that there is a frame in which we exist, and one in which we don’t. This applies whether we know when that end is, or don’t, but could be seen as easier to deal with if we do have an idea of when the end is. Suicide is generally an act of depression, but I don’t believe it always is. Sometimes it is just a way of framing life and death, so that it is not unbearably unknown. If both Heidegger and my hypothesis on suicide are right, then the longevity gene test could very well be the most important biological discovery of all time. With knowledge of our life expectancy we can frame a productive life, even though we may not live it all that much differently. We will view our illnesses, our accomplishments and our children in new, more enlightened ways. It is true that the test itself should not be necessary for this, but I think that it may be for a lot of us. The human desire for answers may be too great to overcome through philosophical revelations of Heidegger or any other philosopher. It may come only from an understanding of something deep within us. Something in our genes.