Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Whereas the weekend has sneaked up on me entirely unexpected, and whereas I have but precious few minutes before my friends arrive and I can type no more this day, I feel compelled to swiftly pronounce upon some state of affairs in this world, with the cool eye of a dispassionate observer and the authority of a weekly blogger.

Be it hereby known that I have named a variant of a certain informal fallacy, which is to say a logical fallacy that does not violate a formal rule of logic, yet derives its conclusions from a flawed premise. I say it is new, because I have done minimal research into whether it has been previously identified by some other weekly blogger, but on the off chance that it hasn’t, I would like to be given credit for it.

The variant to which I refer is the appeal to pop culture. It typically appears in the form of an identification of a demographic category of people who possess superior (or inferior) ethics, politics, or manners as a consequence of their exposure to certain kinds of mass-produced entertainment at a formative moment in their development. It relies upon the assumption that these entertainments were universally received by the members of the category in question and regarded as worthy of learning from, and that the content of these entertainments were always interpreted in the same way.

Do I have to explain why these assumptions are faulty? I really am in a hurry. I am hopeful that I will get to spend a lovely evening listening to music and playing games with my friends. If I could get away with asserting my claim as self-evident, and then sign off immediately, I would just as soon do that. Alas, they may not be self-evident if you don’t already share my point of view. Few things are, and that is unfortunately at the heart of this fallacy’s appeal.

First of all, demographic categories are almost always defined too broadly, often lumping together everybody born within a certain span of years as members of a “generation” that share certain values and tendencies. In reality, the only thing that membership in a generation really tells you is how old somebody is, more or less. Generations are cut by lines of class, gender, race, and any number of qualifiers, and their formative experiences are not identical. People change as they grow older, not as a consequence of their membership in an aging cohort but because they are aging. The story of a life to come is not laid out in a few brief years of box office receipts or top 40 radio rankings.

Secondly, pop culture is more clearly a reflection of the concerns and objectives of the older people who produced it than a guiding light of the youthful audience that receives it. Audiences (especially young ones) are divergent in their ability to understand and incorporate themes or subtext into their assessment of a work. Some people will always clap their hands for whatever they were told was made for them; they’re not looking for entertainment to teach them how to be better people. They do like to take credit for being the target audience of quality programming, however.

I don’t deny that culture (pop or otherwise) has a role to play in how a society develops. It is the failure to account for the limits of that role that is fallacious. Furthermore, when evaluating the qualities of any group of people, it is always more illuminating to examine what they actively create than what they passively receive.

I have pronounced enough: my friends will be here very soon, and therefore it’s time to put this argument away. I only ask that when you look back fondly on the “classics” you were marketed in your youth, you reflect on whether they taught you the values you hold dear, or whether you merely agreed with the values they expressed. The answer may turn out to matter more than you might think.