Mad Men and Philosophy

Nothing Is as It Seems

James B. South, Rod Carveth, William Irwin, James B. South, Rod Carveth

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470649251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A look at the philosophical underpinnings of the hit TV show, Mad Men

With its swirling cigarette smoke, martini lunches, skinny ties, and tight pencil skirts, Mad Men is unquestionably one of the most stylish, sexy, and irresistible shows on television. But the series becomes even more absorbing once you dig deeper into its portrayal of the changing social and political mores of 1960s America and explore the philosophical complexities of its key characters and themes. From Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, Mad Men and Philosophy brings the thinking of some of history's most powerful minds to bear on the world of Don Draper and the Sterling Cooper ad agency. You'll gain insights into a host of compelling Mad Men questions and issues, including happiness, freedom, authenticity, feminism, Don Draper's identity, and more.

• Takes an unprecedented look at the philosophical issues and themes behind AMC's Emmy Award-winning show, Mad Men
• Explores issues ranging from identity to authenticity to feminism, and more
• Offers new insights on your favorite Mad Men characters, themes, and storylines

Mad Men and Philosophy will give Mad Men fans everywhere something new to talk about around the water cooler.

PART ONE

“PEOPLE MAY SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY, BUT THEY DON’T REALLY WANT TO”: MAD MEN AND PROBLEMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND FREEDOM

One

WHAT FOOLS WE WERE: MAD MEN, HINDSIGHT, AND JUSTIFICATION

Landon W. Schurtz

That Mad Men takes place in the 1960s is no accident. The creator, Matthew Weiner, could have made a series about modern advertising executives, but he chose not to. By showing us the differences between Don Draper’s time and ours, Mad Men deftly underscores the ways in which we aren’t so different after all. One thing does stand out, however, at least for me. Every time I watch the show, I find myself asking, “Were these people just stupid?”

Let me explain myself. I don’t actually think that the people on the show are idiots. Nonetheless, sometimes they just seem so dense. There are things in their world that it seems like they ought to know, but, for some reason, don’t.

For instance, here in the twenty-first century we know that one of the most successful ad campaigns of all times is Marlboro’s use of the “Marlboro Man.” Cowboy hat pulled low to shade his squinty gaze, he stares into the empty distance, alone in rugged country—the Marlboro Man is still an iconic figure, even though he hasn’t been seen in a decade. The campaign traded on the notion of smoking as manly, the smoker as a hardy individualist. It was a runaway success.

Why is it, then, that when advertising genius Don Draper is presented with a similar idea by his firm’s research department, he rejects it? Maybe we wouldn’t have known at first sight that it was a good idea for a campaign, but it seems we could reasonably expect Don to know—yet he doesn’t. What’s more, Pete Campbell, the junior man on the team, does see the potential of the angle. What’s going on?¹

Let’s use that case, and others like it, to examine exactly what it takes to know something. As we’ll see, Don’s a smart guy, but what he does and even can know is limited by the resources available at his particular time and place in history. Like any effective salesman, though, I need to wind up a bit and get a good lead-in before I can sell you on the bottom line. So before we get to the part where I try to convince you that we’re all blinkered by time and place, let’s start with something a little more general: What do we mean when we say we “know” something?²

“He Could Be Batman for All We Know”

In “Marriage of Figaro” (episode 103), Harry Crane points out to his co-worker Pete Campbell how little they really know about their boss, Don Draper. “Draper? Who knows anything about that guy? No one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know.” Pete shrugs the comment off, but Harry’s right—they don’t know much about Don, because he doesn’t really talk about himself. He doesn’t give them anything to go on. The junior account executives could sit around making guesses about Don if they wanted. But at the end of the day, even if some of their guesses turned out to be correct (without their realizing it), they still wouldn’t know anything because, right or wrong, they wouldn’t have any reasons.

The philosophical study of knowledge is called epistemology. Epistemologists have long recognized that having knowledge involves having reasons. Reasons, or—put another way—justification, are one ingredient of what you might call the formula for knowledge. (Philosophers will argue about anything, so I’m necessarily glossing over some quibbles about the details here.) Briefly, we can think of knowledge as justified true belief.

Let’s take the three ingredients of knowledge in reverse order. When epistemologists talk about “believing” something, they just mean that you think it’s true. “Belief ” can sometimes carry other connotations, and in everyday speech it’s often even set up as an alternative to knowing. That’s not how we’re using the word here. For our purposes, belief is an ingredient of knowledge, not an alternative to it. So to have a belief is, roughly, to just “buy into” something. For instance, after her employee orientation with Joan in the pilot episode (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”), Peggy believes that if she doesn’t butter up the switchboard girls, she won’t be able to do her job as a secretary.

The next ingredient is truth. You can’t know what isn’t true. In other words, you can believe something false. Betty Draper, for example, believes her husband’s name is really Don Draper. She may even think she knows it, but she would be wrong. “Don,” as we learn in “5G” (episode 105), is really Dick Whitman. His ruse has fooled everyone, Betty included, into thinking he’s someone he really isn’t, so that they don’t really know who he is.

Truth and belief seem pretty straightforward, and they are, indeed, fairly uncontroversial elements of the definition of knowledge. They’re also of the least interest to us in trying to answer our initial question. People in all times and places wind up with false beliefs, and therefore come short of having knowledge. What we’re interested in figuring out is how so many seemingly smart people wound up being so wrong about so many things that seem pretty obvious to us, while still yet apparently believing they have knowledge. To answer that, we need to talk about the last ingredient—justification.

It’s one thing to have a belief, and even to be right about it, but it’s quite another to have good reasons for that belief. We need reasons to believe the way we do—in other words, justification. Justification is the magic stuff that transforms merely being right into knowing. Earlier, we observed that the junior execs could make guesses about Don all they wanted and they still wouldn’t know anything about him, even if they somehow came up right on some of the guesses. You can’t know just by taking shots in the dark. You have to have reasons, too.

Of course, reasons aren’t enough, not all by themselves—you need justification as well as true belief, and it’s very important to understand that having justification doesn’t entail having the truth, and vice versa. Betty doesn’t know her husband is really named Don Draper for the obvious reason that he isn’t. That much seems right. But wouldn’t we say that she’s justified in thinking he’s Don Draper? Seeing a person use a name on a day-to-day basis, buy a house and conduct business under that name, get married under that name, and so on certainly constitutes good reason to think that that is the person’s real name.

Betty’s a smart woman, but she’s dead wrong about her husband. Still, she’s also justified in believing as she does. Can that possibly be right? Perhaps something about how this whole justification thing works can explain how an otherwise smart person who seems to have all the good reasons in the world to believe something is true can somehow wind up with a false belief. If so, then we’ll be in a position to better understand why, with the benefit of hindsight, some of these folks from 1960 come across as so obtuse. So let’s dig into justification.

“Every Day I Make Pictures Where People Appear to Be in Love. I Know What It Looks Like.”

What constitutes being justified? Where do justifications for beliefs come from? The most obvious sources of justification for beliefs are our senses. Some philosophers maintain that we cannot regard beliefs that come about from relying on our senses as justified, but it’s clear that what we perceive about the world must play an important role in justifying our beliefs. It certainly seems that the chest pains Roger Sterling felt in “Long Weekend” (episode 110) constituted justification for thinking he was experiencing some sort of problem, even if it didn’t necessarily mean he was justified in thinking he was having a heart attack, specifically.

Another means of justifying beliefs that is a bit more complex than pure sense data, but still pretty basic, is personal experience. In “The Hobo Code” (episode 108), Don observes from their behavior around each other that Midge, his Greenwich Village mistress, and Roy, her fellow beatnik, are in love. “Every day I make pictures where people appear to be in love. I know what it looks like,” he says, and he’s right. They are in love. Don’s not justified in thinking that it’s true in the same way as he might be justified in reporting some mundane fact about the world around him, like the color of Midge’s wallpaper, for instance, but he is justified. He can’t see love in the same way he can see the color of the walls, but, owing to his personal experience, he can nonetheless “see” it when it’s right in front of his face.

So far, so good. We can be justified in our beliefs in virtue of what we sense directly and in virtue of what we can figure out based on our own personal expertise. That certainly seems plausible enough. We can imagine we’d accept such first-hand accounts as fairly solid justification for beliefs. But this hasn’t helped us answer our initial question at all, or at least not in a satisfactory way.

Normally, if someone doesn’t see something that’s very obvious to most other people, we think that person is either being careless with the evidence or just isn’t “getting it.” But all this started when we noted that some things that we regard as obvious are obscure to the Mad Men characters. For instance, even the most well-behaved characters on the show are rather startlingly sexist. Their behavior is just wildly inappropriate—it’s offensive, intimidating, and unpleasant to a lot of the women on the show. It’s hardly surprising that Peggy would come across Bridget crying in the bathroom of Sterling Cooper (episode 102, “Ladies Room”)—who knows what she had to put up with that day? So if this is so obvious to us, why don’t the characters get it?

On the account I’ve just given of justification, when someone fails to grasp something it either means that the evidence is difficult to perceive or the person is somehow at fault, epistemically speaking. Since the fact that the behavior of the junior account executives at Sterling Cooper is clearly inappropriate, and would seem so to just about anyone watching the show, it doesn’t seem right to say that the evidence isn’t clear. But that means the characters must be either very careless or just not very bright. There’s something that doesn’t seem quite right about that, either. We must be missing a piece of the puzzle.

As it happens, we are. What the preceding account of justification does not take into account is that there’s only so much we can know first-hand. If we could rely only on ourselves for justification, we’d have relatively little of it, and would therefore know next to nothing. The idea that we must depend on ourselves and only ourselves for justification, and therefore knowledge, is called epistemic individualism. Very few thinkers have actually held this view, but for many years, most of the epistemology that was done acted as if we were isolated, solitary knowers, focusing solely on the ways in which we were or were not justified with respect to our senses and our own internal mental processes. Relatively little attention was paid to the fact that most of the evidence for our beliefs comes from other people, but that’s been changing recently, and this new approach is commonly known as social epistemology. Social epistemology recognizes the importance of the social nature of humans in thinking about what and how we come to know things. As a result, it has been able to shed some light on issues that might otherwise be puzzling. Some of the concepts used in social epistemology can help us fill out our picture of justification a little more, and get us closer to an answer to our question that rings true.

“Well, I Never Thought I’d Say This, but What Does the Research Say?”

Testimony occupies a central place in social epistemology. Testimony is a pseudo-religious-sounding term for sincere communication of belief, and social epistemologists have come to understand that it plays a hugely important role in individual knowledge. Freddy Rumsen, Don Draper, and the others didn’t do any personal exploration of “the Electrosizer” (which made its infamous debut in “Indian Summer,” episode 111), but they’re nonetheless justified in believing that it gives “sensations” of a certain sort. Why? Peggy told them, and they have good reason to believe that she is in a position to know. Their justification for the belief (and, incidentally, the belief itself ) came from her testimony.

So we get a lot of our beliefs through testimony, and likely most of our justification, too. Since beliefs and justification are both required before we actually know anything (the other part, of course, is being right), this means that we’re remarkably dependent on other people for the ingredients of knowledge. We need other people in order to know much of anything. We depend on other people for knowledge, so maybe it’s the case that if otherwise intelligent people fail to know something that seems obvious to us, something’s gone wrong in the realm of testimony. So we should ask ourselves, who do the characters on the show depend on, epistemically speaking?

Then and now, one of the best kinds of testimony is expert testimony. After Betty’s accident in “Ladies Room,” she’s very worried because she doesn’t know why she had the strange attack that caused the car accident. Don, frustrated and worried as well, appeals to the promise of knowledge that experts offer us. “Well, go to a doctor, another doctor. A good one!” Of course, he’s also got a healthy sense of skepticism about at least some doctors. “That Dr. Patterson is not thorough. I swear when we walked down Park Avenue, I could hear the quacking.”

It’s all well and good when we can find a qualified so-and-so to answer our queries and be done with it. If any of the secretaries at Sterling Cooper have a question about how the office runs, they can always ask office manager Joan Harris; they do not ask Don, even though he’s senior to Joan. We may be stuck getting our knowledge from other people, but we can be judicious about who we listen to. What’s worrying, however, is when experts in the same area disagree—like Betty’s doctors. There’s an interesting example of this phenomenon in the first episode (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”). It’s an incident we touched on earlier—the tobacco ad campaign and Pete Campbell’s insight that playing on the danger of smoking could be a viable advertising option.

In case you haven’t seen the episode recently, let me refresh your memory. In the wake of widely publicized research revealing that cigarette smoking is linked to various diseases, the Lucky Strike cigarette company is worried about its image. They want an ad campaign that’ll still sell a product now known to be potentially dangerous, and they can no longer rely o...