Are You Serious?

Lee Siegel

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062064127
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

LeeSiegel, author of Falling Upwards, Not RemotelyControlled, and Against the Machine delivers a provocative critique ofmodern lightness and frivolity, and a timely guide to being serious in an unserious age. In thevein of The Culture of Narcissism, Shop Class as Soulcraft, and How Proust Can Change Your Life, Siegel offers a revelatory look at how a serious bearing is vital toaccomplishing any worthwhile goal in an era increasingly defined by a sardonicapproach to life.

Chapter One
The Urge to Be Serious

How Seriousness Is Used

Only in America could reality become a trend, as in “reality television.” But then, only in America do we take time out for a “reality check,” as if anyone so far gone as to lose their sense of reality would actually know what to check in order to get it back. I mean, get real. Of course, only in America could the admonishment “get real” be a reproach, and “unreality” be a sin.

Now that we’re on the subject, only in America do we say “I mean” before we say what we mean, as if it were an acceptable convention for people to go around saying what they didn’t mean, and it had become another convention to make the distinction, before saying anything of consequence, between meaning and not meaning what you are about to say.

Already I’m, like, getting dizzy. Which raises the question of why Americans distance themselves from what they are saying by putting “like” before the description of something, as if people are nervous about committing to a particular version of reality, or to a direct, unmediated, nonmetaphorical experience of the real.

In a society like ours where reality is so slippery that we actually now have a whole branch of entertainment explicitly claiming to depict it, the urge to be serious is very powerful. I don’t know exactly when the words “serious” and “seriously” began to perform the function of an intensifier. But using them that way speaks volumes about our yearning to be serious.

That is a seriously beautiful sunset. That girl is seriously hot. That is a serious CD collection. Those are some serious abs. My favorite is, He is seriously funny. Meaning: Not what passes for funny. But truly, authentically, honestly, originally funny. Seriously funny. So much of the life around us has been seized by advertising and Hollywood, so much of our experience has been caricatured and “branded,” that we use the word “serious” in an attempt to reclaim experience for ourselves. It’s a way to distinguish the originality of something from all the many imitations and copies of the thing.

When we say, “That is a serious hamburger,” we mean that it is not like all the hamburgers we have seen in ads and commercials. It is not the proverbial hamburger of childhood outings with Dad, or of stoned, late-night, teenaged visits to McDonald’s, White Castle, or that Greek diner. No, “that is a serious hamburger” means that is a true hamburger, unlike any imitation or copy. It means, At last! I am having a fresh, original experience of a hamburger that exists in fullness of being beyond all the cheap replicas of a burger. Likewise, serious money means not the tired, trite, wearyingly familiar image of money. Serious money is life-changing, status-transforming, “I’ll never have to work again” money. It is not simply a thing to be possessed. It occupies its own category of being. The $7 billion that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is worth qualifies as serious money. Barack Obama, with his millions in book royalties, does not have serious money.

My dictionary traces the etymology of “serious” back to an Old English word meaning “heavy” or “sad.” I have my own fanciful origin of the term. I like to think that the word is somehow tangled up with the Spanish verb ser. Ser means “to be” in Spanish, but it is distinct from the Spanish verb estar, which also means “to be.” You use estar to describe a mood or an emotion. You use ser to describe identity or the particular traits that make up the essence of a person. Estar implies temporariness; ser connotes permanence. In that sense, “serious” is a state of being in which you are fully aware of who you are, and what your place is in the world at that moment. You are also aware of who someone else is, and what their precise relationship is to you. That is what you expect when you are told that someone is “serious”; that what he or she does will follow from who he or she is. We spend our days floating along on a train of disconnected feelings and moods, waiting for the moment when we suddenly become aware of the connection between who we are and what we are doing.

You might say that estar is an artificial state of being because it is contingent on the forces that create our moods and cause them to change. Ser, on the other hand, is wholly natural. It is how we live in clarity and conscientiousness. Ser is organic seriousness. When people say that they are searching for meaning, they are saying that they are trying to find something serious about which they can be serious. To live meaningfully is to live seriously.

I know what some of you are thinking. This guy is making too much of a hamburger. Siegel is being too serious. In fact, the attraction and the aversion to being serious is a pendular American motion, as we shall see in a later chapter. A constant fear runs through American life, that you are either too serious—and thus depressed, in the Old English sense of the word—or not serious enough. As Abraham Lincoln, one of the most serious people who ever lived, wrote to a woman he was courting:

I have commenced two letters to send you before this, both of which displeased me before I got half done, and so I tore them up. The first I thought wasn’t serious enough, and the second was on the other extreme.

As we’ve noted, in contemporary American life, “serious” seems to be used more frequently the less its meaning is clear. “Serious” occurs in the most diverse and contradictory contexts. It has traveled far from Arnold’s snobbish use of the term, and even beyond Beerbohm’s realms of laughter and absurdity. Yet the impulse behind the use of the word—the desire to be serious!—remains constant.

“If you wanna be taken seriously, you gotta have serious hair,” Melanie Griffith says in the movie Working Girl. She turns out to be right, though neither highfalutin’ Matthew Arnold nor mischievous Max Beerbohm would have had any idea what she was talking about. In The Godfather, Don Corleone tells Virgil Sollozzo, a gangster newly arrived in town who has joined up with a rival crime family, that he has agreed to meet with him because he has heard that Sollozzo is a “serious man.” The don means that Sollozzo means what he says, but Sollozzo is also serious in another sense: he ends up nearly killing the don and murdering one of his sons. You might say that Sollozzo turned out to be too serious, while Don Corleone was not serious enough.

Even exemplars of Arnoldian high seriousness are of no help in clarifying what “serious” truly signifies. Arnold’s foremost American disciple was the literary critic Lionel Trilling. What fun Beerbohm might have had with him. About sixty years ago, Trilling offered a provocative insight into the social construction of seriousness. “It might be said,” he wrote, “that our present definition of a serious book is one which holds before us some image of society to consider and condemn.” In other words, Trilling scorned what he regarded as the “middlebrow” notion of seriousness. For Trilling and other intellectuals of his time, “middlebrow” meant art—or taste in art—that pretended to value difficulty and complexity but settled instead for easy sentiments and simple ideas. In Trilling’s eyes, social outrage was an instantly available emotion that provided the appearance of a complex, critical attitude toward society, and so it often served as the quickest route to “seriousness.”

Trilling was thinking of—to use his mildly ironic phrase—“commercially successful serious novels,” like those of John Steinbeck, James Gould Cozzens, and James Jones. We don’t have much socially conscious commercial fiction anymore. Rather, Hollywood has taken on the function of holding “before us some image of society to consider and condemn.” Think of the award for Best Picture, bestowed upon the film considered to be the most serious of the past year. The last five movies, as of this writing, to have won the award are: Crash (2005), a movie about racial and ethnic prejudice; The Departed (2006), a movie about police corruption; No Country for Old Men (2007), a movie about the way violence, greed, and sheer chance expose the sham of social harmony; Slumdog Millionaire (2008), a movie about the rottenness at the heart of capitalism; and The Hurt Locker (2009), a movie about the sickness of war.

But was Trilling right? Are these movies pretending to be serious by taking up “serious” themes that are actually emotionally and intellectually facile? Or was Trilling, like so many other elite intellectuals, a seriousness snob who felt the periodic urge to renounce his own serious nature when he found it reflected in contexts that were unfamiliar and even inhospitable to his own?

The meaning of “seriousness” is seriously elusive. We spend our days searching for a way to be serious. We exhort our children to be serious. We look for serious people to associate with, to befriend, to fall in love with. We search for serious work. We get tired of all the buying and selling, of all the numbing routines that fill our days and consume our time, tired of the petty but necessary white lies that we have to tell and endure being told. We want to feel that there is a purpose to our lives. We want to feel that our experiences add up to something that explains our experiences. We wish to stop thinking about our self-interest, just for a minute, and get caught up in something larger than ourselves. We want to be serious.

Yet we don’t want the busy, transactional, ego-gratifying world to pass us by. We do not want to get weighed down by lugubrious seriousness, by the Old English origin of the word. Maybe that’s why “serious business” has become such a universal expression. It captures our ambivalence about being serious. Serious business is not just business as usual. It’s fresher and more original and more consequential than that. At the same time, it’s not so out of the ordinary that it takes us away from the importance of attending to our business.

Still, for all our ambivalence and confusion about how to be serious, and in what degree, our yearning to be serious persists. It makes its way into our speech again and again.

“Serious” as an intensifier is as ubiquitous, if you will pardon my crudity, as the word “fucking.” The two terms are like the respectable and the unrespectable sides of the same social coin. We may say, for example, that something is “fucking great” or that something is “seriously great.” “Fucking great” means that there is something asocial about the thing that is great, or at least something asocial about the way we think about the thing. It could lead us into turbulent waters. “Seriously great” means that no matter how great it is, it will remain within the bounds of what is normal and acceptable.

The modulations are infinite. “I’m seriously upset with you” means that you are upset in a way that cannot be captured by all the many representations of being upset that we have been flooded with throughout our lives. You are “seriously” upset; you are upset in an unprecedented way. You are also upset in a way that has purpose, attention, and continuity. That is to say, there are going to be consequences to your being upset. You are going to stay focused on being upset. You are going to follow through on being upset. But being “seriously” upset means that you are sticking to the rules. You are not going to be hurtful. You are not going to do anything reckless. If you are “fucking upset,” on the other hand, then all bets are off. The still-taboo word is out of social bounds. It means that you are probably going to do something that is equally out of bounds. You might be reckless. You might hurt someone.

Use of the intensifier “seriously” puts the brakes on a situation where “fucking” might be used instead. He is a “fucking womanizer” expresses disgust and disapproval. He is a “serious womanizer” is an emphatic description that indicates moral neutrality and even a hint of admiration. “Serious” as an intensifier brings a situation right up to the brink of emergency and violence without crossing the line.

But by the same token, “fucking” is so commonly understood to be an expression of power used by someone who feels powerless that “serious” has a sincerity “fucking” lacks. All a cop needs to say is that you are in “serious” trouble. If he says you are in “fucking” trouble, you might wonder about his state of mind. After all, cops are at their most serious when they are wordlessly arresting someone. The same goes for “We’re in some serious shit.” The world is brimming with shit and with people who say “shit.” But serious shit—ah, that’s the real thing. It’s shit with official consequences. We add “serious” to an expletive when we want to preserve the outlaw force of it while shedding its implication of impotence. “Serious” as an intensifier makes something both respectable and absolutely urgent.

Or as Group Home raps: “Me and my fam, take this rap shit serious / New York to L.A., and you niggaz best to fear this.”

Interlude: The Serious Business of Numbers

Between the previous section and this one, I had the urge to snack on some cheese, but I resisted the impulse because my cholesterol is a combined 205 and it should be less than 200. The LCD, or bad cholesterol, is on the high side, coming in at about 135. It’s supposed to be less than 130. The HCD, or good cholesterol, is 52. It should be above 40. My father’s father, my father, my maternal grandfather, and my maternal grandmother all died of heart attacks. That means that I have a 1 in 50 chance of succumbing to the same illness. On the other hand, I don’t smoke, so that lowers the chance to 1 in 200. I used to drink between 3 and 4 glasses of wine a night—the maximum healthy amount for men is 2 glasses per day, while for women it’s one. I don’t drink alcohol at all anymore, except on the rare occasions I go out to socialize. Then I have between 4 and 6 glasses of wine. If I go out once a week, that is well under the recommendation of 14 glasses per week for men. Twice a week brings me to between 8 and 12 glasses, which is still just below the limit. But I don’t go out much because I’m trying to finish this book. It’s 3 months overdue. I was given 18 months to write it. It should be 50,000 words long. At 250 words a page, that’s about 200 pages. I’m writing approximately 1,000 words a day. At that rate, I should be finished in about 50 days. The thing is, I don’t always write on weekends. Say I’ll be done in 60 days, to be on the safe side.

Some days, I admit, I don’t hit 1,000 words. Yesterday I was on the phone for several hours with an old, dear friend who is pregnant. She’s 40, which means that she has a 1 in 100 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome. So far, she’s had two diagnostic tests. The first test determined that she actually had a 1/800 chance of having an “affected” baby, as the clinical euphemism goes. Her AFP level was 1.2, her HPP was 1.0, and her PPP was .98. This was very good, because all three levels are supposed to be around 1.0. The false negative rate is 5 percent. The second test had less encouraging results, putting her risk factor at 1 in 100. The second test has a false positive rate of up to 20 percent. This result made my friend think that she should get an amniocentesis, an invasive procedure that extracts a small amount of amniotic fluid to test for an affected baby. This test has an accuracy rate of 99.7 percent. It holds a risk of miscarriage of between 1 in 200 and 1 in 1,600. My friend is weighing the possibility of having an affected baby—somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 800, not counting the high possibility of a 20 percent false positive from the second test—against the risk of miscarriage: again, between 1 in 200 and 1 in 1,600. The only experience I could draw from to try to advise her was the time, for one reason or another, a doctor recommended that I get a full-body CT scan. This test has a 1 in 100,000 chance of causing a fatal result. I declined. It then turned out that I had experienced a false alarm. These happen at about a rate of 1 in 125 every year.

I told my friend that she should ask her ob-gyn what to do, but she told me that he was so cautious that he simply presented her with lots of data without offering any kind of guidance, or even subjective opinion. Apparently, 1 out of every 62 ob-gyns will get sued by a patient in the course of his career. That accounts for his caution. His malpractice insurance has shot up over 150 percent in the last 10 years. My friend understands his situation. What concerns her is that he was once included in New York magazine’s list of the 10 best ob-gyns in New York, but he didn’t make the list this year. I told her that was one thing she shouldn’t worry about. I knew with between 94 and 96 percent certainty that the list is compiled by 6 editors, 2 of whom were spending just one-third of their time in the office working on the list. Anyway, just because her doctor didn’t make it into the top 10, it didn’t mean that he wasn’t in the top 25, or 50, or 100. Since there were 16,428 ob-gyns in New York, even if he was in the top 500, that was still pretty good. On the other hand, someone in America is suing their doctor 2.4 times an hour.

Numbers are to seriousness what yarn is to knitting needles. They are useless without the connecting instruments of intuition and knowledge, which exist beyond mere information.^*

Chapter Two
My Comical Struggle to Be Serious

As an asthmatic child suffering from a variety of upper respira...