Serious thoughts

At some point in your life, I'm sure you've walked back a comment you regretted by saying "Oh, I was only joking." (If you haven't, I'm sure you're lying.) It's such a common thing to say that you probably do it reflexively, without even thinking, but it's actually doing a lot of work behind the scenes. That kind of comment depends on the assumption that there are only two ways to behave: jokingly, or seriously. If you're not joking, the implicit understanding is that, well, obviously you're being serious. What else could you be doing? "Serious" is the default, the thing we all just assume happens without giving much thought to it.

This is sometimes called the "unmarked category," and as with so many unmarked categories, seriousness is not actually all that default or unremarkable. More to the point, as with many unmarked categories, we fail to see it at our peril. Here's a different example that hopefully avoids any excessive social science dullness as well as any culture-war accusations of wokeness: the idea that you're either sick, or you're healthy. It's easy to recognise when someone is sick — they're puking, or feverish, or sneezing, or whatever. But that makes "healthy" the unmarked category; it's easy to believe that if you're not obviously sick you must therefore be healthy.

This isn't true, of course. You might have high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, or some early, asymptomatic form of cancer, which aren't healthy but likewise don't give any indication that you're sick. In those cases, treating healthy as the "default" can have the immediate negative consequence that you don't get treatment for something that's wrong with you.

But it can also have the much larger and harder to pin down negative consequence that we don't pay much attention to what "being healthy" actually means. You could be sitting at a desk eight hours every day without exercising, then polishing off a bottle of wine by yourself every night — and though you may not show any obvious signs of being sick, clearly you're not really being healthy, either. But because we assume "healthy" is something that just exists, it's easy to delude yourself about how "healthy" you actually are.

Anyway, back to joking and being serious. If you actually stop to think about it, you'll realise that seriousness, like healthiness, doesn't just happen. Making a fart noise is a joke; delivering a eulogy is serious. But there's a lot of space in between those extremes, and in most of the conversations you have day-to-day you're probably neither joking nor being serious, at least not in the same way you'd be "serious" when delivering a eulogy (or attending a job interview, or breaking up with someone, or...)

So what actually happens when someone is being serious? We all recognise the signs that someone is making a joke — a raised eyebrow, a smirk, a shift in language — so what are the equivalent signs that someone is "making a serious"? And, more to the point, as with being "healthy", what are the consequences of assuming seriousness just happens on its own?

These are some of the big questions that Steven Connor attempts to unpick in Styles of Seriousness. Ironically, one thing he doesn't give much attention is the kind of seriousness you only find in long academic books on niche topics, to wit, writing that's intentionally difficult to understand — thereby demonstrating that your ideas must be serious. That's certainly the kind of seriousness Connor is going for; he admits as much in a couple of places, like in his seventh chapter, "Monition," which he acknowledges is "an unfamiliar word" (p.179) when he could have just called it "Warnings." But if it were easy to understand, clearly it wouldn't be serious enough to bother thinking about, so.

Indeed, I confess that the book is so impenetrable in places that my eyes glazed over and I started skimming large chunks. (Life's too short to spend your evenings trying to understand stuff that's intentionally difficult to understand.) On the other hand, Connor does say some interesting things that I think bear repeating. In fact, reading Connor's analysis of seriousness, it's hard not to see to the troubling consequences of ignoring how we make serious happen — just like the troubling consequences of ignoring what "healthy" really means. So here goes.

Connor identifies six styles of seriousness:

• Intent, by which he broadly means making it clear that you really mean what you're saying.

• Importance, by which he broadly means making it clear that what you're saying really matters.

• Solemnity, by which he broadly means making it clear that you're really trying to be serious (as in, for example, a religious ceremony, or a funeral, or a political ritual like passing a motion or certifying a vote count).

• Zeal, by which he broadly means making it clear that you are more serious about something than anyone else.

• Rue (another intentionally unfamiliar word), by which he broadly means making it clear that you feel seriously about something that happened in the past.

• Monition, by which he broadly means making it clear that other people should be serious about something, particularly something that might happen in the future.

It's easy to see how some of these play out in dangerous ways in today's political climate. Intent: Elon Musk can make what appears to be a Nazi salute at a Trump event, then say he didn't really mean it. (This is a variation on the "just kidding" defence I mentioned at the start.) Importance: Musk's opponents can insist that his intent is irrelevant, that what really matters is anyone making something that looks like a Nazi salute, particularly at a presidential event. Solemnity: press conferences are held to discuss the salute, and we get impassioned speeches about democratic principles and norms to demonstrate how seriously everyone is taking the situation.

Yet everyone gets so tied up in knots debating who's being serious about what, and what's actually serious to begin with, that seriousness itself becomes the only issue anyone actually discusses. Indeed, the same people who accuse Musk, Trump, et al. of being "serious" about turning the US into a fascist country, are often the same people who accuse them of not governing "seriously". Evidently, whether Musk and Trump are serious about any particular thing is not really the issue; the issue is what they're actually doing. Whether you're an anti-Musk Democrat or a Republican worried about Soros and the Deep State, it seems like we can all agree it's probably a bad idea to give unelected billionaires sweeping authority over the federal government. But as long as we're all so intent on "out-seriousing" each other — or at least, accusing the other side of not taking things seriously enough — we'll never even start that discussion, never mind agree on anything.

This is sort of what Connor is getting at with his discussion of zeal, which for my money is probably the strongest part of the book — both in terms of the point he makes and the clarity with which he makes it. Zeal, says Connor, "is not just seriousness... It is specifically a competitive form of seriousness, a serious devotion to outdoing others in seriousness" (p.117). In fact, with zeal, "it is not enough to outdo one's neighbours in zeal; one must outdo them in the zealous display of it... The zealot is addicted to zeal... needing always to seek to go further in their zealousness" (p.119). As a result they end up wanting "to drive out every kind of complexity, impurity, or divergence" from their position (p.120).

In other words, once you've decided you're really, seriously right about something, you can't help but come up with ever more exaggerated ways to demonstrate your rightness — until eventually you end up a sort of caricature of yourself, saying grossly over-simplified things in grossly over-confident ways just to prove your chops. You can see this playing out on both sides of the political spectrum, from pussy hats to MAGA hats, though of his contemporary examples, Connor focuses more on wokeness and identity politics as examples of seriousness gone mad, rather than Trumpism or MAGA.

(It's worth saying that Connor's issue largely seems to be with the rhetorical style of the contemporary left rather than the underlying political philosophy, and he mostly stays away from political pronouncements himself. But it's still somewhat tiresome hearing an old white man say that you couldn't "identify as" something before 1975 (p76-77) — I guess nobody told Sojourner Truth. Clearly the real change in the 1970s was that white men also had to start "identifying as" white men, in order to acknowledge their own privilege. Talk about the unmarked category!)

Anyway. Connor's description of zeal admittedly sounds familiar if you're the sort of person who makes a good-faith attempt to keep up with the preferred language of the contemporary left. The comparison Connor makes is with the Puritans, who he notes were sometimes mockingly referred to as "Precisians," for their tendencies "toward the extraordinary multiplication of sects and factions, along with carping and carving disputes over their very naming" (p.123). That may as well be what Dan Savage is describing in this column:

I’m confused about why someone who’s your brand of non-binary (AMAB, femme and into femmes) would even want to label themselves as a lesbian. Since you’re neither a woman nor a man, ALLI, why would you want to use such a gendered label? [...] That said, no one can stop you from using the label “lesbian” to describe yourself... some lesbians are gonna find your label annoying — extremely annoying — but annoyed lesbians can’t prevent you from self-identifying as a lesbian.

But you can see the same dynamic playing out on the right as well, in the increasingly zealous expressions of fealty to the Second Amendment, or Trump, or immigration crackdowns. It might not seem like there's a lot of common ground between Dan Savage's concerned AMAB lesbian and these Trump voters telling Jordan Klepper that all the January 6th rioters should be pardoned no matter what they did, but in terms of Connor's idea of zeal they're not all that different: they're just trying to publicly demonstrate just how seriously they take their particular brand of politics.

As a result, people have given up debating the finer practical details about how, say, Second Amendment rights should be interpreted and enforced in the 21st century, or how the government should be obliged to acknowledge women's rights, or trans rights, or anyone's rights. Instead, it's all just about who can more zealously demonstrate the absolute seriousness of their issue and the rightness of their position on it. When both sides are coming at an issue that way — and they increasingly are — there's never going to be any way to compromise, because the issue itself is no longer what they're actually discussing. They're just trying to win the argument about who cares more.

There's also another of Connor's styles of seriousness at play here: monition (or warnings, as I mentioned above). The problem with a warning is that "it forces things into significance, removing the choice of making no choice" (p.183). It's impossible not to respond to a warning, because even ignoring it "will itself constitute a response" (p.184). So when someone warns of a climate disaster, they automatically divide the whole world into two classes of people: the ones who heed that warning (and hence care about the planet), and the ones who choose to ignore it (and hence selfishly don't). Likewise, when someone warns of the government taking away your guns, they automatically create a class of people who, whether by disagreeing with or ignoring that warning, are okay with an authoritarian state infringing on constitutional rights.

I want to emphasise that clearly these stark divisions don't reflect reality in any meaningful way. There are lots of fine-grained differences in the positions you can hold on climate change or gun ownership. But the dire warnings both sides issue about the end of government or civilisation or the planet as we know it are increasingly unhelpful in solving those—ahem—serious issues. Instead, they're just contributing to this hurricane of performative—ahem—bullshit about who has the highest moral ground. As a result, it's becoming impossible to take a practical approach to any of the issues that people profess to care so deeply about. When anyone can give a warning to anyone else, 24/7, whether on TV on social media or even in person, the whole world turns into a "reflexive stress machine" (p.209), one which no longer exists to solve problems but to maintain them.

I realise, of course, that I probably sound like I'm making a warning of my own here. But that's not what this is. After all, hardly anybody is going to read this, and if the people who do read it choose to ignore it, well... Not a lot will happen. Things will just carry on as they are, getting slowly worse. Likewise, even if everyone who reads this immediately changes their behaviour, the world's problems aren't going to disappear.

But we have to start somewhere. So next time you feel yourself trying to demonstrate how serious you are about something, take a deep breath and a step back — and ask yourself whether you being serious is really what matters.