Do Sunglasses and Masks Make Us Less Moral?

Wearing sunglasses makes a person less generous, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.  Wearing big sunglasses makes a person more less generous.   And masks?  Well, forget about it: moral behavior gets heart-staked, and the id comes stomping up the basement stairs and burst into the living room to the tune of Romp and Circumstance.

The researchers theorize that obscuring the face, even if only partially, loosens the inhibitions that tie us to social convention. 

Really? 

Evidently, the researchers  don’t remember  those sunglassed Watergate impresarios of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, on the cover on “Newsweek” magazine.   They must not have not seen Paul Newman’s film “Cool Hand Luke;” otherwise, they’d have known how  menacing, how appallingly sinister, sunglasses, especially mirrored ones, can be.  They somehow missed all the Westerns featuring villains with bandanas pulled up to their noses, all the bank-heist films and their variously masked desperados.  They obviously have not read Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” or they would know the Reverend Hooper, going all Puritan-symbolic about secret sin, covers his face in black crepe and freaks out his congregants; nor could they have read  Joyce Carol Oates’  “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” or they would know the ironically-named Arnold Friend conceals his homicidal sadism behind aviator sunglasses.  They seem not to have learned the lesson of Burger King’s unceremonious dumping of that sneaking creeping plastic-masked  King mascot.   Nor, it seems, have they deeply considered  masked youngsters’  extortionate Halloweenean demand of “Trick or Treat.” 

I mean, who, after all, didn’t already know what the Toronto researchers have spent years laboring to discover?   It seems to me self-evident that masks can disinhibit.  After all, their sole purpose is to conceal identity, and, human nature being what it is, people often will do or say things contrary to social custom when anonymity indemnifies them against the possibilities of shame and shunning.  The inward lurking Iago often emerges with the mask.   But sunglasses?  Perhaps within the parameters of the study’s design, the researchers got the result they hypothesized.  Such parameters, however, do not reproduce a real world context and, thus, do not adequately account for our experience and use of sunglasses as a culturally coded commodity.

Consider, for a moment, what this study tells us about ourselves:   that human nature is susceptible to a deeply internalized bias, an intuitive shortcut for thinking.   Evolution has ineradicably stamped in us a cautionary reserve when dealing with others.  We are shaped to trust only the fully-visible face.   It reduces us to helpless reaction, to the tug of biological strings.   While this may be, likely is, true, it misses much.

The study suggests we are incapable of reflection and judgment, that we lack the cultural awareness to recognize that, in terms of style and brand, sunglasses can simply be worn as a fashion statement—hardly compatible with loosening ties to social convention.   People also use sunglasses to denote cool, and while cool can indicate a detachment from or a mild disdain for the normative, the everyday, it functions more as an affectation, more an iconography of the wish to be perceived as defying conformity, as mysterious, as capable of breaking bad.  Sunglasses do not detach us from social convention; they symbolize a desire to be regarded as detached, as possessing enviable élan.  Sunglasses do not cause rebelliousness; they commodify it.  As cultural actors, we know this; we understand the use of sunglasses to complement or achieve a look or lifestyle as a purposeful, self-aware choice with the goal of being seen in a certain way.  We understand that sunglasses are associated with edginess, glamor, self-possession, unflusterability.  We understand they confer an aura of intrigue, mystery.  Could they, as the study asserts, induce wearers to be less generous?   Possibly, but such a result surely restricts the complex cultural reality in which we use and comprehend sunglasses.  It offers thin gruel in place the thick chowder of culture.

I cannot help but see this study as something like click bait research, designed not to dispel ignorance, not to expand the frontier of knowledge, but, rather, to be alluring enough, enticing enough, to garner the attention of a journal eager to attract readers, to attract the popular press and recirculate on the Internet, and to keep the research dollars flowing.   In what light should we apprehend this study? Samuel Beckett provides an answer: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new.”   

 

Language Abuse: In Four Parts

Part 1

Perhaps only in Iowa could a candidate for the Senate declare that her experience castrating pigs qualifies her for office.

Yes, OK, she means it as a wry, gateway metaphor for her promise to “cut pork.” But it’s precisely this promise, not the tasteless image of detesticled pigs, that I find most objectionable. The words have sound but signify nothing. And that’s the point, really. They are short on meaning, long on emotional resonance.  The promise to cut pork is comparable to promises to resuscitate the American Dream or restore the middle class, to bring change you can believe in or apply sane business practices, to transcend mere politics or be impregnable to the Washington Beltway ethos.  The words are lexical black holes into which all meaning disappears.  What’s left is an emotional residue, a purr or snarl substituting for substance.  That, and the cynicism that thinks that is enough.

 

Part 2

It’s always nice to know we can kill a sentient creature and feel righteously comfortable about it.

The Animal Welfare Institute and Farm Sanctuary, two animal welfare groups, have petitioned the Department of Agriculture to step up inspection efforts at poultry slaughterhouses, so that birds whose necks are not cut by an automatic knife are not dropped alive into scalding tanks.  A Deputy Administrator of the Food Safety Inspection Service says birds boiled to death in the scalding tanks violates the Poultry Products Inspection Act; therefore, the FSIS would “take action, because the animals would be dying other than by slaughter — they'd be drowning, and not slaughtered in a humane way."

I confess I struggle with the ethical distinction being made here.  Aren’t the birds being slaughtered in any event?  Does slaughtering a creature “in a humane way” even make sense?  Can the words “humane” and “slaughter” dwell in the same linguistic neighborhood?  Is dollying the adjective “humane” into place before the noun “slaughter” a kind of verbal juke to avoid ethical anxiety?  Emerson says, "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”  Wouldn’t the really humane thing be not to slaughter the birds at all?

 
 

Part 3

A battle rages, and were I one who prefers his breakfast delivered from a restaurant window through my car window, I’d be caught up in the hostilities. 

On one side, Taco Bell’s new offerings to the on-the-go breakfast crowd—the Waffle Taco and the AM Crunchwrap.  On the other, the breakfast-market-share-leading McDonald’s and its iconic Egg McMuffin.  Just about every article I’ve read has described the two fast-fooderies  as engaged in the “breakfast wars” as they “battle it out” for the $50 million breakfast market.  TB is “taking aim” at MickeyD’s.   “Shots have been fired,” a “salvo” has been launched, a “bomb” dropped, “heavy artillery” rolled out.  McDonald’s will not be “ceding ground” however; in offering free coffee for the next two weeks, it has “fired back” with “coffee cannons.”

Well, metaphors structure how we see and understand, so perhaps journalists describing the thrust and parry of two corporate giants as a battle for the hearts and minds and palates of breakfasters everywhere isn’t so unusual.  It’s a no-brainer, actually.  And that is the problem. 

What are we to make of the herd-mentality journalism; the lazy, cliché-mongering, carnival-barking journalism; and, ultimately, the cynical journalism that uses threadbare metaphor to attract and churn up our interest in skirmishes over the vehicles by which eggs, meat, and cheese are delivered?  Why is it that the important questions are never raised:  why do we break so fast to be breakfasted?   What drives us through the drive through?  And how did a simple ritual of daily home life get outsourced to corporate griddles, fryers, and microwaves?  

 

Part 4

Who asked if roses wanted to be smelled and would rather that passersby not stop to sniff?  Who questioned if they had any desire at all to symbolize someone’s love or if they wanted their buds to be gathered?   Who wondered if lilies in their fields wished to be considered untoiling or wanted to be gilded?  Who inquired whether or not apples aspired to keep doctors away, or be American pied, or compared to oranges, or be in anyone’s eye or cheek, or represent the means of humanity’s fall?  Did grapes consent to being known as wrathful?  Who had considered whether some potatoes preferred or be known as potahtoes, or even cared about how the vowel was pronounced?  Would pickles appreciate being considered as no-win situations?  Did anyone seek to know if daisies wanted to relinquish their freshness, or prunes their wrinkledness or peaches their fuzz?  Perhaps peas do not want to share a pod.  Were olives OK with their branches being held out as a token of peace, or cherries with being gathered in life’s bowl, or carrots with being associated with sticks?

Did they want to be clichéd?  Who consulted them?  Who asked permission for their otherness, or even thought to?